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 [
http://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
Prof. Dr. Hajo Funke 