Healing Israel/Palestine

The Cycle of Mutual Wrongs and Recriminations

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Rather than exclusively blaming Arabs or Israelis, I pride myself in explaining how both sides, for a variety of complex reasons, have kept their conflict going. There’s plenty of blame to go around, as I contend to the distaste of some fervent pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli voices alike (as illustrated here and there). I’m engaged in an ongoing email debate on the Meretz USA Blog with Prof. Werner Cohn, a retired professor of sociology who expresses himself energetically and acerbically in opposition to my dovish brand of Zionism. He has asserted that I’m committing the “Tu Quoque” logical fallacy by deflecting the problem of widespread Arab antisemitism with Israeli transgressions against the Palestinians. The following is an online definition of this concept:
Tu Quoque is a very common fallacy in which one attempts to defend oneself or another from criticism by turning the critique back against the accuser.

Healing Israel/Palestine

In Appreciation of Courage and Complexity during Controversies

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Controversy
For the most part, I have been staying clear of controversies. My passion, and where I see my gifts, is for the process of bringing people together across differences more so than in advocating for this or that position. I take a stand for certain principles and for a vision of a world that serves everyone, not for particular opinions, even though I do have my opinions in abundance. This is a conscious and ongoing choice because I want to make myself available to everyone, not only those with whom I happen to agree on any given issue. Today, however, I am about to walk a complex line on a rather sensitive topic.

Culture

Pinkwashing, NYC Style: The LGBT Center Caves to Pressure

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Watching NYC’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Center succumb to pressure to cancel a kick-off party for Israeli Apartheid Week, I feel compelled to write an epilogue to my recent post on Pinkwashing. I am reminded once again that we must be vigilant in refusing to allow queer liberation to be pitted against Palestinian liberation because as we know from our queer Palestinian colleagues, the two struggles are intertwined. On February 22nd, Michael Lucas, a right wing Advocate columnist and gay porn entrepreneur, issued a press release calling on the LGBT center to cancel the scheduled “Party to End Apartheid,” which he called anti-Semitic. He threatened to “organize a boycott that would certainly involve some of the Center’s most generous donors.” Infamous for his attacks against Islam, Lucas argued that “Israel is the only country in the Middle East that supports gay rights while its enemies round up, torture, and condemn gay people to death…”

Healing Israel/Palestine

Why we are honoring Justice Richard Goldstone

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We are honoring six spiritual progressive leaders at our 25th Anniversary celebration on March 14:

Of these six the most controversial is surely Justice Richard Goldstone. Richard Goldstone first got involved in politics as a college student in South Africa where he was an outspoken opponent of Apartheid. He became a close associate of Nelson Mandela in the early 1990s and served on South Africa’s Supreme Court. He was then picked by the UN to head their inquiries into human rights violations in Bosnia, Rwanda, and then most recently in Gaza. Justice Goldstone approached the Gaza assignment with some trepidation.

Healing Israel/Palestine

Put Pressure on the JNF to Leave Al-Arakib to its Inhabitants

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Israeli government forces have razed Al-Arakib, a Bedouin village in the Negev, eighteen times since last July. The Israeli government does not recognize Al-Arakib and has been coercing its Arab inhabitants to relinquish the land they say they have owned since the beginning of the twentieth century. The Jewish National Fund (JNF), an Israeli environmental organization that has planted 250 million trees, built over 210 reservoirs and dams, and created more than 1,000 parks in Israel has plans to plant a forest over Al-Arakib, with the assistance of the Israel Land Administration (ILA), once the Bedouin people are forced out. (Refer to Devorah Brous’s widely-read Tikkun Daily blog post, “Where are the Jewish Greens?” Brous argues that it is irresponsible for a non-profit environmental group to plant trees on this contested land.) Ironically, the JNF credits itself with “bringing life to the Negev desert” as it is fomenting the death of a community.

Healing Israel/Palestine

Don’t Blame ‘Zionism’, Part 2

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This is my sketchy outline (all I can do in a blog post) of how close we were several times to peace in the last two decades, and what undermined this each time:
The first major blow to the Oslo peace process was Baruch Goldstein’s mass murder of Palestinians at prayer in Hebron. Israel contritely apologized but didn’t act as Meretz and other doves urged at the time, to forcibly evict the extremist settlers in Hebron and/or nearby Kiryat Araba. This was seriously considered by Prime Minister Rabin, but fatally rejected in the conviction that the timetable for final-status talks on the disposition of the settlements should not be disrupted. There were a couple of small Palestinian terrorist incidents before the Goldstein massacre, but they escalated precipitously afterward. Then, there was the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in Nov.

Healing Israel/Palestine

Sharing in Gaza

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By Edward Cherlin
Sharing in Gaza
For my 64th birthday last year, I played Beatles Rock Band with my family- I played drums while we sang, appropriately enough, “When I’m 64.” What made this birthday infinitely more memorable were the thousands of presents from a multitude of people I don’t even know– Palestinians, international charities, the UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East), and the government of Israel. These presents were XO education laptops. On this birthday, April 29th, after ten months of delays, the UNRWA’s One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) celebrated the beginning of its program in Gaza. The UNRWA’s core team of administrators, parents and the children of Rafah Co-Ed Elementary School D joined OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte and UNRWA Commissioner-General Filippo Grandi for the donation.

Healing Israel/Palestine

Don't Blame ‘Zionism’

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When addressing the World Union of Meretz about five years ago, the dovish Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua argued a truth that should be better known than it is: that Zionism is not a single movement or ideology but a common platform or framework shared by political parties and philosophical currents from widely divergent places along the ideological spectrum. Zionism was a grassroots Jewish reaction to the most pervasive and pernicious bigotry of recent Western history. Nineteenth century nationalist movements in much or most of Europe reignited virulent antisemitism, which eventually culminated in the slaughter of a majority of Europe’s Jews and one-third of all Jews worldwide. Palestine was a beacon of hope for an embattled people that saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Although before my time, my sympathies (and some roots of the left-Zionist forces I support today) would have been with the bi-nationalist Zionists—e.g., Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein, Martin Buber and Hashomer Hatzair.

Healing Israel/Palestine

Democracy Rises for Arabs, Retreats for Israelis?

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Naomi Chazan, the former Meretz Knesset member who now serves as the New Israel Fund’s president, is in New York this week for an NIF board meeting. So I saw her twice this past weekend at shuls that I occasionally attend on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. First, she was the guest speaker in front of a standing-room only crowd at a Seudah Shlishit (the ceremonial third meal that traditionally concludes Shabbat with study). An impassioned speaker, she surely left a striking impression for the moderately liberal Conservative-affiliated synagogue, Ansche Chesed. The audience was unfailingly polite and mostly receptive to her message, which contrasted the massive upheavals for democracy and human rights going on in Tunisia and Egypt right now (including spillovers in at least a couple of other Arab countries) with a contraction of democracy and civil rights threatening to take hold in Israel.