Former Milwaukeean Rabbi Ed Rettig told some 130 people Sunday that he wished he could “be coming from the Holy Land with a message of optimism and joy,” but instead had to offer “a message full of apprehension.”
Rettig now lives in Jerusalem where he is the associate director of the Israel-Middle East office of the American Jewish Committee.
He explored what he regarded as the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in an address at St. Mark AME Church, which one member, Milwaukee Urban League President and CEO Ralph E. Hollmon, said is “the oldest African American church in Wisconsin.”
Hollmon presided over the luncheon event and sat at the head table with Rettig, Pastor Darryl Williams, the spiritual leader of the church, WMCS-AM radio talk show host Eric Von and Harriet Schachter McKinney, executive director of the American Jewish Committee-Milwaukee Chapter.
At issue, said Rettig, is the question of who are the “indigenous people” to the land. The Jewish connection, he said, is plain to see in the Bible and is “embedded in how Jews think and live in the world.”
But “our Palestinian neighbors don’t understand this point,” he said. “They believe they are the victims of a colonialist enterprise” like that of the French in Algeria or the British in Kenya.
Therefore, the Palestinians use the kind of strategies that worked to throw the European colonialists out of other places, some morally legitimate and others not, Rettig said.
Because there is “justice on both sides,” the only hope for peace is for both sides to come to recognize this, he said. But if either of the sides see themselves in a zero-sum-game and view compromising with the other side as something evil, “I fear any road to peace will be long and winding,” he said.
Rettig used the analogy of two home-owning neighbors, who have a dispute about whether a hedge should be a foot in one direction or the other; and the only hope for resolution between them is to agree to compromise and move the hedge by six inches.
Respondents at the head table and questioners from the audience referred to that analogy several times. “We know that’s the answer,” said Williams.
Von, who had gone on an AJCommittee-sponsored trip to Israel in 1999, said he returned from that trip “feeling there would never be peace” because in what he heard from all sides he didn’t see much willingness to compromise.
Hollmon spoke briefly about the AJCommittee-sponsored trip he took to Israel recently.
He said one of the lessons he learned from that trip was that “it is extremely important to have open dialogue and cooperation” between the African American and Jewish American communities; and “I hope today’s program will be the beginning” of more such efforts.
In Wisconsin, Rettig had been the Judaic educator at the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center and had also served as part-time rabbi for Congregation Beth El in Sheboygan.
He told a Chronicle reporter that his present job involves bringing delegations of visitors to Israel and helping promote good relations between Israeli and diaspora Jews.
Those relations are becoming “increasingly important,” he said. “Eighty percent of the Jews alive today live in the United States or Israel” and the two communities “have got to understand each other.”
Sunday’s event, titled “Building Bridges of Understanding: Christians and Jews Connecting to Israel,” was co-sponsored by the church and the American Jewish Committee-Milwaukee Chapter.
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