Day 3: Gaza and the Psychological Trauma of War

No, I’m not in Gaza.  The Israelis give very few people permission to enter and witness what has happened there.  But our group heard from a man today who was there just days after the conclusion of the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict which Israelis named Operation Protective Edge.  Sami El-Yousef, regional director for CNEWA, Catholic Near East Welfare Association, told us about the psychosocial services his agency provided in Gaza to hundreds of children traumatized by the military assault.  He maintained, however, that the conflict left all 2 million people of Gaza needing psychological services.  

Sami interviewed many Gazans about the military violence they had experienced and in every case, he told us, they could not complete the conversation without both of them ending up in tears.   He was so overcome by the level of psychological trauma he observed that he decided to look for some measure of the trauma these people had experienced.  Using United Nations figures for the number of bombs and other munitions inflicted on Gaza during that conflict, he calculated that the people of Gaza heard one explosion every minute for 51 days.  

One explosion per minute round the clock day after day.  Add to that the fact that the people of Gaza cannot leave the narrow confines of their land to take refuge from the bombs.  They are walled inside a strip of land 25 miles long and 7.5 miles wide at its widest point with no exits allowed them.   During the 2014 conflict Israel declared half of Gaza a closed military zone and people were crowded even more densely together.   Most war produces streams of refugees leaving the country, but for Gazans this was impossible.  For 51 days they could not escape the walls that form what is called the world’s largest open air prison.  And for 51 days the constant explosions did not even allow escape into sleep.  It is no wonder that the conflict produced so much trauma.  Yet the resources to meet that trauma are severely limited.

We were impressed by Sami’s account of CNEWA’s work.  As a pontifical mission, it was established in 1949, intended as a temporary mission to care for the 30% of Palestinian Christians who became refugees during the 1948 war.  68 years later the refugees have not been able to return and CNEWA’s work has become long-term.  They have kept a Christian presence in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza providing healthcare, education, and social services for all Palestinians regardless of their religion.

An aside for my husband, Scoutmaster Denny Setzler of St. Ann’s Troop 339:  CNEWA supports 32 Scout troops within Israel to promote Christian community amoung the Palestinian youth, providing them ways to come together to do volunteer work and socialize.  I know Denny will enjoy CNEWA’s appreciation for the role scouting can play in Catholic life. 

A little more about our day

Tonight we made our way out the Damascus Gate and up the hill to the conference center Notre Dame to have dinner with Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, retired from the Pontifical Council on Interreligious Dialogue, arranged by our delegation member Jeff Abood.  The Archbishop specializes in Christian-Muslim relations and recently spent a year at John Carroll University teaching a course on the Koran and finishing a book.  I hope I’ll have a chance to share our conversation in a future post.

As we left for dinner and passed through the markets of the Muslim quarter to approach the Damascus Gate we were swimming upstream it seemed.  We passed through crowds of Muslims entering the old city to head to Al Aqsa mosque for the breaking of the Ramadan fast.  Sundown was still more than an hour away.  As we returned from dinner after dark, we encountered the festive lights for Ramadan strung all around the Damascus gate.  We made our way through throngs of people celebrating the breaking of the Ramadan fast with food, music, children’s fun, and general high spirits.  Even if I’d had my camera with me, I could not have captured the warm, spectacular vitalitiy of it all for you.  As I sit here on the hostel terrace, I can still hear the singing at the gate at 11 pm.

Now I’ll capture a few more moments in photos.

Watching Bar Mitzvah processions pass by as we stood in line to go to the Temple Mount.

My favorite view of the old wall with Al Aqsa mosque visible on the left.  We stood in line for an hour and a half to make it up to the Temple Mount to see the mosque and the Dome of the Rock.

Another market scene.  Can’t resist sharing it.

Why do we protest?

Protest.  All it means is to disapprove or object to something.  Yet the word carries so much baggage, it seems downright inflammatory sometimes.  I served on a local panel of women who had attended the Women’s March in Washington in January.  The moderator asked if anyone had any concerns now that they were back home again.  One woman spoke up with considerable energy about how the media had characterized those who marched as “protesters.”  No, she insisted, we weren’t protesters.  We weren’t angry.  We were peaceful.  We had a positive message. Several others on the panel strongly agreed.

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” as Queen Gertrude says in Hamlet.  This woman’s protest of protest brings us right to the core issue: many Americans are afraid to express their disapproval or objection to what their leaders do or say.

Europeans have been quicker to pour a million or more citizens into their streets when their leaders misuse their power, but we Americans relish a sort of exceptionalism about ourselves.  Let’s be polite and patient, and perhaps the leaders of our storybook democracy will save us in the end.

Whatever we call this exercise in free speech, all of the women on the panel had been drawn to travel across three states to speak out plainly in our nation’s capital on the side of justice.  It was something to celebrate.

My activist group, People for Peace & Justice Sandusky County, has been protesting war and social injustice at a downtown Fremont corner every week since 2007.  Friends sometimes ask me why we do this thing that seems so futile.  What can it accomplish?

My favorite answer is that we are telling passers-by that it is legitimate to dissent.  Each of us has a right to decide whether or not to consent to the dominant political ideology. Members of the public are not unanimous in their views.  We hope we can give passers-by the courage of their convictions, and at the same time find our own.

A few years ago, I wrote an article for Toledo Faith and Values that attempted to express all of this.  I offer it, slightly updated, below.

Shattering the Unanimity of Consent

Josie Setzler | Original version published by Toledo Faith and Values | Sep 4, 2012

There can be great urgency in protest’s seeming futility.  Pietro Spina, the hero of the novel, Bread and Wine, felt that urgency.  Pietro does just one thing during a time of war; he goes out in the night and writes the word NO on the town walls. Writer Robert Ellsberg comments, “If nothing else, his deed shatters the ‘unanimity of consent’; it allows people to envision the subversive possibility of an alternative reality.”

Saying no feels plenty futile.  I’m one of the Sandusky County residents who gather at a busy downtown corner in Fremont every week to say no to war.  We’ve done this for some nine years now and we don’t expect the world will give us an excuse to stop anytime soon.  Nonetheless I feel the urgency of saying no.

The “unanimity of consent” pervades and supports the comforts of my daily life that have been bought with the application of immense US military might.   It’s convenient to turn a blind eye to the suffering caused elsewhere, and life’s daily busy-ness serves well to distract us.  It seems as if every week the news gives us another story of innocents killed, drones hovering menacingly over houses in tiny villages, men tortured, people incarcerated without charge, our own citizens surveilled, but then the stories pass into oblivion.  And my life goes on as always, just like the lives of all the drivers passing by me at the corner of State and Front.

I’m complicit until I find a way to say no, to break the unanimity of consent.  In small ways, consent starts to break up once someone says no.  Long-time Chicago peace activist Kathy Kelly tells us we need to “catch courage” from each other.  I’ve found the process is mutual for motorists and protesters alike.  My husband Denny holds the sign that lets people make their own statement.  “Honk 4 Peace,” it proclaims boldly.  He pumps the sign up and down strategically as the light turns, and the honking begins.  The honks crescendo beautifully and our spirits soar.  Some folks whose horns don’t work gesture in frustration at Denny.  He grins and tells them to turn on their windshield wipers.  They are delighted to comply, and we laugh in solidarity.

I admit there’s something foolish about facing traffic with a sign announcing my wisdom in just a half dozen words.  I remember a conversation with my friend Jude who called our signs ineffective, because “you don’t have room to make an argument on a sign.”  With a master’s degree in theology, Jude figured a statement is a thesis that needs arguments to defend it.   I knew I liked to argue with the best of them, but the vigils gave me something else.  “Jude, just making the statement is the whole point,” I told her.  “It’s about finding the courage of our convictions.”  People fear they’re not allowed to dissent, let alone express that dissent.  They see someone they know standing on a street corner in their own hometown expressing what they know deep in their own hearts, and they are surprised.  The protester finds the courage of her convictions in the hopes that passers-by might discover that same courage in themselves.

Yes, there are the occasional obscene gestures and angry shouts.  My friends at a longstanding vigil in Tiffin actually got mooned once by a passing motorist.  We’ve learned that we are not there to change the minds of people who disagree with us.  We are aiming instead for the hearts of those who wonder about these things.

Don’t judge your action by its prospect for success, long-time peace activist Father Daniel Berrigan told his Toledo audience back in 2002 as he spoke about activism in the run up to the Iraq War. An audience member asked him why our religious leaders were not speaking out at the time. “You can’t wait for them,” he told us. “It’s up to you.  Do it.  Get going.”

Speaking out is the job of each of us.  That much we can do right now.  Fellow protester Tom Younker tells me as we wave at passing motorists, “I stand here now, because I didn’t do it when the Vietnam War was raging.”  He senses it is not too late, and so we’ll be out there with him again next week.  We welcome others to stand with us wherever they might be.

–Josie Setzler | March 24, 2017

Abolish War?

“An End to War?” Commonweal’s cover story in the Jan. 8 edition caught my eye.   Writer David Carroll Cochran reminds us that we have ended other barbaric practices in relatively recent human history.  He recounts that private vengeance and dueling were once accepted as a part of normal life, “unavoidable, a reflection of the natural human tendency to give and respond to offense.”  When Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton Burr dueled in 1804, the practice was only then being outlawed in the northern United States.  Yet today we take modern policing and courts for granted and we no longer accept duels and private vengeance as necessary or legitimate.  In fact, today we find these historic practices revolting and barbaric.

Just as dueling was once considered a reflection of a “natural human tendency,” so is war often described today.   Examples abound for barbarisms that were once standard practice, including slavery and capital punishment.  Cochran maintains that war can join this list.  Alternative conflict resolution practices are well studied and have a proven track record.  What we still lack is the firm conviction that war can be abolished.  He cites the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes: human beings must “free ourselves from the age-old slavery of war” by moving toward “the time when all war can be completely outlawed by international consent” through “establishment of some universal public authority” that provides a better way to uphold international peace, security, and justice.

Let’s say it out loud: To outlaw war by international consent reall means that the nations with the most wealth and technology consent to stop supporting war.  The players with the advantages that money and power bring want to use them to amass even more wealth and power.  Pope Francis used his 2016 World Day of Peace message to point to this problem.  He asks, “How many wars have been fought, and how many will continue to be fought, over a shortage of goods or out of an insatiable thirst for natural resources?”

When will we learn that we can better use our wealth and technology to alleviate the shortages and inequities that fuel conflict?  When will we set aside the supposed advantages of our massive military arsenals to get serious about nonviolent methods of conflict resolution?  Pope Francis cites his recent encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si, to remind us that we and our world cannot afford to continue along our present path.  When will we come to terms with the barbarism of war, embrace alternatives that wait only for our serious consent, and abolish war?