NEWS STORY: North American Christians, Jews Press Nonvioent Mideast Peacemaking

c. 2000 Religion News Service VANCOUVER, British Columbia _ Christians and Jews from North America are teaming up with a band of fearless Israelis and Palestinians to serve as human shields in Israel. The nonviolent peace tactics of Mennonite Anita Fast and Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta, a Jew, involve staying overnight in the homes of Palestinian families […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

VANCOUVER, British Columbia _ Christians and Jews from North America are teaming up with a band of fearless Israelis and Palestinians to serve as human shields in Israel.

The nonviolent peace tactics of Mennonite Anita Fast and Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta, a Jew, involve staying overnight in the homes of Palestinian families enduring missile attacks, as well as protecting Palestinian olive pickers from armed settlers.


Fast, a member of Christian Peacemaker Teams, said her ecumenical group of North Americans and Israelis got the idea for its latest anti-bombing campaign after she stayed with a Palestinian family and felt the horror of a raid.

“I could hear the breathy push of the missiles as they went through the air. It gave me a first-hand sense of the terror of being shelled, especially for children,” said Fast, whose group has received international attention for its peace work in Mexico, Bosnia, Haiti and North American inner cities as well as Israel.

With the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at its most deadly in years, Fast, 30, a member of Point Grey Inter-Mennonite Fellowship in Vancouver, said Christian Peacemakers has been organizing well-publicized overnight stays with Palestinians in Hebron.

It has also been joining a small group of people who are overtly working with Palestinian pickers in olive fields to fend off attacks by Israeli settlers.

That nonviolent tactic has enraged authorities in Israel, and drawn worldwide attention to Jewish peace activist Neta Golan, who has been standing between Palestinian pickers and angry settlers, daring them to shoot a Jew.

In the name of peace and non-partisanship, however, Fast has also tried to protect Jewish citizens by boarding Israeli buses on routes that have been bombed by Palestinians, riding the transit vehicles at the same time of day that they have been attacked.

Kaufman-Lacusta, a 59-year-old member of Vancouver’s Or Shalom Synagogue,

is flying this week to Israel to work with Fast’s group, stay with besieged Palestinians and Israelis and support her rabbi, David Mivasair.


The spiritual leader of Vancouver’s Or Shalom synagogue is currently on sabbatical in Israel, where he has spent time studying and working in Palestinian olive groves on behalf of a group called Rabbis for Human Rights.

Kaufman-Lacusta readily acknowledges some Jews disapprove of her defense of Palestinians.

“The people in North American synagogues are divided on this,” she said. “Some think what we’re doing is naive. But you know the Jewish saying: `Two Jews, three opinions.”

Kaufman-Lacusta, who has done peace work for years in Israel, said hundreds of Jews in the strife-torn country have joined with Protestants and

Catholics to support Palestinians, particularly by protesting the demolition of Palestinian homes in the Occupied Territories.

“We are determined to reduce violence,”she said. “We seek a just peace.”

For her part, growing up a Mennonite in Canada, Fast said she was raised to be committed to peaceful direct action.

“Since the church believes the cross is an alternative to the sword,” Fast said, “there must be a way to show the world there is an alternative to solving conflict violently. Christian Peacemakers is one of the only groups


that experiments with the nonviolent techniques of Gandhi and Martin Luther King.”

Fast yearns for a long-term solution that will bring a just peace and reconciliation to Israel, where hundreds of people, most of them Palestinians, have been killed in the past few months. However, she maintains peace will be impossible until Israel withdraws troops from most of the Occupied Territories and Gaza Strip, since Palestinians see it as an act of domination.

DEAEND TODD

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