My Errors

Dear Companions in the great struggle for a spiritually rooted world of eco/social justice, peace, and compassion — and for a Jewish people that sees itself as an instrument of the Interbreathing Spirit of life to work for that world.

My first response last Monday to the horrendous attack by Hamas on Israel held serious errors as well as profound truths.

I had been engaged all of the holy-day weekend during the attack in conversation, prayer, and song with a group of old and deep friends, with no access to news of the attack. The most serious error in my response was that I had no idea and no expression of the way it was carried out to deliberately target civilians — men and women who were clearly non-combatants, among them the very young and the very old.

That led to my assuming this attack, even as violent as it was, was similar to the attacks by Israeli armed forces on Gaza. It was not the same, not even similar. Over the years and decades there had been repeated outright wars that killed Palestinian civilians, often children. There had been years of blockade, semi-starvation, crippled levels of medical treatment. And recently, a blur of worsening pogroms by Israeli settlers supported by the Army and by the Army itself against Palestinian villages and towns on the occupied West Bank and against neighborhoods in East Jerusalem.

It may well be that these decades of subjugation had created deep trauma among Palestinians.

As I absorbed corroborated details of the attack, many of my early assumptions were blown away. Part of the shock and horror that arose in the Israeli and Diaspora Jewish worlds was, I think, the vanished veil of lazy comfort in assumed invulnerability. But part was revulsion at the levels and kinds of violence.

At the same time, I think there were important truths in my letter. One was my retelling of the biblical tale of the key assertion by a Messenger of YHWH that the Breath of life did not support the war plans of either Joshua’s folk or their enemies in Canaan.

Even more important was and is my deep concern that just as Joshua shrugged off the Messenger’s “No!” and proceeded to work genocide on the city of Jericho, so our modern Joshua, Netanyahoo, would prepare for near-genocide in Gaza. The strategy proclaimed by the Minister of Defense, “No electricity, no fuel, no food, no water” bore me out.

I also worried that as violent as was the attack itself, Israeli politicians in power would make statements calculated to boil more blood and shed more blood. Netanyahoo soon confirmed my concern by charging rape had been used as part of the attack. But the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) says, as reported in the Forward, that it has no evidence to support the charge of rape. Mr. Netanyahoo's history of racism, authoritarianism, and corrupt use of his own power to increase his power should have called forth deep doubt from all of us, including such politicians as Mr. Biden, as to its uncorroborated “truth.”

Even if the “rape” charge is proved to be a lie, that does not detract from the heinous quality of other acts of the Hamas invaders. I apologize – seek to do Tshuvah – for my leap into mistakes about those heinous deeds.

And as fantastical as the idea seems now, I repeat my two urgent beliefs about the future:

Jews as well as all other people of spiritual and ethical commitment must insist that the Netanyahoo government’s ravaging of Gaza must end and must demand that Hamas release the Israeli hostages it has taken, unharmed. Not as a deal, but because YHWH / Allah demands both acts.

And there must be a demand from all of us that every government involved join in public Tshuvah, Tawba, Repentance from its automatic invocation of worsening war as the response to every challenge.

Blessings of shalom to you, and blessings that all our friends and family in Israel or in occupied Palestine are safe in dignity

— Arthur