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Tikkun Community Rally to End Occupation
The Tikkun Community, is rallying at Israeli Consulate at noon A11 to urge an end to Occupation. 456 Montegomery (x California)
This Thursday, April 11, at 12 noon, please come to a
demonstration in San Francisco at the Israeli Consultate to protest
the current violence in the Middle East and in opposition to the
Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Our protest will be
held in support of the same-day protest in Washington D.C. organized
by the Tikkun Community and led by Co-Chairs Rabbi Michael Lerner and
Professor Cornel West. Contemporaneous protests will also take place
in New York and other American cities corresponding to the one we are
holding in San Francisco.
We will meet at the Israeli Consulate this Thursday at Noon at
456 Montgomery Street between Sacramento and California in downtown
San Francisco, where we will hold a press conference during which we
will present officials at the Consulate with the attached DECLARATION
OF BAY AREA JEWS FOR AN END TO THE OCCUPATION AND FOR AN IMMEDIATE
CESSATION OF VIOLENCE IN THE MIDDLE EAST. Although the Declaration
was written by me, it is meant to express the broadly agreed upon
views of the Tikkun Community regarding the need for immediate
international action to end the current violence, and the central
importance of ending the Occupation for the creation of a just peace
in the Middle East. The Declaration emphasizes the unique
responsibility of American Jews in helping to reverse the current
destructive dynamic by breaking down the image of American Jews as a
monolithic block supporting the actions of the Israeli government.
That is why we are asking Jews to be the signers of this declaration,
although we ask everyone supporting peace and the end of the
Occupation to come to the demonstration.
The Declaration is printed below in this message. TO SIGN THE
DECLARATION, CLICK ON "FORWARD" AND SEND TO
wervin [at] pacbell.net WRITING YOUR NAME AND THE CITY WHERE YOU LIVE IN
THE SUBJECT HEADING.
As a follow-up to this demonstration and Declaration, the Tikkun
Community will hold a teach-in on the current crisis on Sunday April
21, from 1:30 p.m. top 6 p.m., at a location to be announced. We
will send another e-mail to you regarding speakers and location
closer to the teach-in, or check on http://www.tikkun.org in the calendar
section.
Please join us on Thursday to support Michael and Cornel's
protest in Washington and to continue the important process of
building a decisive world-wide movement to end the terrible and
tragic current crisis and to bring peace and justice to the Middle
East.
Peter Gabel
Board President and Law Professor, New College of California
Member of the Advisory Board of the Tikkun Community
--------
DECLARATION OF BAY AREA JEWS FOR AN END TO THE OCCUPATION AND AN
IMMEDIATE CESSATION OF VIOLENCE IN THE MIDDLE EAST
The recent violence in the Middle East, including both
suicide bombings in Israel and the Israeli invasion of the Occupied
territories, calls upon the conscience of all American Jews to take a
public stand to try to stop the violence and build an international
movement for a just political resolution to a terrible and unjust
situation that has lasted more than thirty years. This moral
imperative weighs upon Jews especially because to be Jewish means to
be committed to the creation of a just world, not just for Jews but
for everyone. It is we who have said every year for over 3000 years
that we must teach each generation to remember our liberation from
slavery so that the world can be free from the injustice that we
suffered. It is we who have internalized a cultural heritage so
powerfully committed to the ideal of social justice that we have been
disproportionately represented in the struggle of peoples everywhere
for civil rights and human rights. The situation in the Middle East
has now deteriorated to the point that we can no longer remain
silent, whether we want to or not.
The long military Occupation by Israel of lands lived in
by millions of Palestinian people has been a tragedy for both the
Palestinians and the Jews. Apart from the physical brutality of the
Occupation-during which the Israeli army has used American weapons to
kill thousands of Palestinian civilians, to bulldoze their homes and
olive trees, and to make them subject to often random arrest and
beatings-apart from this physical violence carried out in the name of
the Jewish people has been the humiliation of the fundamental dignity
of the Palestinian people. Four generations of Palestinians have now
grown up in refugee camps in impoverished and spiritually degrading
conditions under the boot of a foreign army, deprived by Jews of the
very right to self-determination that itself defines Jewish identity.
Against this simple and stark background, the claim today that the
violence in the Middle East is the result of Yassir Arafat or any
other discrete person or group of persons is absurd. The violence in
the Middle East is the result of injustice-the injustice of a Jewish
Occupation that Jews inside and outside of Israel must now rectify.
We must rectify it or risk the destruction of the spiritual core of
our identity as a people.
We are all too aware of the complexity of feeling that
the current crisis has engendered among concerned and well-meaning
Jews throughout the world. We are in no way saying that the suicide
bombings perpetrated against Israeli civilians are justified, and we
wish that the Palestinian leadership had shown itself capable of
non-violent resistance in the morally transcendent tradition of
Ghandi and King and even Mandela. The suicide bombings that have now
killed hundreds of Israelis, torn apart families, and deeply
frightened the Israeli people are an unjustifiable catastrophe, and
as Jews we feel an identification with the suffering caused by these
bombings with special intensity. A part of some of us even feels
that if the present military invasion stops these almost daily
bombings even temporarily, at least some good will come of it-and we
feel this even though it shames us to want to see our people
protected at the expense of the brutalization of another people.
But it is time for such short-sighted thinking to stop once and for
all. In the entire decade prior to the start of the Occupation in
1967, thirty-seven Israeli civilians were killed in conflicts with
Israel's neighbors; in the last month alone, 120 Israeli civilians
have been killed. The Occupation of Palestinian lands cannot be
justified in the name of the security of Israel-Israel is the fourth
largest military power on earth confronting a largely unarmed and
helpless population. Israel will never be secure so long as it
subjects generations of Palestinian people to a humiliation that will
lead them to commit suicide to try to recover through
counter-violence their collective sense of dignity. Israeli security
can only come ultimately from the achievement of justice for both
Jews and Palestinians, and that can only come from ending the
Occupation and recognizing the equal dignity of the Palestinian
people through the creation and recognition of an independent
Palestinian State.
That process of mutual recognition and grant of equal
dignity must happen now, and American Jews bear a special
responsibility for exerting the pressure that can bring this about.
All Jews are affected in some way by our common history as victims of
irrational hatred and persecution; all of us carry inside us the
traumatic memory of the Holocaust, the knowledge that ordinary people
who happened to be German were willing to participate in the murder
of six million of us simply because we were Jewish. To some extent
this has made us self-protectively attached, and even addicted, to
what the great Judaic scholar Zygmunt Bauman has called "hereditary
victimhood." But the majority of Israeli Jews have become even more
addicted to this victimhood than the rest of us, masking an
internalized legacy of humiliation with a kind of desperate and
prideful nationalism that does not dare see its own inner frailty and
pain and fear and that appears to be justified by the actual dangers
that surround and threaten the Israeli people. It is this addiction,
this need to see themselves as history's permanent and perpetual
victims in order to cover over the unhealed pain of our history of
persecution in general and the Holocaust in particular that blinds
Israel to the fact that it is now the cause of its own insecurity.
It is the violence and injustice of the Occupation itself that is now
by far the most serious threat to Israeli security, inflaming the
rage not only of the Palestinian people but of the masses in the Arab
world, most of whose governments have now clearly indicated, at the
summit of Arab nations held two weeks ago and in spite of the forced
exclusion by Israel of the leader of the Palestinians from that
summit, that they want to live in peace with Israel. Addicted to the
denial of pain and vulnerability of past oppression and ever vigilant
to see the next Holocaust at every turn, Israel itself has become the
inflictor of the humiliation that was once inflicted upon it, and has
as a result created and recreated the unjust conditions that in turn
generate the violent acts that appear to "prove" that its fears are
justified.
Why do American Jews bear a special responsibility for
liberating Israel from this self-destructive cycle? We bear this
responsibility because America is Israel's principal supplier of
military and economic aid and because we have allowed the American
government and the Israeli population to believe that we speak as a
unified voice in support of the necessity of the Occupation in the
name of Israeli security. The appearance that American Jews in
overwhelming numbers support the actions of the State of Israel has
had the effect both of silencing the large number of us who with some
uncertainty and even guilt are opposed to these actions and of
silencing the large number of non-Jews who have been made too guilty
by the fact of the Holocaust to speak out against the Occupation.
Most Americans-Jews and non-Jews-know that the Occupation is unjust
to the Palestinians, self-destructive to Israel, and even ultimately
destructive to the moral integrity and physical security of the
United States. But most also feel unable to speak up, entrapped in
the psychological snare of the history of Jewish oppression.
Because of our unique position, it is we American Jews
who are in the best position to liberate both Israel and America from
this increasingly tragic situation. It is we who must act as the true
conscience of the Jewish people and on behalf of the spiritual core
of Jewish identity by beginning to give voice to our opposition to
the Occupation and all of the terrible consequences, including the
suicide bombings, that the injustice of the Occupation is at the root
of. This means American Jews must be willing not only to sign
declarations like this one in large numbers, not only to engage in
demonstrations or even civil disobedience for those who feel capable
of such militant action, but also to clearly and openly disagree with
other Jewish family members, with members of synagogues and other
Jewish organizations and communities that we may be a part of, and
with Jewish organizations and recognized public spokespersons for the
Jews, all of whom are likely to be sharply critical of our dissenting
views. We must take our stand knowing in our hearts that we are
right, and that many, many American and Israeli Jews agree with us
and need our voices to be heard.
THEREFORE, TODAY, THURSDAY, APRIL 11, 2002, WE BAY AREA JEWS FOR AN
END TO THE OCCUPATION AND AN IMMEDIATE CESSATION OF VIOLENCE IN THE
MIDDLE EAST HEREBY DECLARE;
OUR CALL FOR AN IMMEDIATE CESSATION TO ALL VIOLENCE IN ISRAEL AND PALESTINE;
OUR CALL FOR AN IMMEDIATE END TO THE CURRENT INVASION BY THE ISRAELI
ARMY OF THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES AND A WITHDRAWAL OF ALL ISRAELI
FORCES, TANKS AND OTHER MILITARY EQUIPMENT FROM THESE TERRITORIES.
OUR CALL FOR THE UNITED STATES TO LEAD A UNITED NATIONS INTERNATIONAL
FORCE TO PHYSICALLY SEPARATE THE HOSTILE PARTIES AND ENFORCE AN
IMMEDIATE CEASE-FIRE TO THE BEST OF ITS ABILITY, RECOGNIZING THAT
SOME INTERMITTENT VIOLENT ACTS IN THE SHORT-TERM ARE INEVITABLE AND
ARE NOT JUSTIFICATIONS FOR ABANDONING THIS INTERNATIONALLY IMPOSED
CEASE-FIRE.
OUR CALL FOR THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT TO INSIST UPON AND LEAD
POLITICAL NEGOTIATIONS DESIGNED TO BRING ABOUT, WITH ALL DELIBERATE
SPEED, THE END OF THE OCCUPATION, SECURITY FOR THE STATE OF ISRAEL,
AND THE CREATION OF AN INDEPENDENT PALESTINIAN STATE THAT GUARANTEES
THE RIGHT OF THE PALESTINIANS TO GENUINE SELF-DETERMINATION.
OUR CALL FOR THE INITIATION OF A PROCESS OF HEALING, LED BY U.N.
SECRETARY GENERAL KOFI ANNAN AND MODELLED ON SOUTH AFRICA'S TRUTH AND
RECONCILIATION COMMISSION, AND WITH RECOGNITION OF THE PHYSICAL AND
SPIRITUAL VIOLENCE INFLICTED BY EACH SIDE ON THE OTHER OVER THE
COURSE OF THIS LONG CONFLICT, TO CREATE THE CONDITIONS FOR THE
ISRAELI AND PALESTINIAN PEOPLES TO EVENTUALLY LIVE IN HARMONY AS
SOVEREIGN NATIONS AND MUTUALLY SUPPORTIVE NEIGHBORS OCCUPYING THE
SAME SMALL REGION OF GEOGRAPHICAL SPACE. AND FINALLY,
OUR SUPPORT FOR THOSE ENGAGING IN NON-VIOLENT PROTEST IN WASHINGTON
D.C. TODAY IN SUPPORT OF THESE PRINCIPLES AND ACTIONS.
demonstration in San Francisco at the Israeli Consultate to protest
the current violence in the Middle East and in opposition to the
Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Our protest will be
held in support of the same-day protest in Washington D.C. organized
by the Tikkun Community and led by Co-Chairs Rabbi Michael Lerner and
Professor Cornel West. Contemporaneous protests will also take place
in New York and other American cities corresponding to the one we are
holding in San Francisco.
We will meet at the Israeli Consulate this Thursday at Noon at
456 Montgomery Street between Sacramento and California in downtown
San Francisco, where we will hold a press conference during which we
will present officials at the Consulate with the attached DECLARATION
OF BAY AREA JEWS FOR AN END TO THE OCCUPATION AND FOR AN IMMEDIATE
CESSATION OF VIOLENCE IN THE MIDDLE EAST. Although the Declaration
was written by me, it is meant to express the broadly agreed upon
views of the Tikkun Community regarding the need for immediate
international action to end the current violence, and the central
importance of ending the Occupation for the creation of a just peace
in the Middle East. The Declaration emphasizes the unique
responsibility of American Jews in helping to reverse the current
destructive dynamic by breaking down the image of American Jews as a
monolithic block supporting the actions of the Israeli government.
That is why we are asking Jews to be the signers of this declaration,
although we ask everyone supporting peace and the end of the
Occupation to come to the demonstration.
The Declaration is printed below in this message. TO SIGN THE
DECLARATION, CLICK ON "FORWARD" AND SEND TO
wervin [at] pacbell.net WRITING YOUR NAME AND THE CITY WHERE YOU LIVE IN
THE SUBJECT HEADING.
As a follow-up to this demonstration and Declaration, the Tikkun
Community will hold a teach-in on the current crisis on Sunday April
21, from 1:30 p.m. top 6 p.m., at a location to be announced. We
will send another e-mail to you regarding speakers and location
closer to the teach-in, or check on http://www.tikkun.org in the calendar
section.
Please join us on Thursday to support Michael and Cornel's
protest in Washington and to continue the important process of
building a decisive world-wide movement to end the terrible and
tragic current crisis and to bring peace and justice to the Middle
East.
Peter Gabel
Board President and Law Professor, New College of California
Member of the Advisory Board of the Tikkun Community
--------
DECLARATION OF BAY AREA JEWS FOR AN END TO THE OCCUPATION AND AN
IMMEDIATE CESSATION OF VIOLENCE IN THE MIDDLE EAST
The recent violence in the Middle East, including both
suicide bombings in Israel and the Israeli invasion of the Occupied
territories, calls upon the conscience of all American Jews to take a
public stand to try to stop the violence and build an international
movement for a just political resolution to a terrible and unjust
situation that has lasted more than thirty years. This moral
imperative weighs upon Jews especially because to be Jewish means to
be committed to the creation of a just world, not just for Jews but
for everyone. It is we who have said every year for over 3000 years
that we must teach each generation to remember our liberation from
slavery so that the world can be free from the injustice that we
suffered. It is we who have internalized a cultural heritage so
powerfully committed to the ideal of social justice that we have been
disproportionately represented in the struggle of peoples everywhere
for civil rights and human rights. The situation in the Middle East
has now deteriorated to the point that we can no longer remain
silent, whether we want to or not.
The long military Occupation by Israel of lands lived in
by millions of Palestinian people has been a tragedy for both the
Palestinians and the Jews. Apart from the physical brutality of the
Occupation-during which the Israeli army has used American weapons to
kill thousands of Palestinian civilians, to bulldoze their homes and
olive trees, and to make them subject to often random arrest and
beatings-apart from this physical violence carried out in the name of
the Jewish people has been the humiliation of the fundamental dignity
of the Palestinian people. Four generations of Palestinians have now
grown up in refugee camps in impoverished and spiritually degrading
conditions under the boot of a foreign army, deprived by Jews of the
very right to self-determination that itself defines Jewish identity.
Against this simple and stark background, the claim today that the
violence in the Middle East is the result of Yassir Arafat or any
other discrete person or group of persons is absurd. The violence in
the Middle East is the result of injustice-the injustice of a Jewish
Occupation that Jews inside and outside of Israel must now rectify.
We must rectify it or risk the destruction of the spiritual core of
our identity as a people.
We are all too aware of the complexity of feeling that
the current crisis has engendered among concerned and well-meaning
Jews throughout the world. We are in no way saying that the suicide
bombings perpetrated against Israeli civilians are justified, and we
wish that the Palestinian leadership had shown itself capable of
non-violent resistance in the morally transcendent tradition of
Ghandi and King and even Mandela. The suicide bombings that have now
killed hundreds of Israelis, torn apart families, and deeply
frightened the Israeli people are an unjustifiable catastrophe, and
as Jews we feel an identification with the suffering caused by these
bombings with special intensity. A part of some of us even feels
that if the present military invasion stops these almost daily
bombings even temporarily, at least some good will come of it-and we
feel this even though it shames us to want to see our people
protected at the expense of the brutalization of another people.
But it is time for such short-sighted thinking to stop once and for
all. In the entire decade prior to the start of the Occupation in
1967, thirty-seven Israeli civilians were killed in conflicts with
Israel's neighbors; in the last month alone, 120 Israeli civilians
have been killed. The Occupation of Palestinian lands cannot be
justified in the name of the security of Israel-Israel is the fourth
largest military power on earth confronting a largely unarmed and
helpless population. Israel will never be secure so long as it
subjects generations of Palestinian people to a humiliation that will
lead them to commit suicide to try to recover through
counter-violence their collective sense of dignity. Israeli security
can only come ultimately from the achievement of justice for both
Jews and Palestinians, and that can only come from ending the
Occupation and recognizing the equal dignity of the Palestinian
people through the creation and recognition of an independent
Palestinian State.
That process of mutual recognition and grant of equal
dignity must happen now, and American Jews bear a special
responsibility for exerting the pressure that can bring this about.
All Jews are affected in some way by our common history as victims of
irrational hatred and persecution; all of us carry inside us the
traumatic memory of the Holocaust, the knowledge that ordinary people
who happened to be German were willing to participate in the murder
of six million of us simply because we were Jewish. To some extent
this has made us self-protectively attached, and even addicted, to
what the great Judaic scholar Zygmunt Bauman has called "hereditary
victimhood." But the majority of Israeli Jews have become even more
addicted to this victimhood than the rest of us, masking an
internalized legacy of humiliation with a kind of desperate and
prideful nationalism that does not dare see its own inner frailty and
pain and fear and that appears to be justified by the actual dangers
that surround and threaten the Israeli people. It is this addiction,
this need to see themselves as history's permanent and perpetual
victims in order to cover over the unhealed pain of our history of
persecution in general and the Holocaust in particular that blinds
Israel to the fact that it is now the cause of its own insecurity.
It is the violence and injustice of the Occupation itself that is now
by far the most serious threat to Israeli security, inflaming the
rage not only of the Palestinian people but of the masses in the Arab
world, most of whose governments have now clearly indicated, at the
summit of Arab nations held two weeks ago and in spite of the forced
exclusion by Israel of the leader of the Palestinians from that
summit, that they want to live in peace with Israel. Addicted to the
denial of pain and vulnerability of past oppression and ever vigilant
to see the next Holocaust at every turn, Israel itself has become the
inflictor of the humiliation that was once inflicted upon it, and has
as a result created and recreated the unjust conditions that in turn
generate the violent acts that appear to "prove" that its fears are
justified.
Why do American Jews bear a special responsibility for
liberating Israel from this self-destructive cycle? We bear this
responsibility because America is Israel's principal supplier of
military and economic aid and because we have allowed the American
government and the Israeli population to believe that we speak as a
unified voice in support of the necessity of the Occupation in the
name of Israeli security. The appearance that American Jews in
overwhelming numbers support the actions of the State of Israel has
had the effect both of silencing the large number of us who with some
uncertainty and even guilt are opposed to these actions and of
silencing the large number of non-Jews who have been made too guilty
by the fact of the Holocaust to speak out against the Occupation.
Most Americans-Jews and non-Jews-know that the Occupation is unjust
to the Palestinians, self-destructive to Israel, and even ultimately
destructive to the moral integrity and physical security of the
United States. But most also feel unable to speak up, entrapped in
the psychological snare of the history of Jewish oppression.
Because of our unique position, it is we American Jews
who are in the best position to liberate both Israel and America from
this increasingly tragic situation. It is we who must act as the true
conscience of the Jewish people and on behalf of the spiritual core
of Jewish identity by beginning to give voice to our opposition to
the Occupation and all of the terrible consequences, including the
suicide bombings, that the injustice of the Occupation is at the root
of. This means American Jews must be willing not only to sign
declarations like this one in large numbers, not only to engage in
demonstrations or even civil disobedience for those who feel capable
of such militant action, but also to clearly and openly disagree with
other Jewish family members, with members of synagogues and other
Jewish organizations and communities that we may be a part of, and
with Jewish organizations and recognized public spokespersons for the
Jews, all of whom are likely to be sharply critical of our dissenting
views. We must take our stand knowing in our hearts that we are
right, and that many, many American and Israeli Jews agree with us
and need our voices to be heard.
THEREFORE, TODAY, THURSDAY, APRIL 11, 2002, WE BAY AREA JEWS FOR AN
END TO THE OCCUPATION AND AN IMMEDIATE CESSATION OF VIOLENCE IN THE
MIDDLE EAST HEREBY DECLARE;
OUR CALL FOR AN IMMEDIATE CESSATION TO ALL VIOLENCE IN ISRAEL AND PALESTINE;
OUR CALL FOR AN IMMEDIATE END TO THE CURRENT INVASION BY THE ISRAELI
ARMY OF THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES AND A WITHDRAWAL OF ALL ISRAELI
FORCES, TANKS AND OTHER MILITARY EQUIPMENT FROM THESE TERRITORIES.
OUR CALL FOR THE UNITED STATES TO LEAD A UNITED NATIONS INTERNATIONAL
FORCE TO PHYSICALLY SEPARATE THE HOSTILE PARTIES AND ENFORCE AN
IMMEDIATE CEASE-FIRE TO THE BEST OF ITS ABILITY, RECOGNIZING THAT
SOME INTERMITTENT VIOLENT ACTS IN THE SHORT-TERM ARE INEVITABLE AND
ARE NOT JUSTIFICATIONS FOR ABANDONING THIS INTERNATIONALLY IMPOSED
CEASE-FIRE.
OUR CALL FOR THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT TO INSIST UPON AND LEAD
POLITICAL NEGOTIATIONS DESIGNED TO BRING ABOUT, WITH ALL DELIBERATE
SPEED, THE END OF THE OCCUPATION, SECURITY FOR THE STATE OF ISRAEL,
AND THE CREATION OF AN INDEPENDENT PALESTINIAN STATE THAT GUARANTEES
THE RIGHT OF THE PALESTINIANS TO GENUINE SELF-DETERMINATION.
OUR CALL FOR THE INITIATION OF A PROCESS OF HEALING, LED BY U.N.
SECRETARY GENERAL KOFI ANNAN AND MODELLED ON SOUTH AFRICA'S TRUTH AND
RECONCILIATION COMMISSION, AND WITH RECOGNITION OF THE PHYSICAL AND
SPIRITUAL VIOLENCE INFLICTED BY EACH SIDE ON THE OTHER OVER THE
COURSE OF THIS LONG CONFLICT, TO CREATE THE CONDITIONS FOR THE
ISRAELI AND PALESTINIAN PEOPLES TO EVENTUALLY LIVE IN HARMONY AS
SOVEREIGN NATIONS AND MUTUALLY SUPPORTIVE NEIGHBORS OCCUPYING THE
SAME SMALL REGION OF GEOGRAPHICAL SPACE. AND FINALLY,
OUR SUPPORT FOR THOSE ENGAGING IN NON-VIOLENT PROTEST IN WASHINGTON
D.C. TODAY IN SUPPORT OF THESE PRINCIPLES AND ACTIONS.
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"Are you sure you want to do that?"
I turn and look at my Israeli coworker, puzzled. She is concerned and caring, her eyebrows are furrowed with slight worry -- as if she's not sure I understand.
"What?" I ask, "Go to the shuk?"
She nods.
Arrrrrrrrrghh. Not her too.
Over the past two weeks, more than 200 Israelis have managed to survive an attack but with injuries of varying degree. Some are still in the hospital fighting for their lives; others are recovering from shock; others are facing life without an arm or leg or both, injuries that will vastly affect them every day of the rest of their lives. All of them will carry on their bodies the physical scars the terrorists are trying to inflict on an entire nation.
And that is why I refuse to be scared.
My concerned colleague is expressing a certain reality that we face: There are people -- a lot of them -- who are quite good at killing and maiming Jews who live in Israel. And they like to find places -- like the shuk's open-air market -- that are crowded with civilians. More blood for their bang, in essence.
Israeli security forces and plain Israelis produce miracle after miracle and stop attackers in their tracks through elaborate intelligence operations or simply snatching wires out of a bomb about to explode. But even if they thwart 90 percent of the would-be killers, it only takes one bomber to slip through.
This is what we live with.
But we also live with this knowledge: The actual deaths and maimings are merely a means to end.
Yes, the streets in Nablus and Ramallah predictably fill with dancing after each attack, and today, Hizbullah's leader, Sheik Nasrallah, called for the "rivers of blood" to continue. (Ironic, isn't it, that "hizbullah" means "party of God." God must find that really irritating.)
But I don't think they rejoice over spilling our blood nearly as much as they rejoice over the fear they put in our hearts.With terrorism, the killing is secondary. They want us to feel fear.
Do they want us dead? Yes, undoubtedly, but they know they're not going to kill all 5 million of us. But by slaughtering a few hundred and mutilating a few thousand more (in the space of a year or two), they can traumatize an entire nation. That's why it's called "terrorism." The killing is secondary: They want us to feel fear.
They want us afraid to go to a coffeehouse, afraid to go to the mall. They want us afraid to take a walk by the beach, or to get a slice of pizza. They want to make us prisoners in our own home. (And by "home," I mean not just our houses or apartments, but Israel: our Home.)
They want our American relatives and friends afraid to come visit.
My roommate is getting married in a few months. In addition to picking out her wedding dress and the menu, she now has to consider which wedding hall has the best security. After all, they've been targeting bat mitzvahs and bachelorette parties. Do we recognize the world we live in?
The people who do this clearly misunderstand something about the Jewish people. Yes, they are traumatizing us. We feel deeply, profoundly the deaths and the maiming of our brothers and sisters. At times, I find myself feeling guilty for laughing at a friend's joke. What can possibly make me chuckle two days after five teenagers were gunned down while listening to a Torah lecture (last Thursday night, in Atzmona)?
But weeping and mourning does not make me fearful; it does not make me want to leave my home. If anything, it makes me more resolute than ever. I loathe Israel's semi-socialist infrastructure, knotted with bureaucracy and waste, and the economy is in shambles. (The terrorists did much of that, too, by knocking out the tourism industry and much of the hitech investment.) Plus, I am a proud American -- proud to come from the nation I believe to be the most free, the most efficient, and perhaps the most just country in the world. But Israel is my country.Every time a bomb goes off, I feel more and more the pride and privilege of being here.
Every time a bomb goes off, I feel more and more the pride and privilege of being here.
I used to work in Jerusalem's Old City: My "commute" included walking alongside those famous walls through the Jaffa Gate. And, many mornings, the commute moved me to tears.
"What on earth did I do right to deserve this?" I would marvel silently to myself. For 100 generations, Jews have longed for Zion and yearned to glimpse Jerusalem. Some of the greatest Jews who ever lived only dreamed of the privilege of being buried in the Land of Israel! And me? I get to live here.
And live I will.
I grew up hearing the maxim that one does not negotiate with terrorists. It's like giving in to a spoiled child -- it only teaches them to want more. Of course, I don't hold any political power and, truth be told, I don't know what decisions I would make if I did. But I know that I feel a tremendous sense of power by refusing to allow them to control my life, by refusing to allow them to scare me away from living my life.
Today, I got an e-mail from a friend saying that he is organizing a "sit-in" of sorts -- a large group of people are going to go sit in coffee houses in the nearly abandoned restaurant districts. In the war of terror, the cafes are the front lines.
This is the pioneering spirit re-imagined for the new millennium. Where brave souls once drained swamps and cleared fields, we now sit in cafes. And in the war of terror, that's the front lines.
Those who seek to turn our bodies into tributaries for Sheik Nasrallah's rivers of blood know us better than we sometimes know ourselves. They couldn't care less about the arbitrary distinctions and schisms to which we pay so much heed. The boys they shot during a Torah lecture were going to school in a "settlement." The mothers they blew up next to a Jerusalem synagogue were ultra-Orthodox. The people in the chic cafe were paragons of the secular left. Russian immigrants outside the Dolphinarium, Ethiopian border police, Americans ex-pats; Sephardi grandmothers. To them, we are all the same: Jews.
I realize this is nothing new.
The Haggadah tells us: In every age, they have risen against us to annihilate us. But in every generation God saved us from their hands.
"Do you really want to go to the shuk?" she asks me.
I think of a passage from Psalms: "O God, fight my adversaries, battle those who do battle with me. Take hold of shield and armor and rise up in my defense. And draw the spear, and bar the way before my pursuers; say to my soul, 'I am your salvation.'"
In the meantime, I'm going to the shuk.
This is his eyewitness account:
I had arrived in Ramallah at about 10:30 in the morning and was getting into a taxi on the main road to go to Nablus, where there was to be a funeral that I wanted to film, when all of a sudden there came a big crowd of Palestinians shouting and running down the hill from the police station.
I got out of the car to see what was happening and saw that they were dragging something behind them. Within moments they were in front of me and, to my horror, I saw that it was a body, a man they were dragging by the feet. The lower part of his body was on fire and the upper part had been shot at, and the head beaten so badly that it was a pulp, like red jelly.
I thought he was a soldier because I could see the remains of khaki trousers and boots. My God, I thought, they've killed this guy. He was dead, he must have been dead, but they were still beating him, madly, kicking his head. They were like animals.
They were just a few feet in front of me and I could see everything. Instinctively, I reached for my camera. I was composing the picture when I was punched in the face by a Palestinian. Another Palestinian pointed right at me shouting "no picture, no picture!" while another guy hit me in the face and said "give me your film!"
I tried to get the film out but they were all grabbing me and one guy just pulled the camera off me and smashed it to the floor. I knew I had lost the chance to take the photograph that would have made me famous and I had lost my favorite lens that I'd used all over the world, but I didn't care. I was scared for my life.
At the same time, the guy that looked like a soldier was being beaten and the crowd was getting angrier and angrier, shouting "Allah akbar" -- God is great. They were dragging the dead man around the street like a cat toying with a mouse. It was the most horrible thing that I have ever seen and I have reported from Congo, Kosovo, many bad places. In Kosovo, I saw Serbs beating an Albanian but it wasn't like this. There was such hatred, such unbelievable hatred and anger distorting their faces.
The worst thing was that I realised the anger that they were directing at me was the same as that which they'd had toward the soldier before dragging him from the police station and killing him. Somehow I escaped and ran and ran not knowing where I was going. I never saw the other guy they killed, the one they threw out of the window.
I thought that I'd got to know the Palestinians well. I've made six trips this year and had been going to Ramallah every day for the past 16 days. I thought they were kind, hospitable people. I know they are not all like this and I'm a very forgiving person but I'll never forget this. It was murder of the most barbaric kind. When I think about it, I see that man's head, all smashed. I know that I'll have nightmares for the rest of my life.
http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/History/irgun.html