Many Friends—and many Quaker meetings—have struggled to articulate, even to themselves, a clear response to the relentless violence against Palestinians after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023.
Steve Chase describes his personal journey from instinctive support of Israel to a recognition of the Palestinian cause. “We need to fight antisemitism and stand up for Palestinian rights,” he says. “It’s part of the same struggle for making a much better and just world.”
Steve then describes how his meeting in Washington, DC, fought over hanging a banner that said “Ceasefire Now” and “Never Again for Anyone” on their fence. For him, the solution to such disputes is not to sever relationships, but to work to strengthen them “by learning to talk together and listening to each other and giving each other grace.” And, in the end, his meeting was able to find unity in a different action.
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Transcript:
One of the things that meant a lot to me in the Bible was when Paul was writing a letter to the friends and followers of Jesus who were living right in the belly of the beast of the largest empire the world had ever known. And he writes to them because he realizes how corrosive that could be to genuine faithfulness. “Do not conform to this world, but renew your mind so you may discern what is the will of God, and is perfect and good in God’s sight.
My name’s Steve Chase. My pronouns are he/him, and I’m a member here at Friends Meeting of Washington in the District of Columbia. Through my teens and even into my early twenties, I had a very conformist view of Israel Palestine. I thought there was little or no legitimate grievance that the Palestinian people had against the state of Israel. That Palestinians were only motivated by unprovoked hate and anti-Jewish bigotry. And I believed at the time that anybody who had any criticism of the state of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians was either an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew.
It started shaking things up that, you know, my Jewish friends who I trusted and I knew they were committed to the Jewish prophetic tradition of justice and peace, some had gone and worked on a kibbutz. Some had gone and visited for shorter periods of time, and they came back and were telling me that things are not right there. What’s happening with the settlements, what’s happening with Palestinians, the mass incarceration of Palestinians, and telling me some of the history of Zionism that I had assumptions about. About, “well, this is purely a liberation movement for Jews and the creation of Israel was sort of reparations for the horrors of the Holocaust. But the thing is, it was done largely by the U.S. and European powers who at that time totally dominated the U.N. when it created the partition plan, and essentially outsourced who was going to pay the reparations.
Jewish Zionism emerged in the late 1800s, and as I’ve been studying it more and more, and the leadership, it had a very settler colonial strategy, as if it was the only way to fight anti-Semitism. Most Jews at the time when it was first getting together, thought that Zionism was either far fetched, blasphemous or unjust. And so that’s slowly began to shift my position, make me more curious. But it took me even several years before I was willing to listen or read Palestinians talking about the situation. And I didn’t know any Palestinians at that point. I hadn’t really heard about the Nakba. I hadn’t heard those stories about 15,000 Palestinians being killed, over 500 Palestinian towns and villages being wiped off the map, and that three quarters of the Palestinian population in 1947 and 48 were expelled from the 78% of Palestine that they had lived in. And so that started a process where I wrestled with myself for four decades, and finally sort of came out publicly with a really different view. We need to fight anti-Semitism and stand up for Palestinian rights, and it’s part of the same struggle for making a much better and just world.
Soon after October 7th but when you could see the handwriting on the wall — that 2.3 million Gazans were going to be collectively punished, there would be mass murder, there would be starvation, there would be disease, there would be total destruct — the Peace and Social Concerns committee here at Friends meeting of Washington came up with this beautiful banner and then in the middle, in somewhat larger type was “Never again for anyone.” And here we are in the nation’s capital and our meeting could not come to agreement that we should hang it on our fence. There were people who called members of the committee, Israel haters and Hamas supporters. And there were other people in the meeting who were mad at those people and calling them genocide deniers and racist hypocrites.
I’ve talked with a lot of young activists and they talk about the tension of feeling like there’s a cultural norm about calling people out or breaking relationships with people who don’t have the clarity that you might. And given my own experience as being somebody who painfully had to learn over time, I think you call people in, you ask elicited questions, you listen to them, ask if they’re willing to hear another perspective and you share it. You find common ground and you build on that. The motives for the people yelling at each other was they were focusing on one aspect of justice, but it was sincere. By learning to talk together and listening to each other and giving each other grace and saying, I’m sorry, We adopted the the eight major Quaker organizations around the world, including the American Friends Service Committee and Friends Committee on National Legislation, their April 2024 statement “A Different Future as Possible: A shared Quaker vision of peace for Palestine and Israel.” And just two weeks ago, at business meeting, we agreed to sign on to the Apartheid Free Communities Pledge, which talks about: We will work with others to end Israeli occupation, apartheid and settler colonialism. I’ve seen first hand here in our faith community growth that sort of parallels in the collective my personal growth over time from not seeing things deeply or wholly and seeing the humanity of everybody involved. And I remember in the business meeting when people agreed, I just burst into tears. And it was tears of joy (that), in the midst of this horror, we were rising to the moment, we were being faithful and we were loving each other a long way.
People gave up hope that apartheid could be brought down. People put their shoulders to the wheel to abolish enslavement in this country, and many of them didn’t feel like it was going to happen, they just felt morally duty bound to do it. If you assume that there’s no possible change to a better world and then you act according to that belief, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you assume as Quakers at their best have always done, that it is possible we could move closer towards a beloved community, and we act accordingly, it at least keeps the possibilities of the future open. In this current moment that we’re in, we don’t know if we’re going to be midwives to a new culture or we’re going to be hospice workers to the death of our culture. But either way, what is required of us? Love, tenderness, helping each other, seeing each other out. And it’s not waiting around and, you know, God will automatically do this for us. We are the heart and hands of the divine in this world, and it is us who have the possibility to bend the moral arc of the universe towards justice.
Discussion Question:
- Has your meeting made a statement or recorded a minute about the violence in Gaza? How did that conversation go?
The views expressed in this video are of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of Friends Journal or its collaborators.
This gives me hope that more people will educate themselves on the causes of the conflict. Thank you for your advocacy.
This is a wonderful, professionally created interview.
I’m loving QuakerSpeak videos.
Thumbs up! Thank you for this excellent interview. I will share it with West Knoxville Friends Meeting in Knoxville, TN.
Thank you for your comments. Palestine seems to be hell on earth right now, and the U.S. must stop sending weapons.
Most Friends here support the AFSC’s call for ceasefire and value the AFSC personnel who on site are trying to bring food, medicine, and hope of some sort. On the other hand we share the pain felt by relatives of hostages still unreleased and we cannot imagine an Israel no longer existing. Thus many remain inescapably in the middle. Nevertheless, we cannot applaud Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian civilians
Thanks so much for this video of Steve Chase’s description of his initital Israel support and his oppostton to Palestiian
reactons, and his support now of our search for support of both a safe Gaza for the Palestinins and security for the Israelis. I have been through the same change in view over the past year. He doesn’t openly say that Netanyahu’s control of Israel has much to do with the Israeli change of tactics, but Netanmyaha is supported in Israel, according to a few Israeli friends of mine who see him as a dictator.
The AFSC and other groups are coming to this position and looking for a solution.
Thank you for your very clear thoughts, sharing your process on how you changed your point of view, and your vulnerability. Let’s all keep reaching for one another!