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The Israel/Palestine Integrity Test
The unbearable inconvenience of living up to your values.
On March 23rd, 1775, as the might of King George III’s army threatened to crush the American colonies, Patrick Henry persuaded the Second Virginia Convention that freedom was worth fighting, and even dying for:
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Just over a year later, Thomas Jefferson declared that the newly established thirteen United States of America would be a nation of equals, free from imperial rule or foreign control:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
And a few decades after that, moved by the continued hypocrisy of slavery, Henry David Thoreau called on each individual to oppose injustice, a call that later inspired Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King:
… [one must not forget] those cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply, in which a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, cost what it may…
