Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2014/07/page/2/)
This week’s Torah stories remind us of those six Biblical ‘cities of refuge’ -places where anyone could go and seek shelter, protection from bloodshed or vengeance. But in reality there are no places of refuge. The Torah is like a dream. And then we awaken from it – and the nightmare is that there is nowhere safe from death’s sudden arrival, however guilty or innocent one might be.
Bat Adam calls herself the “heartist,” a label that she feels embodies the message behind her art. She hopes her work will inspire viewers to soul-search, to “go to their hearts and be present to what they see.”
For Wendy Somerson, every morning she wakes up she feels helpless in the face of such a large scale massacre being carried out in Gaza. So yesterday, instead of passively watching the news, her group of Jewish, Palestinian and allied activists made some news of their own.
Young people in Los Angeles held a fast during the fourth week of July to call attention to the welfare of Central American children crossing into the United States. They are asking the Obama administration to take executive action to treat the children as refugees.
People under occupation have a right to resist and fight back. Whether or not one condemns or approves of Hamas’s rocket fire, one thing is clear: Israel is not really defending itself from rockets, it is instead defending its self-declared right to swallow up more and more Palestinian land and empty it of more and more Palestinians.
Listen to Uri Avnery’s interview from Tel Aviv and then read some articles from Israel and Palestine, one on the demonstrators assaulted in Tel Aviv after protesting the Gazan War, and one about humanizing Palestine.
One either stands unequivocally by Israel’s actions, or stands in opposition to Israel. There is no in-between. And it is in that liminal space is where David Harris-Gershon and many others stand, a space that stands separated from the community…And that is saddening. One author’s investment in Israel compels him to critique its geopolitical policies.
A luxury condominium complex in New York City’s Upper West Side plans to contain a door for use by wealthy residents only, and a separate door for lower-income tenants. What we are witnessing is a postmodern version of the high-walled city center of Medieval times protecting the nobility from peasants and marauding bands, and the 20th-century gated communities meant to keep out thieves and bandits. These hermetically-sealed containers, nonetheless, eventually imprison us all.
Facebook has been a forest of assertions and denunciations this week. Maybe it’s the company I keep, but almost everyone is posting links at an accelerated rate, and the subject of this battle of citations is Israel-Palestine. I spent a remarkable amount of time reading blogs and essays, but still, I was able to consume only a fraction of this material. The volume was such that I could have begun reading each morning, pausing only to sleep, then rolled out of bed and continued till bedtime the next day. The vast majority of posts came from people who, like me, live thousands of miles from the Mideast and, like me, have almost no direct knowledge of the situation.
The two-state solution is the answer, as it always has been. The solution–which can only be reached through U.S.-brokered negotiations that will include the Israelis and all Palestinian factions–is two states living side by side in peace. That is no fantasy!