Peace, or the absence of it is on many tongues right now. The Other Cheek met a peacemaker this week, Joyce Ajlouny, the leader of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a century-old aid and advocacy group that has changed with the times.
The Other Cheek asked, What is a friend?
“A friend is synonymous with the word Quaker, which is a Christian faith,” Ajlouny explained. “So that is the friend part, the name Quaker. And Quakers, you find Quakers all over the world. But in Australia, I believe there’s a small group of Quakers, but they are very active. And that’s the beauty about being a Quaker. We say that we let our lives speak, meaning that we are very much for action and making the world a better place. A lot of people confuse Quakers with pacifism, meaning they sit down and do nothing, right? But Quakers are pacifists, but we are certainly not passive about dismantling injustice and speaking about truth and justice and doing the work that dismantles the structures of oppression.”
What drives Quakers to do all of that?
“That’s a very good question. Quakers believe that there’s that of God in everyone. And that to me is sort of central to what drives us to do our work, because if there’s that of God in everyone, it means that there’s something sacred in everyone. And when we see war and violence and genocide and impacting that divine in people and destroying it, killing it, we have to do something about it. We need to oppose it, right? Because we believe in that light and in keeping it lit.”
You lead the American Friends Service Committee. So, as an American with your nation at war, although some people, sometimes your president says you’re not at war, what’s it like to be a US Quaker?
“Yeah. At this time, it’s very, very difficult. We are unfortunately not just at war with Iran, we have also been complicit in supporting so many other wars, from Vietnam to Iraq to the genocide in Gaza, that we have fueled it by our weapons and by our tax dollars. We are an American organisation, but we’re also global.
“We have programming in the United States where we push for fair immigration policies and also we’re doing our best today to protect immigrants from ICE and other repressive policies. We are also working globally
“And we are, for example, in Gaza. And in Gaza, we’ve been since 1948, building the first humanitarian infrastructure for the Gazans post Nakba, which is the Palestinian catastrophe, and we remain there today. So we provide the life-saving [aid], the real needs for communities, but at the same time, we don’t stop there.
“We speak truth to power and we ensure that we dig into the root cause of what’s causing oppression, be it racial injustice or war. And so in the United States today, from all administrations, it’s not just this administration, we hold them to account.”
Joyce, you describe the Quakers as a Christian body: What is it about the teachings of Jesus that led you to adopt your attitude towards peace and peacemaking?
“To put it simply, Jesus called us to love thy neighbour, right? And so I think it’s the teachings of Jesus and that we instil in our work and our values of how we take it forward. We have what we call the testimony of peace and the testimony of equality we take to heart.
“So we say we decolonise our work, for example. So if we work in Africa, which we do have a lot of work in Africa, you’d be sure to know that 100% of our staff in Africa are African. And so it’s ensuring that not only is their voice being lifted, but it’s also that we are being led by them and it’s not the other way around.”
And alongside peacemaking, I sense that you add humility. As somebody from a very rich country, you’re adopting what you call a decolonised position.
“Yes. And humility is often something we talk about at work in our meetings, because it’s never about us. And I think that’s what we always want to say. It’s not about us. It’s about the people that are impacted by oppression and how we can support them.
“So we do a lot of behind-the-scenes work. We do a lot of quiet diplomacy. We do some research, for example, on corporations that are supporting or profiting from oppressive systems like a heartbeat, like the prison industrial complex, like the militarisation of borders. We do the research. A lot of it is behind the scenes. So communities and organisations that want to divest from oppressive systems have that information. So a lot of it is done with the focus on the issue rather than the focus of us as an organisation. And sometimes people say, ‘Well, not a lot of people know about you as an organisation.’ And we say, ‘Yeah, that’s probably by design because it’s really not about us.”
Many Christians argue about just wars, and certainly in your country, some of them would side with Israel against Palestine. Is there a temptation as peacemakers to want to support the Palestinians fighting back?
“Well, as a Quaker organisation, we do not support any form of violent resistance. We know it’s enshrined in international law. International law gives people who are living under the duress of military occupation the right to use arms to resist. We understand that. We understand that some communities may decide to revert to that, but as a Quaker organisation, we don’t support that.
“We believe in other forms of resistance, because here’s the thing: we have seen for centuries what war and violence do. They beget more violence. They enter us into another cycle of violence, more hatred, more people seeking revenge, more people wanting to fight there. And history has shown us that that’s not going to get us to peace. I think what history has shown us is that peace is attained through peaceful means, through dialogue, through diplomacy, through non-violent resistance like boycotts, like divestment.”
Give me an example of being a peacebuilder, but not being neutral.
The example I will cite is Palestine, right? We know, and we recognise as AFSC, that’s why we are sometimes accused of taking sides, and we say, ‘Yeah, we do take sides. We take sides with the oppressed against the oppressor.’ And for us, that situation is clear. This is a settler colonial enterprise that for the past over seven decades, has ethnically cleansed and subjugated Palestinians to apartheid and to heinous, belligerent crimes against humanity. We just look at, since October 7th, we have 8,000 or more Palestinians who’ve been abducted from their homes and are now in Israeli prisons, tortured. And you have the Israeli human rights organisation, B’Tselem, which issued a report last year called Welcome to Hell, and it talks about the prison system there. And so we see, as AFSC, we see how oppressive this military system has been and how it aims to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its people, starting with 1948 and the ethnic cleansing that took place in 1948 to make way for the Israeli state to be established.
“So history aside, we look at today and what’s happening in Gaza and the genocide. We have staff in Gaza who provide aid. They are Palestinians themselves. They’ve lost tens of family members. And so we have to take sides.”
I mean, a more conservative Christian might say, but what about October 7th? That was an act of violence.
“Of course it was. And it needs to be condemned as that. And AFSC issued a statement immediately after October 7th saying that we don’t condone that violence, but at the same time, we recognise that the people who have perpetrated the violence against Israelis, we don’t want to give them any excuses, but at the same time, they’ve been living under the duress of a blockade. They’ve been bombed year after year after year. They’ve lost family, they’ve lost … They resisted. They resisted, and they chose to resist in perhaps an ugly way, and we don’t condone it, but people have painted this issue as a war on religion, which is not true. This is not a war against Jews, right? This is a conflict between an oppressor, an occupier, and people who have been subjugated to that military occupation year after year after year. AFSC does humanitarian work all over the world.”
Well, as a Palestinian, let me ask you, what do you see the future as being? There is no doubt that Israel is a very militarily powerful nation. The Israeli people, many of them would say, “Well, at least half of us were refugees from Arab speaking countries in the Middle East.” What should happen?
Well, I’m very worried about the future. I can tell you, I worry that this genocide and the continued violence on the West Bank from settlers and the Israeli military, that’s also where we work at AFSC. We support the displaced in the West Bank who are struggling with settler terror as well.
‘But all of that has generated more anger. To my earlier point about violence begets violence, right? And so you have Israelis at the same time, which is something that I often wonder when you look at the polls, and you say that you see that almost 90% of the Israeli population is okay with the genocide in Gaza, okay with what their government did in Gaza. And to me, what does that say about the society? My heart goes out to them. I believe in the humanity of people, right? People are good; they have that God in them, right? That divine [is] in them; they’re good people, yet they believe in the obliteration of their neighbours because they believe Palestinians are all terrorists, including children. And so you have a situation where there is a lot of dehumanisation happening and also a lot of anger on the Palestinian side because of that decades-long subjugation that they’ve been experiencing.”
Note: This writer does not use the term “genocide” to describe events on October 7 and following, because the commonly used definition does not match the tragic events in my view. In this story i am seeking to accurately portray Joyce Ajlouny’s point of view. I acknowledge there is a technical legal definition that might apply and might be used by both belligerents and their supporters.
Image: Joyce Ajlouny. Image Credit: Joyce Ajlouny and Friends Journal