This week’s Friends Jour­nal fea­ture is a piece by Lau­ren Brown­lee, who’s writ­ten many book reviews for us, but only one fea­ture before this (“One Drop in the Wave of Lib­er­a­tion” about the new African Amer­i­can his­to­ry muse­um in D.C.). This time she talks about one of the more con­tentious issues of our day, the polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion in Israel and Pales­tine, but does it very much in a Quak­er context.

What make it Quak­er? Well, she shares her per­son­al sto­ry of weigh­ing the sides on the issue, going from one view­point to anoth­er until she finds one that she can own. The process of dis­cern­ment is care­ful and not lin­ear. It lis­tens to par­ti­sans with­out itself becom­ing par­ti­san. As I write in my open­ing col­umn, “Her answer may not be your answer, but we hope her mod­el of dis­cern­ment is use­ful to read­ers.” She writes:

My great­est fear is hurt­ing peo­ple, and my new friend had made it clear that the worst con­se­quence of BDS is not inef­fi­ca­cy; it is caus­ing more pain to a peo­ple who have already great­ly suf­fered. I did have the oppor­tu­ni­ty ear­ly in the gath­er­ing to voice these obsta­cles to ful­ly embrac­ing the BDS Move­ment, and in fact, we all shared con­cerns that we had heard about advo­cat­ing for the movement

A Lov­ing Quak­er Jour­ney to BDS — Friends Journal 

A Friend strug­gles to find a posi­tion on the Boy­cott, Divest­ments, and Sanc­tions Movement.

Friends Journal