Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/israel_palestine/analysis_of_israelpalestine/page/2/)
I am both Arab and Jewish, and I enjoy resisting those binaries through the performance of my own unique identity. But identifying with both my Arab and Jewish heritage garners mixed results. So long as Hillel is in the business of defining people’s Jewishness for them, they will continue to marginalize Jewish voices.
My approach and Somerson’s should be two examples of dueling alternatives on the American Jewish Left, hopefully beyond the Left, in search of both a correction (tikkun) and a conclusion (siyum) to the injustices of one people dominating another.
Even as the Israeli government exerts a more visible rule over the movement of goods and people in the West Bank and Gaza, Israel also exercises tight control over the movement of information between Palestinian landlines, computers, and mobile devices.
Misinterpretation due to language barriers allows Israelis and Palestinians to dehumanize each other. In order to realistically begin a movement toward the creation of more holistic language learning programs, we must draw a tight connection between high-level negotiations and grassroots language programs.
The Zionist movement was not an innocent victim of Arab fanaticism and antipathy to Jews. It was an active participant and initiator of an intercommunal conflict which resulted in the expulsion of a million Palestinians in 1948 and then 1967, which has produced a brutal and illegal occupation that continues and even intensifies to this day. Do you think this is fair, Mr. Voight?
If we act from a loving and generous place, seeking to overcome behaviors that were previously perceived as disrespectful and humiliating, then the icebergs of anger and hate (some of which our behavior helped to create) can melt away and people’s hearts can once again turn toward love and justice for all.
The Haredi community has always been a thorn in the side of secular Israelis because the Haredi community does not buy into the Zionist ideology or the militarist symbology of the state. To move forward, Israel has to make room for this political and religious voice in the conversation.
There are arguably no two movements in Israel as disparate as the Settler Movement (known as Yesha) and Neturei Karta. Yesha represents the community of Israelis who live in the West Bank. It does not support a two-state solution and remains wed to a Greater Israel ideology that claims all of historic Erez Israel belongs to the Jews. Members of Neturei Karta are what we might call premillenialists. They are against a Jewish State in the Land of Israel claiming that tradition dictates that the messiah will come solely by divine fiat and the job of the Jews is to perform mitzvot and passively await his arrival.
Wendy Elisheva Somerson reviews Israel/Palestine and the Queer International by Sarah Schulman.
Temperatures have been increasing every decade since the 1970s, producing increasingly severe storms, floods, wildfires, areas of drought, and other signs of climate change. Yet, an alarming percentage of Jews, especially among the Orthodox, still believe that climate change is nothing more than “liberal politics.”
For me, there was no surprise. From the very first day, I was convinced that Yasser Arafat had been poisoned by Ariel Sharon. I even wrote about it several times.
While the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems in abeyance and “nothing happens,” it is really going on with full force in the only battlefield that matters: the settlement enterprise.
Palestinian gays and lesbians have urged the gay community in the United States to become more aware of how we have become an unwitting partner in Israel’s efforts to improve its much-criticized human rights record—especially with respect to the Palestinians. Through a policy that some have called “pinkwashing,” Israel has self-consciously sought to rebrand itself as less religious, less militaristic and less hostile, and in so doing wants to deflect attention from the International Court of Justice and UN Human Rights Council’s findings that many of Israel’s policies with respect to the Palestinians violate international law.
There is, on the face of it, no more need for a book on the Arabs and the Holocaust than for a book on the Africans or the Australians and the Holocaust. But Israel was created in the Arab world, and Israelis and Arabs have long been fighting a bitter war about both the nature of Israel and that of Arab opposition to Zionism.
Israel’s expansionism relies on the Zionism of Desire. Indeed, the building of settlements—and worse, the continued expansion and building of settlements in Palestinian territory in light of the current situation—is essentially unimaginable without it. A Zionism of Fear is a political philosophy that takes as its point of departure the credible threat of cruelty against individual Jews because of their Jewishness. It is the Zionism of Desire that fuels Hamas and Hezbollah—but is it also the reality of Hamas and Hezbollah that fuels a more palatable Zionism of Fear.