Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/peacemaking/healing-israel-palestine/page/12/)
David Harris-Gershon obliterates Pennsylvania State Senator, Daylin Leach’s, argument on how supporting Israel is a progressive idea.
Join The Network of Spiritual Progressives and Tikkun on Sunday, September 14th for a four-hour workshop where you will learn techniques to deal with your distress, rage, and upset about the situation in Israel and Palestine and also have opportunities to learn and practice skills for hearing those who don’t agree with you and expressing yourself more effectively. You will leave feeling empowered to engage in healthy discourse, even with those with whom you disagree.
Ella Baker taught us to look deeply to discover the root causes of injustice. We can use her teachings to identify those causes in Ferguson and Gaza, and separate ourselves from our own loyalties to radically effect change.
Holocaust survivors and their descendants publicly condemn the occupation of Palestine and the massacre of Palestinians in a letter published as an advertisement in The New York Times.
Israelis For a Sustainable Future, a growing group of Israelis living in the United States who oppose Israel’s military operations in Gaza, have written a letter calling on American Jews to reexamine their support for Israel’s actions and to denounce the occupation of Palestine. The group writes, “We are reaching out to you because we want to re-examine what it means to be pro-Israel or pro-Palestine. We argue that these terms might be one and the same.”
Standing on the site of the Warsaw ghetto, hearing Israeli Hebrew spoken around me, I thought about Gaza. And a deeply cynical, deeply hurt, deeply hopeless voice within me thinks: do Israelis really need to come all the way to Warsaw to learn about ghettoes? And a more hopeful voice, the voice of a student and a teacher wonders, what if more of us came to Warsaw not to reinforce a history of oppression, but to study the legacy of those proposing ways to eradicate it?
A group of 10,000 activists gathered in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv over the weekend protesting against war and for a political solution that creates peace.
The Zionist movement was not an innocent victim of Arab fanaticism and antipathy to Jews. It was an active participant and initiator of an intercommunal conflict which resulted in the expulsion of a million Palestinians in 1948 and then 1967, which has produced a brutal and illegal occupation that continues and even intensifies to this day. Do you think this is fair, Mr. Voight?
In conversations about Gaza, I have heard many thoughtful people in the Jewish community lament the loss of Palestinian lives in Gaza but then say, “But Hamas…,” as if that were the heart of the problem. I’d like to suggest that, when we have these conversations about Hamas and Israel’s current bombing campaign, we begin with the necessary context and historical perspective.
“Tisha b’Av is a holiday about adding to the heap whatever calamity Jews have most recently experienced. The profound insight of Eicha, Lamentations, and the rabbis of the Talmud, is to understand our calamities by focusing not our attackers or their moral status, but on our own moral failures.”