Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/guest/page/34/)
Things on the ground have changed very rapidly and the old paradigms of looking at how to resolve the Israeli Palestinian conflict won’t work quite so easily now.
In Israel/Palestine today, the seeds of peace are there where we need them, but the conditions that would nurture those seeds are not. It is this that we must change. We can start by supporting the courageous activists who are already tilling the soil.
Most Israelis see the missing teenagers as innocent civilians captured on their way home from school, and the Palestinians who were killed as having provoked soldiers. Palestinians, though, see the very act of attending yeshiva in a West Bank settlement as provocation, and complain that the crackdown is collective punishment against a people under illegal occupation. May the tears we shed on both sides become the wellsprings not of revenge but of transformation—as they did in the Mississippi Freedom Summer.
It has been said that the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. Well, that journey need not seem impossible. There can be unity and peace, and even happiness in the world, in spite of all the diversity. But, to achieve it—we each must find a way (through meditation, prayer, daily attitude, selfless service, or a combination of these things) to be inwardly joyful and also loving and kind in our interpersonal relationships.
Cherrie Brown was a shaper of the co-counseling movement and then created the National Coalition Building Institute to do education work against racism. We are presenting her 3 letters from Jerusalem to give a sense of what sensitive and intelligent people experience when they go to the Holy Land without the filters often required of us by the Jewish community or by anti-Israel activists.
Fateful hours, fate-filled moments – maybe they are happening all the time. Maybe the decisions we make at each moment, or fail to make, nudge history imperceptibly into new directions. What an awesome fate it is for a people to realize, even to glimpse at, just how true this might be, just how much may hang on each choice, at each moment – 100 years ago or today.
The tragedy of the Israeli government’s policies of segregation and separation between Israeli Jews and Palestinians is that it is easy for many within Israel to lose sight of the humanity of Palestinians, and most have little sense of the context of Palestinian daily life. The mothers of the Palestinians who have been killed, injured and imprisoned (in the hundreds) as a result of operation “Brother’s Keeper” , feel the loss of their children just as deeply as the Israeli mothers of the 3 missing teens.
Mass incarceration is a domestic crisis that touches every community in America. Because it does, the struggle against this racial justice must begin in local communities.
For Argentina, so far so good at the World Cup in Brazil. At the Supreme Court in Washington, however, Argentina suffered a catastrophic defeat that no soccer metaphor can accurately capture.
The choice is nationalism or human rights as the guiding principle. Otherwise one is left with a contorted defense, in effect: “We knew transfer had to happen for our goals to be met, and it happened — but we didn’t intend for it to happen,” letting the inhuman doctrines of ethnic nationalism determine our future as Jews.