Jewish,Synagogue,Torah,Judaism,Kosher Blog » peace

If only they were ‘closely following’ Hamas’ treatment of Gilad Shalit

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 15:03:01 +0000

The United Nations is ‘closely following’ Israel’s treatment of three Hamas legislators and a former Hamas cabinet minister whom Israel is seeking to expel from Jerusalem. Richard Miron, spokesperson for the UN special coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, said the UN official was concerned over the legality of the deportation threats, and asked "Israel to respect its obligations under

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If only they were ‘closely following’ Hamas’ treatment of Gilad Shalit

LATMA’s Tribal Update: Tie a yellow ribbon for Gilad Shalit

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 14:26:00 +0000

Here’s LATMA’s latest Tribal Update, which includes the song about Gilad Shalit that was subsequently released as a separate video. This one has English subtitles (I actually saw it last night in Hebrew – it takes them a while to get the English up).Let’s go to the videotape.Heh.And don’t forget to click the link and buy your ‘We Con the World’ T-Shirt on the right side of my home page (yes, I

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LATMA’s Tribal Update: Tie a yellow ribbon for Gilad Shalit

Israel to apologize and compensate for Mavi Marmara?

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 14:13:21 +0000

If this actually happens, I’d like to propose that we Israelis take to the streets, burn Turkish flags outside the Prime Minister’s office, and make it clear to everyone that the people doing this do not speak in our names.The Turkish English-language daily Hurriyet is reporting that Binyamin Ben Eliezer told Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Wednesday that Israel would apologize for

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Israel to apologize and compensate for Mavi Marmara?

Camp David ( 2000 )

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 03:00:01 +0000

Today’s Golden Oldie is a Dry Bones cartoon I did 10 years ago this month. Back then it was a smiling Bill Clinton rather than a snarling Barack Obama who had a “plan” to bring Peace to the Middle East. The succession of self-serving U.S. Presidents who refuse to recognize the simple truth about the Middle East is astounding. The simple truth: The area between the Persian Gulf on the East, and North Africa on the West is a region which was conquered by Arab Muslims. All other nationalities, peoples, and religious communities have been suppressed, occupied, or crushed. From the Yazidis, Christians, Kakayees,and Mandaeans of Iraq, across to the Berbers of Morocco and the Copts of Egypt in North Africa, the Middle East is one huge oppressed and occupied territory. Oppressed and occupied by Arab Muslims. -Dry Bones- Israel’s Political Comic Strip Since 1973

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Camp David ( 2000 )

Piracy

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 03:00:00 +0000

The lawless “wild west” of 20th century Hollywood movies has been translated into the 21 century. The Somali Pirates are the outlaws raiding stagecoaches. The Flotilla battles are becoming like the American range wars between farmers and cattlemen. “Why can’t the Farmer and the Cowman just be friends?” goes the frustrated refrain of the peace-loving audience. * * * Meanwhile, the world media shields us from seeing the massive world-wide assault on modern society and its freedoms by ferocious, totalitarian Islamism. -Dry Bones- Israel’s Political Comic Strip Since 1973

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Piracy

Heat (1988)

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 03:00:01 +0000

Today is a special day. It’s the Summer Solstice. And it’s the official start of Summer. The season of heat! This Golden Oldie was done 22 years ago. in 1988. Back then buses, cabs, restaurants, living-rooms and stores were not all air-conditioned. Back then we were grumpier. I believe that the two facts are connected. Sure we continue to remark on the heat, but we do it in uncomfortably cool surroundings. The other day, when I suggested to the LSW (Long Suffering Wife) that we go out for dinner, she said “Wait, I’ll get a shawl!” Sitting in an Israeli restaurant in a summer heat wave can be a chilling experience. -Dry Bones- Israel’s Political Comic Strip Since 1973

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Heat (1988)

Yoffie, don’t abandon human rights entirely

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:01:13 +0000

I suspect we direct our most bruised anger at those most likely to be our supporters…who don’t. That “self-hater” is such a cutting insult is part and parcel of that emotion. And it’s why it’s taken me a couple days to come down from the anger I felt towards Rabbi Eric Yoffie following his speech at J Street. On Tuesday, he spoke strongly and provocatively. He did not shy from controversy and never wavered. He has the prophetic instinct to make himself unwelcome in his own house, which I support and commend. It’s a talent I value, admire and aspire to. Kol hakavod to him. Most of his speech was right on the money, leading me to applaud many times, but two moments left me seething, ready to skewer him and leave him hanging as a traitor. Thanks to Noam Shelef of Americans for Peace Now , I now have a term for my eagerness to briefly kill Yoffie: the narcissism of small differences . I have since cooled off my anger and I wish to give Yoffie a second chance. It began when Yoffie had just finished recounting the dire straights of Sderot children. Did he presume to lecture us on Israeli suffering? Or perhaps hoping by storytelling would align our sympathies only with Jewish blood rather than balancing it with Gazan strangulation? He seemed to justify in entirety Operation Cast Lead, without any mention of the negotiations which Israel abandoned, without any discussion of proportion. He drew no alternative — ironic for the head of movement founded on alternative interpretations — except crushing force and did it by omitting huge factors under debate. I expected more from a man of his prophetic talent. But it was following Ben-Ami’s mellow response that I felt Yoffie slammed the door on his own prophecy, when Rabbi Ellen Lippman posed a question. Putting aside the charges of anti-Israel bias at the UN, she asked, “what will you do to further human rights in the region?” Yoffie’s position on the Goldstone report was already clear, having already berated Goldstone’s person at some length, when Rabbi Lippman handed him this opportunity to still affirm his commitment to human rights. Essentially, is there room in supporting Israel for supporting human rights in Israel, for both Israelis and Palestinians? Can we agree that Israel is not perfect and that we must investigate our abuses? He ignored her question entirely. Worse yet, he returned to his impassioned diatribes against Goldstone. It was watching Yoffie talk and talk about Goldstone and let Rabbi Lippman’s question linger and linger until, at end, it went unanswered which made me yell at the screen in the overflow room, “ Answer the question! ” Scattered applause met my outburst. Jeremy Ben-Ami’s response to Lippman was too light, by far. No Jewish press so far noted that the largest moment of disapproval for Yoffie was not the scattered boos but the resounding applause to Ben-Ami’s backhanded rebuke to Yoffie: The Goldstone report is not an excuse to ignore the mistakes of Operation Cast Lead. I was hoping to see in Yoffie a similar relationship to Israel, yet all I saw was the behavior that disgusts me so much about the older generations. The charges of anti-Semites are too exciting to leave and let be, it seems. Yoffie preferred to fuel our sense of oppression, victimhood and unfairness than to deal with the root of the problem. Instead of an enlightened thinker, Yoffie represented at that moment the hallmark of all that I am very happy my generation is leaving behind. My eagerness to see his generation grow old and pass away was embarassingly palpable. In a more extreme articulation: between human rights and Israel, Yoffie said the most important was Israel. My answer will always be human rights. As Matt Yglesias said the next morning, “I am not into fascism. I’m not about to endorse a Jewish dictatorship,” and that there is no pro-Israel unless it includes pro-peace and pro-democracy. Not only are human values more important, but you will not long have a Jewish state without them. I am not sorry that Rabbi Eric Yoffie, a good man and visionary by all accounts, served as the conference’s lightning rod. He accepted the post willingly and spoke his words accordingly. Even as the narcissim of small differences makes us impassioned to fight over nuance, he should know that he cannot ignore wholesale Rabbi Ellen Lippman’s question. While I do not wish him personal ill, I would like to give him a chance to answer her question again. So I ask Rabbi Eric Yoffie here to answer clearly and unequivocally where our obligation to human rights intersects with our relationship to Israel. You can always redeem in our eyes your leadership and worldview. I do not assume that you will frame your answer in the terms or contexts of my generation — but I at least expect an answer. Photo courtesy of Dan Sieradski’s awesome flickr feed .

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Yoffie, don’t abandon human rights entirely

Is J Street good or bad for peace process?

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:41:59 +0000

The Guardian ran an online poll. Is J Street helping or hurting the peace process? 13.4% Roadmap. J Street’s voice is valuable 86.6% Roadblock. J Street muddies the debate This poll is now closed

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Is J Street good or bad for peace process?

Palestinians are running out of options and time

SCHELLY TALALAY DARDASHTI — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:15:24 +0000

By Ted Belman Recently the Guardian, to the surprise and delight of most of us, attacked the Goldstone Report in an article titled A Moral Atrocity. . Now it has published another article attacking the tentative plans of the PA to declare a state in Two years. It is an excellent take-down of the idea. The author is is a senior associate member of St Antony’s College, Oxford and a former Palestinian negotiator. The Palestinian Authority’s state-first mistake By Ahmad Samih Khalidi The Palestinian Authority is intent on a kind of Zionism in reverse. The approach is badly flawed. As President Obama seeks to jumpstart the Middle East peace process with increasingly disappointing results, a new approach has begun to emerge from within the upper circles of the Palestinian Authority. In essence, this approach puts “statehood first” – without waiting for negotiations to resume, or for a full final status agreement with Israel. From this point of view, and in a kind of Zionism in reverse, unilateral actions on the ground can lay the foundations for an independent Palestinian state, irrespective of Israel’s demands or strategy. This approach has recently been formalised in the PA government’s two-year plan, which includes an ambitious range of economic and developmental projects and is intended to tally with the growing international consensus on setting a two-year time frame for the two-state vision and a comprehensive Palestinian-Israeli settlement. “Statehood first” has a superficially attractive ring to it that has begun to gain some traction among decision-makers in Washington and the EU. But it is fundamentally flawed. The first problem is the assumption that unilateral Palestinian state-building is possible when every PA action is determined by the Israeli occupation. Even putting to one side the Fatah-Hamas split, the PA cannot exercise the most elementary of powers; it cannot independently trade on the world market, decide who can enter its soil or deploy the smallest unit of its security services from one village to another; its leaders cannot even move without prior Israeli consent. In short, it cannot freely exercise its authority over its citizens or territory in any meaningful manner. At the heart of the PA’s programme lies a basic contradiction: while it claims to be building a state against the occupation, it is in practice building state-like structures with the occupation. No genuinely sovereign state has been or can be built while still under occupation, and nothing in Israel’s current stance on the basic issues of Palestinian sovereignty (territorial extent, control over borders, the right to self defence, and so on) suggests otherwise. The second problem stems from a total misreading of history. The Zionist movement may indeed have developed its state-building capacity while under the British mandate, but Israel only came into being as a state by using force against British and Palestinians alike. By way of contrast, the only military capability the PA is building under US supervision is directed against those who seek to take up arms against the occupation. The “Zionist” option of military self-reliance and readiness to use force for political-territorial ends is totally absent from the PA’s new approach and is inimical to its political outlook. The state-first approach carries other significant risks: it threatens to transform any final status negotiations into a prolonged state-to-state dispute whereby the fate of Palestinian refugees, the future of Arab Jerusalem and other critical issues will be indefinitely deferred. The urgency of dealing with Palestinians’ national grievances as a whole will diminish, and their interests will be gradually pushed to the margins of international and regional concerns on the grounds that they have already fulfilled their major aspiration by being granted statehood. In present and foreseeable circumstances, the PA’s programme will be concentrated on the West Bank alone. This will only aggravate the division of the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian hinterland. It will generate new Fatah-Hamas frictions, making it harder for a unified position to emerge. It is also worth remembering that the current PA cabinet is a caretaker government twice over, and has no mandate for any two-year programmes. Moreover, the issue of Palestinian statehood lies outside its legal remit: it is a political decision that rightfully belongs to the Palestine Liberation Organisation, not to the Palestinian Authority. Yet if it proceeds with its programme regardless, the PA will find itself caught in a political trap – success will undermine its claim for more land and greater territorial viability in the final status negotiations; failure will simply demonstrate that the Palestinians are unworthy of statehood. Palestinian unilateralism will open the door to legitimising Israel’s own unilateralism, and both historical precedent and the balance of power suggest that in such a contest Israel will prevail. Rather than lay the foundations for a truly viable and sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, Palestinian “Zionism” as conceived is only likely to produce a partial, ersatz entity; one that differs little from the autonomous self-rule that has long been Israel’s remedy for addressing the Palestinian problem. The new PA approach is not really about building a state by stealth or undoing the occupation by other means. Its focus is apolitical: improving Palestinian living standards and fomenting state-like behaviour but without any of the advantages of a real state. Indeed, this approach dovetails all too neatly with Bibi Netanyahu’s notion of “economic peace” – it appears as a pragmatic ambition, to supplement the peace process and path to a viable two-state solution. In reality it is destined to circumvent it altogether – or, at best, to ensure that the outcome is determined by Israeli national interests alone. The first essential duty of a state is defending its citizens against foreign incursions and threats. This part of the citizen-state contract clearly cannot be fulfilled under the proposed plan. The net result may be to devalue the already unconvincing currency of a two-state solution and leave the Palestinians suspended in yet another twilight zone whose only real dimension is a return to the heady days of “benign” occupation.

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Palestinians are running out of options and time

Political compromise or dialogue?

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:47:55 +0000

This is a guest post by Naomi Goldenson. First thing this afternoon at the JStreet conference there was a town-hall plenary session, within which there was space for dialogue among participants, and questions about important policy issues. Interestingly, it seemed to give an equal platform to Jeremy Ben-Ami, representing JStreet, and to Rabbi Eric Yoffie of the Union for Reform Judaism . All of Rabbi Yoffie’s comments did not concur with my understanding of JStreet’s political leanings. For example, “The day after the withdrawal Gaza should have become the Singapore of the Middle East.” This was not the tight message control I had come to expect from the emails I’ve been receiving from JStreet this past year. After each of them spoke questions were posed for discussion. If you didn’t already know, the questions that were officially posed would have made it clear that JStreet is on the defensive against attacks from the right and not the left (not that there aren’t critiques from the left). For starters, how does a “pro-peace” group reconcile itself to the need for self-defense? “Pro-peace” is not pacifist, but I’m sure plenty of people would like to confuse the two in order to paint JStreet as naive. Next. Is it true that many liberal Jews don’t recognize the threat from Iran? And was the Goldstone report fair to Israel? Rather than take the defensive, in both cases Ben-Ami agreed with the bias implicit in the questions. JStreet won’t rule out sanctions if diplomacy doesn’t work some time vaguely soon. And Ben-Ami agreed that the Goldstone report was a problem, although that shouldn’t prevent us from “looking in the mirror” and investigating human rights concerns. I was bothered by some of the rhetoric I heard condemning the Goldstone report. Jeremy Ben-Ami agreed with Rabbi Yoffie that it’s used against one side and one side only, it focuses on this over all other issues on the globe, it was a flawed process coming from a mess of a UN system. Why do these arguments sound familiar? This is the same logic used against any criticism of Israel to label it as anti-Semitic. It can be really hard to walk that fine line of working within a framework that rejects all criticism, but still be critical. I hope that JStreet can manage to do this without being co-opted. Naturally for JStreet to gain the mainstream traction that they require, they must play into the mainstream narrative of Israel as the primary victim. In other words, you must convince people within the framework of their existing worldview if you wish to accomplish anything in politics. That is the role of JStreet. It’s also worthwhile to fundamentally challenge that worldview, but that is work that can only be accomplished on longer timescales, most likely on a local level. Meanwhile there is the longer-term project of real dialogue. Earlier I attended an excellent session on “How Jews, Christians and Muslims Can Work Together for Peace”. Many of the lessons discussed in this session could also apply to how we interact with people in our own community with whom we disagree. Dialogue is not easy. You must be willing to listen. First you must build relationships and only later address the difficult questions. The questions that were asked at the end reflected the kinds of questions asked in both of those stages. At one point a Muslim on the panel was singled out to explain that Muslim groups do in fact condemn violence and anti-Semitism. You’d hope that it wouldn’t have to be said, but apparently some people need to hear it. Then came a question about how justifications of violence can be found in the texts of all three traditions. It can’t be denied, and they didn’t deny it. That’s the kind of thing that’s harder to do among people with whom you are not yet comfortable. The panelists did a good job of modeling what we should all aspire to in these kinds of dialogues. Open-minded dialogue and political pragmatism each have their place. I’m excited to see so many people who want to do something to create some real change.

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Political compromise or dialogue?