Israel does not intentionally target civilians, but it has full reason to know that its targets will inevitably kill huge numbers of civilians. We who rejected the excuse that Viet Cong were hiding in Vietnamese villages as the rationale for U.S. forces to wipe out hundreds of such villages and ultimately cause millions of Vietnamese deaths in the Vietnam war will not accept a similar rationale for what is a de facto Israeli war on Palestinian civilians. Fine, destroy tunnels potentially used to infiltrate Israel; but it is a crime against humanity to destroy housing compounds, schools, and hospitals.
In my book Embracing Israel/Palestine (www.tikkun.org/eip) I argue that both Israelis and Palestinians are victims of post-traumatic stress disorder. I have a great deal of compassion for both peoples. Members of the Jewish people have been the victims of 1,600 years of oppression in European countries and hundreds of years of apartheid-like conditions in Muslim countries. We have faced a world that mostly refused to help us or open its doors to us as refugees when we were the victims of genocide.
The traumas of that past still shape the consciousness of many Jews today. Jews deserve compassion and need healing. Similarly, the Palestinian people's expulsion from their homes in the process of the founding of the State of Israel, remembered as Al Nakba (the great catastrophe), continues to shape the consciousness of many Palestinians 66 years later. But those traumas don't exonerate Israel's behavior or that of Hamas, though they are relevant for those of us seeking a path to social healing and transformation.
Yet that healing is impossible until those who are victims of PTSD are willing to work on overcoming it.
And this is precisely where the American Jewish community and Jews around the world have taken a turn that is disastrous -- turning the Israeli nation state into "the Jewish state" and making Israel into an idol to be worshiped rather than a political entity like any other political entity, with strengths and deep flaws, a political entity which should be held to account for its systematic violations of human rights.
Sadly, too many Jews relate to Israel not as a state but as some holy reality. Despairing of spiritual salvation after God failed to show up and save us from the Holocaust, increasing numbers of Jews have abandoned the religion of compassion and identification with the most oppressed that was championed by our Biblical prophets. Instead, they've come to worship power and to rejoice in Israel's ability to become the most militarily powerful state in the Middle East.
If a Jew today goes into any synagogue in the United States or around the world and says, "I don't believe in God or Torah and I don't follow the commandments," most will still welcome her in and urge her to become involved. But if the same person says, "I don't support the State of Israel," she is likely to be labeled a "self-hating Jew" or an anti-Semite to be scorned and dismissed. As Aaron said of the golden calf in the desert, "These are your Gods, O Israel." The idolatrous view that God is working through the Israel Defense Forces has led some Jews to believe that this powerful army is "the most moral army on earth," and no amount of senseless killing of civilians breaks through this religious worship.
The worship of the state makes it necessary for Jews to turn Judaism into an auxiliary of ultra-nationalist blindness. Every act of the State of Israel against the Palestinian people is seen as sanctioned by God. Each Sabbath Jews in synagogues around the world are offered prayers for the well-being of the State of Israel but not for our Arab cousins. The very suggestion that we should be praying as well for the Palestinian people's welfare is seen as heresy and proof of being "self-hating Jews."
The worship of power is precisely what Judaism came into being to challenge. We were the slaves, the powerless, and though the Torah talks of God using a strong arm to redeem the Israelites from Egyptian slavery, it simultaneously insists, over and over again, that when Jews go into their promised land in Canaan (now Palestine) they must "love the stranger/the other," have only one law for the stranger and for the native born, and warns "do not oppress the stranger/the other."
Remember, Torah reminds us, "that you were strangers/the other in the land of Egypt" and "you know the heart of the stranger." Later sources in Judaism even insist that a person without compassion who claims to be Jewish cannot be considered Jewish. A spirit of generosity is so integral to Torah consciousness that when Jews are told to let the land lie fallow once every seven years (the societal-wide Sabbatical Year), they must allow that which grows spontaneously from past plantings to be shared with the other/the stranger.
The Jews are not unique in this. The basic reality is that most of humanity has always heard a voice inside themselves telling them that the best path to security and safety is to love others and show generosity, and a counter voice that tells us that the only path to security is domination and control over others. This struggle between the voice of fear and the voice of love, the voice of domination/power-over and the voice of compassion, and empathy and generosity, have played out throughout history and shape contemporary political debates around the world.
Almost every single one of us hears both voices. We are often torn between them, oscillating in our communal policies and our personal behavior between these two worldviews and ways of engaging others.
As the competitive and me-first ethos of the capitalist marketplace has grown increasingly powerful and reflected in the culture and worldviews of the contemporary era, more and more people bring the worldview of fear, domination, and manipulation of others into personal lives, teaching people the rationality of the marketplace with its injunction to see other human beings primarily in terms of how they can serve their own needs, rather than as deserving care and respect just for who they are.
This ethos has weakened friendships and created the instability in family life that the Right has so effectively manipulated (a theme I develop most fully in my 2006 national best-seller The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right, based on a study I conducted during my years as a psychotherapist and principal investigator of an National Institute of Mental Health study of stress and the psycho-dynamics of daily life in Western societies).
Every religious and secular worldview, including Marxism, feminism, liberalism, psychoanalysis, and the various ideologies that predominate in universities hiding under the guise of a pseudo-scientism, has had partisans of both worldviews contending with each other -- because every religion and secular worldview reflects this conflict within the psyche of the human beings who have articulated them.
No wonder that Jews and Judaism have had these conflicting streams within our religion as well. Those compilers of the Torah who heard God's voice commanding the Israelites to wipe out the inhabitants of the promised land in order to start afresh were explained away some 2,000 years ago by subsequent interpreters who emphasized that those peoples referenced in Torah no longer existed, so the command to love the "other" was the only relevant guide for our lives as Jews. Yet, subsequent generations facing the frequent assaults on Jews by majority populations in the Diaspora found it hard to keep the command to "love the stranger/other."
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