Contact
your government and tell them to endorse a cease fire and give
humanitarian aid to Palestine. In so-called Canada you can
call the office of the Prime Minister: 613-992-4211 or email:
justin.trudeau@parl.gc.ca
You can also contact the Canadian Ambassador to the United
Nations (Rob Rae) and ask why they haven't been supporting a
ceasefire. Phone: 212-848-1100 or Email:
canada.un@international.gc.ca
Learn about the history, find your place within it, and take
action. Recognize that global powers like America, Canada and
Britain are far bigger terrorists than any Arabic nations are.
And while we're talking about Palestine, we should also be
talking about: Indigenous land rights and sovereignty, Yemen,
Tigray, Sudan, Congo, Myanmar, Tibet, Syria, Venezuela,
Xinjiang, CAR, Burkina Faso and all oppression happening
globally.
In the ruins of Jenin, an old friend of mine is digging bodies
out of the rubble where Israeli bulldozers flattened houses,
burying people alive. Blackened, maggot riddened corpses,
unearthed from the rubble, are displayed to anguished
relatives for identification. A teenage girl unearths an
infant's arm and wonders what to do with it. A Palestinian
father cries over the dark smears of flesh that once were his
two little daughters. Another Jewish friend leaves an
anguished message on my cell phone: "I'm in downtown
Washington DC. There's a huge, pro-Israel rally going on. I
don't understand it. How can Jews support this? I know you
must have something inspirational to say. Send me what you
write."
She doesn't know that for weeks I've been trying
unsuccessfully to write something about the situation. I'm
overwhelmed with accounts of the atrocities. Yet I am also
haunted by images of bodies shattered at a Seder meal, at a
café, a Passover drenched in a new plague of blood. I'm
frightened and saddened by the real resurgence of
anti-Semitism, by swastikas carried in peace marches,
synagogues attacked.
A third friend, a deeply spiritual woman and longtime
ecofeminist ally, sends me a copy of a letter she wrote to
President Bush entitled, "Standing Firmly With Israel."
In no way can I stand with her. And yet I cannot simply stand
against her, either.
I cannot stand with an Israel that tortures prisoners, an
Israel that has mounted a restrictive and dehumanizing
occupation, that assassinates political leaders as a matter of
policy, that has cut down ancient olive groves to destroy the
livelihood of the Palestinians, that is daily committing war
crimes: refusing medical care to the wounded, firing on
journalists and peace demonstrators, bombing civilians,
destroying homes. Nor can I stand in the bloody remains of the
Seder meal, among the corpses in the café, the restaurant. Yet
to say, "both sides are wrong, both sides should give up
violence" is to ignore the reality that one side, the Israeli
side, is the fourth largest military power in the world. That
the suicide bombs are a direct response to calculated
political assassinations and to a brutal occupation that has
made life untenable for the Palestinians. That for over fifty
years, the State of Israel has failed to guard and cherish the
Palestinians' rights, aspirations, and hopes for an
independence that could lead to peace and prosperity.
It is, on the one hand, incomprehensible to me that my friend
could stand with such a regime, that the Jewish community as a
whole, composed of people I know to be caring, compassionate
and good, can stand behind the tanks, the bombs, the
brutality.
On the other hand, I understand quite well the wrenching
emotional journey that many Jews must make to admit the
reality of what Israel is doing. For those of us who grew up
saving our pennies to plant trees in the Galil, who, snowbound
in blizzards, celebrated the New Year of the Trees timed to
the blossoming of almonds in the Judean hills, who ended every
Seder with the prayer "Next year in Jerusalem," no other issue
is so painful and sad.
I am a Jew who has spent her adult life as a voice for a
different religion, a blatant Pagan whose spirituality is
attuned to the Goddess of regeneration, not the God of my
fathers. To Orthodox Jews, I'm a heretic, which gives me a
certain freedom to say what I think. I was born into, raised
in and acculturated by the post-war Jewish community, but I
have not been immersed in that world for many years. I speak
from the margins of the Jewish community. But I am still a
Jew, and the view from the edge can sometimes be clearer than
that from the center.
The San Francisco Chronicle writes a front page story about a
school in Gaza where little Palestinian children are taught to
hate Jews. I have no reason to doubt the truth of their story,
although I question why they feature it front and center with
no counterbalancing tale of, say, the International Solidarity
Movement where Palestinians and Jews together risk themselves
in nonviolent interventions for peace. The hate is real, and
the fear it engenders is also real. Yet the story makes me
consider what I was taught in ten or more years of Jewish
education that included a teenaged summer spent on a kibbutz.
We never chanted, "Kill the Arabs". We were never told in so
many words, ‘Hate them.' Rather, we learned a more subtle
discounting, a not-seeing, as if the Palestinians were not
full human beings but rather a minor obstacle to the
fulfillment of a dream, something to be moved aside, that
didn't really count.
We were taught to be proud of the brave Zionist settlers and
pioneers, the idealistic youth who fled the ghettoes and the
pogroms of Europe to build a ‘new' land. And I am proud,
still, of their experiments in new ways of living, their
awareness of women's rights, their courage in leaving home and
family to escape oppression. But I understand now that they
did not come into an empty place, and they did not come with
the capability of truly seeing and respecting and honoring the
people of the land. They came out of a Europe that had an
unshakeable belief in its own cultural and racial superiority
and had for centuries been appropriating the lands of darker
peoples.
They came as the settlers came to the "New World", saying,
"This land is ours by right, God gave it to us," The people
who had lived there during those two thousand years of exile
were an impediment. And so began the long litany of
justifications: that the land didn't really belong to them but
to the Turks or the British; that they weren't doing anything
with it, had not made the desert bloom nor drained the swamps,
and above all, that they hate us, are raised to hate us, with
a hate irrational, implacable, and unchangeable.
The word for this sliding off of the glance, this NonSeeing,
is racism. Less blatant, perhaps, than chanting "Kill, kill!"
but with the same insidious results.
Yet to simply condemn Zionism as racism without acknowledging
the context of centuries of racial hate against Jews from
which it arose is to absolve those who have blood on their
hands as well. Worse, it is to support the complacency of Jew
haters and fascists who now emerge into the open again. Israel
has indeed served the interests of the Western powers in
subjugating the Arab world. But Israel also arose out of an
oppressed people's dream of liberation. To discount the
oppression, to deny the strength and the beauty of the dream
of a homeland, is to miss the full tragedy of what is
happening now. Unless we understand the dream, we cannot truly
comprehend the nightmare.
I know what Israel meant during my childhood in the fifties,
to my family still reeling in shock from the revelations of
the gas chambers and the ovens, still searching for news of
lost relatives. Israel was the restitution for all the losses
of the Holocaust. It was the thing that restored some meaning
and some hope into a world utterly shattered by evil. It was
the proof that Jews were not just passive victims but actors
on the screen of history, capable of fighting back, of taking
charge of our own destiny. It was the one safe place, the
refuge in a hostile world.
And for some, it was the answer to the anguished question,
"How can I believe in God in a world in which such things can
happen?" To acknowledge the truth of what Israel is now doing
is to face a grief so deep and overwhelming that it seems to
suck away all hope, is to gasp again in the suffocation
chambers, to cover our faces with the ashes from the ovens and
know that there is no redemption, no silver lining, no happy
ending, no good and noble thing that emerged to give dignity
to these deaths. There is only the terrible cycle, of victims
becoming victimizers, the abused perpetuating abuse. It is to
look down and see the whip in our own hands, the jackboots on
our own feet.
"Don't make the Nazi connection," a Jewish peace group warns.
"It only feeds the right wing."
And yet the Nazi connection begs to be made.
It is true that the Israelis have not built extermination
camps. It is true, although not immediately relevant, that
other people in the world besides Jews have done and are doing
bad things. Other atrocities occur daily. But it is also true
that to attempt to erase a people, to destroy their culture,
livelihood, and pride, is genocide.
A wan young woman, looking depressed, wanders through the
Justice for Palestine rally, carrying a sign that says: "My
father survived Auschwitz. His parents didn't. Orphaned, he
fled to Israel."
Part of the horror of Jenin lies in her father's new kinship
to the teenaged boy dug alive out of the rubble of his house
where his parents and brothers and sisters now lie dead.
That parallel is a dark mirror that reveals how easily we
become what we most despise. If we look into it open eyed, we
face truths so painful they make it hardly bearable to be
human. For this is not just about Jews and Germans, Israelis
and Palestinians, not about how any one people is prone to
evil. It's about us all. The capacity for cruelty, for
inflicting horrific harm, exists in us all. All we need is to
feel threatened, and to let our fear define our enemy as less
than fully human, and the horrors of hell are unleashed.
If we don't like the Nazi parallel, we must refuse to become
Nazis. We must remember that the Nazis played on the German
sense of deprivation and loss after World War One, and admit
that our own real victimization has not elevated us to some
realm of purity and eternal innocence. We can grow beyond the
propaganda we were taught and the myths of our childhood and
the comfort of our chosenness, and see the Palestinians as the
full human beings that they are. Even if to do so seems to
require us to walk out again into the wilderness with no
outstretched hand nor hope of a promised land to guide us.
For if we admit the Palestinians' full humanity, if we admire
their knowledge and appreciate their culture and cherish their
children, then all the justifications of conquest fall away.
No God, no superior virtue or inherent right, has granted us
dominion. We have the land because we were able to take it.
And while that admission might seem to threaten Israel's very
right to exist, it is not nearly as much of a threat as
clinging to the justifications and rationalizations that
prevent us from seeing the Other as human.
For full human beings placed in a situation of utter despair
may turn to suicide bombs and retribution. Human beings,
humilated beyond bearing, may turn to revenge. But full human
beings are not mindless agents of hate. Given hope and dignity
and a future to live for, human beings will tend to choose
life. And full human beings can be reasoned with, bargained
with, made peace with.
The wilderness, the desert, has always been the place where
our people have heard the still, small voice of God.
Religion is supposed to call us away from our most brutal
possibilities, to challenge us to act from compassion and
love. Right now in the Middle East, religion is not doing its
job.
I know well that to equate the actions of the Israeli
government with Judaism is to risk feeding anti-Semitism and
to erase the great spectrum of political and spiritual
diversity that exists in the world Jewish community. And yet
the question of Israel cannot be separated from Judaism. Our
prayers for rain are timed to coincide with cloudbursts over
the Sea of Galilee. We count the ‘omer', the successive
gathering in of the harvest from ancient fields bordering the
Jordan. Fundamentalist Jews have established the contested
settlements in the Occupied Territories and resist any
concessions to the Palestinians. And the mainstream Jewish
community stands firmly behind the Israeli government's rule
of force.
The current crisis represents a great spiritual crisis within
Judaism. I write as an admitted heretic, yet it's clear to me
that the Orthodoxies of all three Great Religions, along with
atheists, pragmatists and secularists of many political
persuasions, are embroiled in a blasphemy that far outweighs
any naked dancing around a bonfire. They are united in the
worship of the God of Force.
The God of Force says that force is the ultimate answer to
every dilemma, the resolution of every conflict, the ‘only
thing they understand.' The God of Force makes His appearances
in the Old and New Testament, the Koran, and other sacred and
secular scriptures. The God of Force licenses his agents to
kill, unleashes the holy war, the jihad, the crusade, the
inquisition. The God of Force says, "Go unto the land and kill
all the inhabitants thereof."
Now, I'm a polytheist. I recognize many Powers, many
constellations of energies and forces in the universe, that
arise from a deep interconnectedness and unity but have their
own flavors, characters and names. One advantage of being a
polytheist is that you can choose your gods or goddesses,
acknowledging that bloodthirsty and cruel powers exist, but
turning resolutely away from them. When God tells you to
commit some horrific atrocity, you have somewhere to go for a
second opinion. But monotheism is, of course, the heart and
essence of Judaism as it is of Islam and Christianity. I
submit that the God of Force is incompatible with the oneness
of God. For if God is one, s/he must by definition be God of
All, not of any one people exclusively. He cannot
simultaneously encourage callousness and cruelty and be Christ
the God of Love, Allah the Merciful, or El Maleh Rahamim, God
Who is Filled with Compassion. And if he chooses a people, he
does it in the same spirit in which my partner confides to
each of his four daughters that she is his favorite.
The current situation is a call both to God and to us to
evolve. Judaism has always had within it a tradition of
wrestling with God, as Jacob did with the angel, of arguing
with God, as Abraham did when God wanted to destroy Sodom and
Gomorrah. To see God as fixed, eternally and unchangingly
rigid is indeed to worship a graven image. Instead, we might
see God as a dynamic process in which we are cocreators of the
world we inhabit. We are actively engaged in shaping who God
becomes.
We are commanded not to make images of God because our human
imaginations are always limited and will reproduce our own
faults and lacks and prejudices. God the General, God the
Ruler, God the King, God the Distributor of Real Estate, God
the Avenger, God of Holy War, God of Punishment, Retribution
and Revenge, God Who Favors One People Above All Others, may
in reality be that very idol, that truncated image, we are
told to turn from. The worst heresy of all may be to limit our
conception of the great force of compassion that underlies the
world.
Judaism can march lockstep with the Israeli authorities deeper
into the domain of force. Israel could conceivably exterminate
the Palestinians utterly, and that is the trend of the current
policies. Nothing less will crush their aspirations for
independence and freedom. A Jewish community that supported
that final solution would lose its soul and any claim to moral
authority. An Israel that carried out the genocide would be no
fit homeland for any person of conscience. The dream of Israel
would become an utter and complete horror show. And genocide
would not bring security to Israel: it would simply inflame
the hatred of the entire Arab world and jettison the rest of
the world's support. Given all the nuclear weapons floating
around in the Middle East, that road is likely to lead
straight to the fulfillment of Christian prophecies of
apocalypse.
One of the agonies in the current crisis is that nobody seems
to have much hope or vision of how to resolve it. We can see
where the road leads, but we don't know how to step off of it.
"If only the Palestinians would practice nonviolence, embrace
the principles of Gandhi and King," I hear from some of my
Jewish allies.
Of course, there are Palestinians, and Israelis, and many
others who have stepped forward to be a nonviolent presence in
refugee camps, who have accompanied ambulances and attempted
to deliver medical supplies, who have written their own
eyewitness accounts and spoken their truth.
But I find myself thinking "Wouldn't it be quicker if Gandhi
or King reappeared among the Israeli leadership and their
supporters? Are they not in an even better position to change
this situation?"
If the Israeli leadership were to abandon the idea that force
will resolve this conflict in any positive way whatsoever, the
solution becomes stunningly, obviously clear. Any mind not
clouded by fear or hate or self righteousness or utter
religious certainty can see it in ten minutes of serious
thought:
The Palestinians need their own state. And it needs to be a
viable, coherent state with the potential for prosperity and
beauty, not a Bantustan, not a few scraps of unwanted land the
Israelis have decided to discard. A Palestine of milk and
honey, of bread and roses, of the vine and the fig tree, of
olive groves and red anemones, of health clinics and
universities, of a new renaissance of Arabic culture, science,
learning and art. Anything less will be an eternal festering
sore, and there will be no peace.
An Israel that gave up the delusion that force will win all of
Israel's demands while conceding the Palestinians nothing
might recognize that a flourishing and happy Palestine would
be Israel's best security measure, might even become her
closest trading partner, best friend. Such a Palestine would
offer its youth a better future than becoming human bombs. It
is utterly in the best interests of Israel to nourish and
support and foster the creation of the Palestinian state, to
be surrounded by friends instead of enemies. And while that
might seem impossible at the moment, consider the friendly
relations between the U.S. and our former deadly enemies,
Germany and Japan.
Those who love and care for Israel need to stand with her true
interests now, by demanding an end to the occupation, the
dismantling of the settlements, by calling for the
intervention of a neutral, peacekeeping force, and by
pressuring the United States government to stop covertly
supporting and funding Israeli aggression.
The grip of the God of Force is strong, so strong that even
though we can clearly see what the solution might be, we may
despair at actually bringing it about. To pry that grip loose,
we need to use all the tools of political activism, from
writing letters and making phone calls to demonstrating, doing
nonviolent civil disobedience, or even joining the peace
witnesses on the front lines.
On a spiritual level, we can look into the dark mirror that
reveals our own prejudices and reject them. We can believe
that the force of intelligent, embodied love, as feminist
thealogian Carol Christ describes the Goddess, is indeed
stronger than stupid, disembodied hate.
One last Pagan heresy is the belief that we can prod a
sluggish God into producing a miracle or two, by performing an
action with conscious, focused intention.
So, as a spell for peace, make peace with someone you think
you can't make peace with. Notice what resistance arises even
at the thought, how you build your case against your enemy,
how you marshall your allies and ready your weapons. Note what
it takes to give them up, what you must sacrifice and what you
gain.
Maybe, in this process, we can all learn something. Maybe we
can begin a turning, a transformation that will leave the God
of Force starved of his blood sacrifices and burnt offerings,
and feed gentler fruit to a kinder God. So that the children
of Israel and Palestine can both grow up to enrich the land
not by the blood of corpses but by the songs of poets, the
works of artists, the healing of doctors, the fruit of
farmers, the knowledge of teachers, the wisdom of mystics. And
this corner of land, battleground for so many years, might
become for all people a place of refuge, vision and hope. --
Starhawk, April 28, 2002
Copyright (c) 2002 by Starhawk. All rights reserved. This
copyright protects Starhawk's right to future publication of
her work. Nonprofit, activist, and educational groups may
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change any part of it without permission. Readers are invited
to visit the web site: www.starhawk.org. Thoughts on
Israel/Palestine
http://starhawk.org/activism/activism-writings/israel_palestine/heresies.html