Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/peacemaking/healing-israel-palestine/page/17/)
Israel has dropped 800 tons of explosives on Gaza, a strip of land roughly the size of Detroit. The official death toll currently stands at 81, the majority of whom are civilians and half of whom are women and children. Those who are ready and willing to reckon with root causes must not be content to simply accept these bi-annual military onslaughts as simply the price of Jewish nationhood.
In the wake of the heightened conflict between Palestine and Israel, Warren Blumenfeld offers lessons to be learned from Dennis Shepard, who showed his son’s murderers mercy.
After nearly a month living in Jerusalem, Cherie Brown reflects on the acts of brutality and racism she witnessed, which are put in stark contrast by the acts of great kindness she observed from this same group of people on her journey.
In light of the horrific events of the past week, one author questions whether or not he can remain in support of Israel as a Jewish state while holding on to his progressive ideals.
Just as a litmus test determines where a chemical is on the spectrum from acidic to alkaline, many American Jews seek to label perspectives on a scale from ‘pro’ to ‘anti’ Israel. Jewish reactions to the divestment resolution passed at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) show that it’s time for the Jewish community to recalibrate its litmus test on Israel.
The military is destroying homes without any consideration for the law and imprisoning relatives of the murderers, and hundreds of others. Netanyahu is saying, “Hamas is responsible and Hamas will pay.” And Hamas is saying: “All Hell will break loose if you attack.” Planes are flying over us, Gaza is being bombed, and there is a sense that war is just around the corner… I want to scream ENOUGH to acting out our pain. Can we just take some time to feel it?
Things on the ground have changed very rapidly and the old paradigms of looking at how to resolve the Israeli Palestinian conflict won’t work quite so easily now.
I’m totally dispirited by the killing of the three teenagers and by the Israeli government’s ugly, political reaction to it — a reaction designed to justify the war against Hamas that Netanyahu lusts for.
In Israel/Palestine today, the seeds of peace are there where we need them, but the conditions that would nurture those seeds are not. It is this that we must change. We can start by supporting the courageous activists who are already tilling the soil.
Most Israelis see the missing teenagers as innocent civilians captured on their way home from school, and the Palestinians who were killed as having provoked soldiers. Palestinians, though, see the very act of attending yeshiva in a West Bank settlement as provocation, and complain that the crackdown is collective punishment against a people under illegal occupation. May the tears we shed on both sides become the wellsprings not of revenge but of transformation—as they did in the Mississippi Freedom Summer.