Healing Israel/Palestine

Dead Young Men in Mississippi, Israel, and Palestine: Spirals of Violence and Nonviolence

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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.

Healing Israel/Palestine

Mourning for the Three Murdered Israeli Teens

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We at Tikkun are in mourning for the three teens murdered in the West Bank. We find this act painful and outrageous. There can be no excuse for this kind of act. And we know that the revenge/retaliation acts of Israel will only bring about more acts of violence. The cycle will continue until Israel ends the Occupation and accepts a peace arrangement generous enough both in its particulars and in the spirit in which it is offered as to undermine the support for Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza and to empower the voices of Palestinian peacemakers.

Education

How to Create the Ideal Government and Society

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It has been said that the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. Well, that journey need not seem impossible. There can be unity and peace, and even happiness in the world, in spite of all the diversity. But, to achieve it—we each must find a way (through meditation, prayer, daily attitude, selfless service, or a combination of these things) to be inwardly joyful and also loving and kind in our interpersonal relationships.

Culture

Personal Reflections from Jerusalem

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Cherrie Brown was a shaper of the co-counseling movement and then created the National Coalition Building Institute to do education work against racism. We are presenting her 3 letters from Jerusalem to give a sense of what sensitive and intelligent people experience when they go to the Holy Land without the filters often required of us by the Jewish community or by anti-Israel activists.

War & Peace

Chance, Fate, Luck: How the History of the World Turned on the Randomness of a Sunny Morning, 100 Years Ago

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Fateful hours, fate-filled moments – maybe they are happening all the time. Maybe the decisions we make at each moment, or fail to make, nudge history imperceptibly into new directions. What an awesome fate it is for a people to realize, even to glimpse at, just how true this might be, just how much may hang on each choice, at each moment – 100 years ago or today.

Healing Israel/Palestine

Free the Kidnapped Israeli Teens

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Kidnapping anyone, anytime is always a violation of a basic human right. But is even more outrageous when done to children or teens who are particularly vulnerable. So it is with shock and outrage that we at Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives respond to the kidnapping of 3 Israeli teens who were returning from their study at a yeshiva in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank.

Healing Israel/Palestine

Keeping Care of All Our Brothers (and Sisters)

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The tragedy of the Israeli government’s policies of segregation and separation between Israeli Jews and Palestinians is that it is easy for many within Israel to lose sight of the humanity of Palestinians, and most have little sense of the context of Palestinian daily life. The mothers of the Palestinians who have been killed, injured and imprisoned (in the hundreds) as a result of operation “Brother’s Keeper” , feel the loss of their children just as deeply as the Israeli mothers of the 3 missing teens.

General News

Israeli Rabbi Evokes Hiroshima to Justify Collective Punishment of Palestinians

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The fate of three Israeli teenagers, kidnapped last week by an unconfirmed entity in the West Bank, remains unknown, a deeply concerning truth that has refocused attention on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. However, while their fate remains unknown, what is known is the fate of those Palestinians who have been killed, detained and shuttered with the Israeli military’s search for the missing teens transitioning into a collective punishment of an entire people.