Category Archives: Palestine

The Sick Slandering of NIF

In my last post I addressed the sliming of J Street. I’m so sorry to report on yet another slanderous campaign against a respectable Jewish organization.

The New Israel Fund, a institution that has long supported social justice efforts in Israel is now being viciously attacked by a right-wing ultra-nationalist group called Im Tirtzu (a shadow organization that apparently has connections to Christian Zionist leader Pastor John Hagee).

The most sickening aspect of their campaign is a full-page ad run in the Israeli press attacking NIF President Naomi Chazan. (See right: the anti-Semitic overtones of this image are truly astonishing, especially coming from a group that purports to support the State of Israel.)

This issue has been well covered in the Jewish blogosphere. For more info I recommend reports by Noam Sheizaf in Promised Land and Richard Silverstein in Tikun Olam. Click here to read a response by NIF CEO Daniel Sokatch – I also encourage you to click here to support the NIF.

(Yesterday, I received an email from a congregant that read “what the hell is going on in Israel?” I’m asking the very same question…)

J Street’s Bumpy Philadelphia Road

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Now that Brit Tzedek has merged with J Street, we’re witnessing the rapid growth of “J Street Locals” proliferating throughout more than 20 regions across the country. (I’m happy to be attending the launch of J Street Chicago at Emanuel Congregation this Thursday night and even happier to hear that a healthy turnout is expected).

I’m dismayed, tho, to learn that J Street Philadelphia‘s debut is receiving more than its share of ridiculous attacks from certain corners of the Philly Jewish community. I’ve just read that even Penn Hillel has come under fire for renting out its facility to this “anti-Israel” group.

According to the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent:

A flap over Hillel of Greater Philadelphia’s decision to lease its space to J Street — for the official launch of its Philadelphia branch — is just one local manifestation of a debate that has roiled much of the national Jewish establishment since the advocacy organization was founded nearly two years ago…

Gary Erlbaum, who sits on the Jewish Community Relations Council’s Israel advocacy committee and is also a board member of the Jewish Publishing Group, has been outspoken in his opposition to J Street, and is upset about Hillel’s decision to host the group’s Feb. 4 event.

“What makes them pro-Israel? If the Palestinians had a lobby, it would be called J Street,” said Erlbaum. “The Hillel building is an inappropriate spot for a group that’s anti-Israel.”

Oh, for God’s sake. A group committed to supporting the two-state solution through a diplomatic means while safeguarding Israel security and its future as a Jewish and democratic state is somehow “anti-Israel?”

You know, sometimes when I’m feeling really, really optimistic, I dream about what it might feel like if the American Jewish community actually could tolerate the kind of vigorous and freewheeling debate that they enjoy in the actual Jewish state itself. (Now wouldn’t that be “pro-Israel?”)

Replanting the Uprooted on Tu B’shevat

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Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu celebrated the festival of Tu B’shevat (“The New Year of the Trees”) by leaving a meeting with American peace envoy George Mitchell and promptly embarking upon a tree-planting tour at Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Here is what he had to say:

The message is clear – we are here and will remain here. We are planting and building; this is an inseparable part of the State of Israel.

For those looking for a different way to connect the festival of Tu B’shevat to the current political reality in the State of Israel, I recommend reading this at your seder, written by Rabbi Arik Ascherman of Israel’s Rabbis for Human Rights:

Lift the olive branch and say:

The olive branch, what is the reason for this?

We raise the olive branch as a symbol of responsibility, identification and hope.

We raise this branch in sorrow because each and every year, olive trees, the source of livelihood for Palestinian families, are intentionally chopped down, burned and uprooted. In attempting to exercise their right to work their lands, farmers repeatedly put themselves in danger. Both the human being and the trees of the field are desecrated, and there is no earthly law or judge (ein din v’ein dayan). Only a few are guilty, but all are responsible (Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel).

On Tu B’shevat, we are taught that the trees cease to drink from the rains of the past year and begin to be nourished from the rains of the current year (Jerusalem Talmud, Rosh Hashanah 56a). However, into the old and the new waters have fallen the tears of the dove of peace whose feet cannot find a resting place (Genesis 8:9) because the earth has become filled with violence (Genesis 6:11). The olive branch has become bitter in her mouth – a symbol of strife.

We raise this branch as a symbol of identification with those Israelis and Palestinians who are doing everything in their power to change this reality and make enemies into friends (Pirke Avot De’Rabbi Natan) by planting, pruning, plowing and harvesting together, despite the voices of hate and incitement from both sides.

May it be Your will that the fruit of the olive, symbol of the World of Yetzirah/Creativity (Pri Eytz Hadar) inspire us to create justice and peace out of the basic materials of the soil, the fruit of the soil, and the human spirit (adamah, pri adamah, ve’ruakh ha’adam) so that by the time evening falls (Genesis 8:11) we will reconnect the olive branch to the root of the soul (Shoresh Nishmato).

May we thus beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks…so that every person may sit under their vine or fig tree and none shall make them afraid (Micah 4:3-4) and the land shall know tranquility (Judges 3:11, etc.) and all of its inhabitants will rejoice.

Rabbi Brian Reports From Israel/Palestine

On Haiti Remembered and Gaza Forgotten

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Two prominent Israeli columnists ask: why are Israelis so eager to pitch in to the rescue effort in Haiti and yet show such little concern over the dire humanitarian crisis they’ve helped to create just a few kilometers away in Gaza?

Akiva Eldar, writing in Ha’aretz

(The) remarkable identification with the victims of the terrible tragedy in distant Haiti only underscores the indifference to the ongoing suffering of the people of Gaza. Only a little more than an hour’s drive from the offices of Israel’s major newspapers, 1.5 million people have been besieged on a desert island for two and a half years. Who cares that 80 percent of the men, women and children living in such proximity to us have fallen under the poverty line? How many Israelis know that half of all Gazans are dependent on charity, that Operation Cast Lead created hundreds of amputees, that raw sewage flows from the streets into the sea?

The disaster in Haiti is a natural one; the one in Gaza is the unproud handiwork of man. Our handiwork. The IDF does not send cargo planes stuffed with medicines and medical equipment to Gaza. The missiles that Israel Air Force combat aircraft fired there a year ago hit nearly 60,000 homes and factories, turning 3,500 of them into rubble. Since then, 10,000 people have been living without running water, 40,000 without electricity. Ninety-seven percent of Gaza’s factories are idle due to Israeli government restrictions on the import of raw materials for industry. Soon it will be one year since the international community pledged, at the emergency conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, to donate $4.5 billion for Gaza’s reconstruction. Israel’s ban on bringing in building materials is causing that money to lose its value.

Gershon Baskin, in today’s Jerusalem Post:

Humanitarian disasters around the world bring out the best in Israel and in Israelis. The horrific devastation caused by the earthquake in Haiti and the scenes of unbearable human suffering brought about an immediate enlistment of both civilian and public efforts to come to the aid of the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere…

But what about the humanitarian disaster in our own backyard caused in a large part by our own doing? What about Gaza? More than 1.5 million people are living in total poverty, without sanitary drinking water, under an economic and physical siege, locked in what could easily be called the world’s largest prison. While we ask to see in all of the gory details, all of the destruction including hundreds of corpses on the streets of Port-au-Prince, we wish to see none of the human suffering of our Palestinian neighbors in Gaza where we literally hold the keys to the end of their suffering.

My Favorite Rabbis: Everett Gendler

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Most people probably don’t realize this, but rabbis need rabbis too.

And there are a lot of great rabbis out there. Over the years I’ve been personally inspired by many of them: remarkable, talented leaders whose work challenges me, drives me and constantly reminds me why I do what I do. So with this post I’m debuting a new series I’m calling “My Favorite Rabbis:” ongoing profiles of the contemporary rabbis whom I consider to be my own spiritual teachers.

I’ll start by introducing you to Rabbi Everett Gendler, a Conservative rabbi whose moral courage has provided Jewish leadership for some of the most important progressive causes of our day. Today, some fifty years since he became a rabbi, I believe he remains on the cutting edge of the issues that truly matter.

This MLK weekend, it is certainly appropriate to note that Rabbi Gendler was one of the first rabbis to become actively involved in the struggle for civil rights in America and played a critical role in involving American rabbinical leadership in the movement. It’s doubtful that American rabbis would have stepped up to this struggle nearly as much had it not been for Rabbi Gendler’s prophetic influence.

During the early and mid-1960s, Rabbi Gendler led groups of American rabbis to participate in numerous prayer vigils and protests throughout the South. Of course many know that the legendary Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched with Dr. Martin Luther King in Selma in 1965. I imagine far fewer are aware that it was in fact Rabbi Gendler who persuaded Heschel to do so.

Heschel biographer Edward K. Kaplan writes:

Despite fears for his safety from his wife and the twelve year old Susannah, (Rabbi Heschel) agreed to join the march at the urging of Rabbi Everett Gendler, a pacifist and former student. Gendler had led a group of rabbis to Birmingham, Alabama to work for voting rights and remained in touch with the Reverend Andrew Young, King’s Executive Assistant at the SCLC. (From “Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America,” p. 222)

Rabbi Gendler was also instrumental in arranging Martin Luther King’s keynote address at the Rabbinical Assembly’s convention on March 25, 1968. This now-legendary speech took place at the Concord Resort hotel in New York’s Catskill Mountains just 10 days before King’s death. (That’s Rabbi Gendler to the left of Dr. King in the pic above).

Today, decades after King’s death, Rabbi Gendler remains an eloquent Jewish advocate for the path of nonviolence. His work has taken him across the world – most notably to India where he and his wife Mary teach the principles of nonviolence to Tibetan exiles.

I’m personally honored to serve with Rabbi Gendler on the Elder’s Council of the Shomer Shalom Institute for Jewish Nonviolence. In this picture, he leads a workshop at JRC in 2008. Shomer Shalom founder Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb (someone whom I may well be profiling in the future) is sitting next to him.

Rabbi Gendler has also been a long time advocate for Palestinian human rights – and his courageous stands have made it possible for new generations of rabbis to find their own voices on this painful issue. When Rabbi Brian Walt and I first began Ta’anit Tzedek and were looking for rabbis to join our campaign to protest the blockade of Gaza, we immediately turned to Rabbi Gendler, who joined our effort without hesitation. It is difficult to describe how much it means to know there are rabbis out there like Everett, someone who has been putting himself on the line for so long, and upon whom we always know we can rely for guidance and support.

Rabbi Gendler was also one of the first Jewish leaders to embrace environmentalism and vegetarianism long before they became fashionable. As the rabbi of a green synagogue myself, I recognize a tremendous debt to Everett, who more than anyone helped to put environmental issues on the radar screen of the Jewish community.

From a 2008 article in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal:

On a ferociously cold evening in November 1978, Rabbi Everett Gendler climbed atop the icy roof of Temple Emanuel in Lowell, Mass., and installed solar panels to fuel the synagogue’s ner tamid (eternal light)…

Gendler’s conversion of that eternal light marks the first known action to green a synagogue, making it more spiritually and ecologically sustainable, and Gendler himself, now Temple Emanuel’s rabbi emeritus, has been hailed as the father of Jewish environmentalism.

There so much more to say about Everett and his work. I suppose the most essential thing I can say about him is that he was and remains a spiritual maverick. His work remains as relevant and courageous as ever.

As we honor Dr. King this weekend, it’s critically important to honor those who continue his to walk his path in our own day. For me and so many others, Rabbi Everett Gendler is the one who teaches us how to walk that walk.

Nurit Peled Elhanan’s Cry from the Heart

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Dr. Nurit Peled Elhanan is an Israeli woman whose 13 year old daughter was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber in 1997. Shortly after, she helped found the Bereaved Parent’s Circle, a courageous Israeli-Palestinian coexistence group about which I’ve frequently written. It’s not an exaggeration to say that over the past two decades she has become one of the most important and eloquent members of the Israeli peace activist community.

On January 2, Peled Elhanan gave an emotional speech in Tel Aviv at a rally commemorating the one-year anniversary of Israel’s military assault on Gaza. I don’t know how else to describe it but as a primal scream – a cry from deep within the reaches of her heart. It is a gut-wrenching read, but also, in its way, enormously edifying. More than anything else I’ve read lately, it addresses head-on the poison that has been spreading through Israel’s soul – a phenomenon many fear to be true, but few are willing to identify out loud.

Please make sure to read all the way to the end, including the footnotes, which will help you to better understand her references, as well as the Jewish soul that throughly permeates her words.

Continue reading →

Toward a New Gaza Strategy

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There is new tension along the Israel-Gaza border. Israel is bombing targets in Gaza; mortar shells and Qassams are flying into southern Israel once again. If Israel’s massive military assault last year was designed to deter Hamas and/or provide security for the citizens of southern Israel – then it now appears that effort has been for naught.

When will we learn that bombs won’t work? As so many of us have been shouting for so long, the only true solution to the Gaza conflict is a political solution: to open the border, to provide relief and development assistance, to engage with Hamas directly.

I’m gratified, at least, that the editorial board of Ha’aretz seems to be moving in this direction:

A renewal of rocket fire shows that even a major military operation that brought death and destruction cannot ensure long-term deterrence and calm. Israel has an interest in stopping escalation at the border so as not to find itself caught up in another belligerent confrontation with Hamas …

Instead of erring by invoking the default solution of more force, which does not create long-term security or ease the distress of the Palestinians in Gaza, the crossings between Israel and the Gaza Strip should be opened and indirect assistance rendered to rebuild its ruins.

Amen. Massive military bombardment and a crushing blockade is not making either side more secure – it is only exacerbating the conflict and ensuring the likelihood we will be reading more tragic news from a small patch of land that has known nothing but tragedy for the past six decades.

PS: Since I wrote this post this morning, I’ve been thinking all day about how I addressed the Gaza conflict as largely a strategic policy issue. If I’m going to be totally honest, however, I’d have to admit that my feelings about this issue go deeper than simply “war doesn’t work.”

I’ve come to accept that at its heart, this conflict is not simply strategy but about justice. To anyone who believes that this latest border issue is about Hamas and its missiles, I’d respond that it is only the latest incarnation of an injustice that was committed against the Palestinian people, long, long before the Qassams started flying.

I’m currently reading Joe Sacco’s devastating graphic-novel style reportage, “Footnotes in Gaza.” I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the tragic history of the Palestinian experience in Gaza.

Playing the Blood Libel Card

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Ha’aretz:

(An) Italy-based group of researchers studied Israel’s use of ammunition and said the population of the Gaza Strip is “in danger.” It based the claim on soil analysis of four bomb craters. “It is essential to intervene at once to limit the effects of the contamination on people, animals and cultivation,” the researchers stated…

“Our study indicates an anomalous presence of toxic elements in the soil,” (the committee’s spokesperson) stated. This included metals that “can cause tumors and problems with fertility, and they can have serious effects on newborns, like deformities and genetic pathologies.”

The article continues:

Professor Gerald Steinberg, founder of the Jerusalem-based, non-governmental Monitor organization, said the study did not present enough evidence to support its claim… (He) said the committee’s “accusations are designed to stigmatize Israel and erase the context of mass terror.” He said he considers the accusations “a modern form of blood libel.”

Dr. Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress had a similar reaction:

“This so-called research is eerily reminiscent of ancient blood libels against the Jewish people, when rumors were spread about Jews poisoning wells” … “Today we are seeing a recurrence of all the worst excesses of anti-Semitism and diatribes that we perhaps naively thought had remained in the Dark Ages.”

I don’t know if the Italian scientists’ research is accurate or not, but I do know this: we Jews are becoming much too fond of shouting “blood libel” for political purposes.

Not long ago, of course, the epithet was directed at Judge Richard Goldstone. I’m also reminded of another recent news story, in which a Swedish newspaper made the ghoulish claim that Israel was killing Palestinians to harvest their organs. Israel’s outrage was inevitably swift:

“This is an anti-Semitic blood libel against the Jewish people and the Jewish state. The Swedish government cannot remain apathetic,” said Israel’s Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz.

“We know the origins of these claims. In medieval times, there were claims that the Jews use the blood of Christians to bake their Matzas for Passover. The modern version now is that the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) soldiers use organs of Palestinians to make money.”

When I first heard this news, I was also outraged by the allegations. Then I read last month that a former head of an Israeli forensic institute admitted that forensic pathologists did indeed illegally harvest organs from bodies, including Palestinian bodies, in the 1990s.

According to reports there was no proof that individuals were actually killed for their organs – but as I continue to read up on this incident, I’ve become further mortified to learn that NGOs have long considered Israel to be among the top purveyors of illegal organ-trafficking in the world. Will we take these kinds of reports seriously or will we simply accuse these organizations of blood libel as well?

While there is still no lack of irrational hatred directed at Jews, I believe Israel does the Jewish people no good every time its leaders invoke the spectre of anti-Semitism to deflect criticism. At the end of the day, which is worse: the very real scourge of anti-Jewish prejudice or the cynical accusation of blood libel to cover up potential crimes of our own?

Gaza One Year Later: Beyond the Complications

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It was exactly one year ago that I read the first news accounts of Israel’s military assault in Gaza:

Waves of Israeli airstrikes destroyed Hamas security facilities in Gaza on Saturday in a crushing response to the group’s rocket fire, killing more than 225 — the highest one-day toll in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in decades…

(There) was a shocking quality to Saturday’s attacks, which began in broad daylight as police cadets were graduating, women were shopping at the outdoor market, and children were emerging from school. The center of Gaza City was a scene of chaotic horror, with rubble everywhere, sirens wailing, and women shrieking as dozens of mutilated bodies were laid out on the pavement and in the lobby of Shifa Hospital so that family members could identify them. The dead included civilians, including several construction workers and at least two children in school uniforms.

By afternoon, shops were shuttered, funerals began and mourning tents were visible on nearly every major street of this densely populated city.

Previously, whenever I’d hear this kind of news out of Israel/Palestine, my shock and anguish would quickly be tempered by a familiar voice telling me to calm down, don’t overreact, don’t forget how terribly “complicated” the situation is. (Indeed, I recall hearing that voice distinctly three years earlier when the IDF responded to Hezbollah rocket attacks with a similarly massive military onslaught.)

This time, though, it was different. This time I didn’t hear the voice. Somehow, it just didn’t seem all that complicated to me any more.

This is what I wrote on my blog that day:

The news today out of Israel and Gaza makes me just sick to my stomach.

I know, I can already hear the responses: every nation has a responsibility to ensure the safety of its citizens. If the Qassams stopped, Israel wouldn’t be forced to take military action. Hamas also bears responsibility for this tragic situation…

I could answer each and every one of these claims in turn, but I’m ready to stop this perverse game of rhetorical ping-pong. I don’t buy the rationalizations any more. I’m so tired of the apologetics. How on earth will squeezing the life out of Gaza, not to mention bombing the living hell out of it, ensure the safety of Israeli citizens?

We good liberal Jews are ready to protest oppression and human-rights abuse anywhere in the world, but are all too willing to give Israel a pass. It’s a fascinating double-standard, and one I understand all too well. I understand it because I’ve been just as responsible as anyone else for perpetrating it.

So no more rationalizations. What Israel has been doing to the people of Gaza is an outrage. It has brought neither safety nor security to the people of Israel and it has wrought nothing but misery and tragedy upon the people of Gaza.

There, I’ve said it. Now what do I do?

As I read this post one year later, I remember well the emotions I felt as I wrote it. I also realize what a critical turning point that moment represented for me.

As a Jew, I’ve identified deeply with Israel for my entire life. I first visited the country as a young child and since then I’ve been there more times that I can count. Family members and some of my dearest friends in the world live in Israel.

Ideologically speaking, I’ve regarded Zionism with great pride as the “national liberation movement of the Jewish people.” Of course I didn’t deny that this rebirth had come at the expense of another. Of course I recognized that Israel’s creation was bound up with the suffering of the Palestinian people. The situation was, well, it was “complicated.”

Last year, however, I reacted differently. I read of Apache helicopters dropping hundreds of tons of bombs on 1.5 million people crowded into a 140 square mile patch of land with nowhere to run. In the coming days, I would read about the bombing of schools, whole families being blown to bits, children literally burned to the bone with white phosphorous. Somehow, it didn’t seem so complicated at all any more. At long last, it felt as if I was viewing the conflict with something approaching clarity.

Of course I think we’d all agree that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is technically complicated. But at the same time I think we all know that at the end of the day, there is nothing complicated about persecution. The political situation in Darfur, for instance, is enormously complicated – but these complications certainly haven’t stopped scores of Jews across North America from protesting the human rights injustices being committed there. We do so because we know that underneath all of the geopolitical complexities, oppression is oppression. And as Jews, we know instinctively that our sacred tradition and own tragic history require us to speak out against all oppression committed in our midst.

I’d suggest that if there is anything complicated for us here, it is in possibility that we might in fact have become oppressors ourselves. That is painfully complicated. After all, our Jewish identity has been bound up with the memory of our own persecution for centuries. How on earth can we respond – let alone comprehend – the suggestion that we’ve become our own worst nightmare?

More than anything else, this is was what I was trying to say in that anguished, emotional blog post one year ago: is this what it has come to? Have we come to the point in which Israel can wipe out hundreds of people, whole families, whole neighborhoods and our response as Jews will be to simply rationalize it away? At the very least will we able to stop and question what has brought us to this terrifying point? Have we become unable to recognize persecution for what it really and truly is?

Those who know me (or read my blog) surely know that it has been a painfully challenging year for me. My own relationship to Israel is changing in ways I never could have predicted. Since I started raising questions like those above, I’ve lost some friends and, yes, my congregation has lost some members. If Zionism is the unofficial religion of the contemporary Jewish community then I’m sure there are many who consider me something of an apostate.

But at the same time, I’ve been surprised and encouraged by the large number of people I’ve met who’ve been able to engage with these questions openly and honestly, even if they don’t always agree with me. I suppose this is what I decided to do one year ago: to put my faith in our ability to stand down the paralyzing “complexities,” no matter how painful the prospect.

One year later, I still hold tight to this faith.

Shalom Rav

A Blog by Rabbi Brant Rosen