Here are some of the most significant statements we've printed on Israel. Most were written at the time of Israel's 60th anniversary in 2008. Statements from: Rabbi Michael Lerner, Uri Avnery, Mazin Qumsiyeh, Omid Safi, Art Green, Shaul Magid, Riane Eisler, David Shasha, and Lynn Gottliieb. It also includes our vision of what a Comprehensive Settlement Agreement Would Have to Look Like in order to Succeed in the Long Run. 

{Editor's Note: this section has many different perspectives that together define the realm of discourse that takes place within Tikkun on Israel/Palestine. The Statement by Michael Lerner and the proposal of what a settlement should look like reflects our "official position" while the rest give a sense of the concerns that continue to be an important part of our community. }

 

Israel 60 Years Later   

By Michael Lerner   Editor, Tikkun and Chair, The Network of Spiritual Progressives

WHEN I WAS A CHILD, ZIONISM WAS THE NATIONAL LIBERATION STRUGGLE OF THE JEWISH people. While the United States and all other countries--including the Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist countries--closed their doors to Jews seeking refuge from the murder of millions of Jews by the fascists, and while the Palestinian people's leadership used their influence with the British to ensure that Jews would not be able to settle in our ancient homeland both during and immediately after the Second World War as hundreds of thousands of survivors languished in displaced persons' camps in Europe, the Zionist movement championed the need for a state of the Jewish people with its own army and its own territory. For a people who had been stateless for twenty centuries, who were forced to depend on the often-absent "good will" of their hosts in Europe, Africa, and Asia, the prospect of a homeland, prayed for everyday by Jews around the world for two thousand years, seemed to be at once impossible and yet the only imaginable redemption from the trauma of the Holocaust and the previous centuries of suffering and insecurity.

Jews jumped from the burning buildings of Europe into Palestine not because we were servants of imperial or colonial interests, but because we were desperate and because no one wanted us or would protect us. Unfortunately and tragically, we landed on the backs of Palestinians who were already there, and we hurt many of them in our landing. So scarred were we by our own pain--having just witnessed the death of one out of every three Jews alive on the planet--that we were unable to notice or take seriously the pain that we were causing to the Palestinian people in the process. When our army uprooted Palestinians from their homes and villages, it was in the midst of a struggle for survival in which Jews were determined to be as ruthless towards others as others had been towards us.

Yet, there were alternatives. We could have remained a minority in an Arab country and hoped for the goodness of the Arab people to prevail. The Zionist movement could have made dramatic overtures to the feudal landlords who owned much of the land in Palestine and who feared that our ideas of socialism would lead to a revolution against their interests. We could have reached out, as Martin Buber and Judah Magnes did, to a growing Palestinian nationalist movement and tried to create a bi-national state. We could have rejected the Histadrut's "Jewish only" policy of membership in its powerful union and its health care system. We could have put our energies into demanding that the United States open its gates and let Jews settle here.

window.onload =getAd();

But the Zionist movement was made up of "realists" who didn't believe in the possibility of reconciliation, and the Palestinian people were led by similar "realists" who didn't believe that it would be possible to live in peace with Jews, and hence refused to allow Jewish immigrants (although immigrants of any other religion were welcome). Both sides had embraced nationalist rhetoric, and both sides had left behind the loving messages of their respective religions. Both sides were traumatized by their own history, and by outrageous acts of violence perpetrated by the other. I've detailed this history in my book Healing Israel/Palestine (North Atlantic Books 2003). And I'm well aware that partisans on each side have plenty of "facts" to use to "prove" that it was really the other side that caused all the problems, and that there is no "moral equivalency" between, for example, the slaying of Jews in Hebron in 1929 and the slaying of Arabs in Deir Yassin in 194-8. The list of atrocities is long on both sides, and only those who wish to "win" for their side continue to insist that it was they who were innocent and the others were "evil" in intent as well as in action.

The expulsion of Palestinians from their homes, some by fear of being subject to terrorist attacks consciously planned by Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, and the terrorist groups that they led, and others by fear of being caught in a war zone (but then, Jews had no such place to avoid the war zone, and for us, that was decisive about why we had a right to stay), intensified angers. But these relationships could have been repaired had Israel allowed the refugees to return home after the armistice was reached in 1949. It did not. Instead it declared those who had left as a "hostile population," and shot as "terrorists" those who sought to sneak over the border in ensuing years to return to their homes. Those actions, particularly the brutal murders by Ariel Sharon and his Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) unit, provoked counter-acts of terror by Palestinians. The story has only intensified in killings of civilians ever since.

Surrounding Arab states have not helped the matter. The decision by the feudal Arab leadership to reject the UN proposal for a two state solution in 1947 (one that would have given Palestinians far more than the Palestinian Authority is now seeking) and to instead invade Israel when the Jewish Yishuv declared itself a state on May 14, 1948, turned into a huge disaster for the Palestinian people. For at least five decades thereafter, those Arab states, with the exception of Jordan and Egypt, rejected every attempt by Israel to make peace (though Israel's offers never included any serious attempt to deal with the fate of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in refugee camps). Except for Jordan, all of those states have been wildly insensitive to the needs of their Palestinian Arab brothers and sisters, and have used the Palestinian cause as a political football to embarrass Israel, hoping to build a worldwide consensus that Israel should be eliminated from the family of nations. It's only in the last decade that most of these states have come to accept that there is no military solution likely to yield a better deal for the Arabs than what they could get through negotiations. Moreover, many of those Arab states have treated Palestinian refugees at least as poorly, and sometimes considerably worse (e.g., in Lebanon) than have the Israelis. Yet, as the example of Egypt and Jordan shows, those states no longer act as a bloc, and even the most extreme among them have finally come to accept the reality of Israel and have given up most of their fantasies that Israel would some day disappear. Only the non-Arab state of Iran still has leadership holding on to that illusion.

When I look back and watch the irrational and self-defeating behavior of both sides, and when I interview people on both sides of this struggle, one concept shouts out to me: PTSD--Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The trauma on both sides has led people to be unable to think rationally about what is in their own best interests. For the Palestinians that trauma led them to reject the proposal of a two-state solution that was offered them in 1947, and to encourage the surrounding Arab states to reject every offer made by Israel in subsequent decades even after those states were decisively defeated in the 1967 War. In later decades, starting in the 1980s, it was the Jews who rejected reasonable offers for peace, and instead imagined that their military might would allow them to crush the Palestinian national movement. Illusion after illusion after illusion.

Even today, Israel has been faced with an offer by the Arab states for full recognition and peace if Israel would simply return to the pre-1967 borders. However, Israel will not accept, though it knows full well that in the negotiations the Palestinians would allow the Jews to hold on to the Western Wall and the Jewish Quarter of the Old City and would even consider trading some close-to-the-border land to allow some of the major Israeli settlements if Israel gave an equal amount of land back to the Palestinians and made a credible and serious offer to provide reparations for Palestinian refugees. If Israel were to approach this kind of offer in a spirit of open-heartedness, it could soon work out details that would provide Israel with adequate security.

Arrogance of power? Subordination to the religious messianism of the West Bank settlers? Sure, those play a role. But in my view, it is PTSD that is decisive in keeping Israelis from looking at their actual situation: a tiny minority in a world surrounded by Arab and Muslim states whose power will only grow in the coming decades and whose anger at Israel grows in intensity as they watch the state that claims to be the representative of the Jewish people act in horrendous and cruel ways toward Palestinians. Any rational assessment would lead Israelis to accept the terms being offered to them, and to do so in a way that manifested a spirit of generosity and caring for those whom it had hurt, tortured, falsely imprisoned, killed, or wounded. Similarly, it is PTSD that can best explain how Palestinians would embrace Hamas or Hezbollah and fantasize that they could eventually destroy Israel rather than work out an agreement that allows Israel to exist as a Jewish state (that is, as a state that gives affirmative action in regard to immigration to Jews who have a reasonable claim to fear persecution where they are currently living--but not a state that is run by Jewish religious law except in the cultural sense that Jewish holidays are given the same official public priority in that state that Christmas is given in the United States).

How do you deal with two peoples who are suffering from PTSD? Well, we know what you don't do. You don't try to coerce them into situations in which they perceive themselves as vulnerable to re-experiencing the insecurity and pain that caused the trauma in the first place.

This is why I've argued against any attempt to force Israel into accepting solutions that make it feel more vulnerable. It's not that using coercion would be wrong or immoral, but that it will have the exact opposite of the intended effect. Disinvestment in Israel, for example, would only reconfirm the basic feeling (based on a great deal of historical reality) that "the whole world is against us, but that this time we will not be led like sheep to the slaughter in the way that European Jewry allowed itself to be destroyed" (a false description of European Jewry, but nevertheless the dominant perception in Israel). The Massada Complex remains a central frame through which Israelis experience their reality: the courageous Jews who preferred death to surrendering to the Roman imperialists who were seeking to outlaw Jewish life in what the Romans had named "Palestine." In this case, the Israelis are armed with hundreds of nuclear weapons. There is enough willingness on the part of the majority to use those weapons even if in the process they destroyed themselves..

Thus, the situation cannot be analogized to that which existed in the 1980s and early 1990s in South Africa. On the one hand, the entire world recognized that apartheid was fundamentally evil. There is no such consensus about Israel or its policies. Apartheid meant that there was a legal structure preventing blacks from voting, participating in the same schools or same beaches as whites. There is no such set of laws within the pre-1967 boundaries of the State of Israel. There is certainly deprivation of rights in the West Bank and Gaza, but those deprivations stem from a political assessment of the alleged dangers that Israel faces, not from a commitment to degrade all Palestinians (though this distinction is rapidly losing its force as the settlers become more active in periodic pogroms against Palestinian civilians). On the other hand, the minority of whites in South Africa were not part of a people who had always suffered systematic persecution, and though they had some reason to fear what might happen to them as a minority in a black country, they did not have reasonable claim on the conscience of the rest of the world. Yes, it's true that in the West Bank the conditions of oppression and discrimination are in many respects worse than those which existed in South Africa--but it is not apartheid, and using that word or thinking that one can use the same strategies to challenge Israeli policy has proved to be a deadend. So while I support boycotts and disinvestment in Western firms that make goods specifically to help the settlers and the IDF be more effective in enforcing the Occupation, I oppose any general boycott of Israel itself. And there are moral reasons to oppose it as well--after all, the amount of suffering that Israel imposes on the Palestinian people pales in comparison to what the United States continues to do to Iraq. Any boycott that doesn't also involve active campaigns for boycotting and disinvestment in U.S. firms (or for that matter, given its behavior in Tibet and Darfur, China) feels like selective prosecution, and something inappropriate for majority Christian or majority Muslim societies that have not yet taken full responsibility for their own role in creating the trauma that is now being played out against Palestinians.

In fact, this last point should remind us of the larger context. Israel has been put into the same position internationally that Jews often were forced into domestically in Eastern Europe: the public face of a system of oppression that Jews did not control but which they served in part because they received protection from ruling elites. History has shown that this position is precarious, and a bad deal for Jews. But it is Western imperialism and colonialism that set this up, and Jews are only one of many peoples who suffer the consequences along with our Palestinian brothers and sisters. Yet this reality should also remind Jews that placing their faith in the allegiance of the U.S. capitalist class is a terrible strategic error almost certain to backfire. American imperialism around the world, often with the backing of Israel as its sole loyal ally in disgraceful acts of domination, is generating huge amounts of anger that will be passed down from generation to generation among the peoples of the world. It's a story we could have learned from the Book of Genesis in the Torah--Joseph becomes the prime minister of Egypt, comes up with economic schemes that deprive many Egyptians of their livelihood, and in future generations the Egyptians then enslave and oppress the Jews. This is not a rational strategy for long-term survival.

The problem with PTSD is that it deprives people of the capacity to think about long-term survival and instead focuses them on the perceived (and usually unrealistic) immediate threats to such an extent that they are unable to act rationally.

What can one do with such a reality? Psychotherapy has proved of only limited impact with PTSD clients, but is has some chance. Not so when trying to build a mass psychology of healing for a whole society, particularly when the society has not elected to undergo therapy! Those of us who know healing is necessary are far from being empowered to develop societal strategies that could begin the healing process. For us, part of the problem is to get the society to recognize that it could benefit from therapy. My own work with the Institute for Labor and Mental Health started on this same challenge with regard to destigmatizing the use of therapy for working class people. We developed a campaign to popularize the notion that everyone is facing stress, that one is not "crazy" if one seeks support for stress-related problems, and that talking to someone about it would be helpful and not a sign of self-identifying as mentally ill. It was a powerful strategy, and by the mid 1980s we had become so successful that the term "stress" entered the popular vocabulary with much broader meanings than it had ever had before. One of the goals of the Tikkun Community and the Network of Spiritual Progressives is to bring together psychotherapists in the West with Israeli and Palestinian therapists to explore what would be analogous work in those societies.

A central ingredient in any serious strategy will be the task of reassuring people in both societies that they are not hated and demeaned by the peoples of the world, but rather than they are understood in some deep way. That's why in Healing Israel/Palestine I try to tell the history in a way that shows that both sides have a legitimate story, both sides have been unnecessarily cruel to the other, both sides need to do repentance and atonement. Sure, the story can be told in a blame-oriented way. But that will only make it less likely that we can heal the two sides enough that they could actually imagine feeling safe enough to make compromises for a real peace. Those who want to advance social healing should begin writing the texts, composing the songs, and creating the T.V. and movie documentaries that have as their goal the presentation of this kind of balanced and non-blaming compassionate perspective.

I don't underestimate the difficulties in this strategy. The very fact of telling the story in a balanced way in the Jewish community in the United States has earned Tikkun the reputation of being anti-Semitic, or run by self-hating Jews. The organized Jewish community in the United States, prodded on by the Israel Lobby (see my discussion in Tikkun Sept/Oct 2007) has been one of the major impediments to this kind of discourse, or to any peace process that cares equally for both sides. The fact that Barack Obama felt that pressure intensely enough to insert in his speech on race a line about the real problem in the Middle East stemming not from Israel's relationship to its neighbors but only from Islamic fundamentalism, is only the latest example of the incredible power of the Israel Lobby to make questioning Israel's policies in the United States a sure path to political suicide.

So what can we do? We've found that lobbying Congress is a dead-end, because most of the Congressional leaders who agree with our "progressive Middle Path that is both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine" feel scared to say so publicly, and will continue to feel this way until some mainstream political candidate is willing to run for president and make this Middle Path his or her own. Similarly, and for reasons explained above, there's no point in demonstrations that one-sidedly fault Israel, even though Israel, at the moment, has far superior power and hence far superior responsibility to take the first steps to change the situation. Of course, we'll work with the "J Street" project to help create an alternative to AIPAC, but the pressures on that "alternative" to moderate its message in ways that make it less effective will be huge, and the tendency to focus only on policy issues and not on the underlying mass psychology that has contributed to AIPAC's power is going to be immense.

What does make sense is a politics of compassion and a discourse of non-violence. Those of us who wish to see Palestinians freed from subjugation, and Israel living in peace with its neighbors, have to begin to apply the wisdom of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi to the situation in the Middle East. Efforts to create dialogue, to learn how to express oneself in ways that are supportive and not hostile, to learn how to respond to violence with non-violence, must be coupled with a principled embrace of non-violence and teaching non-violence in our public schools, churches, synagogues, mosques, and religious schools.

But there is a deeper change that is needed to heal Israel/Palestine: a change in our own conception of what brings security. The Network of Spiritual Progressives/Tikkun Community evolved from its primary focus on challenging Israeli policy to challenging the Domination Strategy (the view that homeland security comes from imposing our will on others lest they impose their will on us) in Western societies. This evolution occurred not only because of the moral disaster of the Iraq War, but also because we became increasingly convinced that at the heart of the Middle East struggle was the need to undermine the Domination Strategy that has become the common sense, not only of the post 9/11 Western countries but also of the mass consciousness in Israel and Palestine. In place of that slippery-slope to violence and war, we propose a Strategy of Generosity: that homeland security can best be achieved through acts of genuine caring and generosity toward others, so that we are perceived as (and actually become) a country that recognizes our fundamental interconnection with all other human beings on the planet and with the well-being of the planet itself. It is that thinking which now leads us to give priority attention to the Global Marshall Plan, not only because it is the best way to end global poverty, homelessness, hunger, inadequate education and inadequate healthcare, but also because it is the best way to lead by example and to show both Arab and Israeli peoples the way that could bring them lasting peace.

This, we believe, is the most important contribution we in the West could make to healing Israel/Palestine. If we could build a political movement in Western societies that was committed to the Strategy of Generosity and the Global Marshall Plan, we would help Israelis feel that acting from generosity was not some utopian fantasy but rather a way of thinking that was already legitimated in the politics of the economically advanced societies of the West. In this way we could re-empower the many decent people in Israel/Palestine who today avoid politics, certain that there is no point and that no one would ever be willing to make the compromises necessary for peace. Living in the West, we have an important role, but it is not that of imposing our solution, but rather that of modeling a way of relating to others that could infectiously transform the world's "common sense." Just as the women's movement, first dismissed as "unrealistic," has had a profound impact on every country on the planet, so a movement for love and generosity, and for a New Bottom Line, such as that detailed in our Global Marshall Plan (click on "Current Thinking" at www.tikkun.org) and our Spiritual Covenant with America (www.spiritualprogressives.org) could have a profound impact on the process of healing the Middle East. To the extent that we can make that happen here, we would be making a huge contribution toward the possibility of lasting peace for Israel.

In future writing I will discuss the meaning of the situation in Israel/Palestine for those who believe in God and who want to keep Judaism alive. For now, suffice it to say that the kind of Zionism that has emerged in Israel is fundamentally incompatible with the highest values of the Jewish tradition, and must be rejected even as we develop a compassionate attitude toward the Jewish people of Israel. For those who wish to see Judaism survive the twenty-first century, a major first step is to separate the religion from its current identity with the policies of a national state that has lots of Jews living in it and that has succeeded in getting many Jews around the world to identify it as "The Jewish State." I personally feel tremendous pride in many aspects of what the Jews in Israel have accomplished in culture, science, and technology, even as I feel tremendous shame at what they have failed to accomplish in human relations, ethics, and environmental sensitivity.  For me, Israel is part of my extended family, and no matter how I may deplore its treatment of Palestinians, or the culture of day-to-day insensitivity that I've often experienced during the many years that I lived in Israel, I want Israel to survive, to be strong and to be safe. But I carefully separate my sense of family--which for me is tied quite strongly to the people of Israel--from my understanding of what is required of us to serve God and to preserve Judaism in the contemporary period. For that latter goal, we must be willing to apply the prophetic tradition and ask Israelis Isaiah's powerful question: "Who asked you to trample in My Courtyard" and to defile the holiness of God's Torah? As God explains to the prophets,it is precisely because I love you that I insist  on demanding of you that you be your highest possibiity, and will not accept less.Yet today, Israel is not only NOT its highest possibility, it is acting in  ways that have made it one of the major violators of human rights on the planet, an oppressor to Palestinians, and a major reason many Jews in the Diaspora want to have nothing to do with Judaism ("If this is the embodiment of Judaism," they say, "then we can be sure we don't need to be Jewish, because we see little in its behavior that is ethically or spiritually inspiring." And that is said by many who have spent months or even years in Israel, not to mention hundreds of thousands who were born there and have chosen to live elsewhere in the U.S., Canada, England, Australia, even Germany). 

Judaism teaches us to "love the stranger," (the Other). There is no more frequently quoted injunction in Torah than variations on the following theme: 'When you come into your land, do not oppress the stranger: remember that you were strangers in the land of Egypt." A Jewish state that has been unwilling or unable to live by that command has no religious foundation and can generate no lasting support from those committed to God and Torah. Such a state, failing that central commandment, is unlikely to provide safety and security for the Jewish people in any long-term way in the twenty-first century.

Like every other people on the planet, Jews have a yearning to live in a world based on love and kindness and generosity. We will respond to those possibilities just as all peoples will if given half a chance. The task of building a Network of Spiritual Progressives is to convince all peoples that far from being a naive utopian fantasy, building such a world of open-heartedness, compassion, and caring for others is the immediate survival task of the twenty-first century.

*******************************************************************

 What Would a Settlement of the Issues Actually Look Like?


I. Tikkun has always maintained that no agreement will work unless it is both based on and intensifies a process of open-hearted reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. Agreements that do not focus on this as critical and central are doomed to fail in the not-too-long-run. It was the absence of that on both sides in 1993=1995 that made the Oslo Agreements fail to yield a genuine peace.

A reconciliation process would have the following elements:
    1. Each side would publicly acknowledge that the other side had legitimate claims on the Land of Israel/Palestine.
    2.  Each side would agree to teach in schools at every grade level, and in their armies, police forces, universities, and training schools the story as understood by the other side. The curriculum for these teachings would be developed by the other side, and would be taught by “team teaching” in which one of the two people in each team came from the other side.  A museum of tolerance would be created in Jerusalem that documented and held exhibitions highlighting the ways that each side has been hurtful toward the other. Each side shall require a working knowledge of the other side’s language as a prerequisite for passing through the 8th grade of school, and greater competence for anyone graduating high school and stlll greater competence for anyone entering universities or religious training institutions.
    3. Each side would agree to have teachings in their respective synagogues, churches and mosques, radio stations, television stations, newspapers, and website monitored for offensive content that delegitimated the story of the other side, and those who persisted in doing such teachings would be denied further access to teaching in those contexts. This material would be treated the same way we now treat overlty racist or sexist materials in much of Western societieis.
    4. A Truth and Reconciilation Commission would be empowered to obtain testimony from all participants in the struggles of the past seventy years with the aim of educating the public to the sins that have taken place on both sides of the struggle. Hearings of this commission would be on television on prime time every evening and would preempt all other programming on all channels.

II. Israel would withdraw its army from the West Bank and Gaza and no longer attempt to control the points of entrance or the flow of goods and services into the West Bank and Gaza. An International Force recruited from both Christian, Muslim and other nations would be set up on the border of both states to protect each state from the other, and from the fundamentalist or nationalist extremists who will inevitably seek to provoke the other side through acts of terror and violence. That Force shall be empowered to arrest, provide a fair trial based on international principles of law, and expel from the Middle East anyone who is convicted of acts of violence, terror, or destruction of property of those on the other side. That Force shall also enforce a demilitarization of the Palestinian state. It shall also determine an equitable distribution of water resources to ensure that each Palestinian and each Israeli has the same amount of water available on a daily basis.

III.    A Palestinian State comprising all of the territory belonging to Palestine after the 1947 Armistice shall be created, with the following exceptions:
a.    The Jewish and Armenian Quarters of the Old City of Jerusalem and the access roads to them, and the French Hill and Mt Scopus, and the Western Wall and the large plaza adjacent to it, and access roads to it shall be part of Israel
b.    Minor border modifications shall be made through mutual agreement between Israel and Palestine to allow Israel to incorporate some of the close to the border Israeli settlements if and only if land equivalent in size and value to the Palestinians is given to the Palestinian state.
c.    Israeli settlers may remain in their settlements in Paletstine if and only if they accept full Palestinian citizenship and renounce Israeli citizenship, and swear to live by the laws of the Palestinian state and be governed by its courts and police force without engaging in any attempt to change the status of those settlements, and agree to be fully disarmed, and to open their settlements to integration from Palestinians who may choose to live in those settlements or build housing in them, in accord with whatever zoning rules are created by the Palestinian state.  Settlers who live on land that has been obtained by theft of fraud should expect to be punished to the full extent of the law in a Palestinian state. Conversely, Palestine agrees to provide equal access to its universities and school system to former Israelis who are living in West Bank “settlements” and to punish any Palesitnian institution, corporation, or governmental bureaucracy that discriminates against these settlers.
d.    Israel agrees to prohibit and punish any Israeli institution, corporation, or governmental bureaucracy which discriminates against Palestinian citizens of Israel, and will provide equal funding for each Palestinian area as it provides for Jewish Israelis living in any part of Israel Alvaran


IV.    The International Community will commit to raising Reparations for the Palestinian people who have lost property, income, and suffered other losses as a result of the creation of the State of Israel and in any subsequent losses till the present moment. Those reparations shall be paid in two parts: a. to the Palestinian state so that it can create an economically viable reality, and b. to individuals both in Palestine and around the world who have suffered such loss. In addition, the International Community will commit to raising Reparations for Jews who fled Arab lands in the period 1945-1968. In both cases, the reparations shall only go to those who are currently living at an economic level of “struggle,” which will for the purposes of this agreement be defined as anyone whose total household income is less than $120,000/yr and whose total wealth in property, stocks, bonds, annuities etc. is less than $4 million dollars (both figures adjusted for inflation, based on the beginning year of 2010). Any Palestinian accepting these reparations shall be required to sign a document swearing that on behalf of themselves and their families they renounce any claim to property that once belonged to their families inside what is now the State of Israel.

V.    Israel will accept back into it borders 20,000 Palestinian per year for the next 20 years from families that can document that they or their parents or grandparents or great-grandparents before 1967 lived in the territory that is now the State of Israel. Any Palestinian accepting this offer, however, will first sign a sworn oath to live by the laws of the State of Israel, and will acknowledge that they forswear any claims to property that may have once been theirs or their families.

VI.    Israel and Palestine will agree to joint economic cooperation without tariffs or restrictions. After five years of such cooperation, if an international commission of the European Union can establish that that cooperation takes place in good faith, then both countries shall be admitted to the EU and to NATO. If a cooperative economic and ecological district is created in the Arab world, then both countries will also be admitted into that organization as well.

VII.    Except as restricted with regard to attempts to undermine this agreement, both countries shall provide full democratic and civil liberties and human rights to all of its inhabintants.

VIII.    Each country shall be the homeland for its respective people and shall be allowed to provide preferential treatment to its people in regard to immigration. Jews will retain a unique “right of return’ to the State of Israel and Palestinians will have a unique “right of return” to the State of Palestine.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is Not the Israel Our Young People Died For   

By Uri Avnery

MAY 14, 1948. B COMPANY, 54TH BATTALION, GIVATI BRIGADE. WE HAD JUST PUT UP OUR LITTLE tents (which we called "bivouacs") in the yard of kibbutz Hulda. We were not allowed into the dining hall, the center of the kibbutz.

We were busy preparing for the night's action. We already knew our objective: Kubeiba, an Arab village east of Ramleh, on the Jaffa-Jerusalem road. I was cleaning my Czech rifle--manufactured for the Wehrmacht and supplied to us courtesy of Stalin--when a rumor went around: Ben Gurion was just making a speech declaring the foundation of our state. For this special occasion, the kibbutz was allowing the soldiers into the dining room, where the communal radio was located.

We were busy preparing for the night's action. We already knew our objective: Kubeiba, an Arab village east of Ramleh, on the Jaffa-Jerusalem road. I was cleaning my Czech rifle--manufactured for the Wehrmacht and supplied to us courtesy of Stalin--when a rumor went around: Ben Gurion was just making a speech declaring the foundation of our state. For this special occasion, the kibbutz was allowing the soldiers into the dining room, where the communal radio was located.

window.onload =getAd();

Frankly, we were not very interested in the windy phrases of some politician in Tel Aviv. We knew that the state was us. If we won the war, there would be a state. If we didn't, there would be no state, no Tel Aviv, and no us.

But there was one item that aroused some curiosity: What was the new state to be called? Jewish State? State of the Jews? Zion? Judea? Jerusalem? So I went to the dining room. When Ben Gurion's easily recognizable voice announced that we were founding the "State of Israel," I had heard enough returned to my bivouac.

On the way out, I ran into Issar, the brother of a girlfriend of mine. He belonged to another company, which was about to attack another village. We exchanged some small talk. I never saw him again--a few days later he was dead.

That night we attacked the village. When we got there, it was already deserted. I went into one of the primitive houses and found that a pot on the stove was still hot. The villagers must have fled at the last moment.

At that time I could not foresee that these villagers would return to haunt us for decades to come ...

 

When you reach the age of sixty, you should know who you are. The State of Israel does not

Is it a "Jewish state"? The "State of the Jewish People," as one of our laws says? An Israeli state? A state belonging to all its citizens, at least 20 percent of whom are not Jewish at all? Or a state belonging to its Jewish citizens only? A "Jewish and Democratic State," as the official doctrine, upheld by the Supreme Court, asserts? And is this not an oxymoron?

And if this is a "Jewish" state, what does that mean? A state expressing the Jewish Spirit--whatever that is? A state where the majority of the citizens are Jews, now and forever, which would turn it into a "Jewish and Demographic" State? A state where Jews enjoy special privileges?

And anyway, who Is a Jew? Somebody who would have been considered a Jew by the Nazis and marked for annihilation? Somebody who practices the Jewish religion? Somebody who feels they belong to a Jewish nation? Or, as the Israeli law says, somebody whose mother is Jewish and who has not adopted another religion, as well as somebody who has converted to the Jewish religion in a recognized religious ceremony? (In the Jewish religion, the father does not count.)

And what are we Jews in Israel? Israelis? Jews? Israeli Jews? Jewish Israelis? These are very different things. The distinctions are not abstract, not at all theoretical. They have very practical implications in our daily life and in the life of our state.

Current polls in Israel show that a third of the population defines itself as Israeli, another third as Jewish and the rest as Jewish Israeli. The population registry of the Interior Ministry refuses to recognize anyone as belonging to the "Israeli nation." A group of Israelis, including myself, has a case on file against the ministry, demanding that their registration document should drop the entry "Nation: Jewish" and replace it with "Nation: Israeli."

Sixty years after its birth in the throes of war, the state does not really know what it is. There is hardly any debate about this, aside from some little-noticed academic treatises. By universal, tacit agreement, the issue is simply avoided.

One of the manifest results: on its sixtieth anniversary, Israel is one of just three states in the world without a formal constitution. (The British Constitution, consisting mostly of precedents established over a very long time, exists in all but name. New Zealand is still British in this respect.)

Israel knows no clear separation between religion and state, nor between religion and nation. The status of its Arab citizens is uncertain in practice, if not in theory. The war between us and the Palestinian people just goes on and on. For the whole of its sixty years of existence, Israel has lived officially in a state of emergency. Indeed, the State of Israel and the State of Emergency are twins.

Why? What is the root cause of this uncertainty?

Modern Zionism was born at the end of the nineteenth century. The timing is significant.

Zionist mythology has it that throughout the ages the Jews yearned to "return" to the Holy Land. If so, they certainly kept their longings in check. When hundreds of thousands of Jews were expelled from Spain 515 years ago, most of them eventually settled in the countries of the Muslim Ottoman Sultanate, but only a handful of old Rabbis went to the poor Turkish province of Palestine. When Napoleon called for the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine, nobody paid any attention. Similar nineteenth-century British and American initiatives did not fare any better.

The real trigger for the revolutionary movement called Zionism was the emergence of nationalism as the main driving force all over Europe. All the new national movements were more or less anti-Semitic. When many of the Jews realized that there was no place for the Jews in the new European nations--from the France of the Dreyfus Affair to the Russia of the pogroms--some of them decided to constitute themselves as a new nation. Instead of "assimilating" individually, as Theodor Herzl initially proposed, they were to assimilate collectively by becoming a nation of their own on the European model.

Almost all the leading Orthodox Rabbis of the day cursed Herzl. God had punished the Jews by expelling us from His land, and only He could decide whether and when to lift His punishment. By seeking to anticipate the Messiah, the Zionists were committing a mortal sin. Some of the Orthodox even believe that the Holocaust was a sign of God's wrath.

The trouble with the Zionists' resolve to create a national state for the Jews was that there was no Jewish nation in existence. One had to be invented. So invent one they did.

Actually, inventing nations was then developing into a popular international pastime. In his ground-breaking book Imagined Communities (Verso, 2006), Benedict Anderson describes how all modern nations more or less "invented" themselves by rearranging historical facts and myths and creating "national" histories.

The Zionists went much further than that. They pretended that the Jewish Diaspora was also a nation. Actually, the Jews, who were such an anomaly in nineteenth-century Europe, had been quite normal at the time of Christ, when ethnic-religious communities led autonomous lives and had their own jurisdiction. They were then the rule, not the exception.

At that time, a Jew in Alexandria could marry a Jewess in faraway Antiochia, but not the Hellenic lady across the street, who in turn could marry a Hellenic man in Corinth but not her neighbor the Jew. This system continued under the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires (where the communities were called "millets"). It was taken over by the British mandate regime in Palestine, and traces of it can still be detected in the legislation of today's Israel.

When Herzl wrote Wir sind ein Volk--we are a people--he was borrowing a term from European reality. But of course the Jews were not ein Volk like the Germans or un peuple like the French. Even today, when we use the term "Jewish people," it is in a metaphorical sense.

When the Zionists came to Palestine, using a borrowed terminology and a reshaped history, they created a new reality. Today, no one in his right mind would deny that we here in Israel are a nation in a very real sense; a vibrant, thriving nation with a renewed language, creating a new culture, boasting achievements in many fields.

But this nation--what is it? Jewish? Hebrew? Israeli? I have no doubt that it is a new Israeli nation, new as, say, Australia, Canada, and indeed the United States are "new" nations, distinct from their British mother-nation. We, the Jewish Israelis, are as Jewish as the Cohens of New York and the Levys of Los Angeles--but we belong to different nations. Their nation is American, ours is Israeli.

It could not be otherwise. One cannot transplant millions of individuals from one country to another, from one language to another, from one climate to another, from one society to another, from one geopolitical reality to another, and expect them to remain the same.

The Jewish Israelis and the Jewish Diaspora are closely connected. We have common traditions, a common religion (even atheists like myself are Jewish atheists, not Christian atheists), common memories--foremost among them the terrible, unifying memory of the Holocaust.

But we are Israelis, belonging to this country, this region, this reality in which we live, work and fight--mostly fight.

If somebody had told us on that sunny day in May 1948 that we would still be fighting the same war in 2008--indeed, that this war would still dominate our lives, fill the front pages of our daily newspapers, occupy our thoughts and actions--we would have considered them mad.

My comrades and I saw before us a vista of a thriving, peaceful state, democratic, liberal, secular, in the front row of a humanity marching towards a better world. Instead, we are mired in a conflict without end. Many Israelis now believe that this will be our lot for generations to come.

This is the central failure of Israel: it has achieved so very much in so many fields, but it has failed to achieve peace.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been likened to a clash between an unstoppable force and an immovable object. When the early Zionists decided--contrary to the inclinations of Herzl himself--to found their national state in Palestine, they unwittingly started the war which has continued to this very day and which completely warps our character and all our endeavors.

I wrote almost the same on our fifteeth anniversary. I hope that I shall not be obliged to write it again ten years hence--assuming I am still around.

Writing this, I think of Issar--the young soldier I ran into in front of the kibbutz dining hall the day the state was proclaimed, who lost his life in the desperate struggle to hold off the Egyptian army on the approaches to Tel Aviv. If he were resurrected today (and it wouldn't be the first time that something like this has happened in this country, would it?), as he was then, still eighteen years old, what would he see?

He would hardly recognize the face of the state that had then just come into being. Instead of a society which ranked equality and solidarity and mutual responsibility above all other social values, which had created the unique kibbutzim and a comprehensive system of universal social insurance, he would see a state with a gap between rich and poor wider than in any other developed country, with more than a quarter of its population below the poverty line, with just nineteen families controlling a third of the economy, with a shameless governing group of corrupt politicians in the pay of local and foreign billionaires.

Instead of a vanishing religious establishment, ridiculed by most young Sabras at the time, he would see a huge Orthodox pressure group using its immense power to impose intolerant, reactionary laws on the citizens, while milking them without shame. He would be amazed to see that the "Religious Zionists," whom he knew as a moderate party on the margin of the political scene, have turned into a fanatical, semi-fascist, racist and Arab-hating monster controlling government policy, gobbling up the land of others and preaching a religion of ethnic cleansing.

 

He would see that the army--whose name he never knew because he was killed before the Israeli Defense Forces were officially established--this citizen-army he joined in order to defend his home and family, and which boasted of its "purity of arms," has turned into a brutal army of oppression, a colonial force executing Arabs at will, turning back women in labor and the terminally ill at the checkpoints, terrorizing a whole population and covering up war crimes.

Worst of all, he would see the Zionist movement, which he believed to be an idealistic, humanist liberating force, behaving like a soulless instrument oppressing another people, led by cynical demagogues whose main aim is to choke any peace initiative in order to gobble up more land and cover it with new settlements.

What would Issar have said? Would he have said: "This is not the state I died for, to hell with it!"? I don't think so. Rather, I imagine him saying: "This is not the state I died for! So let's get to work and change it, let's turn it into a state--what was the name again?--a State of Israel we can be proud of."

The Biblical general whose name I bear, Abner, cried out to his opponent on the eve of battle: "Shall the sword devour forever? Knowest thou not that it will be bitterness in the latter end? How long shall it be then, ere you bid the people return from following their brethren?" (2 Samuel, 2:26)

Joab, King David's commander in chief, did indeed call the battle off. When shall we have the good sense to do the same?

Uri Avnery is Chair of Gush Shalom, the pre-eminent peace activist organization in Israel.

******************************************************************************************

Co-existence and Joint Action: A Lesson from 60 Years of Conflict   

By Mazin Qumsiyeh

AS A PALESTINIAN FROM THE WEST BANK I was raised under Israeli occupation, but my family was rather lucky in being in a part of Palestine that was occupied in 1967 rather than ethnically cleansed in 1948. This has always placed an element of guilt and responsibility on me. Most people I developed close connection to seem to be refugees: in childhood schools in Bethlehem, in college in Jordan, and even in the United States where 400,000 Palestinians now live. But the second group of people I developed close friendship with is Jews of conscience. These interactions and many others shaped my life, including my philosophy of life.

My thoughts evolved as I learned history and grew in my political understanding of the causes and consequences of the Zionist project. I went through stages of anger, depression, immobility, hope, and caring. Today, sixty years after that seminal event, there are simple truths that my friends (Palestinians, Israelis, U.S. citizens, etc.) and I understand even as we continue to evolve our political and activist agenda. We know now that the catastrophe (Nakba) of 1948 was not inevitable and certainly most Jews in the world at the time did not participate in the Zionist project (although many were silent while today many speak out).

We know that ethnocentric nationalism is not the humane answer to the racism and discrimination inherent in ethnocentric nationalism. We know that people of all faiths and backgrounds can and do work together for peace and justice. They can and do live together (even as husband and wife--I have been married to a Chinese woman for twenty-three years). We know that violence is a symptom of the underlying disease not its etiology (as seen in the end of violence in Northern Ireland and South Africa). We know violence to be more: that violence only begets violence. We know that the only route to a durable peace is restorative justice. And we know that we must transcend the nineteenth-century ideologies especially now in this twenty first century after the birth of Jesus. This is the era of dissolving borders (e.g., in Europe) and dissolving barriers (e.g., the internet). In my humble opinion, the only way to maintain an Israeli Hebrew culture is Sharing the Land of Canaan (the title of my book). If apartheid (segregation) was the problem in South Africa and the Jim Crow South, why would we think it a solution in the Holy Land?

window.onload =getAd();

We can either wallow in our old violent ways or we can really be alight unto the nations. Of all these lessons, the one I as a Palestinian Christian most understand now is what Jesus and many of the prophets taught: though we must challenge and hate the bad deeds done to any fellow human being, we must never hate the evil-doers but try to win them over to the causes of humanity and co-existence. That should be our collective mission and the lesson we draw from sixty years of violence (but also sixty years of good people doing good things for peace and justice).

Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh served on the faculty of Duke and Yale Universities and is a peace activist who splits his time between Palestine, Connecticut, and the Wheels of Justice bus to

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

A Muslim Spiritual Progressive Perspective on Palestine/Israel: (with a dash of Obama)   

By Omid Safi

I BEGIN MY REFLECTIONS ON THE SIXTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE MODERN nation state of Israel, alongside the events commemorated by Palestinians as the Nakba (The Catastrophe), with a reminder of an event that at first sight might seem unrelated: Barack Obama's March 2008 speech entitled "A More Perfect Union" that called for addressing racial issues in the United States.

In this speech Barack Obama, a Christian spiritual progressive who would surely find a home among many committed to the Tikkun ideals, spoke about how there is no way for us to immediately and magically get beyond our racial divisions. There is, however, a way for us to begin addressing issues of racial justice by confronting systematic injustices inflicted upon black communities as well as the real economic anxieties of white communities. Obama stressed that we can "address our past without becoming victims of our past." It is in this spirit that I wish to address the Palestinian/Israel situation/tragedy.

Jews have historically been persecuted and marginalized as few other communities in the history of the West have been. The rise of Zionism in many ways was a response to this persecution. While Zionism did begin with European Jews, it is in many ways part and parcel of the same milieu that saw the rise of other nationalist movements. For many Jews, the desire to return to what they have seen as their ancestral homeland is also real, and was a joyous cause for celebration after centuries of exile. Furthermore, there is little doubt that the establishment of the state of Israel has had a positive impact on the survival of Judaism--and Jews--in the Western world that for far too long had attempted to eradicate them. Furthermore, the concerns of the Israeli civilian community for genuine and meaningful security are real, and must also be addressed.

window.onload =getAd();

And yet part of our attempt to see with two eyes, hear with two ears, and yet feel with one heart is to recognize and remember that the same establishing of Israel is remembered differently, radically differently, by Palestinians. Going back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, there has been a history of colonial support for the creation of Israel that remains for many Arabs and Muslims a painful reminder of centuries of oppressive foreign occupation and domination. The establishment of Israel in 1948 involved the forceful and violent ethnic cleansing of some 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homelands (see Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oneworld 2006). The homes and lands of these indigenous Arab inhabitants of Palestine were confiscated and handed over to Jewish immigrants. In a matter of two generations, Palestinians who had made up 90 percent of the inhabitants of Palestine were forced to become a persecuted minority in their own homeland, or perpetually homeless exiles, much as Jews themselves had been for centuries before. The other major act of injustice on the part of Israel has been the forty-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, combined with draconian measures that inflict collective punishments upon Palestinians, in both the occupied territories and inside Israel itself. These systematic injustices too are real, and the subhuman condition that many Palestinians live in must be addressed if words like justice are to rise above being hollow mockeries of their lofty reality.

All of this is well known. And yet our point is quite simple: if we are to have a common future for all of us in this sacred land, there must be a just and compassionate way to atone for these atrocious realities of the past and the present.

I write these words not as a nationalist, but as a person of faith who remains convinced that the Divine qualities of al-Rahman and al-Rahim, the Compassionate and the Forgiving Merciful, are the two greatest Divine qualities that human beings can and should embody. I write as one of many who are certain that forgiveness and reconciliation are indeed possible, as they were in South Africa, so long as the reconciliation is an exercise in Truth and Reconciliation. The truth must be told, as bitter as it might be for some of us to speak it, and as unpleasant for others of us to hear it. Yet if we are understand one another's realities, we have to grant that the same truth that brings joy to some members of humanity has caused immense pain and suffering for others.

I also write these words as a religious humanist, and a historian, whose issue is not with the existence of Jews, or Muslims, or Christians in this holy land, but with the notion that the state somehow belongs to one ethnic or religious group. It is that arrogance of nationalism that I reject in favor of a pluralistic and historically more accurate vision.

 

I remember that a thousand years ago, over 85 percent of all Jews lived among Muslims of Arab and Persian backgrounds. I remember that Jews achieved a "Golden Age" in Andalusia, ruled by Muslims. I remember that it was the Muslims who received the majority of the Jewish exiles when they were later expelled from Christian Andalusia. I remember that it was the Muslim Ottomans who provided for the welfare and security of the Jewish community, to the point of voluntarily settling Jewish families in the region, including in Jerusalem. We have lived together in the past, and can live together again.

The problem, therefore, is not that of the presence of Jews in the Holy Land. The issue is an unjust interpretation of Zionism that has sought and seeks to rid the land of Palestine and Israel of its Arab inhabitants, and render them second-class citizens in their own ancestral homeland. Only after addressing these issues can there be hope to realize the creation of a community where Jews, Christians, and Muslims can live side by side with one another in full dignity and equality.

Speaking on behalf of all those who resonate with the dream of such a new Israel, such a new Palestine, I say the following: We too dare to dream, we dream of a place, of land, where Muslim, Christian, and Jew live side by side, where Jerusalem becomes once again the Holy City, the Sacred City, simultaneously al-Quds and Zion. (There are many who share this dream, including Christians like Elias Chacour, the many Israeli peace organizations, and members of the Jerusalem Peace Makers such as Sheikh Abdul Aziz Bukhari). We too have the audacity to hope and dream that God's love encompasses all of God's children, Jewish and Muslim, Christian and others. In that dream, we reject the notion, any notion, that this land belong exclusively to one people, or that others are at best tolerated guests. Rights, if they are meaningful, belongs to all; otherwise they are nothing more than privileges guaranteed to a chosen few, which effectively work as frameworks for oppression.

There are some Jews and some Arabs who if given a chance would no doubt wish to purge the land of the other. We see this hateful wish written into the charters of movements like Hamas, which has responded to the Israeli occupation with its own injustice, by inflicting violence upon Israeli society. And as many Palestinians have mournfully reminded us, the creation of Israel has involved the destruction of their own society not as an abstract dream but as an all too vivid reality. It is vital for us to address these past and present realities, and yet we remain hopeful that by addressing them we can avoid the situation of forever remaining their victim.

We dare to dream of a place where the majority of people want to live together, to co-exist, perhaps initially uncomfortably--but we have no choice today other than learning to live together. And we remain convinced that God creates us in love, that love is natural to our state, and it is in fact hate and mistrust that are unnatural. We are taught to hate one another, and if we have been taught hatred, we can un-teach hatred and replace it with an inclusive love. Our hearts are big enough for all of us.

Martin Luther King taught us that we have a choice: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation. We have gone down the path of attempting to violently annihilate one another, and it has gotten us nothing but this vortex of pain and destruction. It is time to try the higher path of nonviolent coexistence, illuminated by love.

We dream of a day where our children, Jewish children and Arab children, go to school together, live in the same communities, and work the same fields together. That day is possible, and our coexistence is possible, but only if we dare to rise above our own worst fears, and reach out to others who wish to coexist with us. Dr. King was right: we are all bound up in an inescapable network of mutuality. Buber was right: we achieve our full humanity when the "I" is projected into the Thou. Jesus and Muhammad were right: that which we do to the least of humanity we do to one another. May it be that when the 100th anniversary of Israel is celebrated, it is also a celebration of how the dreams of multiple communities became realized, not one at the expense of another. It is to that common humanity that we appeal. May the path to Truth and Reconciliation begin with each of us, today.

A professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina, Omid Safi is one of the leading Muslim public intellectuals in the country, and is committed to social justice, compassion, and pluralism.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A lover's lament   

By Art Green

I'M JUST BACK FROM YET ANOTHER TRIP TO JERUSALEM. PERHAPS MY THIRTIETH OR SO, BUT I'VE really lost count. Yes, wonderful to be there, as always. Seeing friends, drinking endless lattes in the Israeli version of middle European coffee houses, enjoying the special atmosphere of conversation that so characterizes that city as a Jewish intellectual hothouse.

I first visited Israel in 1961, six years before the Six Day War and Israel's conquest of the Old City of Jerusalem. In those days you could go up to the belltower of Notre Dame Monastery, right on the city divide, and for a fifty grush fee you could get a look over the Old City wall and peer into the marketplace. I came to Israel as a young man filled with dreams of holiness, of Jerusalem as the embodiment of heaven on earth. During that first visit, a year of study and teaching, the holy Jerusalem of my dreams and fantasies was transformed into a real place. I came to love the real Jerusalem--its people, markets, parks, and cafes. This was "new" Jerusalem, though it seemed plenty old to me. It was an all-Jewish city (except for the monks and nuns), rich with Hebrew and all the languages of the Diaspora, spanning an infinite Jewish ethnic and religious diversity. But it was no longer the Jerusalem of my prayers, of perfect wholeness, of messianic dreams. The pushing and shoving, the cursing and bargaining, the roughness of daily life made it clear that this place was real, not the stuff of fantasy. That Jerusalem, I decided, must reside over there, inside the Old City wall, a place I could not reach. I paid my fifty grush, peered over the wall, and dreamed.

When I went back after the war, I was able to walk through those markets, see the difficult conditions in which Jerusalem's Arabs lived, and feel the hostility behind their masks of commerce-driven friendliness. The markets were beautiful in their own backward way, and drew me to them frequently. But they were not holy; the air I breathed in them was not that of redemption, certainly not that of freedom. The proclamation of Jerusalem as a united city was clearly a myth. Old Jerusalem, too, became real, even profane, as I came to understand the deep conflict between its inhabitants and the multiple hatreds that lay just beneath its beautiful facade.

window.onload =getAd();

Where, then, was holy Jerusalem? I looked up at the Temple Mount, beyond the Western Wall, and decided that was where the true Holy City lay. Respecting both strict halachah and Muslim sensibilities, I decided I would not go up there, and I still have not done so, despite all those many visits to Jerusalem since then. But the truth is that it is neither Jewish nor Muslim strictures that have held me back. I fear that this Jerusalem too might turn out to be profane, and then there would be no holy place on earth at all. I cannot allow that to happen.

This self-imposed taboo is a metaphor for much of my relationship with Israel. I so wanted to believe in it fully--in the rightness of our cause, in the high humanitarian ideals it represented, in the "purity of arms" of its soldiers, in the writing of poetry in Hebrew once again, in the clearing of swamps, the eradication of mosquitoes, and the raising of health standards throughout the Middle East, for Jew and Arab alike, as those old Zionist films used to proclaim. This was the Israel I learned about as a child. This was the Israel I believed in fully when watching Abba Eban address the United Nations, when hearing about David Ben Gurion's interest in the Bible and in Buddhist meditation, when corresponding in childish Hebrew with pen pals in Pardes Hanna, when reading the first Hebrew novel I mastered, S.Y. Agnon's In the Heart of the Seas, the tale of a fantasy journey to the Holy Land, many centuries ago.

That Israel got lost, of course, in the clash with reality. If it continues to exist somewhere behind a wall, that wall stands deep within my own heart. Meanwhile, I have indeed come to love the real Israel, the one I visit so frequently and where I have many friends. I love the richness and naturalness of its Jewish culture, so much of which is borne by the Hebrew language itself. I love the directness of human encounter one has there, as though you are always dealing--and arguing--with half-familiar members of your own extended family. I love the closeness of Jewish historical memory that Israel represents, so dulled and almost forgotten among American Jews.

But that love combines with a deep sense of betrayal, disappointment, and hurt that I also feel when visiting Israel. In recent years I have refused to visit Jewish settlements across the Green Line. My feeling since 1967 has been that this territory belongs to the Palestinians, and should be kept in trust to be given to them when they are ready to make true peace. Settling that land in seemingly irreversible ways, creating "facts on the ground," as they were called, betrayed the Zionist dream. It (combined with ongoing Arab intransigence and folly, both of which there are plenty of, I know) has made a two-state solution nearly impossible. Without a two-state solution, I believe, Israel is impossible, and will not survive.

Even inside the state's borders, the ongoing discrimination against Arabs, who have been second-class citizens for more than half a century, is a terrible stain on the moral reputation of the entire Jewish people. The inability of most Israelis, both individually and institutionally, to treat the Arab population with dignity, even to the point of learning their language, marks a major failing in the Zionist enterprise. One would have thought that post-Holocaust Jews would understand what it is to be a minority, and would empathize with those who entered that status because of our presence. Far from it. One might have imagined that Jews would feel impelled to treat others in our midst as the Bible tells us to treat strangers, "for you were strangers in the Land of Egypt." But this has not been the case. The memory of our own hurt, the terrible wound of the Holocaust and the lesser, but still traumatic memory of second-class status in the Arab world, are what count. Biblical imperatives mean less, especially, so it would seem, among the more traditionally "religious" sectors of the Jewish population.

I believe that it is very late. Great damage has already been done. Is it too late? Is it still possible to reverse direction? Could responsible leadership in Washington, Jerusalem, and Ramallah force a change, giving us a peaceful Israel behind safe borders, one not consumed by Holocaust-driven fears and not playing into and intensifying the hatred by which it is surrounded? I try to believe that time has not yet run out, but that belief gets harder to maintain, day by day. Meanwhile, I see Israel, the state and the society, as the great collective accomplishment of the Jewish people in the twentieth century. Its astounding successes--material, cultural, scientific, technical, and artistic--reflect the tremendous strengths and resources that are our people's legacy. But the essential moral failing of Israel, its inability to deal fairly with the rights and even the full humanity of the other people with whom it shares a homeland, remains deeply troubling. Whether this inability was caused by the intransigence of the other side, was fueled by memory and fear left over from the Holocaust, or was the predictable legacy of Jewry as an ancient covenantal community that never cared enough about the lives of those who stood outside it, is something we have no time to debate right now. Only history will be able to judge.

Visits get harder. My friends, members of the Israeli intelligentsia, will talk about anything except the one thing that matters: Is it too late? Is there any chance for a two-state solution any more? None of them has a shred of faith in any of the present or proposed Israeli leaders, in any political party, or in the current Americanled "peace overtures." They'd rather talk about Mozart overtures, or ever Wagner. None of them believes in a possible Israeli government that could offer nearly enough to satisfy even the most moderate Arabs, without being instantly toppled by intransigent coalition partners. Most ominously, these dyed-in-the-wool Israeli leftists fear that there is no more Arab will for a two-state solution. We have given them so little hope, so little reason to believe, that they are turning more and more to groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, whose message is very clear: "Give those Zionists nothing. The Jews will tire of this. Just sit tight. Make more babies. We have the strength and numbers to wait them out."

I therefore need to violate the most terrible of taboos to talk about the alternative, my fears of what will happen without that two-state solution. If not two states, there will be one, reaching from the Sea to the Jordan. Within a decade or two, the Arabs will be a clear majority. Lebanon will be the model: a bi-communal state, supposedly built on equal protections, but where everyone knows who the real majority is.

At some point they'll stop taking--or counting--the census. The Jews have the guns, of course, and they will try for a while to rule in that way. But then the "Apartheid State" epithet will become too obviously true, and the world will not permit it. Israel will become a pariah, finally having to agree to equal citizenship rights for all. We'll be fighting increasing boycotts and denunciations, as we'll have progressively less and less stomach for it. But even after voting rights are acquired, the Arabs, feeling victory imminent, will not stop in their harassment of the Jewish populace. War, sniping, and suicide bombings will continue to make life too unpleasant for Jews to stay and raise their children in Palestine/Israel, or whatever it will be called at that particular stage. Jews who have the ability to do so will begin to leave in large numbers. I mean really large numbers, far beyond the Israeli emigres we already see today. Ashkenazim, activating those EU passports they can all now receive, will flee with their capital, education, and skills. Poor Sephardim, Ethiopians, the ultra-Orthodox, and others with no place to go will be left, led by a small fringe of ideological hard-liners. Can you imagine an Israel led by the sorts who now lead on the West Bank? Does it seem unimaginable? Just look to the north, at the growth of the Lebanese Phalange as the moderate Christian populace and resources re-established themselves in South America.

I won't go on. This nightmare gets worse, not better. The editor of Tikkun will attest (at my forthcoming trial in the Jewish public media) that I tried to beg off writing this article, having nothing to offer but an old-fashioned Jewish cry for teshuvah, for us to repent of our sins before it is really too late. What sins? You know the list: Arrogance, Deafness, Greed, High-handedness, Intransigence, Land-hunger, and all the rest. If [editor of Tikkun Rabbi Michael] Lerner hadn't already made up the full alphabet, we could certainly do it here and now.

Will repentance do any good at this point? Can we rebuild an Arab constituency for two states, one of them the Jewish State of Israel (in which I fully believe, by the way)? I think that depends (God help us!) on the Arab governments, especially the Saudis. The solution will need to be imposed by the Americans, the Europeans, and the Arabs, acting in concert, with a fig leaf of "consent" given to both sides. If the outside Arab leadership gets fully behind it, I think there still is a slim chance. At least I need to believe there is. Israel's best--and only--hope lies in such an imposed settlement, replete with international guarantees and foreign troops to back them up. As a lover of Israel and all the best that she stands for, I pray that there are still some statesmen who understand this and are powerful and persuasive enough to make it happen. They will need the courage to ignore the screams and machinations of the American Jewish establishment, of course. I don't envy them that, but I urge them with my whole heart to stick it out. The day will come when we will thank them for it.

Arthur Green is Irving Brudnick Professor of Jewish Philosophy and Religion and Rector of the Rabbinical School at Hebrew College.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The "Zionist" clock at 60   

By Shaul Magid

IN THE 1980S THERE WAS A DEBATE IN THE HAREDI (ULTRA-ORTHODOX) WORLD IN ISRAEL ABOUT THE GOVERNMENT'S decision to institute "summer time" by moving the clocks ahead one hour. The reasons largely had to do with energy consumption. There were protests from the religious parties in the Knesset about making sure this was done after Passover so that the seder would not begin too late at night. But there was a deeper anxiety in the haredi world having to do with the ostensible expression of power expressed in the "Zionist" state determining time. During these days I noticed a giant poster in Kikar Shabbat, the main intersection separating the haredi neighborhoods of Geula and Meah Shearim. The poster had two clocks, one reading 7:00 and the other reading 8:00. The first was labeled "true clock" (she'on emiti) and the second, "Zionist clock" (she'on zioni). I recall being struck by what I took as an expression of existential angst embodied in this poster. While many governments legislate "summer time," the haredim saw in this an expression of how Zionist influence pervades their lives and how, against their collective will, they feel trapped in its grasp.

In the past sixty years, Zionism has made enormous contributions to Jewish and global society: it drained swamps and made the desert bloom; it provided a refuge for persecuted Jews from Yemen to the former Soviet Union, from Ethiopia to Iraq. For many American Jews, Israel has been a source for pride and renewed Jewish identity. It created a vibrant secular Jewish culture including art, music, dance and literature. It revived the Hebrew language and created a thriving and organic religious environment. It breathed new life and, for some, provided renewed faith, after the devastation wrought by the Nazis. It brought democracy to the Middle East. This is all to be celebrated.

But there is a darker side that cannot, and should not, be ignored. Zionism as an ideology and political reality was also guilty of a form of colonialism and, until quite recently, overtly denied the very existence of Palestinian collective identity. In some cases, it "liquidated" villages, illegally expropriated agriculturally rich territory and oppressed another people through occupation for almost a generation before any sustained armed resistance by the oppressed. Whatever justifications one could make for all these things, they were a product of Zionism, perhaps necessarily so. Benny Morris's "Zionist" response to his own post-Zionist book on the making of the Palestinian refugee problem said it best when he argued that, yes, Israel committed many of the atrocities enumerated in his book but that is the necessary price of nation-building. In other words, Zionism needed to undermine the indigenous population and deny their collective existence in order to create the Jewish state. While he claims it was taken out of context, his analogy of Israel's origins to nineteenth-century America's treatment of the Native Americans is not totally out of place. While the analogy is problematic on many levels, it is arguably true that both countries would not be what they are had they not committed these deeds. This, I think, is Morris' point.

window.onload =getAd();

Zionism, of course, is not monolithic. However, Gershom Gorenberg's new book The Accidental Empire does a wonderful service documenting how the leftist kibbutz movement was as deeply invested in settlement activity after 1967 as the religious Zionists now seen by many progressives as root of the "the problem." That is, the issues regarding Israel, the land, and its non-Jewish population are not solely a product of a religious ideology gone awry but are an outgrowth of the very notion and nature of Zionism.

While many of us on the Left have a deep love for the land, the country, and the culture (secular and religious) that Zionism produced, we can no longer stand under the banner of Zionism; we no longer want to tell time by the Zionist clock. Perhaps it is time, after sixty years, to unambiguously state, "we love the land and its culture and support a state in part of Eretz Yisrael but we can no longer call ourselves Zionists." Why? Because Zionism, in its myriad forms, cannot absorb what needs to be done, from relinquishing vast amounts of territory to the implementation of a liberal (and not only an "ethnic") democracy where all citizens are treated equally in the eyes of the law. This may, or may not, result in the end of the Jewish State as we know it, or as Zionism envisioned it. That depends on many factors beyond our direct control. Many Israelis, known as post-Zionists, have come to a similar conclusion but post-Zionism is an Israeli phenomenon and has no real place in the Diaspora. Diaspora Jews who are sympathetic to this position must begin to formulate a stance that continues to appreciate and even celebrate all the positive things Zionism has accomplished at the same time that it views Zionism as an ideology that can no longer serve as a foundation for the future of Israel.

Until this point, Zionism in the Diaspora has been viewed as synonymous with supporting Israel. I suggest the Israel that some of us would like to see is one that can no longer be viewed through the Zionist lens. Perhaps, after sixty years, we need to critically look at whether Zionism itself has become a spent and even counterproductive ideology. This is not about the eradication of Israel, far from it: it is about the liberation of Israel from an ideology that once brought it into existence but can no longer serve as its core. America would simply be a different country without the doctrine of Manifest Destiny or slavery but few, if any, in America still hold these ideologies as having any contemporary relevance. In fact, America has gone to great lengths to repair the damage done by these doctrines. We in the Diaspora have lived for sixty years with a Zionist clock. Perhaps it is time to consider resetting our watches.

Shaul Magid is the Jay and Jeannie Schottenstein Professor of Jewish Studies at Indiana University/Bloomington and rabbi of the Fire Island Synagogue in Sea View, New York.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Israel's Dilemma   

By Riane Eisler

RABBI LERNER ASKS, "To WHAT EXTENT IS Israel tied to a world view based on the notion that domination of others is the way to achieve security, rather than a world view, implicit in the Torah command of Ve'ahavta la'ger, that security comes through generosity and caring toward others?"

This to me is not the right question because it fails to take into account the fact that, unfortunately, most of Israel's enemies tend to view generosity and caring as weak, as "feminine," and hence an invitation for domination on their part. Research shows that when people believe that men's "honor" depends on absolute and, if "necessary," violent control over women, they also believe there can only be rulers and ruled, winners and losers, dominators and dominated--and that violence on their part is holy and moral.

This then is Israel's dilemma--and the dilemma for the world. How do you deal with cultures where rule by the "strong"--the male head of family, the tyrannical head of tribe or state, the cruel warrior--is honored, and one-sided concessions are seen as weakness? This is characteristic of fundamentalist Muslim cultures; it also afflicts "Christian" fundamentalists, who likewise believe in women's subordination and "holy wars"--wars that the Left fiercely opposes.

window.onload =getAd();

Yet when it comes to Palestinian violence and other Arab policies of confrontation, the Left rushes to their defense. No matter how brutal their attacks on civilians, how openly they state their goal of destroying the Jewish state, or how blatantly they continue teaching their children hatred of Jews, to the Left, it's all justified.

Horribly immoral, this double standard brings the indifference of the world that led to the Holocaust roaring back to mind.

In 1946 I found out what happened to those in my family who weren't as fortunate as my parents and I to escape from Europe--my beloved aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, whose survival I daily prayed for as a refugee in Cuba during the war. There were only a handful of survivors, desperate to leave the continent that stood by and often actively participated in the murder of their parents and siblings along with six million other Jews. They wanted to go to Palestine. The British intercepted one and interned him in Cyprus. Another young cousin made it. When the state of Israel was approved by the UN and was immediately attacked by an overwhelming army of its neighbors, she died fighting with the Haganah (which later became the Israel Defense Forces).

What happened during the Holocaust, what almost happened to me, profoundly affected not only my life and my feelings toward Israel but my work as a cultural evolution theorist and activist. My book The Chalice and the Blade cuts to the core of our problem--not East vs. West or religious vs. secular, but the difference between domination systems and partnership systems. The Holocaust led me to passionately work for the cultural shift from domination to partnership worldwide, starting with the foundational relations between women and men and parents and children, where people first learn respect for human rights or to accept human rights violations as normal and moral.

The kibbutz movement was a movement in Israel toward partnership, toward economic, social, and gender equality. These were--and remain--positive ideals. But Israel, again and again, has had to fight neighbors pledged "to push the Jews into the sea." Every war, including the Six Day War, was a war of self-defense. Israel did what any other nation would do if it were attacked, if terrorists were killing its people in buses, schools, and homes. It struck back with armed force.

I know that in the end violence only breeds more violence. But to change cycles of violence we have to look to the underlying culture. Yet the Left refuses to look at the cultures surrounding Israel realistically, to acknowledge that cultures that rely heavily on violence in intimate relations are not going to renounce violence in national and international relations.

We do not help the situation one iota by preaching caring and nonviolence to Israel without just as forcefully asking the same of its enemies, and, even more fundamentally, helping all those--Muslim, Jewish, or Christian--working to change cultural beliefs that idealize and even sacralize brutality and violence.

Riane Eisler is author of The Chalice and the Blade and The Real Wealth of Nations, and founder of the Center for Partnership Studies (www.partnershipway.org) and the Spiritual Alliance to Stop Intimate Violence.

================================================================

Sephardim and Israel today: "The Levantine Option" on shaky ground   

By David Shasha

ABOUT FIVE YEARS AGO I FORMULATED A RADICAL PERSPECTIVE ON MIDDLE EASTERN POLITICS, WHICH I CALLED "The Levantine Option." This new formulation was an attempt to restore an old way of seeing things that was fitted into a dynamic and fresh new context. "The Levantine Option" is an idea predicated on the traditions of Jews native to the Middle East. These traditions contain a significant Arabic component where the indigenous culture of the region has been fused with the realities of Judaism and Jewish identity encapsulated in the rabbinic tradition.

The Levantine Option is built on the hallowed foundations of Sephardic Religious Humanism, an elastic concept that goes back to the writings and ideas of Maimonides and his heirs. Sephardic Religious Humanism incorporated the learning of Greco-Roman wisdom into a parochially Jewish context. The religious mandates of the Jewish religion, its ritual laws and traditions, were opened up to the expansive modalities of the Greco-Roman intellectual system, creating a rich synthesis of sacred Jewish values and Greco-Roman politics, science and philosophy.

Enabled in great measure by the opening provided by Islamic scholasticism, Sephardic Religious Humanism showed that Judaism could adapt and transform itself.

window.onload =getAd();

The traditions of Sephardic Religious Humanism were fiercely contested by Ashkenazi rabbinic authorities who saw in the new modalities a fearsome liberality and an acceptance of new and different ideas. Ashkenazi authorities looked to seal off Judaism from the new ideas and set Judaism apart from the world and its evolutionary changes.

It is not well known that the initial impetus in the nineteenth century for a return to Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel came from two Sephardic rabbis living in the Ottoman Balkans--Judah Alkalai and Judah Bibas. Their Zionism was one that sought to affirm the right of the Jewish people to be secure in their own country and to serve as a proud member of the international community.

While the ideas of these two Sephardic rabbis influenced the Eastern European Jews who became the de facto leaders of the emerging Zionist movement, the core humanistic ideas of the Sephardic tradition were often ignored in the new formulations of the Zionist idea.

Ideas of separation from the indigenous populations of the Middle East became the norm that European formulations of Zionism articulated. Such a move led to many of the problems that Israel faces as it marks its sixtieth anniversary as a nation.

Rather than seeing integration of Jews into the cultural and historical contexts of the region, Zionism is today seen by itself and by others as an alien element in the region. From the early concept of what the Zionists called "Avoda Ivrit"--Jewish labor--to the current desire for a separation between the Jewish and Arab peoples whether by the use of physical walls or cultural barriers, the Zionist orientation has sadly followed the Ashkenazi pattern of alienation and parochialism.

It is today a radical idea--given the violent modalities that have subsumed both the Zionist idea as well as its Arab nationalist counterpart--to assert that the future of the region rests in a cultural symbiosis that would continue to acknowledge the genius of the old traditions of Sephardic Religious Humanism that were so pronounced in Spain, North Africa and the Middle East.

With a fierceness that frequently borders on the pathological, many individuals reject the idea that Jews were once a legitimate and accepted part of the Arab world. We are warned that Jews were simply tolerated by a hegemonic Arab triumphalism that kept them in their place. This ignores and diminishes the great accomplishments of Arab Jews who integrated Judaism into the dominant cultural trends in the Middle East.

Indeed, at the dawn of the modern age, marked by the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, reformist movements in the region acknowledged the indigenous Jewish presence and welcomed Jews as partners in the process of national regeneration. Early forms of Sephardic Zionism acknowledged this cultural symbiosis and demanded of the Ashkenazi Zionists a requirement to acknowledge the realities of the region: its history, its values, its culture.

But from the very start of political Zionism, this native Levantine Jewish voice was silenced. There were Jews whose names are not at all known today such as Albert Antebbi, Elie Elyashar and Haim Nahum Effendi who counseled for a Sephardic role in the Zionist enterprise and in the development of a new Middle East.

As scholars such as Abigail Jacobson, Yaron Harel and Michelle Campos have shown in their researches into the subject of native Middle Eastern Jewish thinking during this period, not only were these voices silenced, but the ideas they presented were mocked and vilified. Rather than accepting the native place of Jews in the region, the incoming Zionist leadership incorporated alien ideas into their thinking, which served to ensure that Zionism would become a foreign element in the region.

A corollary to this point was the tension it created between Ashkenazim--whose culture and history would come to dominate the new state and its ideology--and the Sephardim, the indigenous Jews of the Middle East, who were marginalized and often demeaned in the Zionist mission.

As Arab Jews continued to live in their ancestral homes in the region, some adapted to the new Zionism, while some did not. A seismic shift took place in their world that would be deeply disorienting. In the course of a few decades, Jewish life in the Arab world would come to an almost complete end and with it the rich and varied cultural traditions of those Jews.

The Levantine Option died in the 1950s and 1960s when Jews were forced to leave the Arab world under the specter of an intractable stalemate between Israel and its neighbors that was not merely a matter of politics and territorial dispute, but of a more insidious cultural divide which isolated Israel from its neighbors.

Arab Jews were forced to undergo a cruel process of De-Arabization that left them bereft of their organic identity. The "melting pot" mentality as it took hold in Israel was in essence a process of Ashkenazi acculturation, a process which has continued to this day in the alienated culture of the state.

So in spite of Israel's success in re-establishing Jewish sovereignty over the land, the problems that have been created by its alienated stance have led to a residual violence and a sense of paranoia and entrapment that has gripped so many Israelis who have little hope that the country will ever find normalcy. The parallel obstinacy of an Arab world that has also rejected its own native traditions of liberalism and pluralism has added to this dysfunctional picture of a region that is now permanently on edge.

While The Levantine Option is an idea that will be fiercely contested by those who hold to the useless orthodoxies--ideas that have led us into violence, anomie and racial hatred--the idea merits examination as a means to restore dignity and rationality to what is now a completely unworkable mess.

The Levantine Option, with its foundation in Religious Humanism is an idea whose allure rests in the fact that it is the native modality of the region and has its roots in the thinking of the greatest figures in the cultural history of the Jews, Muslims, and Christians.

Over the course of many fruitless decades punctuated by hatred, cruelty, and violence at the hands of the different protagonists in this drama, the failed premise that continues to inform the discussion is that peace and stability will come from an acknowledgement of the differences between Jews and Arabs.

The Levantine Option asserts that the future of the Middle East will come when Jews and Arabs learn that they share a culture and that this shared culture flowered in the many centuries of life in the wake of the cultural giants of the region such as Maimonides, Al-Farabi, Averroes and so many others whose names and memories continue to be venerated in the parochial communities that have now been wrenched apart under the rubric of a failed set of nationalisms.

David Shasha is the director of the Center for Sephardic Heritage in Brooklyn, NY. The Center publishes a weekly e-mail newsletter and promotes lectures and cultural events. He can be reached at davidshasha@aol.com.

 ===================================================================

Refusing to be Enemies   

By Lynn Gottlieb

MOTHERS WORRY ALL THE TIME. SHE SAT BEHIND THE COUNTER, BUSY WITH PAPER WORK. HER boss, who lost sight in one eye when he was hit with a rubber bullet, was speaking to us about their organization, which provides free wheelchairs and crutches to thousands of those wounded. It's easy to be in the wrong place at the wrong time if you are a Palestinian living anywhere in the West Bank or Gaza. I was leading another Fellowship of Reconciliation delegation to the land of sorrows, visiting health care professionals on both sides of the conflict to gather information about those who occupy themselves with healing broken bodies and souls. We had just come from a women's center where the director told us about her daughter who volunteers in a youth ambulance corps. Her daughter comes home and pulls a finger out of her pocket, which she found in the street after an incursion, and wants to know how to return it. Muslim sensibility like Jewish sensibility demands that all the parts of the body are buried together. I have to find out to whom it belongs. She tells her mother who does not know how to keep her daughter from the extreme risk-taking which is all too common among Palestinian youth. Death is all around them, and they don't know how to stop it, she says.

I walk over to a woman behind the counter surrounded by stacks of crutches and greet her with "salaam" and ask if I might be able to interview her for a few minutes about the Occupation and she agrees. I sit down.

"What is the most difficult aspect of the Occupation for you," I ask. Tears well up in her eyes and I immediately regret stirring up her pain. "It's okay," she says. "The hardest part is coming to work because I have to pass through two checkpoints. I have two sons, one ten years old and the other fourteen. It is so difficult. The younger one never wants to let go. He pees in his bed every night, is frightened by noise, and cries and screams every day when I go to work. Once I take him to school, he's better, but all the children are easily terrified. My elder son refuses to go to school. Every day I argue with him before he finally leaves the house. He prefers to stay at home and play video games. I tell him education is important. He says, 'Why bother, they're going to kill me anyway.' I sent him to a peace camp before the intifada, but those days of hope are over. 'How can I be friends with people who put on a uniform the next day and shoot at me?' he asks. I wake up at two every morning, my heart pounding. I start to worry in the middle of the night. I try not to think about it but I am scared to leave my children, scared I will not make it home, scared something will happen to them. Sometimes, if the situation is really dangerous at the checkpoint, I walk through the hills, which takes hours, and then my children worry even more. Some days," she says, her eyes overflowing with tears, "I think perhaps it would have been better if they had never been born. Tell me, what can I do?" Both of us are crying, we hold hands in the silence of her question.

window.onload =getAd();

As always, after listening to the testimony of survivors, I am speechless. I carry thousands of stories in my heart, as I have been listening to both Palestinian and Jewish survivor accounts since 1966; when I first heard the story of the Nakba from the lips of Atallah Mansour. I always wonder which terrible rendition of loss and grief will tip the balance of scales so that a flood of compassion will wash away our fear and create the resolve to not turn away. In times of profound sadness, I gather up seeds of hope from the tears of those Israeli Jews and Palestinians, who in spite of the worst kind of loss, nonetheless, reach out to each other for the sake of peace, and then take their message of reconciliation to anyone who will listen. Aware of all the complexities, they refuse to be enemies, they speak out against occupational brutalities, construct bridges across the abyss. For the sake of our children, how can we not do the same?

Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb is director of Shomer Shalom Institute for Jewish Nonviolence, cofounder of the Muslim Jewish Peace Walk and a performing artist.