Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/politics__society/war__peace/page/8/)
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.
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?
Editor’s Note: We at Tikkun oppose military solutions to the world’s problems. Please read our proposed Global Marshall Plan at www.tikkun.org/gmp. –Rabbi Michael Lerner
Hillary Clinton’s Foreign Policy Deception
Jeffrey D. Sachs
August 13, 2014
It’s said that the best defense is a good offense. This strategy probably lies behind Hillary Clinton’s recent takedown of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy. After all, Clinton was a lead architect of that policy as Secretary of State, and the policies that she espoused until recently now lie in shambles. The most aggressive of her claims, that Obama’s unwillingness to give support to the Syrian rebels has led to the rise of ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) — is not true.
What happens when you put a daughter of the Holocaust among Arab trauma workers just back from the Syrian crisis? A powerful personal story.
“Thou Shall NOT Take Vengeance” is a key law of Torah, but it is being ignored in Israel today both by the government and by significant parts of the people of the State of Israel (read Chemi Shalev’s article and Gideon Levi’s article). We at Tikkun condemned the kidnapping of three Israeli teens several weeks ago, and we rejected the suggestion by some on the Left and some in the Palestinian world that this act had to be contextualized to the Occupation. Instead we insisted that acts of kidnapping and then subsequently of murder are ethically wrong and should not be minimized or morally excused on the grounds that just before those kidnappings Israeli occupying forces had killed several Palestinians in nearby Hebron. Now we watch in horror as Israelis march through the streets of Jerusalem and many other cities calling for vengeance, as some Israelis kidnap and murder a Palestinian teen in East Jerusalem, as the Israeli Army blows up dozens of homes of “suspected terrorists” without the slightest attempt to give them an opportunity to defend themselves against this charge, and as the IDF bombs Gaza though there is no evidence that the Israeli teens were killed by order of anyone in Hamas. This, of course, is not fundamentally different from what the United States did after 9/11, or what China did after the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square or what many other countries do.
Remember the fascists in Ukraine? Turns out the Ukrainian far right does not seem to pose as much of a threat to the democratic development and security of Ukraine as some have claimed.
The American Left needs all sorts of things. Rather than dwelling on its own history, it would serve itself much better by pressing for serious economic equality—and politicizing the ongoing economic crisis.
Uri Avnery
March 21, 2014
A Hundred Years Later
THERE IS an old Chinese curse that says: “May you live in historic times!” (If there isn’t, there should be.) This week was a historic time. The Crimea seceded from Ukraine. Russia annexed it. A dangerous situation. No one knows how it will develop. After my last article about the Ukrainian crisis, I was flooded with passionate e-mail messages. Some were outraged by one or two sentences that could be construed as justifying Russian actions.
Editor’s note: an interesting article by a Tikkun subscriber and ally. What if they gave a war and nobody paid? By David Hartsough
“Considering the Tax Shelter.” (Flickr/JD Hancock)
As April 15 approaches, make no mistake: The tax money that many of us will be sending to the U.S. government pays for drones that are killing innocent civilians, for “better” nuclear weapons that could put an end of human life on our planet, for building and operating more than 760 military bases in over 130 countries all over the world. We are asked by our government to give moral and financial support to cutting federal spending for our children’s schools, Head Start programs, job training, environmental protection and cleanup, programs for the elderly, and medical care for all so that this same government can spend 50 percent of all our tax dollars on wars and other military expenditures. My wife Jan and I have been war tax resisters since the war in Vietnam. We cannot in good conscience pay for killing people in other parts of the world.
We continue our attempt to provide a wide variety of perspectives on what is happening in the Ukraine. Here we present the perspective of some of the Jewish establishment organizations reassuring us that anti-Semitism is not a big problem in the new post-coup reality of Ukraine, and then an article from a very different perspective by Zoltan Grossman arguing that the new Ukrainian government includes overtly fascist forces and that it is moving quickly to “privatize” essential services and utilities that are being given to the rich who will sell these back to the Ukrainian people who previously received them without regard to private profit. Again, we take no stand on the accuracy of any of this material, but only present it to our readers so that they can hear a wider range of views than those presented in the lamestream American media. Open letter of Ukrainian Jews to Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin
LE MAÏDAN
La place du Maidan
Mr. President ! We are Jewish citizens of Ukraine: businessmen, managers, public figures, scientists and scholars, artists and musicians.
Editor’s Note from Rabbi Michael Lerner:
One thing I’m sure of is that media accounts available in the United States are so tainted by anti-Russia and U.S. nationalist and capitalist interests that we have no idea of what is really happening in Ukraine. It is clear that the U.S. involvement is not “out of the blue,” but part of an ongoing campaign to increase NATO power and Western economic penetration of the countries surrounding Russia, stimulating for some Russians reminders of the previous trauma of being attacked by the Nazis and others through the Ukraine, where pro-fascist, anti-communist and anti-Semitic sentiments ran strong and welcomed foreign interventions. While we at Tikkun have some doubts about parts of the analyses by Robert Parry and Norman Solomon presented below, I am sharing them because they have the advantage of momentarily challenging the dominant discourse, though in ways that represent its own peculiar perspective. And they do have some plausibility—we know that much of the neo-con perspective on the world is based on an amalgam to two somewhat different commitments that have been welded together:
the neo-cons whose primary goal is to maintain and expand the U.S. economic and political empire and
the neo-cons whose primary goal is to protect Israel and destroy all of its potential enemies–a list that grows longer and longer as long as Israel retains its dominance over the Palestinian people and denies them fundamental human rights. These two goals come together as long as the United States is perceived by the neo-cons as the primary and sole reliable ally of Israel, and all others are suspected of being willing to see Israel destroyed.
Meeting the family of the man who bombed the Hebrew University cafeteria in Jerusalem was the first step toward healing from the traumatic attack.
Arguably the two most immediate—and in my judgment, truest—books from the Great War, in spite of Hemingway’s assertion that there were none, were written by authors who not only never set foot on the battlefield; neither of them was a male.
NBA player Jason Collins is the first active player in the four major U.S. sports to declare himself gay since Glenn Burke in the 1970s. For a nation that remains contemptuous of nonconforming notions of masculinity, the Collins event is not a question of tolerance for gays, but of masculine identity itself: can a man who falls in love with other men be integrated into the American ideal of manhood?