Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/archive/page/12/)
In medical genetics, the field in which I specialize, we believe the correct diagnosis is the best guarantee of selecting the right therapy and improving prognosis. I’d like to offer a diagnosis of the injustice in Palestine/Israel: the morass that we are in was created by an ideology called Zionism, which overlooked the immorality of transforming a multireligious and multicultural Palestine into the Jewish State of Israel.
Ever since it became clear that the U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, had failed to cajole the Israeli and Palestinian leaders into finally ending their conflict, the pressing question has been, what next? Now, with the Israeli prime minister being reelected on a “no-two-state platform,” the need to answer this question is more pressing than ever before. For over twenty years process has trumped outcome, but it is now in danger of being out-trumped itself by the total collapse of the only internationally recognized paradigm for a solution to the conflict. A new international strategy urgently needs to be devised as an alternative to failed bilateral negotiations. Our proposal takes as its starting point the need to resolve two crucial ambiguities regarding Israel’s control of the West Bank and Gaza, its rule over the Palestinians, and the colonization of their land.
As it now stands, Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories is lucrative rather than costly. No nation in possession of territory it seized from another has been known to give up that territory merely because of a change of heart. The Israeli people will not support withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories unless the continuation of the Occupation causes them to suffer, whether materially or in terms of their standing in the world. One way in which the continuation of the conflict benefits Israel is that it helps Israel test and sell more of the weapons and security systems it manufactures.
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Bringing about the conditions needed for a durable two-state deal would necessitate currently unthinkable shifts in some long-standing assumptions held by Israeli Jews. A deal sufficiently durable to withstand post-agreement pressure from Palestinian dissidents would need to include three components:
Territorial integrity. Even a deal that accommodated land swaps along the 1967 borders would require some combination of moving and removing many, if not all, of the Israeli Jewish communities living in the territory of a Palestinian state. It would require an arrangement for mobility between Gaza and the West Bank. Defensibility.
The decorative mosaic adorning the ancient synagogue floor
is innocent of its future. Good luck, it means to say, or
my swastika hands miming perpetual motion wish you
everlasting peace and prosperity. And what coincidence
sends my son running across the plaza, blowing again
and again on his precious pinwheel toy? Say what you mean,
I want to shout. I am listening to the politicians
in the courtyard, excavating for small truths buried
beneath thick stratum of tedious lies.
Entheogens, Society & Law: Towards a Politics of Consciousness, Autonomy & Responsibility
by Daniel Waterman
Review by Stephen Mo Hanan
The reelection of Binyamin Netanyahu, accompanied by his renunciation of the two-state solution and racist denigration of Israel’s Arab voters, has created the moment of greatest despair over Israel/Palestine that we have experienced in Tikkun’s thirty years of existence. I first published in Tikkun in its inaugural year, 1986. At that time I joined Michael Lerner in his courageous call for negotiations with the Palestinians (then forbidden by Israeli law) and the creation of a Palestinian state side by side with Israel. Tikkun has consistently fought for that position over the years. There have been moments of hope, such as the Oslo Accords, and moments of great despair, like the Second Intifada.
Flawed System/Flawed Self: Job Searching and Unemployment Experiences
by Ofer Sharone
Review by Amy Mazur
Before the Door of God
Edited by Jay Hopler and Kimberly Johnson
The Sea Sleeps: New and Selected Poems
by Greg Miller
Once in the West
by Christian Wiman
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.
Our social change organizations have internalized the destructive messages of mainstream society. It’s time to compost what’s not working.
It’s impossible to create activist spaces where everyone is equally powerful. Instead, we can acknowledge and encourage different paths to power.
Leadership doesn’t have to be patriarchal. Remembering that leadership is service will help social movements resist the tyranny of structurelessness.
To overthrow the alienation and false needs of capitalism, we must imagine a culture of love, fearlessness, and honor for the sacred—then start building it.
As a lifelong feminist practitioner of the Torah of nonviolence, I am drawn to respond to the question of what’s next in Israel/Palestine through the hermeneutics of nonviolence, which I believe is a fruitful way out of the one-state/two-state conundrum. The practice of nonviolence is a path toward the future. We learn from people on the front lines of systemic violence that “don’t speak about us without us” is a core principle of nonviolence solidarity, and so I begin with words from a poem titled “Running Orders” that Lena Khalaf Tuffaha wrote after the massacre of Gaza last summer.
They call us now. Before they drop the bombs.