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CPT in Iraq has been criticized for speaking out only against American violence and ignoring the violence perpetrated by radical Muslims in the country. Is that a fair criticism?

I have not followed with care all the statements that have been made by CPT or the CPT people in Iraq. So I don't really have much of a judgment.

However, the vast majority of Christian leaders said that on just war grounds, the U.S. invasion of Iraq was wrong. The Pope said it; the Catholic bishops said it; mainline Protestants said it. The National Association of Evangelicals was silent and didn't say it was right or wrong. The only people who supported it were some evangelical leaders. The vast majority of Christian insight on the war was that it was premature, it was wrong, it didn't fit just-war criteria.

Any group of people, finite as we are, is sometimes going to get things wrong. So if CPT didn't get the balance right, I consider that far less significant than what they are trying to do, which is to say there is another way to work at peace and justice in the world.

It seems to me that not just from the pacifist side but from the just-war side what CPT is trying to do should draw in thousands and thousands and thousands of Christians across the Christian perspective. As I argued to my Mennonite brothers and sisters in Strasbourg, if we're serious about finding an alternative to just war, then we'd better start living it out, which is what CPT is trying to do.

The other side is that just war criteria say very clearly that war must be a last resort. In the 20th century, we have seen massively successful nonviolent campaigns. It's not just that Martin Luther King non-violently changed American history, or that Gandhi defeated the British Empire. Solidarity defeated the Soviet empire. The Manila campaign in the Philippines defeated Marcos, one of the most brutal dictators. The list goes on and on. Nonviolence can be amazingly successful even in the face of pretty vicious dictators. We have only begun to explore the possibilities.

Since the just-war criteria require that war be a last resort, those who subscribe to just-war theory should put millions and millions of dollars and thousands and thousands of people into the campaigns of nonviolence like CPT to see how much we can do that way. My appeal is both to just-war people and to pacifists to massively expand what CPT is doing.

You probably know Jonathan Kuttab he is an evangelical Palestinian, born in Bethlehem, and has been working for justice for the Palestinians in nonviolent ways for a couple decades now. He says if we have 1,000 CPTers working throughout the West Bank, it would make an enormous difference. We all know that one of the most difficult issues and one of the biggest causes of problems in the Middle East is the inability to resolve the Israeli/Palestinian dispute. It seems to me CPT is precisely the tool that would be most successful.

All pacifists and just-war people in the next year should put a thousand CPT kinds of people all through the West Bank to say to the Israelis and Palestinians, "You have to stop killing each other. There has to be two states here that are fair and just."

Copyright © 2006 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Ron Sider's speech, God's People Reconciling, is available from the CPT website.

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March (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50