Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/other_voices/editorials__actions/page/39/)
Have you gotten a chance to check out Tikkun’s Summer 2014 print issue “Thinking Anew About God”? A significant number of Tikkun readers have told us that they don’t believe in God. No worries! Our managing editor and many of our authors identify as agnostics or atheists too. Check out two free articles from this latest issue!
Abbas appealed to the world body to draw up a specific timetable for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank.
PA President Mahmoud Abbas. (photo credit:REUTERS)
Mr. President,
At the outset, I wish to extend our sincere congratulations upon your election as President of the United Nations General Assembly this session and to express our gratitude and appreciation to H.E. Mr. John Ashe for his able leadership of the past session. Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen,
In this year, proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly as the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian people, Israel has chosen to make it a year of a new war of genocide perpetrated against the Palestinian people. In this year, in which this Assembly, on behalf of the countries and peoples of the world, conveyed the world’s yearning and determination to realize a just peace that achieves freedom and independence for the Palestinian people in their State of Palestine alongside Israel in order to rectify the historic injustice inflicted on the Palestinian people in Al-Nakba of 1948, the occupying power has chosen to defy the entire world by launching its war on Gaza, by which its jets and tanks brutally assassinated lives and devastated the homes, schools and dreams of thousands of Palestinian children, women and men and in reality destroying the remaining hopes for peace.
Planting the Seed of Eternity: A Meditation on Rosh Hashanah & Our Planet
By Rabbi David Seidenberg
On Rosh Hashanah, after every time we hear the sound of the shofar, we
call out the words, Hayom harat olam. This expression is usually
translated as, “Today is the birthday of the world, or “Today the
world is born.” Even though that’s how people translate it, the Hebrew word harah or
harat actually means pregnancy, conception or gestation. Not birth,
but the process that leads to birth. Furthermore, olam can mean world, but it can also mean eternity, from
the root that means “hidden,” or more precisely, the infinite that is
hidden, that is beyond our limited perception.
Hundreds of thousands of us marched against climate change Sunday to emphasize to the political leaders of the world assembling at the UN in the next few days that this is an issue of intense concern for the people of the world. We demand action, not just pious statements of concern!
Dear friends,
The People’s Climate March on Sunday, September 21, in New York City will be the largest demonstration yet for climate sanity. We hope you can join us there that day. Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) have been working in coalition with hundreds of other groups to make this important event an impactful assembly of those who do not want to stand by passively while our global environment is being destroyed. We at the NSP believe that there are three things that can be done right now to begin the process of preventing global environmental disaster:
1. Plan local and national demonstrations to call attention to the urgency of the problem
2.
Editor’s Note: Stephen Walt wrote this piece in 2011, but it is just as relevant today as Americans are lining up for yet another war. What Walt misses, in my view, is that many Americans are motivated by a genuine desire to do good, to protect the powerless, and that that motivation deserves praise. Unfortunately, that goodness in Americans is manipulated by the institutions that serve the multinational corporations and the 1 percent of super rich as they give priority to their narrow interests in wealth and power and misuse the goodness of Americans by shaping a media and an educational system which gives most Americans little understanding of the class structure, the destructive impact of multinational corporations, the way the ethos of materialism and selfishness and looking out for number one endemic to the ethos of global capitalism, and the destruction of communities and faith systems around the world have contributed to the resurgence of the most irrational elements in fundamentalist religious communities as a misguided protest against the world order that US power has brought to much of the world. Sadly, most liberals then respond to appeals to fight those crazy and hateful fundamentalists, without any sense of how these enemies are the flip side of the distortions in a country that uses massive violence as well as subtle manipulation to retain its global power. We who love America must do our best to help Americans see that it is precisely their goodness that makes them vulnerable to this kind of manipulation, and that the solution is NOT to then adopt the kind of ethical neutrality about foreign policy adopted by some, but rather to get a more complex picture of what a world manifesting loving and caring values would really look like.
Denying Palestinians Their Humanity
A Response to Elie Wiesel
by SARA ROY
Mr. Wiesel,
I read your statement about Palestinians, which appeared in The New York Times on August 4th. I cannot help feeling that your attack against Hamas and stunning accusations of child sacrifice are really an attack, carefully veiled but unmistakable, against all Palestinians, their children included. As a child of Holocaust survivors—both my parents survived Auschwitz—I am appalled by your anti-Palestinian position, one I know you have long held. I have always wanted to ask you, why? What crime have Palestinians committed in your eyes? Exposing Israel as an occupier and themselves as its nearly defenseless victims?
Editor’s Note: Although I believe that it is Alon Gottstein, not Tutu, who has no willingness to honestly confront the history and present reality of Israel, I believe that the deepest truths emerge from the intellectual struggle between different perspectives and for that reason want to print dissenting views from our own whenever they are presented in a coherent and respectful way that Gottstein has done. So since we sent out to our readers the original article by Archbishop Tutu, I want to give his critic a similar opportunity to have his perspective heard in our community. –Rabbi Michael Lerner
To Desmond Tutu: Singling out Israel for blame won’t bring peace
by ALON GOSHEN-GOTTSTEIN
You address the Israeli people in your letter but you ignore their central concern: The conflict isn’t just a struggle for liberation, it’s for survival. It’s not apartheid-era South Africa redux, which is why your boycott ‘cure’ won’t work. Dear Archbishop Tutu,
Recently, you addressed the people of Israel in Haaretz (“My plea to the people of Israel: Liberate yourselves by liberating Palestine”) explaining why the methods of boycott and divestment used in South Africa should be applied to the situation in Israel-Palestine.
Editor’s note: Sami Awad’s statement below provides an immediate and clear answer to those who think that there are no Palestinians with whom Israelis could work to build the preconditions for peace between Israel and Palestine. Awad’s endorsement of Tikkun’s book Embracing Israel/Palestine (available for kindle at Amazon.com and in hard copy from tikkun.org/eip) was rooted in the perspective he now outlines below—he shares our view that there is no possibility of peace until there is a fundamental transformation of consciousness and a healing of the post-traumatic stress disorder that afflicts many on all sides of this conflict. Sadly, many of the good-hearted organizations that have funded Israeli and Palestinian organizations and institutions that are doing good but very limited and narrowly focused reconciliation work have never fully grasped the need for a full-scale societal-wide consciousness-changing effort like that called for by Tikkun and by the Holy Land Trust Foundation. Such an effort has to operate at every level—pro-peace television, radio and print media, a political party that talks about love and generosity toward each side, a religious movement in each camp that is unequivocal in its affirmation of the humanity and needs of “the Other,” a campaign at every level to influence mass psychology, and the building of peace-oriented educational institutions and yeshivot from grammar and high school to universities in both Israel and Palestine. The right has worked at this kind of consciousness changing for the past forty-seven years, while the pro-peace forces have developed neither the strategy nor the funding base for this kind of campaign.
Start by recognizing where ISIS came from. The U.S. and its junior partners destroyed Iraq, left a sectarian division, poverty, desperation, and an illegitimate government in Baghdad that did not represent Sunnis or other groups. Then the U.S. armed and trained ISIS and allied groups in Syria.
From Just War to Just Peace: The Time Is Now
“Those who use the sword are sooner or later destroyed by it.”
– Matthew 27:52
“If we cannot know from the New Testament that Christ totally rejects violence, then we can know nothing of His person or message. It is the clearest of teachings.”
– Rev. John L. McKenzie, Biblical Scholar
“War is the suicide of humanity because it kills the heart and kills love.” – Pope Francis, June 2, 2013
As Catholic Christians, we call on our Church to embrace gospel nonviolence as the only stance consistent with Christian discipleship and to reject the just war tradition (JWT), as expressed, among other places, in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (¶ 2309). The JWT is unChristian and obsolete. War undermines human development and human dignity.
Exclusive: Cornel West talks Ferguson, Hillary, MSNBC — and unloads on the failed promise of Barack Obama
an interview by THOMAS FRANK in Salon.com
Cornel West teaches at Union Theological Seminary and is the author of Race Matters and (with Rabbi Michael Lerner) of Jews and Blacks: Let the Healing Begin. Cornel West (Credit: Albert H. Teich via Shutterstock)
Cornel West is a professor at Union Theological Seminary and one of my favorite public intellectuals, a man who deals in penetrating analyses of current events, expressed in a pithy and highly quotable way. I first met him nearly six years ago, while the financial crisis and the presidential election were both under way, and I was much impressed by what he had to say. I got back in touch with him last week, to see how he assesses the nation’s progress since then. The conversation ranged from Washington, D.C., to Ferguson, Missouri, and although the picture of the nation was sometimes bleak, our talk ended on a surprising note.
In a letter published today in The New York Times as an advertisement, 40 survivors of Nazi genocide and hundreds of their children are publicly deploring “the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza,” Israel’s ongoing occupation, and the troubling rise of systemic racism. The letter, a response to an advertisement posted recently by Eli Wiesel, in which Palestinians were portrayed as championing “child sacrifice,” is the first of its kind to be signed by so many Holocaust survivors, who are making waves by calling for a full boycott of Israel – roundly viewed as anathema by Jewish institutions in both the United States and Europe. Below is the full text of their letter:
As Jewish survivors and descendants of survivors and victims of the Nazi genocide we unequivocally condemn the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and the ongoing occupation and colonization of historic Palestine. We further condemn the United States for providing Israel with the funding to carry out the attack, and Western states more generally for using their diplomatic muscle to protect Israel from condemnation. Genocide begins with the silence of the world.
A New Model Required
Lev Grinberg*
The Israeli government has drawn the IDF and the whole country into an unprecedented complicated situation that the country has seen since the disengagement. This is due to a fundamental misunderstanding: the model of Gaza control which was built by Sharon in 2004 has collapsed. The model was based on aerial and marine blockade, closure of above-ground border crossings to the Strip and a below-ground supply of goods via tunnels. Al-Sissi changed the rules of the game by closing the tunnels, as a part of his internal struggle against the Moslem Brothers, pushing the Palestinians to a political re-alignment in a national agreement government. The question that rises is: How will the Israeli diplomacy adapt to the new circumstances?
The Search for Peace During World War One:
by Neil Hollander
A hundred years ago, just after the First World War began, the Danish
anti-war film, Lay Down Your Arms, had its world premiere in New York. The film was faithfully based on a novel by Bertha von Süttner, who
was, at the time, one of the most famous women in the world. She had
been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905 and her anti-war book had
been published in 16 languages. It had gone through more than 40
editions and millions of people had read it. In this the centennial year of the beginning of the First World War
there has been, as one might expect, a wave of new books.