2015

Closing Thoughts on “What’s Next for Israel/Palestine?”

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King Solomon, reputed to be one of the wisest ancient kings, decided to create a ring for himself bearing a message that would always be true. The message he chose? “This too will pass.”

The conflict between Israel and Palestine will also pass. A new generation will arise that is no longer traumatized by the past and no longer believes that its interests are served by engaging in this struggle. We, sadly, live “in the meantime.”

And we have a huge responsibility to hasten the day when trauma will be replaced by mutual affirmation and reconciliation, or steps in that direction sufficient to make it possible for that new generation to grow up without the traumas of the past.

2015

Israeli Elections Won’t End Oppression in Palestine/Israel

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Counting on a “left-wing” election victory to produce change in Israeli policy is naïve. A quick review of history reveals that Labor governments not only have led most of Israel’s wars against its neighbors, but also spearheaded settlement expansion in the West Bank. Labor leaders, including David Ben-Gurion and Shimon Peres, have presided over countless massacres and war crimes. Moreover, Israeli society has been shifting to the far right, so much so that Ariel Sharon became a centrist figure and Tzipi Livni is now a left-wing leader. It is therefore critical to understand the core issues of the conflict in order to move forward in a productive way.

2015

State­-Building Can Pave the Way to Statehood: Lessons from Kurdistan

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How did the Palestinians’ odds for statehood and those of the Kurds get reversed in twenty years? The Kurds have spent several decades, especially the last, constructing the educational, economic, military, and political institutions for statehood. Most telling is the growth in women’s rights and the decline in family honor killings. Turning from killing women and Turks to building Kurdish autonomy, the Kurds are achieving growing international support for their bid for statehood. Similarly, the case for Palestinian statehood will not be made by bashing Israel, by arguing for the moral superiority of one’s narrative and one’s victimhood, or by asking what is good for Israel alone.

2015

A New Horizon for Peace: An Israel-Palestine Union

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In light of the total deadlock on the question of Palestine, a group of Israelis and Palestinians is developing an original vision of peace, which under the current circumstance is becoming more relevant than ever: “two states, one homeland.”

Following Netanyahu’s return to power, a sense of despair engulfed the peace camp in Israel, Palestine, and beyond. Indeed, the Likud Party’s policy of strongly supporting Jewish colonization of the West Bank and recent vicious Israeli attacks on Gaza make peace based on the two-state solution seem like a disappearing mirage. Deep divisions among the Palestinians and waves of Hamas-inspired violence against Israeli civilians further this impression. Moreover, even if a Palestinian state is miraculously established in the near future, it is likely to become a small “ghetto state” with severely limited sovereignty and a source of constant grievance. Further, the “divorce” model between Israel and Palestine is likely to heighten conflict over core issues such as Jerusalem (to be redivided), settlements (to be mostly forcefully removed, causing havoc in Jewish society), the Palestinian right of return (to be ignored, causing major tensions in Palestinian society), and the status of the Palestinians in Israel (to remain dangerously marginal).

2015

Letters: Transforming the Legal Arena

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Restoring Mutual Recognition to the Legal System
I was pleased to see two discussions of restorative justice in the Summer 2015 issue of Tikkun, in Peter Gabel’s visionary essay, “The Spiritual Dimension of Social Justice:  Transforming the Legal Arena,” and in Al Hunter’s reviews of two new books on prison abolition. Restorative justice has played a major role in transforming the criminal justice system in countries such as New Zealand, and it is making an impact in jurisdictions throughout the United States, but it is more than just an alternative approach to crime and punishment. Restorative Justice is an international movement for social transformation. Restorative practices (a more inclusive term preferred by some practitioners) call on us to, as Gabel writes, “link our collective moral impulses with a collective coming-into-connection that holds the promise of making those high moral impulses a living social reality.” And when we fail to act on our highest moral impulses, as we all do at times, restorative practices provide a framework for repairing the harm. Sitting in a peacemaking circle, or another restorative process guided by a skilled facilitator, participants experience the fulfillment of the “desire for mutual recognition” that Gabel describes.

2015

The Problem is that Life is Imperfect

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The best way to achieve Mr. Gabel’s noble goals is, first, to recognize what can and cannot be accomplished by the various decision-making institutions in our society, and then to try to equip them to perform optimally in their areas of influence.

2015

A Response to Gary Peller

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The desire for mutual recognition is not an abstract universal, but a concrete universal manifested in all human situations as an expression of the very meaning of what it means to be a social human being.

2015

History and Transcendence

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The imposition of the “desire for mutual recognition” as the universal that ties us all together in common humanity onto the description of every social phenomena is ahistorical and undialectical—it fails to account for the concrete particulars of time and space that give exercises of social power a particular spin and story.