Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/peacemaking/page/20/)
About war and efforts to bring about peace. About changing a foreign policy of domination to one of generosity.
The Zionist project, what was meant at the beginning to be a communal agrarian renewal of Jewish people, has become an arms and “security” industry supplier worldwide. The siege mentality that Arendt warned would develop has created an Israeli, not Jewish, nationality, in its isolation what she foresaw as “an entirely new people.”
Jesus was not a Christian and Buddha was not a Buddhist but their religion was love. Can it really be this simple?
We met on social media during Israel’s assault on Gaza this summer. We were both grappling with the brutality of the siege, one of us amid the bombs on Gaza, the other child of a Leningrad siege survivor. Frustrated with the intolerable and continuing violence we decided to write together about siege and its lasting legacy.
Vassar College professor Hua Hsu wrote in the New Yorker recently that “There should be nothing controversial about everyday kindness; civility as a kind of individual moral compass should remain a virtue. But civility as a type of discourse—as a high road that nobody ever actually walks—is the opposite. It is bullshit.”
The union that represents 13,000 graduate student-workers in the University of California system has become the first major U.S. labor union to pass, by member vote, a resolution endorsing the movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israeli occupation and in solidarity with Palestinian self-determination.
The fact that we still need to be reminded that black lives have worth brings us back to the way the founding documents of our democracy have, in a sense, written some American citizens out of it from the start. As a line from the Ferguson tribute song “Don’t Shoot” puts it, “I’m a resident of a nation that don’t want me.”
What if you took your solidarity and you turned up, in real time, to the trouble spot on the screen? This is exactly what activist Victor Paes did when he recently joined The International Solidarity movement (ISM) in Palestine for the annual olive harvest.
The temperatures rose sharply in the Gaza-Sderot region during July and August. But it wasn’t the heat that made our lives unbearable; it was the third war that tore through our area in less than six years.
News agencies reported in November that weeks ago President Obama signed an order, kept secret until now, to authorize continuation of the Afghan war for at least another year.
President Obama has authorized “a more expansive mission for the military in Afghanistan in 2015 than originally planned.” What does this mean for the future of Afghans?