Rabbi Michael Lerner: End the Occupation of the West Bank

...the political developments in the United States, Israel, Palestine, Iraq, and Syria have been so upsetting that they have interfered with my sleep and the writing I had planned for the year. I have been so upset by the outrageous behavior of ISIS and the simplistic response of the West (“let’s bomb them and then see what happens”), which threatens to deepen the mess we in the United States helped to create with our last invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
 

This after a summer in which Israelis, understandably fearful from the daily bombing attempts that sent them (often several times a day) into air raid shelters to avoid the missiles beings launched by Hamas, allowed themselves to forget the (if they ever really understood) the horrible conditions that the Occupation has imposed on Palestinians and the hunger and poverty that their seven year blockade of Gaza has imposed on Gazans (with the resulting attitude of "if we are going to perish, let's do it by fighting back" that was propagated by the  leadership of Hamas). While most Americans rallied around Israel, forgetting that Israel had broken off peace negotiations with the non-violence-enforcing Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and the American Jewish community told itself Israel "had no alternative," we at Tikkun were speaking out to remind people that there really is an alternative: to end the Occupation of the West Bank, and with generous and caring terms (that show real respect for the humanity of the Palestinians) to make peace with the Palestinian people rather than beat them into submission. (I've specified those terms in the Winter 2014 issue of Tikkun and more fully in my book Embracing Israel/Palestine). 

Excerpt from an email message to Watch@al-bushra.org sent by Rabbi Michael Lerner

Rabbi Michael Lerner is the founding editor of Tikkun Magazine; he also Beyt Tikkun, a Jewish Renewal synagogue in the San Francisco Bay Area.