Thinking about politics and wars and the big systemic problems always leads me back to thinking about human behavior, and social behavior. Maybe it is the psychotherapist in me — always analyzing the world around me from a psychological and behavioral stance. So, thinking about leadership and the things we bow down to lead me to think about the human psychology of want, envy, fear, and power and the spiritual and psychological question that comes when we pause to get a distance view of Western culture. Which I think, also, ends up being a spiritual issue of western culture.
There is citizen journalism and then there is photographic philanthropy, and they each serve a purpose. I have been covering Occupy events in my area by shooting photos and making them available on flickr, as well as tweeting them around. A few publications have asked me to post to their sites as a citizen journalist, but I haven’t taken that step yet. April 26, though, I shot an event that wasn’t about Occupy. It was a photographic exhibit called “Facing Forward” by volunteer Marsha Guggenheim that displayed beautiful profiles of women who had graduated from the Community Health Worker Training Program of the Homeless Prenatal Program, alongside short blurbs about their success stories.
During the height of Newt Gingrich’s 2012 presidential campaign, the Sheldon-Adelson-backed Republican candidate caused waves when he called the Palestinians an “invented people” and declared that the Palestinian Authority was only interested in Israel’s destruction. Why did Gingrich express such extreme views late last year on a matter that, at the time, was not central to his campaign? Simple: those are not Gingrich’s views, but the views of Sheldon Adelson, who at the time was writing ten-million-dollar checks to prop up the Gingrich candidacy. On Sunday, a New York Times editorial wondered aloud why Adelson is now pumping staggering sums of money into the campaign of his second choice, Mitt Romney. The answer is, itself, staggering:
The first answer is clearly his disgust for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, supported by President Obama and most Israelis.
Daphni Leef — who last summer sparked the largest social protests in Israel’s history when she set up a tent along Rothschild Boulevard — attempted to reignite those historic protests on Friday by again setting up camp (along with hundreds of fellow protesters). However, in stark contrast to the relatively accommodating stance police took toward the tent protests last summer, the authorities yesterday responded violently and with intentional symbolism as a mass of riot police beat and dragged Leef across the boulevard before arresting her. They also forcefully prevented demonstrators from occupying the site where Israel’s protests began in 2011. Saturday evening, approximately 7,000 Israelis took to the streets to protest Leef’s brutal arrest and to begin anew last summer’s massive protests which, at their peak, drew nearly 500,000 Israelis into the streets. The tone was markedly confrontational, with protesters chanting “Returning Power to the People” as they swarmed city hall, blocked one of Israel’s main highways and at times overwhelmed police, some of which were joined by elite Special Forces units. Haaretz interviewed Barak Cohen, one of the protesters injured by police, whose anger was shared by many in the streets:
“We came to create a confrontation, not to stand across from them,” Cohen said.
If the people at the top are ultimately reluctant to collaborate with the people with less power, and those with less power, even at the highest levels within an organization, are reluctant to speak up, to challenge their bosses,… how will the day ever come when enough of us operate collaboratively in the service of practical, material needs such as producing goods or services that all of us depend on?
How did the Earth Get Involved in Politics? Just as the creator seeks solitude, the destroyer must be constantly surrounded by people, witnesses to his efficacy –Walter Benjamin, The Destructive Character
This week’s perasha is concerned with the revolt of Korach, a leading Levite, against the desert leadership of Moshe and Aharon. The story is a bit complicated; there seems to be more than one revolt, with more than one ensuing outcome–Korach and his crew are swallowed up by a gaping crater that opens in the ground, while the 250 would be usurpers of the high priesthood are consumed by an incense driven conflagration. I will not attempt to unravel all the difficulties in this text; I am concerned with essentially two pivotal matters, as we will see. At any rate, I believe there is more here than merely post-revolution factional rivalries, as those of the Mensheviks versus Bolsheviks, that Michael Walzer reads into the Korach narrative.
On & off episodes of Palestinian attacks on Israel have triggered severe and bloody Israeli reprisals; … [and] the sporadic violence out of Gaza has moved the Israeli electorate decisively to the right.
As one who occasionally publishes opinion pieces in The Jerusalem Post — countering the paper’s normative conservatism with a progressive perspective — I often come across pieces with which I either disagree politically or find distasteful. However, I have never encountered a more morally offensive piece in Israel’s largest English-language paper than one posted today by a regular contributor entitled “Alice Walker’s Bigotry.” Before exploring this unhinged piece, and the motivations behind its publication, a bit of context is in order. Alice Walker, Pulitzer-Prize winner and literary hero, has in recent years been invested in Palestinian human rights, and is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) movement aimed at pressuring Israel to end its occupation of the Palestinian territories. Recently, it was reported that Walker has refused translation rights of her book, The Color Purple, to the Israeli publisher Yediot Books.
In his book, “Don’t Ask What Good We Do”, Robert Draper describes a dinner meeting of a group of Republicans on the night of President Obama’s inauguration. The group decided they would not cooperate with President Obama, that they would do everything in their power to obstruct his agenda for the country. They would attack Democrats in the media at every turn in order to take back the Congress in 2010 and the White House in 2012. According to Draper, Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, Paul Ryan, Pete Sessions, Jeb Hensarling, Pete Hoekstra, and Dan Lungren from the House of Representatives and Jim DeMint, Jon Kyl, Tom Coburn, John Ensign and Bob Corker from the Senate attended the dinner. Newt Gingrich also attended the dinner hosted by Frank Luntz.
An Israeli Defense Forces soldier, currently serving time in a military prison for his refusal to serve in the IDF and participate in Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories, has begun a hunger strike in solidarity with scores of Palestinian administrative detainees. Amira Hass at Haaretz writes:
Yaniv Mazor, a 31-year-old Jerusalem resident, was sentenced last week to 20 days in jail over his refusal to fill any position, be it combat or otherwise, in what he said was the occupying army. He was transferred to the IDF’s Tzrifin prison on Monday, launching his hunger strike the following day. In a phone conversation with his attorney Michael Sfard on Friday, Mazor said that he had “become appalled over the last few months by the hunger strike initiated by Palestinian administrative prisoners, but I couldn’t do much about it.” “I decided to start a hunger strike in solidarity [with the Palestinians], and in order to raise awareness on the issue of administrative detention, and not to prompt my own release,” Mazor added.