Summary
Jesuit priest and peace activist whose keynote address to the 1973 annual convention of the Association of Arab American University Graduates Feldman treats, at the close of chapter 3 of A Shadow over Palestine, as an exilic practice of decolonization (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 771-775).
Details
- Berrigan had recently completed a prison sentence for acts of resistance against the U.S. war in Vietnam when he addressed the 1973 AAUG convention, whose theme was a comparative analysis of settler regimes in Africa and the Arab world and their “illusions of endurance,” held in the midst of the October War (A Shadow over Palestine, line 771).
- He addressed the conference from the perspective of an exile: “I am a western Christian,” “in resistance against my government and my church. That position, as I read it, makes me something very much like a Jew” (A Shadow over Palestine, line 771).
- He refused the valuation of expert “expertise,” holding that the craft of experts in a “consuming and killing culture” is to “fiddle while the world burns” (A Shadow over Palestine, line 773).
- Of Israel’s first twenty-five years he said: “the wandering Jew became the settler Jew; the settler ethos became the imperial adventure,” and the settler state of necessity “should legislate armaments and yet more armaments … evictions, uprootings, destruction of goods, imprisonment and terrorism … [and] a law of expanding violence” (A Shadow over Palestine, line 775).
- Drawing on Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez and Mahatma Gandhi, Berrigan imagined a nonviolent movement for Palestinians to claim en masse the right of return, “welcoming Jews to a community of compassion” (A Shadow over Palestine, line 775).
- Berrigan also appears earlier in Feldman’s narrative: his brother, Reverend Philip Berrigan, joined the first Freedom Seder in Washington, D.C. in 1969, and Daniel Berrigan, then recently “gone underground” to protest his federal jail sentence, featured at a 1970 Freedom Seder at Cornell University (A Shadow over Palestine, line 745).
Related pages
A Shadow over Palestine, Association of Arab American University Graduates, Arthur Waskow, Right of Return, Exile