Healing Israel/Palestine

An Ancient Roadmap for a Challenge of Our Time: how the story of Isaac, Esau, and Jacob applies to Israel and Palestine today

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by Rosemary H. Hayes
How influential an ancient story can be is demonstrated in the State of Israel’s insistence on its right to Palestinian territory as “promised” by their ancestral god and recorded in the Hebrew scriptures. However, in our time, Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, said the opposing Palestinian claim to its own existential homeland meant that here was hot a case of “right and wrong,” but a case of “two rights.” This was substantiated by the British in 1917 with Lord Balfour’s famous declaration: “His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people … it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” The roots of this drama lie in archaic tales of the Arab and Jewish peoples, descendants of Ishmael and Isaac, sons of the patriarch Abraham.

Healing Israel/Palestine

The Campaign for Al-Arakib and Justice for Bedouins in Israel

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Our guest post Where Are The Jewish Greens? by Devorah Brous has been widely read in Israel as well as the US. The organization she is with, Bedouin-Jewish Justice, has just sent us this update on the campaign that Tikkun and the NSP have joined. Please sign the petitions to Netanyahu and the Jewish National Fund below. 18 Israeli and American Jewish groups:

Strongly oppose Beer Sheva District Court’s failure to grant a permanent injunction preventing Israeli Government and Jewish National Fund (JNF) bulldozers from resuming work to plant a JNF forest over Negev Bedouin village of Al-Arakib
Welcome the court’s recommendation that the Israel Land Administration (ILA) and JNF refrain from planting trees in Al-Arakib and irreversibly altering the status of the land
Strongly object to Israeli Government and JNF for 9th & 10th Demolitions of Al-Arakib and to ILA announcement yesterday of their intent to ignore Israeli court recommendations in their rush to eliminate the village of Al-Arakib forever
Call on all who care about Israel to join the over 7,500 who have already signed our two petitions of protest to Prime Minister Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Lieberman, Leaders of the Israel Land Administration and JNF Leaders in Israel and the US

January 25, 2011 – The Beer Sheva District Court, which issued a temporary injunction a week ago stopping all further work by the Israel Land Administration (ILA) and the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in the Negev Bedouin village of Al-Arakib, decided on Sunday, Jan.

Healing Israel/Palestine

What the 'Palestine Papers' really tell us

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What I originally took to be WikiLeaks were actually internal Palestinian documents leaked to Al Jazeera by dissident Palestinians to embarrass Mahmoud Abbas and the PLO leadership who attempted (apparently in good faith) to negotiate a two-state solution with the Kadima-led Israeli government of Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni. What the Guardian and Al Jazeera are blasting as a betrayal of Palestinian rights was precisely the kind of deal that could work for both parties in bringing this conflict to an end. In agreeing to a very limited return of refugees to what is now Israel, plus a monetary compensation package, the parties would finally have ended the material ordeal of this population that the world has mired in a disgraceful refugee status as political pawns for generations. Israel may not expect better conditions in Jerusalem than its retention of long-established Jewish neighborhoods over the Green Line in East Jerusalem plus shared sovereignty over Jerusalem’s holy sites. At the cost of Israel giving up its relatively recent settlement community of Har Homa, built to close off East Jerusalem from the West Bank to its east, this would be a bargain for Israel, and a way in which the Palestinians could claim most of East Jerusalem as its capital.

Healing Israel/Palestine

Living under Occupation

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Today I broke the law. I visited Bethlehem, which is off-limits for Israeli citizens. I went to visit Zoughbi Zoughbi, director of Wi’am (cordial relationships) – Palestinian Conflict Resolution Center (http://www.alaslah.org/). Last night I was looking for directions and could not find them. Who would have known that Google would display the familiar “A” and “B” bubbles and say “We could not calculate directions” for many points in the Palestinian Territories?

Environment

Where are the Jewish Greens?

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By Devorah Brous
Jewish environmentalists have elevated a minor symbolic mystical ritual of holding a Tu B’Shvat Seder into an annual and provocative communal celebration. This week is Tu B’Shvat – the Jewish Earth Day that is traditionally marked by planting trees and eating their fruits in the dead of winter to symbolize that lifeforce will again rise to bear fruits in what appears dormant. In advance of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) tree planting activities this Tu B’Shvat, the Bedouin village of Al Arakib was once again demolished. For the ninth time. This time, rubber bullets and batons were used by Israeli police in riot gear.

Healing Israel/Palestine

Jewish Resonances on Gabrielle Giffords

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A surprising outgrowth to this heartbreaking and heartwarming national story are its “Jewish” aspects. First of all, there is the fact that (according to the JTA new service) Congresswoman Giffords, the daughter of a Christian Scientist mother and a Jewish father who was “brought up in both faiths,” identifies strongly as Jewish and is a member of a Reform synagogue. Secondly, there’s the sudden currency in the headlines of a historic term associated with the persecution of Jews, “blood libel.” Sarah Palin has accused the media of engaging in this hateful practice in asserting that the hyperbolic tone of political debate in this country, tinged with violent and threatening imagery coming from the right, contributed to the shooting of Ms. Giffords and the others at her event. Palin deserves to be sensitive on this point because it was Giffords who first rose to national prominence in March of 2010 by calling attention to the graphic gunsight imagery employed by Palin in targeting Giffords and about 20 other Democrats for defeat in last year’s campaign.

Healing Israel/Palestine

Leading Feminist Condemns Judge Goldstone's Critics on Jewish Grounds

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We are always interested in ideas and links our readers send us, though we editors don’t always have time to check them out. For weeks we have been deep in deadlines to get 118 pieces for Tikkun’s 25th Anniversary issue into the print magazine (in bookstores now! buy one here!) or onto the web (where the web exclusives will all be up by week’s end, we trust), plus we just launched a new and beautiful newsletter which you can see here, and sign up for here (along with other Tikkun emails) and we are designing an even more wonderful new magazine website. That’s the Tikkun office headlines. Luckily we did manage to read this email from one of our readers, Scott Rosenblum, which we are very happy to post.

Healing Israel/Palestine

What an Israel/Palestine Peace Treaty Could Look Like Now

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Our editor Rabbi Lerner wrote these prophetic words in early September for the Nov/Dec issue of Tikkun. Now that they have come true, it’s worth reading this article and paying especial attention to his recommendations in the last part of the editorial. Middle East Peace Negotiations? By Rabbi Michael Lerner

Until the populations of Israel and Palestine really want peace, the peace negotiations will be nothing but a slightly sad sideshow, unless the Obama administration, momentarily freed from its own electoral concerns, is prepared to put forward a substantive peace plan of its own. It used to be that the elites in both societies would tell you that once they worked out a deal, their relatively excitable populations would embrace it.

Education

Young Jewish Activists Attract Positive Press for Anti-Occupation Message

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by Wendy Elisheva Somerson
The five young Jewish activists who disrupted Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s speech in New Orleans earlier this week shouted familiar criticisms of the Occupation. What was unexpected and new was the way the U.S. and Israeli media portrayed the protest, seeming to hear the critiques with fresh ears and unusual sympathy. The five activists from the Young Leadership Institute of Jewish Voice for Peace disrupted Netanyahu’s speech at the Jewish Federation’s General Assembly on Monday, November 8, five separate times. The first activist unfurled a banner that read, “The Loyalty Oath delegitimizes Israel” and yelled the same message until she was escorted out of the hall by security. Separated by pauses of a few minutes, the four remaining protesters each unfurled banners and yelled similar messages while they were escorted out: “Silencing dissent delegitimizes Israel,” “Occupation delegitimizes Israel,” “The siege on Gaza delegitimizes Israel,” and finally, “The settlements betray Jewish values.”

Culture

Short Takes: Tribute to Lennon, the 2010 Elections, and Israel/Palestine News

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A tribute to John Lennon, in the wake of these turbulent political times
I hope you like this little web short tribute from the BBC to one of my favorite musicians — John Lennon, z’l (“z’l” stands for zichrono livracha, which is Hebrew for “may his or her memory be a blessing.”) The video is cute and uplifting. Have you heard Lennon’s last few albums, when it was just him, or him and Yoko? They are really amazing. 2010 Elections

Get ready for a massive two-year indoctrination from mass media and the “realists” in both major political parties as they confidently proclaim that the Dems lost badly because Obama proved “too radical” for the American public. Nothing could be further from the truth.