Words Matter

By, Noushin Framke

My first IPMN meeting was in March 2006 in Washington DC, when 30 people attended and our speaker was Noura Erakat, a student at Georgetown Law.

A lot has changed since that meeting and because words matter, I’d like to talk about our vocabulary over the years.

At the 2006 GA in Alabama, people bristled at the word “occupation,” and it was said in hushed tones. It’s hard to imagine now, but it was gutsy to mention the word.

The D word, divestment, was first floated about Israeli human rights abuses in 2004. And I say the D word because it was very controversial to even mention it in connection to Israel. For our opposition, it was so hard to utter the word that I remember in 2014, the president of Auburn Seminary asked us in a meeting if we had even considered what the world would look like on “the day after,” if divestment passed, and what the fallout would be…  She couldn’t even imagine that day, which came soon after that meeting.

In hindsight, that was a failure of imagination. In justice work, that is not an option. We need to look beyond what we can see, and operate with imagination. 

We’ve learned we need to be pushing justice on several fronts. In 2010, six years into the battle for divestment, we widened our focus and also brought the first apartheid overture to GA in Minneapolis. None of our policy wins have been easy, and in fact they have all been won in zig-zag lines. One step forward, one step sideways. As we learned that, we also learned it’s good to have a lightning rod.

In 2014, when divestment finally passed, we also published Zionism Unsettled. It was so controversial to call out Zionism that it made divestment battle look mild. 

So now we had occupation and divestment in the “ok to say” column.

But in October of 2014, we brought Ilan Pappé to Chicago as our keynote speaker. He gave us some important advice; he said we have to correct our vocabulary and we need to stop calling it an occupation, because it’s not an occupation. And it’s not a conflict; stop saying conflict, he said. Pappé talked to us about using the language of colonialism and settler colonialism and told us to start using the right terminology. That was 10 years ago. 

We listened and In 2016 we started work on Why Palestine Matters, subtitled  “the struggle to end colonialism.” It was published in 2018. We supported Black Lives Matter in 2016 and we put Palestine in the context of other justice struggles and started teaching the concept of intersectionality, a term coined for the many intersections of injustice that Black women find themselves at. 

We declared that you can’t be a feminist and deny Palestinian rights. You can’t be for climate justice and deny Palestinian rights. You can’t be for Black rights or immigrant rights, and deny Palestinian rights. 

So now we had intersectionality as a justice tool and we were framing the debate with colonialism. And we started seeing that since we ourselves live in a settler colonial country, we need to confess our own sins on that front too. The PCUSA denounced the Doctrine of Discovery in 2018, which was the 500 year old doctrine that justified colonialism and created manifest destiny. So now we had our own American map of disappearing indigenous lands to use alongside the map of disappearing Palestinian land. 

We are part of a movement calling for ending colonialism, which began to be dismantled at the end of WWII and the creation of the UN. In 1945, 51 countries co-founded the UN. By 1975, as people achieved independence, there were 144 member countries, and today we have 193 member countries, plus the Vatican and Palestine as “non-member” states. 

So now we have gone from occupation to apartheid, from the D word, to calling out Zionism, from conflict to Settler colonialism. So what’s next?

Last month I was in Palestine with an amazing delegation. I am still processing it all, but I came away with three vocabulary lessons.

First:

It IS genocide. Say the word. Wherever and whenever possible. Call it out.

Second:

Stop talking about peace. There is no peace without justice. 

For me, talking of peace or praying for peace feels tone deaf and sounds like white privilege. It’s another way of praying for stability. But whose stability? Isn’t praying for peace praying for the status quo? 

Let us pray for justice. If you must, pray for a peace with justice. Never pray for peace alone.

And finally, third:

Mitri Raheb’s new book is called Decolonizing Palestine. It's a must read. We need to get to the decolonizing part of the work. Unfortunately, the word “decolonize" has itself become a bit of a lightning rod and can impede progress. I wish we had a more positive word because it implies subtracting something. 

Jeff Halper has a good example of what decolonization could look like. He talks about someday having a soccer team for Israel/Palestine with one team going to the World Cup. How great would it be, he asks, to have one national team with both peoples on it? 

That’s decolonization.

We now need to talk about decolonization. What would it look like and what does it mean.

The main thing is for people to understand that decolonization is a good thing, it’s not subtraction; it is addition. It ADDS to society and doesn’t take away from it. 

Going forward, I believe teaching Americans about decolonization is our next challenge.

Noushin Framke

Noushin Darya Framke is a West Asian Christian whose family is Armenian on one side and Iranian on the other. Noushin’s maternal grandmother walked into Iran in 1915 as a ten-year-old refugee survivor of the Armenian Genocide. Noushin was educated in Iran at a Presbyterian mission school and in boarding schools in England. She came to the United States in 1978 for college and her freshman year turned out to be the year of the Iranian Revolution. Noushin served six years as a member of MRTI, Mission Responsibility Through Investment, which advocates for corporate responsibility and socially responsible investing for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). From 2006, Noushin has been a founding member of IPMN. She is a member of the Presbyterian Church’s Committee on Ecumenical and Inter-religious Relations. She is also a member of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Advisory Board of Presbyterian Women. Noushin is a Presbyterian elder and lives in New Jersey and New York City. She and her husband of 42 years have 2 adult daughters.