The brutal murder of a young girl asleep in her bed in a West Bank settlement (Kiryat Arba) justifiably has evoked outrage and condemnation–including from me and Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives. While anti-occupation activists have pointed out that parents ought not put their children in danger by raising them in Kiryat Arba, the settlement with the most extreme hate-filled anti-Arab racists who have repeatedly been engaged in acts of violence against Palestinians, including 5-7 year old Palestinian children on their way to school, we at Tikkun believe that there is NEVER an excuse to target civilians, and all the more so when the civilian in question is a child. We unequivocally condemn this act. We also call upon Israel to end the Occupation, now in its 50-th year, and remove from the West Bank the most virulent settlements including those in Hebron and nearby Kiryat Arba so as to protect those Israelis from the hatred generated by the extremists in Hebron and Kiryat Arba who have honored their most famous killer Baruch Goldstein who went into the famous mosque in Hebron and murdered some 29 Muslims while they were in prayer in the early 1990s. But these cycles of violence and retribution must stop–and many of us Jews remember the slaughter of jews in Hebron by Palestinian extremists in 1929. STOP ALL THE VIOLENCE FROM EACH SIDE, and free Palestinians from the Occupation.
Read the story in Ha’aretz: http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.728013
And let us pray for a speedy end of the Occupation, comfort for the mourners of this young girl, and peace and reconciliation between Israel and Palestine.