What the Saudis Should Do
Document Actions
Send this page to somebody
Print this page
If I were the peace-oriented, “avoid Clash of Civilizations”-oriented, reconciliation and mutual respect-oriented section of the Saudi and Arab world, and I wanted to change the way that Arabs and Muslims are perceived in the Western world
Here is What I’d Do:
1. Challenge the United States to Fund a Global Marshall Plan along the lines defined by the Network of Spiritual Progressives and House Resolution 1078—to donate 1-2% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the US each year for the next twenty to once and for all eliminate domestic and global poverty, homelessness, hunger, inadequate education, and inadequate health care.
To make that challenge significant, the Saudis would pledge to become part of the Global Marshall Plan, and to donate the same percentage of the Saudi GDP that the US donates of the US GDP.
To make that challenge well known, the Saudis would take full page ads in major newspapers, television and radio in the US and Western countries to publicize the idea of a GMP, to give the following message: “We share with many people in the West the desire to defeat terrorism and to create a safe and peaceful world. We know that that cannot be accomplished primarily through military means. That’s why we’ve been very encouraged to learn of the efforts of the Network of Spiritual Progressives in the U.S. and of many Congresspeople to back a Global Marshall Plan (details of which can be read at www.spiritualprogressives.org <http://www.spiritualprogressives.org> ). That plan calls for the U.S. to dedicate 1-2% of the GDP of the US each year for the next twenty years to eliminate global poverty, homelessness, hunger, inadequate education, and inadequate health care.
“To put actions behind our words, we offer the following challenge to the American public. If you take and implement that plan as called for in House Resolution 1078, we in Saudi Arabia will match that by dedicating the same percentage of our Gross Domestic Product that the U.S. donates to help fund this Global Marshall Plan each year that the U.S. donates.”
My commentary: Unfortunately, there is little chance that the U.S. will take the Saudis up on this offer. But making it could have an important impact in changing the way Saudi Arabia is viewed in the U.S. and in the Western world.
If it does go in this direction, it should fire its public relations firm in the U.S. , whoever that is, and take a firm that knows how to communicate effectively. I’ve seen previous ads from Arab countries and they are filled with words that might make sense to the Saudi Arabians but are useless in communicating to the American public. Moreover, they often use a stiff and diplomatic language, when what is needed is speaking to the people directly.
2. Challenge the U.S. to embrace and promote the Saudi Peace Plan for Israel and Palestine. Buy media (print and electronic) in major U.S. media markets to re-present the Saudi Peace Plan. Present it as a real and abiding serious offer. Again, speak in an easily understood colloquial language. Give this message: “We in Saudi Arabia want to help bring peace to both Israel and Palestine. We have gotten agreement for a peace plan that has been signed on to by 18?22? Arab countries. Jews came to an Arab country in the 20th century and by 1949 they had won 72% of Palestine, leaving 28% of Palestine for the Palestinian people. The 1967 border when Israel was victorious in taking over the West Bank and Gaza. Now Palestinians seek a state just in 28% of Palestine, if Israel will return to its pre-67 borders, with arrangements to ensure full access to the Old City by Jews. Israel can have peace. But it cannot claim to be the only democracy in the Middle East when it rules over and does not give the vote in Knesset to 3 million Palestinians, nor can it claim to have no one to talk to when we, the surrounding Arab states, are eager and willing to begin those talks based on our plan. Americans—please get your government to push Israel to do what is best for Israel as well as best for the Palestinian people and the Arab world—to end the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by negotiating an agreement with us, the countries that would like to see an end to this conflict because peace is in our interests as it is in the interest of Israel and Palestine. Please don’t let the Israel Lobby make you think we are not sincere—we want peace and we are willing to do what it takes to allow the Palestinians a politically, economically and geographically viable state of their own in 28% of what was once Palestine. We know that there are some in the Arab world and some in the Jewish world who are maximalists and who will never settle for anything but the whole of Palestine under their rule. But most of us Arabs and most of us Muslims do not hold that position, and our ability to shape the outcome will be greatly strengthened if we have a real partner for peace in the Israeli and American world. That’s why we are once again reminding you that we have put this offer to Israel and have never even received a reply, as though shaming us was a smart way to achieve peace. It is not. Instead, mutual respect and a commitment to the survival of both the Jewish people and the Palestinian people, the State of Israel and Palestine, can guide us to find the details of how best to implement the Saudi/Arab state peace proposal. And let us say unequivocally—we are opposed to any violent effort to wipe Israel off the map, though some of us do still believe that in future generations it will be possible to have some kind of confederation between Israel and Palestine and perhaps other Middle East states as well, on the model of the European Union. ”
My comment: Don’t say: “Hey we tried that and the Israelis didn’t respond.” In American politics, nobody remembers what anyone said last week, much less a few years ago. You have to communicate this offer over and over again. The same should be done by buying ads to this effect in Israeli media. And you should use the kind of language I’m using—language that is not a bit vague.
3. If the government of Saudi Arabia is not able to take these steps, someone there ought to write for Tikkun a detailed article about why they can’t and what the actual political dynamics are that make this kind of open and caring talk difficult or impossible at this point in the reality of Saudi Arabia or the Muslim world.
My comment: Saudis and other Muslim states complain that their message is never heard in the West. Well, here I am, admittedly not the biggest media outlet, but nevertheless one of the most significant in the interfaith world of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus, and I’m offering you the space to have one or many articles by people from Saudi Arabia or other Muslim countries helping us understand the actual realities and dynamics going on inside Saudi Arabia nd other Arab and Muslim countries. We don’t know who should be writing this. But we do know how to tell the difference between a public relations release and a true article that speaks without constraint about the contradictions and struggles in your community in the same way that Tikkun magazine speaks with out constraints about the contradictions and struggles within the U.S. and within the various religious communities inside the U.S. We’d need that kind of honesty in an article before we could publish it. The neo-cons and right-wingers in our country say: “That can’t happen because those people live in a religious totalitarian society in which only the official positions are allowed and anyone who says anything different is going to find themselves in prison or killed—that’s why you’ll never hear the kind of self-criticism in the Muslim world that you, Tikkun magazine, presents in the American and the Jewish world. And that is precisely why we NEED a clash of civilizations, because that kind of freedom and self-criticism is precisely what the Muslims will never allow to be heard by anyone outside their world.” Please help me prove them wrong.
4. Help publish the peace & justice and non-violence voices of the Jewish world and the American world in Arabic and other languages of the Islamic world and have these writings widely distributed. Let the Arab and Islamic world know that many Jews and many Americans have strong critiques of the way that their own country and religion operate—and yet nevertheless are strong and proud supporters of the US and Israel and Judaism or Christianity.
5. Conversely, help promote those media and peace voices in the U.S. and Israel and in the Jewish world in the U.S. that are too rarely heard because they don’t have adequate access to funds.
6. Help create an “International University of Peace, Love, and Generosity” to provide undergraduate and graduate education that incorporates the New Bottom Line proposed by Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives: that institutions, social practices, corporations, laws, educational systems, health care systems, and even individual behavior should be judged “rational, productive, or efficient” not only to the extent that they maximize money or power or other forms of material success or physical gratifications, but ALSO to the extent that they enhance our capacities to be loving and caring, kind and generous, ethical and ecologically sensitive, our capacity to see every human being as an embodiment of and created in the image of God, and to respond to the grandeur of the universe with awe, wonder and radical amazement. Let such a university teach non-violence and non-violent communication, awe and wonder when it teaches science, mutual respect when it teaches about the hsitroy
A university of this sort, with campuses in the U.S., France, Spain, Germany, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Iraq, Brazil and South Africa, and with on-line courses available to students in every country in the world and in their own languages, could have an amazingly profound impact on the next generation that will be running the world in forty years.
As a first step in that direction, the Saudis should set up an institute for Peace, Generosity and Love that finances scholars and publications all around the world to do creative research in how to promote the New Bottom Line, and activists who seek to do that.
7. The Saudis should offer massive subsidies for poverty-stricken people in the U.S., and other countries around the world, to subsidize the additional costs for fuel that they will be facing in the next few winters.
8. Provide support for an Islamic women’s institution of Islamic Studies to train women to be well-versed in the various interpretations of Islam, and to prepare them for places of leadership in the Islamic world.
9. Support a global campaign for spiritual values that embrace Western notions of individual freedom and human rights, but that simultaneously reject the materialism, selfishness and secularist fundamentalism and denial of the realm of spirit that has sometimes accompanied and been seen as equivalent to “enlightenment” or “rationality.” Take the Spiritual Covenant with America at www.spiritualprogressives.org <http://www.spiritualprogressives.org> and use it as the foundation for an international gathering each year of people who want to work together to promote a spiritual agenda that is not tied to fundamentalism either of the religious or secular variants and is fully committed to human rights and individual freedoms and the full equality of women.
10. Actively combat anti-Semitic ideas that have flourished in the Islamic and particularly Arab world. Make the sale of anti-Semitic books, films and videos illegal. Teach respect for Judaism and
Christianity in every grade level, and make it illegal for anyone to teach hate or demeaning of other religions in any place in the Arab world.
Final points: I have no illusions that any of this will be accepted and acted on either by the Saudi government or by the many extremely wealthy corporations that operate and make billions in Saudi Arabia, or by the wealthy Saudi princes and other sources of wealth in the Arab world. Nevertheless, as a rabbi who truly believes in repentance, and who calls for repentance by the people of the US for the way that we have exploited the resources of the planet and not cared adequately for the poor and the oppressed, and for our immoral wars in Vietnam and Iraq, and has called for repentance by the Jewish people for their arrogance and oppression of Palestinians, it seems only fair to also point to a path for true repentance for those in the Arab world who have benefited from their control of oil resources but who have not done enough for world peace and justice. The path I propose is one that is rational and would be of value to the people and government of the U.S., which I support, and to the people and government of Israel, which I support, and of value to the people of Saudi Arabia and the Islamic world whose well-being I also support.
All this flows from my fundamental belief, and the belief of the Network of Spiritual Progressives and of Tikkun magazine, that our well-being depends on the well-being of everyone else on the planet and the well-being of the planet itself, that generosity and caring for others is both the only path to enlightened self-interest and the only path consistent with what God has communicated directly and indirectly to the human race for the past many thousands of years.
Some people believe it is presumptuous it is for an American Jew to be giving advice to the Saudis. I see it differently—as an act that is at once meant to be generous (nobody has paid me to think this out for them) and supportive of the best interests of the United States, of which I am a proud and loyal citizen, and of the Jewish people for whom I have abounding love. It is precisely because I know that we are all part of the One, the Unity of All Being, the Force of Healing and Transformation, the love and generosity of the universe, that I know that we can only be safe, secure and really happy on this planet when every American, Israeli, Chinese, Indian, Arab, and every other people on earth are also safe, secure and happy. Let it be. And so it is. Amen, Shalom, Salaam.
With deep respect,
Rabbi Michael Lerner
Editor, Tikkun www.tikkun.org
Chair, The Network of Spiritual Progressives
www.spiritualprogressives.org <http://www.spiritualprogressives.org>
RabbiLerner@gmail.com
510 526 6889 (home in California) 510 644 1200 (Tikkun office) 510 406-1576
Author of 11 books including The Politics of Meaning, Spirit Matters, Healing Israel/Palestine, The Socialism of Fools:Anti-Semitism on the Left, and The Left Hand of God.
Please consider subscribing to Tikkun. Your financial support helps us keep the magazine running and allows us to provide you with these exciting writers. You can subscribe online or by calling (510) 644-1200.
Paid Advertising
We are an international community of people of many faiths calling for social justice and political freedom in the context of new structures of work, caring communities, and democratic social and economic arrangements. We seek to influence public discourse in order to inspire compassion, generosity, non-violence and recognition of the spiritual dimensions of life.
