Editor’s Note: Uri Avnery, a committed atheist and chair of Israel’s peace movement Gush Shalom, recognizes that the real problem in Israel today is not that it is a Jewish state, but that it is not Jewish at all in the values it embodies in many respects. I have argued in my book Jewish Renewal:A Path to Healing and Transformation a similar thesis–with one qualification: there are two competing Judaisms, from the Torah onward, one a Judaism of love (“You shall love the stranger–remember that you were strangers in the land of Egypt”), a Judaism of generosity (share what you have with the poor, and don’t take advantage of those in need–so do not take interest on any loan you give to others), a Judaism of justice (justice, justice shall thou pursue), a Judaism of environmental sanity (stop all work on transforming the earth every Sabbath and also every seventh year the entire year, everyone the same year, be stewards of the earth recognize that you don’t “own” the earth but are merely wayfarers here for a short period of time but while you are here share the earth and its bounties with those in need) and the other what I call “settler Judaism” committed to conquest and “power over.” These two Judaisms are the different ways that people have heard God’s voice for thousands of years, and these two voices are in the secular and non-Jewish consciousness of every other people on the planet as well (e.g. the difference between Martin Luther King, Jr and Barack Obama, or between Jimmy Carter and Hillary Clinton, or between Rabbis for Human Rights in Israel/Btselem/Truah/Tikkun/Network of Spiritual Progressives/New Israel Fund on the one hand and the American Jewish Committee/Anti-Defamation League/Moment Magazine/Commentary Magazine/national Hillel Foundations/and much of the Orthodox and Conservative movements in the U.S. on the other hand while Reform, Reconstructionist and Jewish Renewal movements have both voices struggling inside them but neither voice has absolute priority at least not yet). And did you read the full page ad bought by Shmuli Boteyach in the New York Times and featuring a message from Elie Wiesel, the voice of those stuck in Holocaust consciousness, urging the US to not seek peace with Iran but instead escalate sanctions at the very moment when the Obama Administration, in one of its few courageous moments, is seeking to find a peaceful path to prevent Iran from developing a military nuclear capacity–only surprising to those who haven’t followed Wiesel’s path toward greater and greater nationalist chauvinism and refusal to speak out on behalf of the Palestinian people or to critique any aspect of Israeli policy toward non-Jews.
I have always argued that both voices are in all of us, a voice of fear versus a voice of hope, a voice that tells us to assume that the other wants to hurt us versus a voice that tells us that the other may also be scared and that if we approach them with generosity of spirit that over some amount of time their fear can be assuaged (or another way of saying it: No, not everyone whom we are in conflict with is a Hitler or a Nazi, though we have compassion for those whose trauma from those kind of terrible experiences makes it hard for them to see the world through any other framework by that of the Holocaust or of 9/11 or of the Nakba or…well every people on the planet has its experience of hurt and hate that it can use to justify going into that fearful place). So my prayer is that we can acknowledge when any group of people are in that fearful place, have compassion for them, and try to wean them away from that consciousness, but also forthrightly challenge the resulting militarism, racism, and oppressive policies that dirty their souls and make other people who witness these behaviors despair of justice and peace, or even give up on the possibility of a world of love and generosity!
