When Will They Ever Learn?
by Rabbi Michael Lerner
When will they ever learn…that violence is not the path to security?
Today we write those words about Israel and Palestine,
yesterday about the U.S. in Iraq, tomorrow about China in Tibet, and it
goes on and on. And the only solution is to break the chain of pain and
say, “No more—we will not respond to violence with violence. We will
follow the teaching of the Torah that says ‘love the stranger’ and
Jesus that says ‘turn the other cheek’ and we will stop this madness
forever if we could really sustain the courage to do that.”
This is a tough moment to say this point—and yet it needs to be said
to both sides. I start with Israel only because it is the greater
military power, but I’ll get to a critique of the Palestinians too, so
read this whole thing through. Tikkun’s progressive middle path for
Middle East Peace rejects any attempt to say that one side is the pure
bad and the other the pure good.
So, the details of the day. Israel is the military power occupying the
West Bank and surrounding Gaza. By all international standards it has no
right to do either, but if it does so it has an absolute obligation to
treat the civilian population with certain respect and basic human
rights. Israel continually fails to do this and has become one (not the
worst, but one) of the world’s major human rights violators.
No wonder that people are asking their Jewish neighbors, “Do you
really think that is morally acceptable to cut off electricity and water
for a million and a half Gazans as a retribution for the killing of two
Israeli soldiers and the kidnap of a third? Isn’t this the kind of
‘collective punishment’ that ruthless dictators have used against
the civilian populations of countries that they controlled to the horror
of the rest of the world? Don’t you realize that when you face acts of
terror against Israeli civilians that it is because the Palestinians
have no army, no airplanes, no tanks, so they fight with their
improvised weapons as resistance forces have always done, and it makes
no sense to call that “terror,” particularly when the targets are
members of the armed forces on active duty. And don’t you think that
the U.S. should be allowed to stand up for human rights there rather
than be restrained by the fear that anyone criticizing Israel will be
described as anti-Israel and their political futures put in danger by
the AIPAC-related crowds that have been so effective in shaping the
media and the public discourse in this country? And while we are at it,
don’t you think that it’s really not great for the Jews to be
identified with AIPAC and neo-cons and their spokespeople in Congress
like Senator Lieberman who support the war in Iraq and who have become a
major voice for trying to push the US into conflict with Iran?”
Those who care about the Jewish people, want to preserve it and protect
it, want to see a safe and secure Israel and a safe and secure Jewish
people all around the world, have to shout out now in very clear words:
“Stop what you are doing, Israel, not just at the moment, but in the
essence of your policies. Forget about taking over the part of the West
Bank within the Wall built by the Israeli Right and their Labor party
collaborators. Get out of the West Bank, and do it in a spirit of
generosity, not of resentment and begrudging response to world pressure.
Do it in a spirit that communicates that you recognize the humanity of
the Palestinian people and recognize their suffering! Imagine, for
example, how different the feelings would have been this week in the
Arab world if, after killing a family on a Gaza beach through an IDF
shelling, the President and Prime Minister of Israel had together gone
to visit the family of the deceased to offer apologies and to share in
the mourning of this loss, rather than trying to prove (unsuccessfully)
that it wasn’t really Israel’s shell after all! Imagine how
different things would be if today the Israeli government said, “We
will find a way to create an international consortium to provide
reparations for those Palestinians who have lost their homes in
1948-1967, and those whose homes were unfairly bulldozed to support the
needs of the Israeli settlers on the West Bank! Imagine how different
things would be if Israel could say, “We recognize that we have the
greatest power in the area, that we face no credible threats from our
neighbors, that our actions since 1948 have been ungenerous and
sometimes outright immoral in the way we’ve treated not only
Palestinians outside our state but also Arabs who have lived and paid
taxes inside our state, and we want to stop all that, stop the
escalation of weaponry and the arrogance of power, so we will take the
first steps to show how generous the Jewish people can be when it
follows its Torah’s command to “love the stranger” and then
announces concrete acts of love and generosity! Nothing less than this
will work.
That is the way to break the chain of pain. The only way. And that’s
why eventually the path that Tikkun put forward years ago in our
Resolution for Middle East Peace, and then in our support for the Geneva
Accord, will be recognized as necessary components of peace. But we are
not believers in power politics—in the final analysis what counts is
transformations in consciousness and in the heart, and that is why the
world so badly needs the New Bottom Line with its call to privileging
love over power. Unrealistic, you say? No. What is unrealistic, in fact
pure craziness, is for Israel to keep acting the way it has been acting
for all these many years, imagining a different result from the same
behavior.
So, does that mean that there’s one side that is good and the other
evil? No, the world rarely works that way.
So, we have a message for the Palestinian people also: Violence
doesn’t work and it is not working for you. You have every democratic
right to elect a government that declares it does not recognize the very
existence of the State of Israel, and that sees the fundamental crime
not in expanding into the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 but rather in its
coming into existence in the first place in 1948. Sure, you can do that.
But if your government that you elect says it is in a war, then don’t
be surprised to find that war getting carried to your doors, to your
electricity and water supply, and to your children. If it’s war that
you want, you’ll get it. But if it is peace, then there is only one
way: totally, 100% renounce violence, renounce the articulators of that
violence (whether they be in Hamas or in Fatah). Embrace the path of
Martin Luther King, jr. and of Mahatma Gandhi and of the later Nelson
Mandela, and physically restrain those people among you who will resort
to violence or even to violent speech. If you want to win, you can’t
do it by kidnapping, or sending missiles across the border, or throwing
rocks. You must be disciplined soldiers of non-violence in your actions
and words. You must not only unequivocally announce your support for the
Right of Israel to exist, you must put forward your vision of a peace in
which you live together with Israel in two sovereign states. And you
must acknowledge that when it was Jews who were climbing out of the
concentration camps and gaschambers and crematoria of Europe and
desperately looking to return to their ancient homeland that it was your
Palestinian leaders who, in alliance with British imperialism, tried to
keep those refugees from settling in Palestine, thereby confirming to
them the previous experiences they had in Arab countries where they were
often treated as second class citizens. Acknowledge that when offered a
two state solution in 1947 it was your own people who rejected it and
denied that Jews could have any state of their own, while Muslims could
have more than a dozen states in which their language, culture and
religion was the official position of the society. Speak about that,
teach it to your children, and enunciate it in Arabic for everyone to
hear, and you will have some credibility in talking about the only thing
that will make it possible for you to win: a strategy of open-hearted
reconciliation with Israel and the Jewish people. So you must reject the
anti-Israel lefties who give you the fantasy that you can keep on
talking about the destruction of Israel, or embracing fanatics like the
president of Iran, and then hope that Israel will be gentle and
generous. It’s a fantasy. Your only power is moral credibility, and
you build that by giving yourself to that vision of peace and
non-violence and love of the enemy. Don’t listen to the people who
tell you you have a right to struggle—because of course you have the
right. The question is not whether you have the right, but whether it s
SMÅRT to follow that path. Those who care about Palestinians will come
to a different conclusion: that the smarter path, the path most likely
to lead to an end of the Occupation and to peace and security for the
Palestinian people, will come through developing the kind of compassion
for the other, for the oppressor, combined with absolute commitment to
non-violence that made Martin Luther King Jr. and Mandela so successful.
Your misleaders have taken you on a self-destructive path, and a path
that has led you to immoral actions against innocent civilians. Stop
that path—it brings only more suffering and no liberation.
This is the message that our ancient prophets have been trying to
communicate in various languages: that the only path that can work is
the path of peace, social justice, love, compassion, kindness and
generosity. And the path to peace is a path of peace.
When will they ever learn?
Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun and national
chair of the Tikkun Community/ Network of Spiritual Progressives. Join
us at www.spiritualprogressives.org. His most recent book is The
Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right
(HarperSanFrancisco, 2006). His most recent book on the Middle East is Healing
Israel//Palestine (North Atlantic Books, 2003). RabbiLerner@tikkun.org.
To support this message, please Join The Tikkun
Community or the Network of Spiritual Progressives at www.tikkun.org.
We are the movement fighting for a New Bottom Line of love and kindness,
caring and generosity. Not only in regard to Israel/Palestine, but also
in our support for an immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. And a
Global Marshall Plan--plank 7 of the Network of Spiritual Progressives'
Spiritual Covenant with America. You are hereby given permission
to circulate this message widely. Please read our Core Vision and our
book The Left Hand of God. NSP@tikkun.org
For Israeli peace voices, please read “Suffering
from Paralysis of Thought” in Friday, June 30th Ha’aretz Prof.
Zeev Sternhell of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem shows how the path
of the Israeli government continues to be as we in Tikkun magazine
described it 20 years ago: immoral and stupid. To confirm, read the lead
editorial "The
Government is Losing its Head " in Ha’aretz also.
web: http://www.tikkun.org
email: community@tikkun.org