Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/page/172/)
Posts about politics and social change, from a spiritual progressive perspective
Last week, Dr. Joseph Bonneau learned that he had won the NSA’s first annual “Science of Security (SoS) Competition.” And how did he respond to being honored by the NSA? By expressing his revulsion at what the NSA has become.
I wonder what it is that other people see about Secretary of State John Kerry’s Israeli-Palestinian breakthrough that I’m missing. The fundamentals haven’t changed. The Palestinian Authority’s goal is to achieve a peace agreement with Israel in which it (yet again) recognizes Israel and Israel agrees to the establishment of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories of the West Bank (including east Jerusalem) and Gaza. This has been the Palestinian position since theOslo agreementof 1993, the one that produced the famous handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat. The Palestinians have never changed their position.
In recent decades the issue of national unity has been widely raised. What holds the Union and all its people together? That question has disturbed some substantial number of Americans – at least among those who speak and write in the public arena – since the 1960s. But it has not been sparked by any significant resurgence of regionalism. Race and myth are still the key factors.
More is needed to address the injustices faced by African Americans, the European Roma, and other groups that have suffered persecution, including periods of slavery, and that are viewed by the state as a largely criminal class. What we need is to refocus the public discussion away from simple anti-discrimination laws toward an Afro-centric approach.
Anyone who wants to really think through the implications of the Affordable Health Care Act, which goes into effect October 1, should consider the results of the Vaillant Study of American men. The study, among the most important longitudinal studies in the history of psychology, traced two hundred men who were undergraduates at Harvard in 1938.
Gossip, hearsay, what we Jews call “lashon hara” – bad mouthing – is the weapon of choice against conscientious people if one can’t put them in the crosshairs – or crash them on the road (Michael Hastings). This has been true for Bradley Manning.
Speaking at the Aspen Institute, General James Mattis warned that if the current peace efforts led by John Kerry fail, Israel will have two paths: bi-nationalism or apartheid. Mattis, the 11th commander of CENTCOM, retired on June 1 after a 45-year military career. His comments at Aspen were uncharacteristically blunt and relatively unfiltered, revealing U.S. military frustrations and perspectives rarely heard from such high-ranking officials:
I’ll tell you, the current situation is unsustainable … We’ve got to find a way to make work the two-state solution that both Democrat and Republican administrations have supported, and the chances are starting to ebb because of the settlements. For example, if I’m Jerusalem and I put 500 Jewish settlers to the east and there’s ten-thousand Arabs already there, and if we draw the border to include them, either [Israel] ceases to be a Jewish state or you say the Arabs don’t get to vote — apartheid.
Secretary of State Kerry is desperate to make an announcement of renewed talks, any talks. As ever, his #1 concern is looking good (literally and figuratively). Prime Minister Netanyahu just wants Kerry off his back because he is anguished over the just-announced EU sanctions which will penalize Israeli institutions that support the settlement enterprise. If the sanctions actually take effect, he will look weak and, even worse, he could be viewed as having produced the “delegitimization” of the occupation. This is what I think happened:
Kerry: Bibi, my dear friend, please do me a solid. Just let me announce negotiations.
In light of Edward Snowden’s recent whistleblowing, Samantha Power’s message in this week’s Senate hearing appeared to be: Concern yourself with the rights and liberties of foreigners living under oppressive regimes, not your own rights and liberties.
There is nothing that would have mitigated the pain caused by Trayvon Martin’s murder. Sure, these things have been happening forever but, once we saw his face and knew the circumstances, and once the right jumped in to denigrate him and defend George Zimmerman, the stakes were raised. How one felt about Trayvon and Zimmerman became a litmus test about how one felt about basic equality and justice for African Americans. Not long ago, acquittal would have been as predictable as the sunset. But Barack Obama’s election to the presidency twice made some of us (not the smartest of us, I’m afraid, including me) believe that it was a new day.