By Rabbi Michael Lerner
According to Ha’aretz correspondent Amira Hass, the IDF has been conducting mass
arrests in the West Bank, between 10 and 30 every day. 24 of the
arrested are members of the Palestinian parliament from Hamas’ Change
and Reform party. The number of those arrested since the kidnapping and
murder of the Israeli teens has already exceeded 1,000. The Palestinians
are convinced that most of those detained have nothing to do with the
kidnapping and that these are mainly political arrests for purposes of
intimidation and revenge.
This
is just the tip of the iceberg. Tens of thousands of young Palestinian
men have experienced arrest, torture, loss of employment, and have been
unable to protect their parents, partners and friends from arbitrary and
repressive treatment from IDF Occupation forces. The surprising thing
is that despite this inhumane and emasculating treatment, few
Palestinians have engaged in acts of violence or desperation.
I’ve
argued that acts of desperation can be self-destructive. Many
Palestinians will suffer for the acts of the few Palestinian Hamas
extremists. But since Hamas activists have come to believe that even if
they do nothing they will still be targeted, some are saying that acting
out violently against the Occupation is the only thing that can restore
their dignity since nothing will restore their land. I think that this
is a mistake for Gaza and the West Bank. Sometimes I think that Hamas
doesn’t really even care for its own citizens in Gaza—they care more
about showing that non-violence will never work to challenge Israel’s
occupation, and they are willing to let the people of Gaza pay the
price, namely the invasion of Gaza by the Israeli army with the
inevitable consequence of many more than the 220 Palestinians already
killed in the past two weeks. And yet, it is hard to deny that the
Israeli Occupation is so repressive and dishonoring of Palestinians that
some young men have taken to violence, while others see those acts as
the only thing that can momentarily give people a relief from the
emotional depression of years under Occupation generates. Yet the
violence against Israeli civilian targets has pushed the politics of
Israel even further to the Right.
For
those of us like myself who care about the well-being of all people on
the planet, not only my own Jewish people, but all peoples. The high
toll of Palestinian civilians is horrifying—several thousand civilians
already wounded according to Palestinian sources. This will likely lead
to more Hamas terrorists. But not only is the war stupid from the
standpoint of Jewish self-interest, it is also immoral in the extreme.
None of this would have happened if Israel had been serious about
negotiating an end to the Occupation. But as Prime Minister Netanyahu
made clear in his press conference last week, he never intends to give
the Palestinian people an independent state of their own.
Israel
must end the invasion, stop its bombing of Gaza, free the Palestinians
it has arrested in the past years, and abandon its insane policy of
seeking security through domination. This approach may work in a
dictatorial regime for a little while, but even in those circumstances,
the repression only works for a limited period (ask the former leaders
of the Soviet Community party). Instead, Israel needs a generosity
strategy, not only agreeing to a Palestinian state in the West Bank, the
release of all Occupation-related prisoners, getting the US and its
Western allies to provide a massive reparation fund to support the new
Palestinian state till it achieves economic and political parity with
Israel, share Jerusalem as the capital of both an Israeli and
Palestinian state, an end to teaching hatred and racism in its schools
and media in exchange for Palestine doing the same, but also agreeing to
allow 20,000 Palestinian refugees a year to move to Israel each year
for the next forty years in exchange for Palestine allowing Israelis
living in the West Bank to stay in their settlements as law-abiding
citizens of the new Palestinian state and subject to Palestinian law and
court system (just as Palestinians living inside the pro-67 borders of
Israel are subject to Israeli law and Israeli courts). If Israel could
apologize for its part (partial, not total) in creating the Palestinian
refugee population, create jointly with Palestinians a Truth and
Reconciliation process similar to that done in South Africa, and accept
an international force to police the borders and protect both Israel and
the Palestinians from the inevitable extremist attacks by Hamas and
Israeli settle fanatics, and most importantly if as the more powerful
party in the struggle can act with a genuine spirit of open-heartedness
to the Palestinian people in seeking to help rebuild all that it had
destroyed in Gaza and the West Bank, its spirit of generosity would
within less than ten years undermine the hold of Hamas on a large
section of that fundamentalist group’s political base in both the West
Bank and Gaza. In the Middle East, particularly among Arab communities,
there is no stronger “weapon” than generosity and genuine caring for the
well-being of the other. So, yes, Hamas can start to lose its
constituency fastest when Israel becomes most generous and caring, or
Hamas can grow into a permanent majority the more that Israel relies on
its current strategy of domination.
This
focus on the psycho-spiritual dimension of the struggle and the need
for a strategy of generosity is precisely what Tikkun brings to the
table through our Network of Spiritual Progressives and which you’ll
find sorely missing in most of the analyses whether from Israeli,
Palestinian, European or American political analysts, editorialists,
politicians, and media reporters and even leftie protesters. Yet it is
this dimension, which is ignored to their peril by all who care about
the well-being of both peoples. So, yes, we demand an end to the bombing
of Gaza and the invasion of Gaza, just as we have demanded of Hamas
that it stop its attempted bombings of Israel. It’s time for a brand new
direction, but only you, the reader of this point can make it happen.
For more information as to how, please read my book Embracing
Israel/Palestine, join our interfaith and secular-humanist-welcoming
Network of Spiritual Progressives at www.spiritualprogressives.org, and contact our new executive director Cat J. Zavis at cat@spiritualprogressives.org or at info@spiritualprogressives.org.
Rabbi
Michael Lerner is the editor of Tikkun Magazine, chair of the Network
of Spiritual Progressives, rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue-Without-Walls
in S.F. and Berkeley, Ca. and author of 11 books incluidng two national
best sellers: Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation and The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right. His most recent book is Embracing Israel/Palestine (available as a kindle book from Amazon.com and in print from www.tikkun.org/eip). RabbiLerner.Tikkun@gmail.com
web: www.tikkun.org
email: info@spiritualprogressives.org
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