Building community means confronting the entire truth
I once sat in a high school on the West Bank, staring at a photograph of a Palestinian girl hanging on the wall. I’d come to the West Bank knowing nothing more about the Palestinians than what I’d seen in western media, which proved to be considerably less than the whole story. The rest of the story was in the girl’s eyes, about how most Palestinians desperately wanted peace. I remember thinking, “What can I, just one person, do?” And I remember hearing the girl say, as clearly as if she was standing in front of me, “Go tell the truth of what you’ve learned.”
I also remember watching John Wayne in westerns. It didn’t have to be John Wayne. It could’ve been any number of actors; stories and characters in Hollywood westerns are mostly interchangeable. What fascinated me was the myth: the American West, a place of rugged individualists making their own way by the sweat of their collective brows and the bullets of their collective guns, taming a frontier God-ordained to belong to the United States. The Native Americans (often portrayed, I noticed, by blue-eyed Caucasians) were germane to the story only because they were in the way. Dispatching them to the Happy Hunting Grounds in the name of progress was often the driving force behind the narrative. Then I began interacting with the real words and voices of real Native Americans, the myth gave way to reality, and again I heard, “Go tell the truth of what you’ve learned.”
I did, speaking of what I saw in Palestine and learned of the truth about the treatment of indigenous people throughout the United States. I received pushback about both. It is true that the state of Israel has a sovereign (some would say divine) right to exist, and it is true there are Palestinians who embrace terrorism. It is true that some indigenous peoples were war-like long before the first Europeans showed up, fighting one another brutally, and it is true Native Americans were guilty of atrocities against settlers and soldiers. But the reality of part of the truth doesn’t justify negating all the truth, especially if we find all the truth inconvenient.
We human beings have been ignoring inconvenient truths since Adam and Eve denied eating the apple. Not coincidentally, we’ve been seeking peace just as long, because there can be no peace apart from truth — all the truth. We must confront the entire truth, the good and the bad, and admit our complicity therein, even if our complicity is nothing more than remaining silent.
For a people as divided as we, confronting the entire truth about anything won’t be easy. What’s easy is simply legislating truth from view, purging textbooks of the entire truth for fear children “won’t feel good about themselves or their country.” This is unfortunate. Things we don’t feel good about we’re less likely to repeat. Or, put another way, we can’t atone for what we don’t acknowledge.
Atonement, I know, can be a tough sell. Many people see no need to make amends for a past they weren’t a part of. As a Presbyterian pastor, I could say the same. I played no part in the denomination I serve forcibly taking Native American children from their parents and placing them in boarding schools. But for me to ignore what happened, thereby diminishing the generational trauma still being dealt with today, and justifying it with the excuse I wasn’t there, is sin, plain and simple. And I’m called to atone in the face of sin. But first, I have to admit the sin. And if admission means that, for a while, I don’t feel good about myself, my denomination, and my country, maybe I’ll be less likely to look the other way when other people, be it here or halfway around the world, are being dehumanized.
This, ultimately, is not about Palestinians or Native Americans. It’s about our relationship with the truth. We are all called to be peacemakers. But peacemaking involves community building, and community cannot be built on half-truths, let alone outright lies. It requires we confront the entire truth, however inconvenient or painful it might be.