Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/peacemaking/healing-israel-palestine/page/39/)
News reports of the prisoner swap have focused overwhelmingly on the humanity of Gilad Shalit. Implicitly, however, these reports deny the humanity of Palestinian prisoners and leave Western audiences with the mistaken impression that Palestinians are imprisoned only for egregious crimes.
by Hadas Marcus
The boy with the angelic face appeared dazed in the interview he was coerced into giving to the Egyptian news. Despite his pallid face, painfully thin body and the dark circles under his soulful eyes, he handled himself with incredible strength and self-restraint, struggling to speak in both English and Hebrew as he responded. Israeli newscasters criticized the harsh questions posed to him, and noted the fear in his eyes of saying something wrong that might invalidate his release. Israeli television showed innumerable times the gaunt young man being shuffled from one place to the next. News anchors commented on the weakness of his left arm, his inability to go down the stairs without gripping the rails, his hesitant speech and problems in focusing his eyes after years in a dark basement cell.
After five years of being held captive, Gilad Shalit was returned to Israel in exchange for the release of over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. Shalit (cousin of former Tikkun editor Joel Schalit) was kidnapped by Hamas when he was just 19 years old. There is certainly much to discuss about the Israeli government’s decision to make this deal, and the impact it will have on the future. For now, I am grateful that Shalit is home, safe, and my prayers are with him as he begins what is sure to be a long journey of healing. My prayers are also with the Palestinians released from prison, their families, and for their journey going forward.
Two years ago, Shlomo Sand, an Israeli professor of European history at Tel Aviv University, came to New York to promote the English-language edition of his book, “The Invention of the Jewish People” (Verso Press). I found his arguments infuriating. I don’t think there’s anything wrong in a serious study on the origins of the Jewish people, whether looking at this subject historically or even genetically, but I felt that Prof. Sand was making a totally tendentious case for ideological reasons, without examining the issue honestly. Instead, Sand set out with a mishmash of evidence, including much with little or no merit, to invalidate the Jewish claim to Israel/Palestine as the historic homeland of the Jewish people. I hasten to add that I am not an advocate of an ethnically-pure Jewish state of Israel, nor do I believe that most Zionists (now or in the past) have ever advocated such a thing; Zionism has always included a broad spectrum of factions, including some on the extreme right who would deny non-Jews equal rights as citizens.
by Jewish Voice for Peace Members Amirah Mizrahi, Antonia House, and Emily Ratner
When Jewish Voice for Peace disrupted Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s keynote speech at the Jewish Federations of North America’s annual general meeting last November in New Orleans, we were met with hisses, boos, verbal harassment and even physical attacks from other members of the audience. But criminal charges were never so much as mentioned. Yet just weeks ago, students who interrupted Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren’s speech at UC Irvine in February 2010 were convicted of two misdemeanors for their participation in the protests. See if you can spot the difference between these two protests:
In both protests, each person who stood up to bring attention to the Israeli Occupation and other violations of international law committed by the Israeli government acted non-violently, and cooperated fully with security personnel and the police. So why were we not arrested, charged and tried while the Irvine 11 were?
Carlo Strenger chairs the clinical graduate program in psychology at Tel Aviv University and is a liberal opinion writer for Haaretz and the Huffington Post. His latest post at HP, “Open Letter to Mahmoud Abbas for Yom Kippur,” asks Abbas to directly address the Israeli people, to convince them that he really believes in a two-state solution for peace with the Jewish state. Here is my abridged version of this excellent piece:
Dear Mr. Abbas,
…. [A] state of Israel that oppresses another people is an affront to my Jewishness and for that of the majority of Jews worldwide for whom human rights are an inviolable value — precisely because our people has suffered immensely from bigotry and racism.
Given my sympathy for your cause, I hope you will listen to my call to you….
Obama needs to reexamine whether current U.S. foreign policy toward Israel is in the U.S.’s best interest. Paradigms constructed during President Johnson’s presidency fail to appreciate the changed dynamics in the Middle East.
by Stephen Zunes
During the Bush administration, I wrote more than a dozen annotated critiques of presidential speeches. I have refrained from doing so under President Barack Obama, however, because – despite a number of disappointments with his administration’s policies — I found his speeches to be relatively reasonable. Although his September 21 address before the UN General Assembly contained a number of positive elements, in many ways it also contained many of the same kind of duplicitous and misleading statements one would have expected from his predecessor. Below are some excerpts, followed by my comments. On Palestinian Statehood and Middle East Peace:
One year ago, I stood at this podium and I called for an independent Palestine.
When Profs. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt co-authored their book on the “Israel Lobby,” they drew back from their original formulation that it had manipulated the US to invade Iraq on behalf of Israel. Their more carefully worded thesis was that it was a “necessary but insufficient cause” for the Iraq war. Still, many (including myself) took this amiss because:
1. It discounts a fuller explanation for the US warring on Iraq, e.g.: W. Bush’s animus at Saddam Hussein for attempting to assassinate his family while visiting Kuwait after the first Iraq war, the importance of oil (Noam Chomsky’s view), frustration that Saddam Hussein continued to oppress his people and to bluster against the US — even though he could have been easily overthrown in 1991, and finally the influence of neocons and some liberals who saw Saddam’s rule as both a threat to peace in the region and the source of an ongoing human rights crisis.
by Jesse Bacon
Young, Jewish, and Proud, the group responsible for the protests disrupting the speech of Benjamin Netanyahu in New Orleans almost a year ago, launched a new video for the Jewish High Holidays as the issue of Palestinian statehood roiled the United Nations. The video was created by nearly 40 young Jews between the ages of 18 and 36 and features their manifesto about the need for the Jewish community to recognize the voice of youth on its most intractable issue: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Jesse Bacon, video participant:
We delivered the manifesto in person to Netanyahu through our protest, and now we are speaking directly to the camera, but the message is the same. Listen to the voice of young Jews arguing for a more open, diverse, and critical community or see your fears of losing the youth come true.