From Tears of Grief To Wellsprings of Transformation
Dear companions,
The last several days and for many, this whole week, has been treated by many Jews and others as shloshim — thirty days to mourn both the Israeli and Palestinian war dead.
We think it time to begin turning our tears of grief for the Israel-Gaza War into a wellspring of creativity for peace. We must explore what the War poses for the future, including the dangers — physical and spiritual — it poses to American Arab and Muslim and American-Jewish communities.
We can imagine that Hamas came to the conclusion that life in Gaza has been so close to intolerable that it was worth taking the risk of a swift, bold, brutal, and by most standards criminal and atrocious attack on Israeli civilians and soldiers. Hamas seems to have expected that such an attack would do a great deal to unhinge their enemy.
As of one month ago, just before the Hamas attack, it looked as if a small majority of Israeli Jews, acting through months of huge street demonstrations and other acts of civil disobedience, were denouncing their government as corrupt, and anti-democratic, a threat to Israeli society.
Among American Jews, that opinion was being held by more and more people. Among those who held it, there were more than in Israel who spoke explicitly connecting the anti-democratic plans of the Netanyahu-plus-racist-Kahaneist regime with the Occupation, the expansion of the settler system on the West Bank, blind eyes (at best) by the State to settler pogroms against Palestinians, and the prevention of a two-state peace settlement.
The overwhelming response among Israeli Jews to the Hamas attack was a chorus of rage and a call for revenge. Among some Israelis there were public urgings for caution not to carry out a massive attack on civilians in Gaza. About 100 Israelis were arrested for speaking out along those lines.
Among American Jews, many more called for a cease fire and many welcomed arrest in calling for a cease fire.
Among most Israeli and many American Jews, there was a second response to the Hamas attack: shocked disbelief at how Israeli intelligence was utterly incompetent in having no forewarning. The N Y Times did a special investigation of that blindness. Its report concluded that arrogant contempt for Hamas and obsession with Iran as Israel’s great enemy was responsible.
(See details in the NY Times at — https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/29/world/middleeast/israel-intelligence-hamas-attack.html. Also available at — https://news.yahoo.com/years-israeli-failures-hamas-led-115616625.html)
So the blind arrogance of a sitting government gives birth to blind un-intelligence. But that is not the only danger the State of Israel faces. The normal alternative to an incompetent government is the parliamentary opposition. But If the parliamentary "opposition" is a wishy-washy-squishy amalgam of the same contempt for the Palestinian people and for Islam mixed with no determination to grasp power and shape a different policy, then there follows a supine willingness to follow the incompetents into war.
And if you have a pro-democracy Resistance movement that is afraid to say the Truth that democracy for Jews is a hoax unless it includes democracy for Palestinians and struggles nonviolently for both, then you feed among Palestinians — and probably among Israelis — a blind and atrocity-addicted band of killers. The longer such violence continues, the more likely will be antisemitic and Islamophobic outbursts.
Over the next generation, this means choosing between a succession of more and more nearly genocidal wars — or a negotiated peace.
Because Israel has much more power than the stateless Palestinian people, it ought to take the initiative for a binational peace. Yet because it has more power, it is less likely to take the initiative.
This leaves an important role to the Jewish, Arab, and Muslim communities in the United States. For both the sake that Israel and Palestine can thrive and for the sake of our own safety and our own spiritual intentions to be peoples of peace, can we choose to act — not only for the sake of each of our peoples separately, but for peace between us?
Salaam and Shalom,
Arthur