Ched Myers at JEM

Ched, in the red vest hand made in PalestineIt came on short notice, but for those 16 or so who heeded the email that Ched Myers of Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries was in town and had time to swing by the JEM office for an evening’s bible study with an eye to the situation in Palestine-Israel, it was quite a treat.

With his new, first person experience of how the Palestinians struggle to remain dignified in the face of Israeli encroachment on their traditional agricultural lands, Ched took the group to Isaiah 5 to do an in depth and hard hitting look at the text, line by line, to help open eyes to the striking and sad similarities between the experiences of the 8th century BCE which the Prophet was commenting on with loving lamentation, and the present day abuses of the poor and subsistence farmers still tending some of the same plots and groves and vinyards as their biblical forbears. Ched talked about how the prophets arose to denounce the economic practices in what Ulrich Duchrow refers to as the first wave of something we call globalization, the shift to an economics of accumulation and concentration and widespread regional power and influence that today we recognize in giant corporations, and an economic system rigged to move wealth upward while displacing the people from their vital connections to land and the productivity that is hard enough won by the work involved.

Ched’s in depth look at the arduous task of establishing plots and vinyards and orchards on the harsh and hilly soil in the region made clear how tragic it could be for a subsistence farmer to face a crop loss to nature, and all the more so to another man-made system geared to swallow competition and those who otherwise fall on hard times. He told us about Abu Nidal, the contemporary olive grower who, while faced with mounting Israeli pressure to leave his home on a hill surrounded by olive trees, has quietly and subversively resisted each attempt to oust him from the land he loves and that has been in his family for several centuries. His method of resistance to the pressure is not to fight back with bombs or stones but to plant more olive trees! Moreover, helping us to remember our own connections to land helped us to understand the connection of a farmer to his land, particularly in a region where life is unambiguously connected to the generative potential of the soil.

To support the dignified response of the hard-pressed (no pun intended) Palestinian olive grower, you might elect to buy their Fair Trade olive oil from Import Peace. Also offered was beer from Taybeh Brewing, a small Christian-owned brewery in Palestine caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of the Israeli pressure upon Palestine, and the potential for the Islamic Hamas party to rise to governance with a Muslim prohibition on alcohol—as threatening a proposition from within. Their answer is that they are preparing to go into making pharmeceuticals!

Thanks to Ched Myers for his passionate teaching. He appears tonight at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego.