Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/articles/page/3/)
Editor’s note: From Tel Aviv, Uri Avnery, leader of the Israeli peace movement Gush Shalom, has been a voice of sanity for many decades. Uri Avnery
May 19, 2018
The Day of Shame
ON BLOODY MONDAY this past week, when the number of Palestinian killed and wounded was rising by the hour, I asked myself: what would I have done if I had been a youngster of 15 in the Gaza Strip?
I. After January’s Martin Luther King Day celebration at Detroit’s Central Methodist Church, a couple of friends, my wife, and I joined the march going further into downtown in order to show our support for continuing action against racial inequality and especially for Black Lives Matters’ mobilization against police violence against African Americans. Within a few minutes we four, politically “progressive” Jews, found ourselves in the midst of a loud and energetic chant: “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free.” I suppose some of those chanting, certainly the leaders, knew that their words were calling for the destruction of the state of Israel. But perhaps some weren’t even aware of that, and wouldn’t have understood why the four of us dropped out. Later that day I happened to go the J Street website for some advice on how to think about the differences and possible links between anti-\Zionism and antisemitism and I was instantly confronted by the words on their banner: “The Political Home for Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace Americans.” Know it or not, those chanting earlier were certainly “anti-Israel,” but it was J Street’s language that stopped me in my tracks. “Pro-Israel” was no doubt a way of rebutting those who had called J Street “Anti-Israel” for opposing some current Israeli government policies, notably the West Bank settlements and the occupation (a word that J Street seems shy about using).
Below are three different takes, from 3 organizations each of which we at Tikkun support for their important work (Hazon in developing Jewish environmental consciousness, Torat Tzedeck for Rabbi Ascherman’s courageous work in defense of refugees, Palestinians, and Bedouin in Israel/Palestine, and T’ruah for its voice for progressive rabbis guided by Jill Jacobs). We present their statements on how to think about Israel on its 70th anniversary. I’m proud to be a member and supporter of each of these.
In the statements below each of them makes important points. Yet, none of them adequately capture the legitimate outrage of those Israelis who as Jews feel that Israel is desecrating that which is most sacred in the Jewish tradition, nor the pain of Arab Israelis who continue to experience the daily humiliations and pain of being a second-class citizen in a society that publicizes itself as an enlightened democracy, nor the pain of those millions of Palestinians living under Israeli Occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.
I particularly like Jill Jacobs, statement on behalf of T’ruah. She makes a very persuasive case for a balanced approach that in tone is very different from some on the Left who can see nothing of value in Israel.
{Editor’s note: Thanks to our media ally TomDispatch.com for sharing with Tikkun this important article about the larger significance of the teachers striking in Red states. RabbiLerner.tikkun@gmail.com]
Class Dismissed
Class Conflict in Red State America
By Steve Fraser
Teachers in red-state America are hard at work teaching us all a lesson. The American mythos has always rested on a belief that this country was born out of a kind of immaculate conception, that the New World came into being and has forever after been preserved as a land without the class hierarchies and conflicts that so disfigured Europe. The strikes, rallies, and walkouts of public school teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, soon perhaps Arizona, and elsewhere are a stunning reminder that class has always mattered far more in our public and private lives than our origin story would allow. Insurgent teachers are instructing us all about a tale of denial for which we’ve paid a heavy price. Professionals or Proletarians?
{Editor’s Note: Uri Avnery is the leader of the Israeli peace movement Gush Shalom. Hundreds more were wounded today. Please send it out to everyone you know, also send it on Facebook and all social media, and post it on your website!–Rabbi Michael Lerner}
Uri Avnery
April 14, 2018 Eyeless in Gaza
WRITE DOWN: I, Uri Avnery, soldier number 44410 of the Israel army, hereby dissociate myself from the army sharpshooters who murder unarmed demonstrators along the Gaza Strip, and from their commanders, who give them the orders, up to the commander in chief.We don’t belong to the same army, or to the same state. We hardly belong to the same human race. IS MY government committing “war crimes” along the border of the Gaza Strip?
On the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, Peter Gabel reflects on the history of racism in the U.S. and our failure to exist in mutual recognition of one another’s being.
We at Tikkun are in mourning for the seventeen Palestinians killed and hundreds wounded by the Israeli army on the eve of Passover. We are outraged by the use of violence and force by the Israeli soldiers who faced no threat to their safety or to the security of the State of Israel (though there were a handful of violent provocateurs among the thousands of nonviolent Gazans who came to the border with Israel to protest the ongoing blockade that has caused incredible suffering and many deaths among those living in this tiny area of mostly Palestinian refugees). We are also once again grieving for a Judaism that is being trampled on by those Jewish leaders who turn a blind eye to the brutality orchestrated by the Israeli army and justified by the Israeli government. I have included below a summary of three articles that I encourage you to read to gain a deeper understandings of the situation on the ground and responses both in Israel and the U.S. Please circulate this widely, and urge those who agree with these ideas to write letters of protest to your elected US officials in both political parties who give automatic support to every funding bill for Israel and every resolution backing Israel, and express your upset also to the various Israeli consulates and embassies around the world. We should not allow those who support the policies of Occupation to call themselves “pro-Israel” when in fact they are following a path that may lead to Israel’s destruction and already have led many people in parts of the world that never had any religious antagonism to Jews (such as, China, India, or much of Africa) to be open to hating Jews because they identify all Jews with the immoral policies of the current Israeli government.
by Jeremy Bendik-Keymer
I was sitting in Rising Star Roasters in Ohio City, Cleveland, Ohio when two loud-mouthed millennials sat next to me. They filled the whole room with their discussion of a building they are making to house yoga, a workout room and other things. It was as if they couldn’t find their worth unless the whole room saw it reflected in their access to property and investment. I was reading and so mostly shut out the discussion that followed of skylights, boiler systems, and ducting -the latter two of which I often find really interesting, given that I love to think about how we can build homes intricately, solidly and sustainably. What if I had read out loud, very loud, my chapter, “Compassion: tragic predicaments” so that the whole room filled with the words of Martha Nussbaum? (I should do that sometime, the next time a person shouts into a cell phone -go up next to them and start reading REALLY LOUDLY.)
But there came a point where my mind told me I should be listening. The builder said to the client, back-pedaling from some difficulty the client faced and which would possibly cause moral problems for the builder: “This conversation never happened.” He implied that they can just act as if he had never heard the difficulty. The problem is, the conversation did happen. That’s the truth. The builder went on blithely through the remaining minutes. I couldn’t figure out what had been avoided, but he seemed happy. The client went to the bathroom, and the builder bounced around the place with a CAVS hat on until they both left. No problem. The conversation happened, and they will suppress it if accountability ever arises. Need I say that this is our society now? “This conversation never happened” is a cliché you can speak loudly in public space while you are trying to vacuum some money away from people’s pockets. We live in an arbitrary society. Our president is an arbitrarian –he is accountable to no rule. Major “news” sources are increasingly arbitrarian -they drive people who have served our country to leave in protest due to their disregard of truth. Even good educational institutions will say that they value X in education -say, “ethics”- but unintentionally omit structured ethical learning and moral education across the university educational experience. Mission statements seem to be mere fluff, and the faculty that should have helped create them irrelevant -the space of the university, then: arbitrary.
[Thanks to our media ally TomDispatch.com for sharing this article by Nate Terani. The introduction is from Tom Engelhardt who edits Tom Dispatch]
Who could possibly keep up with the discordant version of musical chairs now being played out in Washington? When it comes to Donald Trump’s White House, the old sports phrase about needing a scorecard to keep track of the players pops to mind (though you would need a new one every day or maybe every few hours). The turnover rate of top White House staffers was already at 43%, a record for any administration in little more than its first year in office, before the latest round of exits even began. Recently, the president nominated Gina Haspel (“Bloody Gina”) to head the CIA. She had, in fact, been responsible for running one of the Bush administration’s earliest and most brutal “black sites” and had a significant hand as well in destroying evidence of what CIA torturers had done there and elsewhere.
Editor’s note: Thanks to our media ally TomDispatch.com we share with you some reflections on the way the U.S. has been conducting warfare for the past 17 years without most people even noticing. It starts with an introduction by Tom Dispatch editor Tom Engelhardt. –Rabbi Michael Lerner rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com
I’ve long been struck by one strange aspect of the most recent part of the American Century: just how demobilized this country has been in the midst of distant wars that have morphed and spread for almost 17 years. I was born in July 1944 into a fully mobilized country fighting World War II in Europe and the Pacific. Pearl Harbor aside, actual war was then a distant reality for most Americans, but there was no question that this nation was at war (as were both my parents: my father in the U.S. Army Air Forces, as it was then called, and my mother in the war effort at home).
Barbara Artson writes about the plight of the Rohingya people, “a Muslim minority forced to leave their homes in the predominantly Buddhist Myanmar (Burma), whose government claims they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, and therefore they deprive them of their rights as citizens.”
[Editor’s Note: Neither of these positions below represent Tikkun’s position. We call for a focus on healing the PTSD on both sides while simultaneously calling for a campaign for “One Person/One Vote” in an Israel/Palestine with a new constitution that would guarantee without possibility of change through any future democratic process that both Jews and Palestinians would forever have the Right of Return in this new entity. And while we think that formulating it that way might reassure both peoples that their concerns are heard, we put it forward also with the hopes that Israelis would find that growing support for that alternative might produce an Israeli majority for the 2 state solution which we think the best path but politically distant in 2018. –Rabbi Michael Lerner ]
Ending the Occupation is the Path to Peace
By Jeff Warner and Yossi Khen, Feb. 27, 2017
Peace has eluded the parties in Israel-Palestine for decades. Israel, the stronger party economically, militarily, and diplomatically, has effectively prevented peace from emerging. That sad fact has not changed, even though Palestinian nationalism is stronger than ever and the Palestinian cause is gaining international recognition. In frustration, some Palestinian solidarity advocates are pursuing desperate but futile paths. An example was promulgated by Richard Falk in a public speech in Los Angeles on February 7, 2018, while discussing his well-researched U.N. report on Israeli apartheid.
In this article Ronald Aronson reports that, contrary to what many may have expected, there has been an increase in social hope––what he defines as “the disposition to act collectively to improve our situation”––since Trump took office.
No Other Gods: The Politics of the Ten Commandments
by Ana Levy-Lyons
Published by Center Street/ Hachette 2018
Reviewed by Natan Margalit
{Editor’s Note: You are invited to a NYC book launch of Ana Levy-Lyons new book at Book Culture (Columbus Ave. & 82nd St.) on Wednesday, March 7 at 6:30pm.More info at her website (www.analevylyons.com) Ana Levy-Lyons is a member of the Tikkun inner-editorial board and her articles in Tikkun have inspired many of our readers.–Rabbi Michael Lerner }
It is evident from the first page that this book is swimming against the current in our contemporary political and spiritual landscape. Author Ana Levy-Lyons tells a story in her preface about how one of her teachers back in high school liked to entertain the kids by listing oxymorons: pretty ugly, jumbo shrimp, etc, and he sometimes included: “liberal religion.” The laughs that he got demonstrated the underlying assumption in our culture: liberal and religious don’t go together. The task that the author takes on is to prove that assumption wrong. She does a very good job. The book is structured around Ana Levy-Lyons’ modern commentary on the ten commandments.
Editor’s Note: In a society which has never acknowledged its violent foundation from the genocide of Native peoples, to slavery, to the violent overthrow of governments around the world in order to impose regimes that favor U.S. corporate interests, its brutal war against the Vietnamese people, its recruitment of young people into a pre-army ROTC, and its romanticization in movies and t.v. of super weapons and violence, it is no surprise that it is easy to convince men that “real men” use weapons and violence to get their way in the world. Even Obama, the recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize, spent every Tuesday morning approving targets for drone attacks that killed far more innocent people than school shootings in the same period have. Patriarchal and class-based societies have always used violence to establish and maintain their rule, and the advent and mass availability of super-powered weapons makes the violence that used to be the special privilege of the powerful elites is now also available to the masses. Of course, these weapons should be banned, though the powerful interests of the gun lobby and the military-industrial complex is going to make that very difficult. Nonetheless, applaud the students who refuse to listen to the voices that tell them to be realistic and that they cannot change the world. Yet the pervasive fear generated by a competitive marketplace, with its message that everyone is against you and you have to protect yourself from others who would dominate you or take advantage of you if they could, provides the fodder that the NRA and its supporters need to valorize unlimited access to guns.