Tikkun readers naturally want to know what happened on Israel at the US Social Forum. The chief thing that I was aware of (apart from a minor issue of a canceled workshop about which I just posted) was the equation of Zionism with its rightwing manifestations and with current Israeli policies. As if there was no such thing as leftwing, anti-racist Zionism.
I didn’t mention Israel in my first piece about the Forum, because I wasn’t tracking the issue well myself and indeed am highly diffident about writing about Israel at all. That may sound odd for a Tikkun staffer, but as a nonJew, brought in to help with the interfaith outreach of the magazine, I have learned how little I know about Israel/Palestine compared to the experts. Still, I did go to one highly troubling workshop on Israel and do have a few things to say.
In my exploration of the BDS movement a week ago here, I talked about Margaret Atwood, who had chosen to not boycott the Dan David prize of which she was co-winner. She’s written a piece for Haaretz about her experience of Israel, that is a profound and eloquent exegesis of her Israeli experience. She admits that going into the issue she had “strayed into the Middle-eastern neighbourhood with a mind as open as it could be without being totally vacant”, and says, not unfairly, “The whole experience was like learning about cooking by being thrown into the soup pot.”
So what does she conclude about Israel?
The Israelis I met could not have been more welcoming. I saw many impressive accomplishments and creative projects, and talked with many different people. The sun was shining, the waves waving, the flowers were in bloom. Tourists jogged along the beach at Tel Aviv as if everything was normal. But… there was the Shadow. Why was everything trembling a little, like a mirage? Was it like that moment before a tsunami when the birds fly to the treetops and the animals head for the hills because they can feel it coming?
I’d been told ahead of time that Israelis would try to cover up the Shadow, but instead they talked about it non-stop. Two minutes into any conversation, the Shadow would appear. It’s not called the Shadow, it’s called “the situation.” It haunts everything.
The Shadow is not the Palestinians. The Shadow is Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, linked with Israeli’s own fears. The worse the Palestinians are treated in the name of those fears, the bigger the Shadow grows, and then the fears grow with them; and the justifications for the treatment multiply.
In case you haven’t see this yet, David Grossman, award-winning Israeli author and peace activist, whose son Uri was killed in the 2006 war in Lebanon, wrote this response to the flotilla attack that happened May 30, 2010:
We regret and deplore the killings which took place as Israeli troops, in defiance of international law, boarded and assaulted, wounded many and killed some of the participants in a flotilla seeking to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza (itself a morally outrageous policy) to bring humanitarian aid. We ask all people of peace to participate in memorials for those peace activists who have been killed (and we call upon all synagogues around the world to say Kaddish for those people at their Shabbat services this coming weekend), and for prayer for the speedy recovery of all those wounded in this attack (mostly peace activists, but also the Israeli soldiers who boarded the boats with violence).
We invite all peace-loving people to attend a public memorial for those who died in this assault in Lafayette Park opposite the White House on Sunday, June 13, at 11 am – 2 pm, sponsored by Tikkun, the Network of Spiritual Progressives, and many other groups, and which will include a larger consideration of U.S. policies. Memorial prayers and prayers for healing will be said at 1 pm.
The phones have been ringing off the hook here as word spreads of the threatening intrusion upon our editor’s home. It’s heartening to hear some empathetic voices after weathering the days of hate mail that followed Tikkun’s decision to present an award to Judge Goldstone for standing up for human rights in Israel/Palestine.
Sometime late last night or in the wee hours of the morning, vandals glued threatening posters to Rabbi Lerner’s door and around his home. Some posters attacked Lerner personally; others targeted liberals and progressives more generally, accusing them of supporting terrorism and “Islamo-fascism.” Here’s an excerpt from the statement that he and his assistant Will Pasley sent out via email this afternoon:
For years, Israel has said that it cannot negotiate with Palestinians because there is no leader who can represent Palestine and who doesn’t support violence. But finally, things are changing. It appears to be increasingly accepted by Palestinians on the West Bank that the path that offers them the most hope is a non-violent path of demonstrations against the occupation at home and the world wide push for BDS against Israel. Front and centre in this is the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad.
As always in dealing with the Middle East, perception is as important as reality. So the significance of this recent article in the New York Times is two-fold: both what it says, and that the Times (not traditionally a paper that has said much positive about Palestinians) is saying it.
UC Berkeley’s student senate is set to vote once more this Wednesday, April 28, on a bill to divest from two companies that materially and militarily support the Israeli government’s occupation of the Palestinian territories. Yesterday Michael Lerner posted on the diversity of opinion among peace activists on this issue. Today I want to share a piece submitted to Tikkun Daily by Matthew A. Taylor, a Peace and Conflict Studies student and member of Jewish Voice for Peace who is currently on leave from UC Berkeley. As a member of Students for Justice in Palestine, the group that is promoting the bill on campus, Taylor argues with urgency and deep emotion for the bill and explains what those in support of the divestment effort can do to help before the vote tomorrow evening.
When Will the University of California Stop Funding War Crimes Against Palestinian Civilians?
When will the University of California stop funding war crimes against Palestinian civilians and the occupation of Palestinian land? How much longer will grieving mothers have to wait for justice?
“The soldiers came early on the morning of Sunday January 4th. [My husband] Atiyeh went to the door with his hands raised holding his ID but they shot him in the doorway,” said Zinad. “I shouted ‘children, children’ in Hebrew but they started shooting,” said Zinad’s nephew Faraj.
After the massacre, Israeli soldiers left messages for the dead Samounis on the walls of a neighbor’s house. The graffiti read: “Arabs need 2 die,” “Arabs are pieces of shit,” and “1 is DOWN 999,999 TO GO.”
A Palestinian woman cries in Gaza City's al-Zeitoun neighborhood (AFP).
Israel’s attack on civilians was a “deliberate policy” designed to inflict “humiliation and dehumanization of the Palestinian population,” according to a United Nations report.
Debates continue to rage over the UC Berkeley Student Senate’s call for divestment from two companies that help Israel maintain the Occupation of the West Bank.
Student senators debate the divestment bill. Photo by Skyler Reid from April 23.
The argument isn’t over yet, because — after failing to override student president Will Smelko’s veto of the Senate of the Associated Students of UC Berkeley’s divestment bill on April 15 — the student senate passed a motion to reconsider the vote. The student senators met again for a closed session on April 21 but failed to come to consensus about whether to override the veto, so the issue remains open. [4/29/10 Update: In a meeting that started on April 28 and concluded at 4 a.m. on April 29, the student senate came one vote short of overriding the veto. The resolution was reportedly tabled, making it available again for reconsideration at a future time.]
Rather than charge in with my own position, I want to respect the intelligence of Tikkun’s readers by offering a variety of conflicting viewpoints and inviting you all to decide what you think. We are planning a full roundtable discussion among voices on all sides of the Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions debate that we will tape, edit, and publish in either the July or September issue of Tikkun (if you still don’t subscribe, please do so now)!
Here are some key parts of the bill being debated:
When it comes to establishing a just and lasting peace in Israel/Palestine, should we let the perfect be the enemy of the good? Does a “good” peace even satisfy minimum human rights requirements? Can and should we negotiate with regimes with despicable human rights records in order to ensure regional peace in the Middle East? I take up these questions–some explicitly, others implied–in what follows, where I call for the Obama Administration to engage in a sustained diplomatic push with Syria and Israel in order to create the conditions for the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state.
The Israeli-Arab conflict has inflamed the Middle East for half a century, and negotiations aimed towards the creation of a Palestinian state have stalled. While we should encourage Israel and the Palestinian National Authority to fulfill their obligations stipulated at the Annapolis Conference, current political and security conditions within both Israel and the Palestinian Territories are not conducive to reaching a final settlement.
This is partly due to domestic politics within both territories. In Israel, powerful far-right pro-settler parties in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government will seek to stymie any two-state solution, and Netanyahu’s own commitment to a two-state solution appears tenuous. Furthermore, security fears about Iran’s burgeoning regional power are widespread, causing Israel to reorient its foreign policy away from solving the Palestinian question and towards containing Iran.
While admitting that she hadn’t read the book, Sheila Ward, a Toronto District School Board trustee told the Jewish Tribune that she will “move heaven and earth to have The Shepherd’s Granddaughter taken off school library shelves.” Goodness! What would she move if she actually had read the book?
April 5, 2010: I have replaced the original post with this shorter version.
In every generation, we read on Pesach, they rise up to oppress us. This year we must face down our most implacable foe, the one who has dogged our every footstep since Israel bargained for the birthright and got for himself and his progeny so much more than he bargained for. Members of the tribe, in the immortal words of Pogo, we have met the enemy and he is us. For this self-knowledge we can thank the approval of 1600 new housing units in East Jerusalem when Joe Biden arrived in Israel. By publicly slapping Israel’s one true friend in the face we also gave ourselves a big black eye for all to see. The keepers of the siege who insist that Israel has no real friends in the world are clearly intent on making that a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The moral rot within the Jewish community has reached an intolerable level. Bernie Madoff was just icing on the cake. From the inhuman working conditions at the country’s largest kosher meatpacker to the sexual abuse of students at yeshivas in Brookline, to the predatory practices of Goldman-Sachs in Greece and everywhere else in the world, the stench rises to high heaven. If we were trying to validate every anti-Semitic stereotype in the book, the Jews of this generation could not be doing a better job.
Mike Godbe, a young American on a free Birthright tour of Israel, continues his diary and photos of the tour, reporting his experiences and the ways the tour staff present the history and politics of the country. Earlier posts from Masada, Mt. Herzl, Jerusalem, a kibbutz, and Caesaria can be accessed by clicking the corresponding links.
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010
The day began with a much welcome 2 hour bus ride to Tel Aviv, which most people slept through the entirety of due to only getting a few hours of sleep the night before.
Our first destination was the Save a Child’s Heart Foundation, based out of the Wolfson Medical Center in South Tel Aviv. Save a Child’s Heart is a program aimed at helping children from developing countries where pediatric cardiologists are not available or few and far between. They do their work in three ways, they completely cover the costs to bring children to Israel for treatment, they train doctors from developing countries in Israel, and they go to developing countries and do training and surgeries side by side.
The lady giving the info session tells us that 50% of the children who come to Israel to receive treatment come from the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan and Iraq. One of my peers comments that it seems like a political gesture to take such a disproportionate number of kids from the West Bank and Gaza. The SACH spokesperson, a late twenties girl originally from New York, says that it is not political, but that it is simply “a community in need, and we respond to that need.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu is getting pummeled. Great Britain just expelled an Israeli diplomat for the Mossad’s possible falsification of British passports and the United States continues to clash seriously with him over the building of settlements in East Jerusalem.
Netanyahu is known to be a pragmatist and a tactician. He will no doubt take the international criticism seriously and try his best to maneuver out of trouble. But it is clear that his sense of strategy failed him. Netanyahu is in a tight political snare, flanked on the right by members of his governing coalition and the left by the United States and much of the international community.
People may blame Netanyahu or Israeli policies more broadly for the current quagmire. But there is one person who truly deserves credit for ensnaring him: Tzipi Livni, head of the opposition Kadima Party.
This week’s spiritual wisdom is an excerpt from the Passover supplement published in the March/April 2010 issue of Tikkun.
Passover is not meant to be merely a celebration of the Jewish victory for liberation in our past, but is rather meant to stimulate us to extend that liberation to the whole world. Such liberation would bring an end to the destruction of the environment. It would bring an end to the cheapening of cultural life by the dominance of an ethos of “looking out for number one.” It would bring an end to rampant materialism and our society’s belief in salvation through mechanical objects and technological fixes …
We need a movement that has a spiritual dimension and affirms and builds on what the 2008 election revealed: the deep yearning of Americans (and really all people on the planet) for a world in which love, kindness, generosity, ethical and ecological sanity, awe and wonder at the grandeur of the universe, and commitment to a higher meaning for our lives are valued over the pursuit of money, power, sexual conquest, and fame, which have been extolled as central values by corporate media and enshrined in the workings of the global capitalist system. At the Seder table, we invite you to ask how you can help get this kind of spiritual consciousness introduced into the discourse of secular liberal and progressive social change movements, NGOs, and liberal political parties. We invite you to make this discussion a central part of your Passover Seder this year.
It all seemed to start when Vice-President Biden, in Israel to promote the “peace process”, was greeted with the announcement of further Israeli expansion into the historically Palestinian Ramat Shlomo, in East Jerusalem. The US fired back on all cylinders, with Biden, Clinton, and General Petraeus questioning Israel in an unprecedented way. In return, the Jerusalem Post accused Obama of “repeatedly humiliating our prime minister.” And since he’s critical of Israel, Obama must be (according to Hagai Ben-Artzi, Netanyahu’s brother-in-law, anyway) an anti-Semite. The dust was still thick in the air, as American leaders made it clear that they loved Israel, it’s just the actions of the Israeli government with which they have difficulty.
Mike Godbe, a young American on a free Birthright tour of Israel, continues his diary and photos of the tour, reporting his experiences and the ways the tour staff present the history and politics of the country. Earlier posts from Mt. Herzl, Jerusalem, a kibbutz, and Caesaria can be accessed by clicking the corresponding links.
Monday, March 15th, 2010
I woke up at 4:45 this morning for an optional sunrise hike to the top of a nearby ridge. It is noticeably drier here in the south than in other parts of Israel we have been. As soon as the dusk started to light up the land, I looked on the ground and found it to be full of empty shells from desert snails about 3cm wide – literally there was one of these shells on the ground about every six inches. The desert is actually covered in small green plants in many parts now . . . It only lasts a few weeks and we happened to catch it. Right after winter rains and before the summer heat gets too intense.
Mike Godbe, a young American on a free Birthright tour of Israel, continues his diary and photos of the tour, reporting his experiences and the ways the tour staff present the history and politics of the country. Earlier posts from Jerusalem, a kibbutz, and Caesaria can be accessed by clicking the corresponding links.
Sunday, March 14th, 2010
Today we met the six IDF soldiers that will be joining our group for the remaining five days of the program. All of them are between the ages of 19 and 21, half women, half men. When birthright was started around 2000, participants in the program were not allowed to walk through many parts of Jerusalem or go out at night, like we now are, because of the high level of danger during the second intifada. We are told that the IDF “encounters” program was incorporated into birthright to allow participants to meet and interact with Israeli citizens . . . The implication being that the soldiers were here to provide that connection between participants and Israelis, not participants and the Israeli military.
We played some name games and ice breakers in the morning, the soldiers still in full military garb (no guns). We then got ready for a somber day at Yad Vashem and Mt. Herzl Cemetery, the Holocaust museum / memorial and the burying place of nearly every prominent Israeli statesmen and soldier – among many others of lesser fame.
Not every moment is as promising for changing the dynamics in Israel/Palestine as the current one.
It is time to support the Obama administration, which momentarily has developed a bit of a backbone in response to the Israeli government, which revealed its total arrogance and lack of respect for the United States and for the possibility of any real concessions for peace by announcing that it was going to build 1,400 more housing units in Palestinian East Jerusalem (not the Old City, where Jews have an historic claim that deserves respect, but in the part of Jerusalem built by and for Arabs in the past 200 years and then conquered by Israel in 1967).
Israel's Gilo Settlement in East Jerusalem
The Obama administration’s new backbone is unlikely to last in the face of the assault already started by AIPAC friends in Congress, unless there is a loud cry of support for his administration’s demand that building new housing in Jerusalem stop during negotiations. The construction of housing must stop because whether Israel has jurisdiction to build or run East Jerusalem is part of what the negotiations are about and therefore shouldn’t be resolved by Israel “creating facts” on the ground which de facto render the negotiations moot.
