Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/other_voices/editorials__actions/page/58/)
Many of the most vocal defenders of Israel in the Jewish community personally assail anyone who criticizes Israeli policies toward Palestinians, declining to answer the actual criticisms and instead labeling the critics as “self-hating Jews” or “anti-Semites” or worse.
Instead of messing around with partial measures, President Obama should transform our approach to the environment by orienting it around this key idea: the earth is not a “resource” to be used for private profit.
David Horowitz’s FrontPage magazine has published an article about our recent Network of Spiritual Progressives national conference in DC under the absurdist headline “Rabbi of Hate.”
We will be holding a memorial service for those killed on the Gaza Aid Flotilla last week, as well as prayers for healing of those who have been wounded.
We regret and deplore the killings which took place as Israeli troops, in defiance of international law, boarded and assaulted, wounded many and killed some of the participants in a flotilla seeking to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza (itself a morally outrageous policy) to bring humanitarian aid.
Progressives have been blessed in the past two years with three significant opportunities to change the fundamentals of American society. We’ve already blown the first and are missing the second and third.
. . . it relies on the idea of providing temporary worker visas to lower-skilled immigrants who are apparently expected to send their money home, providing American farmers, agribusiness, and other employers with a source of cheap labor that can depress the wages of other laborers.
Yet what the critics maintain is that Obama and congressional Democrats, inheriting an economy and political system in crisis after decades of ideological Republican policies committed to downsizing government and serving the tax-cutting interests of the rich and the corporate elites, blew a unique opportunity to teach Americans a new way of thinking about politics and economy.
Debates continue to rage over the UC Berkeley Student Senate’s call for divestment from two companies that help Israel maintain the Occupation of the West Bank.
The passage of the health care bill was not an embodiment of the vision of universal health care that many of us aspire to, but it was a major turn-around in American politics, a moment in which Barack Obama was able to regain some of the moral authority that inspired his landslide election only a year and a half ago and gave many of us reason to hope a space was opening up for the creation of a more progressive, more social connected, more loving and caring society. But Obama will not succeed in fending off the Sarah Palin-led Tea Party revolt against this progressive vision without the decisive emergence of a different kind of progressive voice into public space, a voice on the spiritual left of Obama which strengthens his own resolve and shows him how a new spiritual progressive vision can be both morally compelling and realistic in political terms.
Yet, this is very complicated, because Obama’s programs actually erode the support for progressive politics. Most people think Obama IS the Left: the progressives, liberals, even “the far left.” So when they hear about his or Congressional Democrats’ policies, or get their lives touched by their fallout, (e.g. his and their support for trillions of dollars to the banks and large corporations, but only symbolic acts to stop the millions of home foreclosures and to create jobs; his war in Afghanistan; his allowing the oil and gas conglomerates to ruin the environment through drilling on the coasts of many American states; his abandonment of his promises to end the human rights abuses of the Bush Administration; and the list goes on), many people become disillusioned, and blame the whole mess created by global capitalism on “big government,” thus giving an amazing opening both to the Tea Party movement and to the large business and financial interests. From the standpoint of the large corporate interests, nothing could be better than to de-fund government or dramatically downsize it, because then it can’t constrain their economic power.
Health care reform is finally in the works. What now?
The inspiring triumph of the Egyptian people in the nonviolent overthrow of the hated dictator Hosni Mubarak is a real triumph of the human spirit. It is disappointing, then, that what should be a near-universal celebration has been tempered by the right-wing Netanyahu government in Israel and its supporters in the United States.
How do you deal with two peoples who are suffering from PTSD? Well, we know what you don’t do. You don’t try to coerce them into situations in which they perceive themselves as vulnerable to re-experiencing the insecurity and pain that caused the trauma in the first place.
I am firmly convinced that ending the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, if done by Israel in a spirit of generosity and open-heartedness, would be the necessary prerequisite for a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinian people. A plan to achieve that—the Geneva Accord—has defined many of the contours of what that peace could look like. The Tikkun Community was the first national organization to embrace and promote that Accord, though always with the caveat that it is not enough to have a legal agreement unless each side embraces a spiritual consciousness that affirms the humanity of the other, recognizes its own sins in having treated the other side disrespectfully, and seeks genuine repentance and atonement.