Calling all Area Quaker Meeting members and engaged attenders!!

Discernment Workshop:
Are We Committed to Justice for All in Israel/Palestine?
Reflections on Joining the Apartheid-Free Communities Coalition

A presentation by Steve Chase, Friends Meeting of Washington
Saturday, January 17th 1-3 PM
Homewood Friends Meeting
3107 N. Charles Street; Baltimore MD

Steve Chase is a longtime Quaker activist, educator, and writer who serves as Outreach Coordinator for the Apartheid-Free Communities’ Quaker Affinity Group. A member of Friends Meeting of Washington and BYM’s Palestinian and Israeli Peace and Justice Working Group, Steve will speak to us about nurturing a sustainable peace by ending our complicity with the US-backed Israeli system of apartheid and explore how Quakers can work nonviolently for peace, justice, and equality for all Palestinians and Jewish Israelis. 

Jewish safety is a real need throughout the world, but it can never be achieved through the ongoing destruction, domination, or dispossession of the Palestinian people and the repression of human rights advocates opposed to apartheid and genocide. Nor is a just peace brought closer by anti-colonial war crimes against civilians by armed Palestinian groups or demonizing all Jews for the crimes of the most openly racist and violent ruling coalition in Israel’s history.

Quakers, if we are truly faithful, can contribute to the nonviolent movement for justice for all Palestinians and Jewish Israelis without succumbing to the temptations and sins of either anti-Jewish bigotry or anti-Palestinian racism.  This requires a clear moral compass, deep discernment on history, power dynamics, ideology, and US policy. Steve will speak about his personal (and Friends Meeting of Washington’s collective) discernment journey from a one-sided, parochial empathy to greater moral insight and action on human rights for all in Palestine/Israel. This will be followed by a Q&A session and small group reflections on three prepared queries.

Besides writing Letters to a Fellow Seeker: A Short Introduction to the Quaker Way, Steve is the author of two Pendle Hill pamphlets, including Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions? A Quaker Zionist Rethinks Palestinian Rights. He is currently working on a new book entitled Seeking a Just Peace in Israel/Palestine: A Discernment Guide for Quakers (and Other People of Faith).

Click here to register for 1/17/26.