Editorials & Actions

Remembering Kristallnacht

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Editor’s note: Kristallnacht is the name of the night and following day Nov.9-10 1938 when the Nazis launched full scale assault on Jewish stores, Jewish homes, and Jews walking the street in Germany. From the time Hitler took power in 1933 there had been increasing assaults on the rights of Jews (banning them from the universities, firing them from teaching jobs, jobs as doctors in hospitals, working for any government funded program or institution, forcing them to wear yellow stars) but it was only at Kristalnacht that every Jew in Germany was forced to face the fact that their lives were in danger. Around the world Jews and humanity had been alerted that the Nazis would stop at nothing in their assault on Jews. No wonder, then, that so many Jews today feel sickened when they read of physical assaults in Israel itself  on random Palestinians and random refugees from Africa and Asia residing in Israel. Joe Newman doesn’t touch that in what he writes below, but his reminder that “Never Again” might apply to never again for anyone not just Jews, brings to mind the way that some Jews are willing to close their eyes to the suffering that a segment of the Jewish people, in the name of the entire Jewish people, are perpetrating against another people! But there the comparison must stop–Israel is not acting like the Nazis were–Palestinians living in Israel still have employment, vote, and live in conditions far better than most people living in surrounding Arab countries (and for that reason, Israeli Arabs make clear that their demand is for equal treatment, NOT to move to an Arab country).

Editorials & Actions

Obama and Netanyahu: A bad deal for peace, for Israel, for Palestine and for the U.S.

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Editor, Tikkun Magazine

Obama and Netanyahu’s “Make Nice” Meeting: Bad for Peace, Bad for Israel

Posted: 11/09/2015 8:24 am EST Updated: 11/09/2015 8:59 am EST

Editor’s Note: Though I published this in the Huffington Post before the meeting, the outcome was exactly as predicted. Netanyahu affirmed his “commitment” to a two state solution, which he has said for years as he continues to expand Israeli settlement in Arab East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and continues with a cabinet filled with overt racists against Palestinians and other refugees. Obama promised him huge new military hardware, as predicted. Netanyahu is paid off for being obnoxious toward the President and arrogant toward the Palestinian people (the latter being the ultimate losers in all this). Of course, I have compassion for Obama, see him as a decent human being, just as I have compassion for the Jewish people still so dominated by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and seeing the Palestinians through the framework of our past suffering.

Editorials & Actions

Hillary Clinton on the Need to Reaffirm Unbreakable Bond With Israel

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Editor’s note: Not everyone is rejoicing at Hillary Clinton’s choice to embrace the Israeli government
at the moment when Prime Minister Netanyahu meets with President Obama. See below Hillary’s statement  the statement from one prominent Israeli critic of the Occupation. How I Would Reaffirm Unbreakable Bond With Israel — and Benjamin Netanyahu

Hillary Clinton

November 4, 2015

We have recently marked the 20th anniversary of the assassination of then Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, a good friend, a courageous warrior and a great statesman. This somber anniversary, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington on November 9, is an opportunity to reaffirm the unbreakable bonds of friendship and unity between the people and governments of the United States and Israel. The alliance between our two nations transcends politics.

Editorials & Actions

Say “NO” to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)

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We at Tikkun’s Network of Spiritual Progressives are part of the Citizens Trade Campaign coalition of forces that have challenged the Clinton Administration and now the Obama Administration in their proclivity to  create trade policies that are destructive to the environment and to the well being of working people here and around the world. The latest such is the Trans-Pacific Partnership which, while having some positive aspects, would restrict countries from passing important environmental and health care related legislation that might interfere with corporate profits. This latest effort to give multinational corporations powers that supersede the powers of national governments is one more reason we need the ESRA–Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The ESRA would, among many other important measures,  overturn any such international agreement that has been approved by the U.S. government or will be approved in the future–please help us get it endorsed after you read it at www.tikkun.org/esra. 

Rabbi Michael Lerner issued the following response about the newly released full version of the TPP:

The TPP agreement violates a basic command of the Bible: that human beings must protect and act as stewards for the earth. Instead, it provides a path for corporations to overturn the most moderate environmental restraints on corporate avarice, much less the far more stringent actions that environmentalists tell us are needed to even begin to reverse climate change and preserve the earth for future generations.

Editorials & Actions

Prime Minister Netanyahu: Have You No SHAME?

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Netanyahu: Have You No Shame? By Rabbi Michael Lerner  Oct. 25, 2015

Israel’s Prime Minister attributing the Holocaust to Palestinian influence over Hitler is a “Blood Libel” level lie. In the Middle Ages, some Christians claimed that Jews were kidnapping Christian children and using their blood to make Passover Matzah (which in Jewish law would make the Jewish kidnapper a murderer, deserving the death penalty, and the Matzah itself unkosher, because Jews are forbidden to eat blood). This “blood libel” lie has been repeated by anti-Semites and sometimes is accompanied in bookstores with a book called  “The Elders of Zion,” who purportedly met and planned to rule the world.

2015

What’s Next for Israel/Palestine? An Introduction

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It has become increasingly clear to many people around the world and among many American Jews that the Israeli government has no intention of creating a politically and economically viable Palestinian state. On the eve of his reelection, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed that no Palestinian state would emerge under his next five-year government. Although Netanyahu subsequently qualified this promise by claiming he only meant that the conditions for creating such a state do not yet exist, his party almost certainly owed its electoral victory to his display of staunch opposition to Palestinian statehood. The government he subsequently appointed contains members who are even more extreme and overtly racist than Netanyahu himself. Such a far right government was made possible because Israeli public opinion has shifted significantly against any two-state solution.

Editorials & Actions

Uri Avnery on Israeli Racism

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Editor’s Note: The sad reality of racism in Israel has been known to many of us for decades–a tragedy for a people which has suffered so much from the racism directed against us. Its first manifestation was in the scorn and discrimination with which Sepahrdic/Mizrachi Jews escaping from Arab countries were treated by Ashkenazi Jews who shaped the Yishuv (the pre-1948 Jewish settlements in Palestine). It has reached monumental proportions in contemporary Israel, yet most Israelis pretend that it is only a reaction to the the insecurity that they feel in relationship to the Palestinians, denying the other element that is a major part of the psychodynamics of the conflict, namely the guilt that Israelis feel at being oppressors which is then denied, repressed, cut-off, and manifests in racist portrayals of those they are dominating and hurting. Yet finally in the last few years that racism became harder to deny as it manifested toward African refugees seeking asylum in Israel and the many other non-Jews who Israel imported to fill the menial jobs that would no longer be filled by Palestinians once Israel decided to cut off the  Gaza- or West Bank-located Palestinians from working in Israel. Now this latest incident demonstrates the racism ever more clearly, and tragically.

Editorials & Actions

Dissecting Obama’s Most Recent TPP Lies

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Dissecting Obama’s Most Recent TPP Lies

EDUCATE! BARACK OBAMA, TPP
By Dean Baker, www.cepr.net
October 21st, 2015

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Above Photo: From PopularResistance.org. The early signals from the Obama administration are that the nonsense will be flowing fast and thick in its effort to push the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). We got an indication of the level of the nonsense factor in a CNN article reporting on the administration’s efforts to promote the still secret agreement. CNN cites a column that President Obama had in a New Hampshire newspaper that told readers:
“…trade is a substantial driver of New Hampshire’s economy. Over 20,000 American jobs are currently supported by goods exports from New Hampshire, with 32 percent of Made in New Hampshire goods exports shipped to TPP partners.”
What exactly does it mean for over 20,000 New Hampshire jobs to be supported by exports?

Editorials & Actions

The Assault on Youth in the U.S.

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Henry Giroux on:
Youth in an Authoritarian Age: Challenging the politics of disposability:
Following the insight of Hannah Arendt, a leading political theorist of mid-20th century totalitarianism, a dark cloud of political and ethical ignorance has descended upon the United States. (1) Thoughtlessness, a primary condition of authoritarian rule, now occupies a privileged, if not celebrated, place in the political landscape and the mainstream cultural apparatuses. A new kind of infantilism now shapes daily life as adults gleefully take on the role of unthinking children, while children are pushed to be adults, stripped of their innocence and subject to a range of disciplinary pressures that saddle them with debt and cripple their ability to be imaginative. (2)

Under such circumstances, agency devolves into a mind-numbing anti-intellectualism evident in the banalities produced by Fox News infotainment and celebrity culture, and in the blinding rage produced by populist politicians who support creationism, argue against climate change and rail against immigration, the rights of women, public service workers, gay people and countless others. There is more at work here than a lethal form of intellectual, political and emotional infantilism. There is also a catastrophe of indifference and inattentiveness that breeds flirtations with irrationality, fuels the spectacle of violence, creates an embodied incapacity and promotes the withering of public life. To read more articles by Henry A. Giroux and other authors in the Public Intellectual Project, click here.

Editorials & Actions

Stop the Killing in Israel and Palestine: A Prayer, Analysis, and Strategy

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Stop the Killing in Israel and Palestine: A Prayer, Analysis & Strategy… plus an article from AlJazeera giving some voices of Palestinians 

A prayer and an analysis from Tikkun/NSP (please post this on your social media and your web page, tweet about it, and circulate it widely–you have our permission)
THE PRAYER:
As we watch in horror as violence in Israel and Palestine escalates and there continues to be needless and senseless killings, we offer a prayer of love, compassion and strength. May Israelis and Palestinians find the love that resides deep in their hearts and pulses through all of us, the love that cries to us from the loving energy of the universe to love the “Other,” the “Stranger.” This is a love that can be hard to access and find and yet it is a never-ending, all pervasive love that encourages and calls us to stand-up for the well-being of each other, for the security of all, for justice for all, for peace. May the Israelis and Palestinians use this well-spring of love to overcome their fears and stand for a new future. May the Israelis and Palestinians find the compassion that lives in each person but that is often suppressed in times of fear and anger and learn to ask the questions that so many seem afraid to ask.

Editorials & Actions

Michael Nagler on the Gun Culture

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A Very Convenient Truth
by Michael N.  Nagler

Modern scientists recognize the potency of thought…as a man thinks so does he become. MK Gandhi
 

THERE ARE TIMES when you can see a familiar scene with fresh eyes.  I had just returned to the U.S. when I found myself in a definitely familiar scene: a local shopping center. The night before I had been on a transatlantic flight where I kept catching glimpses, despite myself, of four private viewing screens shimmering in front of my nearest fellow passengers on the long flight home. They sat there watching ten hours of uninterrupted violence: fights, machine guns, wild explosions – all four of them.  You have to wonder, what does that do to a person’s mind?  You have to wonder, exactly, because in the barrage of detail that floods over us in response to “the latest massacre” you will never hear it mentioned.

Editorials & Actions

Marwan Barghouti on No peace until Israel’s occupation of Palestine ends

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Editor’s note: Sadly, though Marwan Barghouti is right in almost everything he says here, as long as he and the Palestinian people insist on “return” as an indispensable part of a peace agreement, there will be no agreement. I’ve proposed that Israel agree to take 20,00i0 Palestinians a year for the next 30 years, a level that acknowledges Israel’s part in helping create the Palestinian refugee catastrophe. But a general “right of return” is read by Israelis to mean a defacto end of a state in which Jews have a majority, and given the experience of two thousand years of never having the protection of a state, there is little chance Israelis would accept that anytime in the next 40 years, which in effect means that this element in Barghouti’s plan is a guarantee for no end to the horrible reality of Israeli occupation of the West Bank. From the Israeli standpoint, a general “right of return” means that there would be two Palestinians states, one in the West Bank and one in what is now Israel as the Palestinian people becomes a majority through return of the 4 million people who now are the current generation of Palestinian refugees. Including that demand is an unfortunate part in what is otherwise a sane and strong statement from a much respected Palestinian leader who still languished in an Israeli prison.

Editorials & Actions

Israel/Palestine Update Oct. 9 from Uri Avnery

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Editor’s note: Uri Avnery, the widely respected leader of Israel’s peace movement Gush Shalom, may be a bit too generous about Mahmoud Abbas. In our view, Abbas (aka Abu Mazen)  never tried to do what Gandhi did–explicitly commit himself and his movement to nonviolence and seek to teach his people the centrality of nonviolence in winning a struggle against a domineering external nation that seeks to control you while simultaneously pretending to care about democracy and human rights. Nor did he ever seriously commit to changing the perception that the Palestinian Authority and its leading supporters were beneficiaries of special economic and political advantages under the Israeli occupation.  Nevertheless, Avnery’s article should be read primarily because of its useful presentation of the present reality for Palestinians under Israeli occupation. It is a heart-breaking analysis.

Editorials & Actions

Reading the Beginning of the Torah and a note on Why We do Hakafot (circle dancing with Torah) on Simchat Torah

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A Kavannah for Reading the Beginning of the Torah
– B’reishit 1:1-2:3  (Genesis chapter 1 sentence 1 to chapter 2, sentence 3)l
by Rabbi Diane Elliot         Simkhat Torah 2015 / 5776
 On Simkhat Torah we read the very end of the Torah, in which Moses– our faithful shepherd through so much of the Khumash (The Five Books of Moses, a.k.a. Torah)– dies by God’s kiss and is mourned by the people. And then we roll the scroll back to the very beginning, to the Book of Genesis, B’reishit, which might be translated: “in a beginning,” or “with a beginning.” Not “in the beginning,” but “in a beginning”: just one out of the many possible places our story could begin. What kind of beginning will we have this year? What Torah will unfold for you, for each of us, this year? Will it be a Torah of justice or of injustice?