Editorials & Actions

The Blind Alley of J Street and Liberal American Zionism: A Critique by Abba A. Solomon and Norman Solomon

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Editor’s Note:
Tikkun supports J Street, Americans for Peace Now, Jewish Voice for Peace, Rabbis for Human Rights, the interfaith Network of Spiritual Progressives, and any other organization that is vigorously and non-violently working to end the Occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza and that does so in ways that avoid demeaning the Jewish people or the Palestinian people and that avoid denying to the Jewish people and the Palestinian people the right of national self-determination. Having said that, we at Tikkun believe that nation states and nationalism should be transcended and the world’s political and economic nations should be reconfigured around environmental districts to address the two overarching problems facing the human race:

1) The pressing need to end poverty, homelessness, hunger, inadequate education, and inadequate health care, on the one hand, and

2) The way conflict between nations has obscured for most people on the planet the need to unite as one humanity to save the planet from environmental catastrophe and save the peoples of the world from immense suffering. To see concrete plans to achieve these goals, please read the latest iteration of our Global Marshall Plan and the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (ESRA). And please join the Network of Spiritual Progressives to support our work toward these goals at spiritualprogressives.org. So, while for the sake of alleviating the suffering of the Palestinian and Israeli peoples we support a two-state solution, we actually support a “No State Solution” not just for the Middle East but for the entire world we live in.

Editorials & Actions

Obstacles to a Just and Sustainable Peace Agreement

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It will be no surprise to Tikkun readers to note that we have been strongly critical of the Occupation of the West Bank and its treatment of the Palestinian people. Nevertheless, as I’ve explained in detail in Embracing Israel/Palestine (www.tikkun.org/EIP), we view the current situation more as a tragedy that emerged from the desire to both people to live in dignity, and both facing immensely difficult and at times traumatic circumstances as they began to develop self-consciousness through the framework of 19th and early 20th century nationalism. We dispute the portrayal of the relationship between Arab/Muslim culture and the minority Jewish population that lived in Arab lands, which in many respects resembled apartheid for most Jews, and which turned particularly ugly after European colonial powers sought, as they always did, to create havoc between the Jewish minority and the Muslim majority – ask the Sephardic/Mizrachi majority of Israel whose antagonism to the Arabs long predated the state of Israel and which is now the backbone of the right-wing forces controlling the politics of Israel. As part of that Arab majority and nation, Arabs were not just innocent bystanders – their Arab nation and Muslim majority in the Middle East helped create the conditions that led the Jewish population of Arab lands to flee (mostly to Israel). Similarly, from our standpoint, European Jews did not return to their ancient homeland to serve imperial interests, but to escape the oppression and then the mass murder they were subjected to in Europe, not as agents of Western colonialism but as its prime victim.

Articles

Environmentalist Bill McKibben’s Note to Tikkun and the NSP

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The fossil fuel companies aren’t normal companies. In the last few years we’ve come to understand that they have five times as much carbon in their reserves as we can safely burn if the world is to meet its agreed climate target of limiting rises in temperature to below 2 degrees. That is to say, if they carry out their business plan, the planet tanks. What this means in turn is that if you hold these stocks you in effect are wagering that the planet will do nothing to limit climate change.

Editorials & Actions

Special Seder Messages for Passover

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Tikkun’s supplement to the traditional Passover Seder Haggadah is not just for Jews—it will move spiritual progressives both secular and religious. Please feel free to read it and make copies of it for your own use! As we’ve said in Tikkun many times, the particularism of Judaism is a universalist message, albeit one that has been hard for many Jews to hold on to through thousands of years of being subject to abuse, and our Seder Haggadah supplement explores that irony. So check it out at tikkun.org/passover. Below you can read writings by three spiritual progressives—Jonathan Granoff, Shari Motro, and Rabbi Arthur Waskow (one of the most creative thinkers in the Jewish Renewal movement)—who further elaborate on universal messages emerging from specifically Jewish customs and practices.

Editorials & Actions

Uri Avnery on Crimea, Ukraine, Putin and the Nazis

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Uri Avnery

March 21, 2014

A Hundred Years Later

THERE IS an old Chinese curse that says: “May you live in historic times!” (If there isn’t, there should be.) This week was a historic time. The Crimea seceded from Ukraine. Russia annexed it. A dangerous situation. No one knows how it will develop. After my last article about the Ukrainian crisis, I was flooded with passionate e-mail messages. Some were outraged by one or two sentences that could be construed as justifying Russian actions.

Editorials & Actions

What If They Gave A War and Nobody Paid?

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Editor’s note: an interesting article by a Tikkun subscriber and ally. What if they gave a war and nobody paid?  By David Hartsough
 

“Considering the Tax Shelter.” (Flickr/JD Hancock)

As April 15 approaches, make no mistake: The tax money that many of us will be sending to the U.S. government pays for drones that are killing innocent civilians, for “better” nuclear weapons that could put an end of human life on our planet, for building and operating more than 760 military bases in over 130 countries all over the world. We are asked by our government to give moral and financial support to cutting federal spending for our children’s schools, Head Start programs, job training, environmental protection and cleanup, programs for the elderly, and medical care for all so that this same government can spend 50 percent of all our tax dollars on wars and other military expenditures. My wife Jan and I have been war tax resisters since the war in Vietnam. We cannot in good conscience pay for killing people in other parts of the world.

Editorials & Actions

Wrestling Jerusalem: Great new SF play on Israel and Palestine–a must see!

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Loving the Stranger  a theatre review by Corey Fischer
About Wrestling Jerusalem  by Aaron Davidman
The first sentence that Aaron Davidman speaks in Wrestling Jerusalem, his new solo play at Intersection for the Arts, will have an all-too-familiar ring to anyone  who has ever tried to understand the sources of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: “It’s complicated.”  

For the next eighty minutes Davidman seamlessly and thoroughly embodies fourteen characters – Arab, Israeli, American, Jewish, Muslim, male, female, old, young, religious, secular, left, right – who both prove and transcend that assertion.  

At the end of this moving, provocative, exhilarating journey, I had to ask myself whether there had really been only one actor on stage.  There were so many characters, so many arguments, debates, dialogues, so many people with so much to say. Did all that really come from one person?

Editorials & Actions

Ukrainian Fascism & Anti-Semitism–Not Everyone Agrees

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We continue our attempt to provide a wide variety of perspectives on what is happening in the Ukraine. Here we present the perspective of some of the Jewish establishment organizations reassuring us that anti-Semitism is not a big problem in the new post-coup reality of Ukraine, and then an article from a very different perspective by Zoltan Grossman arguing that the new Ukrainian government includes overtly fascist forces and that it is moving quickly to “privatize” essential services and utilities that are being given to the rich who will sell these back to the Ukrainian people who previously received them without regard to private profit.  Again, we take no stand on the accuracy of any of this material, but only present it to our readers so that they can hear a wider range of views than those presented in the lamestream American media. Open letter of Ukrainian Jews to Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin
LE MAÏDAN
 

 

La place du Maidan
Mr. President ! We are Jewish citizens of Ukraine: businessmen, managers, public figures, scientists and scholars, artists and musicians.

Editorials & Actions

Transformative Medicine as one Part of Emancipatory Spirituality

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One of the foci of the interfaith and atheist or secular humanist welcoming Network of Spiritual Progressives (you DO NOT have to be religious or believe in God to be a spiritual progressive) is to build consciousness changing groups in every profession. The goal: to help professionals envision what their profession could look like if the “bottom line” in their profession was not making more money and accumulating more power, but was instead at least equally seeking to maximize through the practice of their profession the fostering of human beings who gave priority to building a world based on love and caring, kindness and generosity, ethical behavior and ecological sensitivity, and awe and wonder and radical amazement at the grandeur and mystery of the universe. What might that look like? I developed some initial ideas on this in my book in 2000 called Spirit Matters. Below, I reprint my chapter on a Transformative Medicine to give you an idea of what kind of visioning we have in mind.

Editorials & Actions

Jews Against Zionism–an intro to their perspective

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Editor’s note:  While the article below has a narrow conception of Zionism, equating it with the policies of its most racist and reactionary elements (though not without some foundation, given that these elements are currently dominant in the Zionist movement)–a mistake similar to that made by some in the Left when they identify American patriotism solely with the right-wingers who wrap themselves in the American flag to defend imperialist policies and not with the liberal and progressive movements that have flourished and often triumphed in American history– it is nevertheless important for Tikkunistas (those who mobilize to heal and transform the world, hopefully by joining our Network of Spiritual Progressives) to inform ourselves about the views of people who totally reject Zionism in all its iterations, even if we do not fully agree with them. Check out the article here on Stephen Lendman’s blog. –Rabbi Michael Lerner. Jews Against Zionism
by Stephen Lendman

They’re numerous, outspoken, and range from secular to orthodox to one group calling itself “True Torah Jews Against Zionism.” They believe that “traditional” Jews don’t support Zionism, an ideology they call “contrary to Jewish law and beliefs and the teachings of the Holy Torah.”