sad news + good analysis of the past israeli elections
Abrazos
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tikkun <magazine@...>
Date: Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 8:10 PM
Subject: The Militarists and Haters win Big in the Israeli Election
To: bazril1@...


   You can read this on line on the home page of Huffington Post: http://
www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-michael-lerner/the-militarists-and-hater_b_6892888.html
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=zorcmStHC%2FPKZuSG3RKLMMhAgJsHaU4v>
--and
then forward it to your lists, post it on your Facebook or other pages, and
send it to your friends.

The Militarists and Haters Win in Israeli Elections

*                        by Rabbi Michael Lerner*
 Posted: 03/18/2015 8:43 am EDT Updated: 4 hours ago
   Winners:  Netanyahu, AIPAC, , US Republican Party, Sheldon Adelson
(American Jewish billionaire funder of the right), Hamas, Islamic State,
the right-wing Mullahs in Iran.

Losers: Israeli, World Jewry, the Palestinian people, the forces for peace
and non-violence everywhere, the Palestinian Authority, the people of Iran,
the people of the U.S.

According to Israeli newspapers reporting on the outcome of the Israeli
election on Tuesday, Likud increased its lead in the next Knesset of 120
members. It will now hold 30 Knesset seats, compared to the Zionist Union
(former Labor Party) with 24 seats. As the front runner, Netanyahu will be
asked to create the government coalition.

The Joint List of Palestinian Israelis, the third-largest party, gets 14
seats, followed by Yesh Atid with 11, Kulanu with 10, Habayit Hayehudi
(ultra right) with eight, Shas with seven, United Torah Judaism with six,
Yisrael Beiteinu (fascist right) with six, and Meretz (once the peace
party) with four.

Though the Israeli president has said he will ask for a government of
national unity, it will be unity around the policies which Netanyahu put
out clearly in the last days of the election: No Palestinian state, no deal
that would allow Iran to develop nuclear energy, no willingness to count
Arab Israelis as "real Israelis" (Netanyahu went so far as to warn the
Israeli public that they were in danger because Arab Israelis had formed a
Joint List and might become a real force in the Knesset unless the Jewish
Israelis rallied around Netanyahu's Likud party).

How can the right wing grow to so much power in an Israel filled with
mostly decent human beings, some of whom have even been influenced by
Judaism's teachings of love for neighbor and love for "the other," though
of course most Israelis are secular?

The first culprit here is the Occupation of the West Bank and blockade of
Gaza which created intolerable conditions for the Palestinian people and
led a handful of them to acts of terror. Do not forget that it was Labor
Party governments that initiated the Occupation, and when in power in the
past forty years failed to end it (even when they had the political cover
to do so immediately after the murder of Israeli Prime Minister Rabin at
the hands of one of the supporters of the West Bank settlers--this failure
being the tragic legacy of the post-assassination government led by Shimon
Peres who today is celebrated as a man of peace but failed miserably when
he was in the position to actually end the Occuaption).

Closely connected to that, and a major reason why so many Israelis tell
themselves that they have no option but to be ruthlessly "tough"  is the
despicable and immoral way that Hamas has chosen to resist that occupation.
We at Tikkun have repeatedly documented the human rights violations
inherent in the Occupation and if you have doubts about that, go to read
the reports of B'tselem: the Israeli Human Rights Organizaiton. And we've
carefully reviewed the ways that Netanyahu manipulated public opinion last
Spring and Summer to create the false impression that Israel was in huge
danger. Nevertheless,. Hamas' decision to bomb Israeli cities last summer
was not only an ethically hateful violation of human rights, targeting
Israeli civilians, pushing millions to run into air raid shelters day after
day for much of the summer, but it was also massive victory for
right-wingers in Israel who were thereby able to justify Israel's massive
assault on Gaza but also to recredit in the minds of many Israelis the most
fearful vision of Jews being in danger of annihilation even though Israel
is by far the strongest military force in the middle east and the only one
with massive nuclear weapons.

 Hamas has played a dirty game here, believing that Israel's extremists
will ultimately cause Israel to lose the support of most of the countries
of the world, and weaken Israel in the long run. Moreover, Netanyahu's
explicit rejection of a Palestinian state gives Hamas the upper hand in its
political battle with the Palestinian Authority which had agreed to the
Obama/Kerry strategy of negotiations with Israel to create a Palestinian
state. With that no longer an option, Hamas' commitment to replace Israel
with a "one state solution" will seem the only remaining option to many
Palestinians and hence increase Hamas' political power in any future
Palestinian election.

For the same reason, most of the Islamic fundamentalist/. violent
extremists will be rejoicing over the Israeli vote. It is in their
interests to portray Israel as an evil state, and the racism and militarism
that just got a new lease on life in Israel will help them make their case.

Republicans will have their stature elevated, having given Netanyahu a
platform on which he could communicate the image of being "tough" and at
the same time loved by the US Congress. Doing so almost certainly helped
his status with a section of Israeli voters who two weeks before were not
so sure about Netanyahu and who continue to deny to pollsters, but not to
each other, that they were swayed by the Congress' support of Likud -- it's
beneath their Zionist dignity to allow non-Jews to impact on their voting,
but it did.

Conversely, being a militarist and racist state will not help win Israel
any friends around the world, and in the not-t00-long-run it will weaken
Israel's support in the US both among Americans in general and in
particular among young Jews. So count the real anti-Semites who want to see
Israel undermined as a way of getting at all Jews as having been among the
beneficiaries of the Netanyahu victory.

The biggest losers will be all those on the planet who yearn for a world
based on social and economic justice, environmental sanity, peace and
non-violence, and genuine caring for the peoples of the world. Those of us
who talk about building a world based on love and caring will face the next
five years with an Israel that scoffs at those ideas and spreads its
cynicism to the rest of the world. Instead, Israel will be spouting a
message of fear and championing the "Right Hand of God," i.e. the notion
that force and violence are the only way to achieve safety and security.
And while few Israelis want to be involved in another war, many want to get
the US to do a proxy war on Iran for Israel, and that will be bad not only
for the people of the Middle East but also for the many Americans who will
lose their lives in such a war.

But why did the progressive peace voice have so little impact in Israel?
The answer to this is startling: it didn't have much electoral impact
because it was almost totally absent from the discourse of the supposedly
left former Labor Party which now calls itself "The Zionist Union."

That party spent much of its time focused on matters of economic
inequality, while simultaneously trying to prove itself equally militant
with Netanyahu both in regard to Palestinians and in regard to Iran. They
thus followed the same bankrupt path that Democrats have followed in the
US, failing to articulate a different worldview from the militarists,
instead trying to insist that they would be just as militant and just as
determined to wipe out "the enemy" (whoever that is perceived to be).

Its an old secret of politics that when people want a warlike government or
a racist government, they vote for right wingers. It's a useless strategy
for Labor in Israel or for the right wing of the Democratic Party to
present itself as the "better militarists," because people who want that
will end up voting for the Right anyway. Obama should have learned that
when, instead of ending the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, as he had led his
followers to believe he would do, he instead escalated those wars with
"surges," the result was not a victory for the Dems in 2010 and ever since,
but rather a growing militarism in the U.S. and a consequent capture of
Congress by the Right.

If you listened to the television ads in Israel about the elections, one
barely heard a peep suggesting that the real issue in the elections was
peace with Palestine, peace with Iran, or an end to Israel treating the US
President as though they owned him. The parties did their best to stay away
from the reality that a vote for Likud would de facto mean more wars and
violence for the citizens of Israel.

Yet the left in Israel, like the left in the U.S., has little understanding
of the need for a whole new worldview to be popularized as the central task
of liberal and progressive Israelis or Americans. They are too busy being
"pragmatic" and "realistic" to recognze that they've lost the election
because they failed to attempt to challenge the dominant ideology of their
society: that it's foolish to believe that people will respond to a vision
of a society based on love, kindness and generosity.

 Israel, like the U.S. badly needs to hear a  worldview that can challenge
the great fears that Israelis have about their own annihilation, help
Israelis recover from their post-traumatic stress disorder that keeps many
from being able to think rationally about their own (or the Jewish people
of the world's) self-interest, and instead keeps them focused on the
Holocaust and why they think it could happen again. Israelis, like
Palestinians, deserve our compassson because they are stuck in fear, and
that fear was maginified both by the daily runs to the air raid shelters
this past summer and by the outrageous actions of ISIL/Islamic State which,
after all, are taking place no further away than say Ohio is to NY or New
Mexico is to California.

All this restimulates the Holocaust trauma which is so carefully
re-introduced to each new generation of Jews with such intensity that many
are unable to recognize that the behavior of the Jewish state in denying
the Palesitnian people the same rights Israelis rightly seek for themselves
is at the core of the problem. Unable to see themselves as the most
militarily, politically and economically powerful state in the Middle East,
they allow the Jewish state to act in an oppressive way toward Palestinians
and justify that as their only alternative to annihilation--and their own
behavior helps create the reality that they fear.

And yes, there is a way out of this self-fulfilling vicious cycle.  Jews
and friends of the Jewish people must join together to champion the
Strategy of Generosity as a replacement for the Strategy of Domination as
the best path to provide security and safety for Israel and the U.S.  I've
developed these themes further in my book *Embracing Israel/Palestine
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=Qo6QXOjMmYVFq1PtQosLjshAgJsHaU4v>*
which you can order for Kindle on Amazon.com or by reading it in print by
ordering it at www.tikkun.org/eip.
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=Q8OS4rC6nX5hHtIUDQWVRshAgJsHaU4v>

Popularizing a fundamentally new story about the world is critical to the
success of peace, social justice, environmental sanity, and human rights.
We have that story, and it is described in Tikkun Magazine, detailed in my
books starting with *Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation*,
Spirit Matters, *The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the
Religous Right*, and *Embracing Israel/Palestine*.

To popularize a different worldview is one of the reasons why I've joined
with people of all faiths and secular humanists and fundamentalist atheists
to build a Network of Spiritual Progressives that can articulate the world
we really want, rather than remaining stuck in a politics that is so
worried about being "realistic" that it only reinforces the very worldviews
that lead to wars and racism of every sort. Please join me in that by
becoming a member of the NSP at
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=B6%2Bq8uP4CJQUGATY8ctob8hAgJsHaU4v>
www.spiritualprogressives.org.
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=hBYrRjzViiggfnHlk%2F7CWshAgJsHaU4v>
 When you join at the $50 level or more, you get a free subscription to
Tikkun magazine as well.

*Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun, the prophetic voice of Jews and
non-Jews working for a world of Love and Justice, www.tikkun.org
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=cbzhBR45H7evPg8Kss4y28hAgJsHaU4v>,
co-chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives with co-chair Vandana
Shiva, and rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue in Berkeley and S.F. California.
He is the author of 11 books including 2 national best-sellers: Jewish
Renewal: a Path to Healing and Transformation, and The Left Hand of God:
Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right. RabbiLerner welcomes
hearing from you AFTER you've joined the Network of Spiritual Progressives.
Email him at RabbiLerner.Tikkun@... <RabbiLerner.Tikkun@...>.*
  ------------------------------

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