Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/peacemaking/page/26/)
About war and efforts to bring about peace. About changing a foreign policy of domination to one of generosity.
People under occupation have a right to resist and fight back. Whether or not one condemns or approves of Hamas’s rocket fire, one thing is clear: Israel is not really defending itself from rockets, it is instead defending its self-declared right to swallow up more and more Palestinian land and empty it of more and more Palestinians.
Listen to Uri Avnery’s interview from Tel Aviv and then read some articles from Israel and Palestine, one on the demonstrators assaulted in Tel Aviv after protesting the Gazan War, and one about humanizing Palestine.
One either stands unequivocally by Israel’s actions, or stands in opposition to Israel. There is no in-between. And it is in that liminal space is where David Harris-Gershon and many others stand, a space that stands separated from the community…And that is saddening. One author’s investment in Israel compels him to critique its geopolitical policies.
Facebook has been a forest of assertions and denunciations this week. Maybe it’s the company I keep, but almost everyone is posting links at an accelerated rate, and the subject of this battle of citations is Israel-Palestine. I spent a remarkable amount of time reading blogs and essays, but still, I was able to consume only a fraction of this material. The volume was such that I could have begun reading each morning, pausing only to sleep, then rolled out of bed and continued till bedtime the next day. The vast majority of posts came from people who, like me, live thousands of miles from the Mideast and, like me, have almost no direct knowledge of the situation.
The two-state solution is the answer, as it always has been. The solution–which can only be reached through U.S.-brokered negotiations that will include the Israelis and all Palestinian factions–is two states living side by side in peace. That is no fantasy!
On the ground in Gaza, Israel’s war against Hamas has been devastating. Online and in the public sphere, a different sort of war has been taking place – a broad initiative to delegitimize those who raise questions about and critique Israel’s actions.
We are holding a Conference Call on the Israel/Gaza war that you are invited to join! It is taking place this Friday with Uri Avnery, Rabbi Michael Lerner, and Cat Zavis. Sign up now!
For an author whose sympathies tend to lie with Israel, events of recent years (and recent days) have made it impossible for him to ignore the plight of the Palestinians. And it is in situations like these, where something must be done but it seems there is nothing to do, that the best of people make the worst mistakes. Lobbing rockets into occupied sections of Israel is counter-productive, but non-violent tactics are ignored by the international media and punished by the Israelis.
During the summer, I have had some time to catch up on some pleasurable reading and, I must admit, binge watching of three TV series. What I found so unsettling and utterly disturbing connecting the three series was the absolute lack of value placed on human life. People killed each other with as much deliberation as they would in squashing a fly on their bedroom wall. The scenes depicted in these series could never occur today in real life, could they?
On Sunday evening, a four-story house in Gaza was decimated by an Israeli missile. At the moment of impact, 25 people belonging to four families, including 19 children, were gathered together to break the day’s Ramadan fast. All of them were killed.