Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/page/184/)
Posts about politics and social change, from a spiritual progressive perspective
And yesterday Shamir’s long-time protégé, Binyamin Netanyahu openly adopted the Shamir strategy. No one needs to wait until his retirement to understand that, like Shamir’s, it is designed to prevent negotiations not advance them.
Ha’aretz reported that the Netanyahu government has informed Secretary of State John Kerry that Israel is not interested in discussing land and borders right now.
The International Topless Jihad Day, in my opinion, is nothing more than a new and more insidious form of Islamophobia. How is this any different than France fining women who wear the veil, or Germany banning the headscarf in schools? Let’s face it, when we base our actions on assumptions, we face the danger of making things worse. Instead of building bridges and giving everyone the right to live (and dress) in the way they want, organizations such as FEMEN compound the view that ‘it’s my way or the highway’.
The good news is that Dershowitz and Joel represent a tiny fraction of Jewish Americans. To say that Jews are loyal Americans is almost embarrassing. Of course, we are. But we are also a tiny minority and, historically, a vulnerable one. Dershowitz and Joel increase our vulnerability by sending out the message that we aren’t Americans at all, that our loyalty is not to this country but to Israel. That may be true about them, just not the rest of us. (Note: Dershowitz hates me for calling people like him and Joel Israel Firsters. Uh, ok.)
I’m wondering if — 68 years on — “Holocaust fatigue” is setting in, perhaps reinforced by a certain weariness regarding “Jewish dramas” in general, because of the seemingly endless succession of world crises directly or indirectly related to Israel.
Why does any of this matter? It matters because it is the Israeli government and its lobby that has generated the hysteria in this country about Iran. Simply put, if it wasn’t for Israel and its lobby, the United States would no more consider bombing Iran’s reactors than North Korea’s. Nor would President Obama be ruling out containment, a policy that we utilized with the Soviet Union and which prevented war for 40 years. Because there is no lobby dedicated to fear-mongering about North Korea, our policy makers are able to approach the problems it poses rationally, without considering the impact on campaign donors. Instead, our Iran policy is primarily about domestic politics, domestic but driven by Netanyahu’s worldview, most notably his belief that you can’t negotiate with the likes of Shiite Iran.
Barack Obama came to Israel and Palestine, saw what he wanted to see, and conquered the mainstream media with his eloquent words. U.S. and Israeli journalists called it a dream trip, the stuff that heroic myths are made of: a charismatic world leader taking charge of the Mideast peace process. But if the president doesn’t wake up and look at the hard realities he chose to ignore, his dream of being the great peacemaker will surely crumble, as it has before.
Francisco shared that his passion to create the Peace Summit was inspired by a vision 30 years earlier during his honeymoon in the U.S., when he felt he was given a “holy assignment” to help develop a new consciousness about man’s relationship with Mother Earth. The recurring mantra he heard for 30 years was “Day One,” but at the time, he confessed, he did not understand the meaning of the phrase. Only in the last few years did his mission become clear, and suddenly Day One came to mean the first day after the Mayan calendar would end and a new era would begin.
O God, remind us that we are part of a whole, part of the land or our ancestry and your future, that we are both bordered people and unbordered, national and trans-national, wound and unwound people. Let us be citizens of a globe, where love and respect have just borders. Amen.
The truth is that the last couple of months were full of anticipation not just for Catholics but many Muslims as well, especially those in the political and interfaith arenas. From Pakistan to Turkey and across the United States, Muslims in all walks of life had been talking, writing and tweeting as they waited of news about the change of leadership at the Vatican. It’s no secret that Benedict’s resignation was viewed by the Muslim world as a sign of positive change, due to his often antagonistic attitude towards the world’s second largest religion.
That struggle for racial justice is often held up as an example of how change is possible. And its stories have helped teach many movements of nonviolent resistance, in countries ranging from the Philippines to Poland to South Africa. But how was change possible at that time? These days the lack of progress in our politics is a given, and it is usually chalked up to fierce polarization, chiefly between Democrats and Republicans. As today, the national politics of 1963 (certainly on the domestic front) was deeply fractured along ideological lines between liberals and conservatives if not strictly between Democrats and Republicans. Still, change happened – and on the most flammable question, race.