Rabbi Michael Lerner | Spirit In Action

I can’t help crying when I read this, but my gut feeling and my heart tell me it would work.

The majority of people in both Israel and Palestine are good hearted, caring and spiritual people.

The fear filled warmongers must be isolated by the rest of humanity wherever they reside, so they can no longer take power and subject the rest of us to their insanity and spiritual sickness.

I hope you will all read, share and discuss this essay with everyone you know.

We do have the power each of us, and collectively, as citizens of the Earth to change the dominant paradigm of war, hatred, fear, power over and control, and worship of money to something more real and humane for all.

Blessings,
ohnwentsya

Israel: Stop the Invasion of Gaza, Stop the Bombing of Gaza, Free the Palestinian Prisoners

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 atcat or atinfo.

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 RabbiLerner.Tikkun

This is heartbreaking.

“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”.

I pray these children are returned safely and that this situation does not escalate the hostilities between Israel and Palestine.

It is time for all Israeli and Palestinian parents to sleep peacefully knowing all their children are safe. And all parents everywhere from Syria and Ukraine to Florida and Mexico.

Let’s all pray together for an immediate end to all wars, all oppression and injustice.
ohnwentsya

*Free the Kidnapped Israeli Teens *

By Rabbi Michael Lerner

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.

We demand the immediate release and safe return of those teens to their families!

We were shocked and outraged at the kidnapping of hundreds of Christian girls by Muslim fundamentalists in Africa, with the implied story that these girls would be raped (the functional equivalent of “forced marriages” along with forced conversions to Islam).

We are shocked and outraged when girls are kidnapped (or sold or persuaded by starving parents who see no other way to get money for their remaining starving children) into sexual slavery or forced marriages.

We are shocked and outraged when children or teenagers are forced into armies (whether through a supposedly “legitimate” draft process or through outright kidnapping) where they are forced to kill or be killed.

We reject any attempt to imply that somehow these acts are understandable given the oppressive conditions faced by the perpetrators. In the case of the Israeli teens some commentators have rushed in to remind us that there are thousands of young Palestinians, some of them younger than the teens who were teenagers, who sit in Israeli prisons or “detention camps,” without trials and sometimes for many months. Yes, this is also a human rights violation. But so what? It doesn’t justify or legitimate the crime committed against these Israeli teens.

There are those who have pointed out that the teens were attending a Yeshiva in a right-wing settlement and that that Yeshiva doesn’t teach about the humanity or the suffering of the Palestinian people, but instead justifies and defacto increases that suffering by participating in discriminatory practices that are part of the daily reality of the Occupation. Again, so what? No matter how reactionary the teachings, it is never appropriate to kidnap or inflict pain on others, except possibly in circumstances of immediate self-defense.

And these teens were not the perpetrators or the creators of the Occupation. They were children doing what their parents had brought them up to do and to be.

I’ve recently heard another such ridiculous attempt to “contextualize” this kidnapping. Just as, when Palestinian children have been shot or killed by Israeli forces enforcing the Occupation, some Israelis and American Jews have said (publicly and in a variety of Jewish newspapers) “these Palestinians don’t really care about their children, else they wouldn’t let them participate in activities that are known to be at risk,” so now some are saying that “Israelis don’t really care about their children, else they wouldn’t be sending them to study in a war zone in which violence against Palestinians is sometimes met by violence against Israelis-so anyone raising their children in the settlements or sending them to study in the Occupied West Bank really have only themselves to blame for whatever happens to them.” This reasoning is as obnoxious when applied to Israelis as it was when applied to Palestinians (or for that matter, when applied to parents who let their children get drafted into an army). The reality is that most parents whatever their religious, national, ethnic or racial backgrounds care equally and intensely about the well-being of their children, and the reasons that they get convinced to put their kids into situations of danger have little to do with how much they love their kids. When I signed permission for my own son to serve in the Israeli paratroopers, I was terrified and remained so throughout the time he was jumping from airplanes and serving in the Israeli army. I cared deeply for my son’s welfare and loved him intensely, spent all week waiting for him to return to our Jerusalem apartment just before Shabbat so I could wash his clothes and feed him home made Shabbat food. I’m not going to go into all the factors that led me to allow him to serve (“allow” because the Israeli military won’t allow an only child to serve in a combat unit without the signed agreement of their parent), but it certainly wasn’t lack of love. And I’ve spoken to many Palestinians whose children have been wounded or killed and they too care just as much about their children as any Israeli or American or any other parents on the planet.

For those of us who want to see an end to all this kind of suffering, it is appropriate for us to demand an end to all wars and all violence, and to an end of conditions that create this violence, including ending global poverty, ending the xenophobia and racism and homophobia and demeaning of “the other” (whether that other be Jewish Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, or whatever), and to urgently seek to end the environmental destructiveness that will soon become the source of more violence between “the haves” and “the have nots.” And it is appropriate to demand an end to the Occupation of the West Bank, to the occupation of Tibet by China and Chechnya by Russia and an end to every other unjust denial of rights to people who want their freedom.

Yet none of this should replace our outrage at the acts of kidnapping that go on “in the meantime.” And that is why we start and finish this note with a demand that whoever has those Israeli teens must return them immediately and safely to their families. And as a rabbi, I add to that demand a prayer for their wellbeing and the wellbeing of their families.

Rabbi Michael Lerner

Editor, Tikkun magazine and Chair, the (Interfaith and Secular-Humanist-Welcoming) Network of Spiritual Progressiveswww.spiritualprogressives.org [ http://www.spiritualprogressives.org ] , rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue in Berkeley, Ca. and author of eleven books, most recently “Embracing Israel/Palestine.”

RabbiLerner.tikkun [ mailto:RabbiLerner.tikkun ]

P.S. None of our outrage should be taken as legitimation of blaming the entire Palestinian people for this kidnapping or for assaulting the people of Gaza or a renewed military assault by the IDF beyond a narrowly pin-pointed search for the kidnapped teens. Punishing an entire population for the sins of a few was developed by Roman imperialists two thousand years ago and remains a disgusting and God-denying act of brutality that should never be tolerated by any humane society.