My heart often burns with outrage as I stand by the collapsed roof of a
Palestinian home, see the buildings of an Israeli settlement built on land
seized from a Palestinian family whose vineyards once flourished there, watch
Israeli soldiers detain and question young men.

How can they not know that this modern country is built on the ruins of
villages, that terraces on the mountains were farmed for centuries by people
in this land, that an entire people are denied their land, water and identity
much as Jewish people have had theirs denied through centuries?

An MCC delegation last fall of five First Nations indigenous people from North
America made me reconsider my outrage. The delegation was making an exchange
visit with Palestinian indigenous people. As we talked, I was reminded of
Jesus' sharp words towards people who judge others in Matthew 7: "Don't
condemn others, and God won't condemn you. God
will be as hard on you as you are on others!" (Contemporary English Version)

"Why are you here, half-way across the world, when your own country has done
the same thing to our people?" was the first question we were asked by the
delegation after we explained CPT's work in Hebron. My mind flashed first to
my 95-year-old grandmother's stories of Native American neighbors in pioneer
South Dakota on land surely seized from the Lakota people a generation before
her.

"I'm not there anymore; why am I responsible?" was my first thought.

A Lakota woman's next statement startled me. She quietly, firmly insisted
that the Lakota people are, TODAY, deeply attachment to the land -- and to the
enduring memory of military persecution and destruction of her people's way of
life. "This is not history -- we feel the loss of our land as if it happened
yesterday," she said.

Another memory came to me, of a conversation with a Jewish friend in a valley
once roamed by the Arapahoe. My friend asked whether we should give the
valley- home to 100,000+ people now-back to the people who roamed it two
centuries ago.

"Of course not -- that is something that's over and done with," was my mental
response. I was reluctant to acknowledge this, knowing that his implication
was that Palestinians should just accept the injustice and their fate as a
scattered, second-class people under Occupation in Israel.

A third memory came back to me, of a conversation with a cousin just before I
came to Palestine. As we discussed what it would be like to return to the
land our grandfather and grandmother had farmed, we asked how we could also
acknowledge and restore rights to the First Nations people who had been the
original stewards of those South
Dakota prairies. For me, as a Christian, returning the land somehow would be
an appropriate obedience to the Biblical themes of Jubilee which insist on
justice and "enough" for all people -- and which remind us that the land is
ultimately God's and not ours.

As we sat in our small CPT apartment, a Lakota man (originally from southern
Saskatchewan) now married to a Mennonite and working with a Mennonite
development organization on a First Nations reserve in South Dakota, again
asked us why we are in Israel/Palestine. He was struck
by the parallel with the Israeli people's of our Mennonite heritage of
oppression and search for a safe homeland which overshadows our own settling
on land seized from another indigenous people.

Mennonites, like Jews, hold tightly to memories of oppression, but we
conveniently discount our legacy of settling land from which armies had
forcibly removed other peoples, both in Russia on Cossack land and in the
Americas.

We Mennonites remember the martyrs of the 15th century, who died because
pacifist and rebaptism beliefs challenged both Protestant and Catholic dogma
and doctrine. We remember that our people who moved again and again to avoid
severe persecution for their odd beliefs, but we forget that Queen Catherine
the Great of Russia asked Mennonites to farm Ukrainian lands that had
originally belonged to wandering,
nomadic peoples whose lifestyle threatened her empire. We remember those who
suffered greatly during the Russian Revolution at the hands of the Communists,
but we forget that they were wealthy landowners who had not always dealt
fairly with their neighbors, earning their jealousy and hatred.

In remembering the less-savory elements of my Mennonite heritage, I am
humbled, but I am not deterred from my desire to seek justice for the people
of Palestine and for the First Nations peoples of the Americas. Seeing the
injustices of Palestine has helped me to be able to more clearly see the
mistakes we have made-and to consider how I
might seek to live more justly.

And if my stories can help my people to examine our own journey more
closely, perhaps being in Palestine can help us come to terms with this black
mark on our history and take action to reconcile this with our God's demands
to
"do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with our God."