Gente querida,
Compartiendo con dolor este mensaje que me reconcilia con la parte que
rescato de la tradición de mi tribu ancestral. Por mi lado, pienso ayunar
el 11 de Junio y honrar la memoria de mi tía Sonia Roih, quién decidió irse
a Beirut con su familia en 1948.
Abrazo
_______________


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rabbi Michael Lerner <rabbilerner.tikkun@...>
Date: Tue, Jun 6, 2017 at 5:28 PM
Subject: 50th anniversary of Israel's Occupation of the West Bank--why we
should mourn what happened AFTER the 6 day War
To: bazril1@...


Tikkun
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=X15h73j1n1QThmAAUnZt5fbC72QVmgA%2F>
  to heal, repair and transform the world
*A note from Rabbi Michael Lerner*

*Join or Donate Now*
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=HoCBotn%2FzVBQwH%2BeQwVmavbC72QVmgA%2F>
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=Q1Jb4a2Ba3%2F3C2ryXi7px%2FbC72QVmgA%2F>
*!*

I was one of those many young American Jews who went to the nearest Israeli
consulate 50 years ago today to volunteer to serve in Israel as it appeared
to be facing a threat to its existence. Fifty years later, I'm mourning
what happened AFTER Israel won the 6 Days War, believing the subsequent
Occupation not only as an ethical outrage but a course of behavior that
will live in infamy in Jewish history not only because it has been
destructive to Israel's security but also because it has been a "chillul
haShem"--a desecration of God's name and an undermining of the spirtual
legitimacy of Judaism itself to the extent that it has become a major
cheerleader for a nation state with lots of Jews but less of Judaism's
powerful and beautiful prophetic, ethical and spiritual foundations.
And...it's not too late to change directions. In my editorial in the latest
issue of Tikkun I lay out a strategy which has not yet been seriously tried
and might lead to a dramatic change in the situation.
      Please read my editorial which appears as part of the Spring 2017
issue of Tikkun magazine which has a focus on "Israel's Occupation at 50:
Still Immoral Still Self-Destructive" and with 29 articles from writers
that include Arik Ascherman, Sami Awad, Sam Bahour, Cherie Brown, Aryeh
Cohen, Nizar Farsakh, Jonathan Kuttabl, Mark LeVine, Shaul Magid, Eli
Tikvah Sarah, Ayelet Waldman, Arthur Waskow, Simone Zimmerman, Stephen
Zunes and many more.
     To get the magazine, please either subscribe now at
www.tikkun.org/subscribe
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=Bch2r2HViPKNWk8WzsBvQPbC72QVmgA%2F>
or ask your local bookstore to carry Tikkun (our distributor Ingram has now
been bought by the News Corp so they can order it from them). To read my
editorial in that issue online please go to http://www.tikkun.org/
nextgen/still-immoral-still-stupid-lets-end-50-years-of-
israels-occupation-of-the-west-bank-one-personone-vote
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=gBKO4uoiT8I6mTHZvUAQo%2FbC72QVmgA%2F>
or read it below. And please join me in mourning and fasting on June 11th,
the day after the 6 days war ended--mourning not Israel's survival, but
 the 50 years of Occupation of the Palestinian people--what Israel did
after it had completely defeated its enemies in Egypt and Syria. And if you
happen to be in the Bay Area, you are invited to join me in a discussion of
these issues at my Torah study Saturday morning June 10 (info at
www.beyttikkun.org).
End 50 Years of Israel’s Occupation of the West Bank
by Rabbi Michael Lerner
June 6, 2017

Family relationships can be very complicated. One can be extremely angry at
a parent, a sibling, even one’s own child, deeply disapprove of some of
their actions, and yet still love them quite deeply. That is the situation
facing many Jews in the Israeli Left and increasing numbers of American
Jews who are united around the following demands of the government of
Israel:

   -

   End the Occupation and end the daily violence against Palestinians that
   is an intrinsic part of almost every attempt by one nation to dominate
   another by force.
   -

   Acknowledge Israel’s role in creating the Palestinian refugee problem
   (not 100 percent Israel’s fault, but definitely a large part Israel’s
   fault).
   -

   Stop calling Israel a “democracy” when it rules over two million
   Palestinians and does not give them the right to vote in Israeli elections
   or otherwise participate in shaping the decisions that impact their lives.
   -

   Stop the building of illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinian land and
   stop the displacement of any more Palestinians. Accept the validity of UN
   Security Council Resolution 2334 which “reaffirms that the establishment by
   Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967,
   including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant
   violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement
   of the two-state solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace.” As
   *Tikkun*’s contributing editor Mark LeVine pointed out, this resolution
   reminds Israel’s government and its American apologists that its
   half-century policy of creating “facts on the ground” as a way to normalize
   the Occupation and the settlement enterprise it has always been intended to
   support, has been for nothing, no matter how much Palestinian land Israel
   claims to have annexed.
   -

   Stop the legal assaults on the rights of Jewish and Palestinian-Israeli
   poets, writers, artists, and human rights activists who are doing nothing
   but speaking out or protesting the Occupation. And along those same lines,
   apply the same standard of law to both Israelis and Palestinians both in
   the territories and throughout the rest of the country.

Many Jews feel a special connection to the land of Israel, and we care
about Israelis, worry about their survival, and have compassion for them,
even while detesting the violent actions of some of them, the arrogance of
many of their leaders, the seeming obliviousness of many of them to what
they are doing to the Palestinian people and their willingness to tolerate
a government that promotes hatred toward Palestinians—a government that
slowly but systematically steals Palestinian lands and ignores human rights
while simultaneously aligning itself with the most reactionary, sexist, and
intolerance-promoting elements of the Jewish religious establishment. That
establishment imposes its practices on the secular Israeli majority as the
price for its willingness to give a green light to repressive policies of
the government—along the way turning many Israelis into intolerant
secularists who blame all the country’s problems on religious Jews.

Many of us also feel a family tie to our cousins the Palestinian people,
both Christian and Muslim Palestinians, spiritual descendents of our
ancestors Abraham and Sarah, and have compassion for them, and are outraged
at how they are being treated by Israel, even as we consistently critique
the violent actions of Hamas and the anti-Semitism that persists in parts
of the West Bank and Gaza.

We also are concerned that the policies of the Israeli government, by
calling itself “the State of the Jewish people,” and the largely blind
support it has received from many of the major institutions of the Jewish
community, have besmirched the reputation of Jews as a people concerned
with ethics and justice.

We see increasing evidence that Israel’s policies are turning younger Jews
against not only Israel, but against Judaism. One can enter almost any
synagogue in America—Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, or
even the highly spiritual Jewish Renewal movement—and be welcomed even if
one doesn’t believe in God, doesn’t want to follow the Jewish traditions,
or even has no particular interest in studying the Jewish holy texts. But
if one announces one’s opposition to the policies of the State of Israel
and/or support for the human rights of the Palestinian people, one is
treated as a heretic and often given the clear message they are not welcome
and their views are outside the range of acceptable discourse. De facto,
Israel has become the god of many Jews, and the Israeli army has become
that god’s emissary on earth—the one thing that they fully trust. In their
mostly blind worship of the State of Israel, large swaths of the Jewish
people are massively abandoning the values that the Jewish tradition urged
us to embody—loving kindness, justice, peace, mercy, compassion, slowness
to anger, forgiving iniquity, and transgressions—in the one place in the
world where Jews have the power to actually implement these values in an
entire nation state. Thousands of years from now, if the human race
survives the current destruction of our environment, Jews will look back
with deep shame at how the Jewish people let our tradition be so polluted
by support for Israel’s inhumanity toward the Palestinians for the past
fifty years, and continuing now.

But even here, some compassion is needed for our people. For many Jews,
God’s failure to “show up” and save the Jews from the Holocaust, and the
refusal of most nations of the world to open their gates to Jews seeking
refuge, led to disillusionment about the possibility of a world based on
love and justice. Thus the hard-nosed neoconservatives and their recycling
of the ancient and perverted view that “might makes right” in international
politics.
Palestinian women crossing through the Qalandiya checkpoint (run by the
Israeli military) between Jerusalem and Ramallah for prayer at the Al-Aqsa
mosque during Ramadan in June 2016. Men over 45 and women were allowed to
cross through without permits. Ahmad Al-Bazz | Activestills

The utopian and socialist branches of the Zionist movement quickly faded as
more and more Jews came to believe that the only thing they can really
count on is the power of the Israeli army and the potential sanctuary they
might find in Israel should future upsurges of anti-Semitism (beginning to
show its ugly face once again around the world in the past ten years, and
more recently in the U.S. responding to the legitimation of hatred and
demeaning of others during the 2016 election period by Donald Trump)
threaten Jewish safety once again. Unable to shake the Post Traumatic
Stress Disorder (PTSD) that infected not only the survivors but also the
millions of Jews whose families or friends were wiped out in this genocidal
attempt to murder all Jews on the planet, the previously marginal right
wing Zionism of Herut (now Likud) became the predominant “common sense of
the Jewish people,” even infecting those who still hold on to a belief in
God yet put more trust in military strength than in the power of love and
generosity.

So modern Orthodox and other observant Jews utter prayers in their
synagogues for the State of Israel and for its army, claiming it to be “the
beginning of the flourishing of our redemption,” while downplaying the
pressing social justice messages of the Torah and the prophets and their
relevance to the realities of contemporary politics both in the Middle East
and in the U.S. Most notably ignored: the frequent repetition of Torah
commandments to “love the stranger/the Other” (ha’ger) and to not do to
them what was done to us when we were “strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Indeed, many Jews of this sort who claim to believe in God nevertheless
hold the view that we can’t trust others, that the “other” always wants to
hurt us, and that the only thing to count on is force and violence. This
way of thinking, as I demonstrate in my book *Jewish Renewal: A Path to
Healing and Transformation*, is precisely the view that Judaism came into
the world to challenge. Those who trust only in power are following the
path of Pharaoh, of Sodom, of the Roman Caesars, of Hitler and Stalin, of
Nixon and of Kissinger, of the neocons, and now of Trump. It’s the
antithesis of Judaism, but it is to some extent the logic of global
capitalism, imperialism, and domination. Yet I’ve heard it echoed in many
synagogues by rabbis and others who are liberal on every other topic, but
revert to this kind of thinking when it comes to discussing making peace
with the Palestinian people and allowing them the same freedom we celebrate
for ourselves at Passover each year.

Yet it is hard for any of us who understand the traumas faced by the Jewish
people, and recognize how brutally we have been treated by much of the
world for much of the past two thousand years, to approach this issue
without some compassion. That compassion must extend to the people of
Israel whose very existence as a country has always been challenged by all
the states surrounding it, states that were meanwhile brutalizing their own
minorities and sometimes their majorities as well! Think Syria, Egypt,
Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, and today even Turkey!

This complex of feelings mirrors that of many progressives in the U.S.
toward our own country. We know that the U.S. has been one of the most
violent and destructive countries in the world in the past sixty years. We
understand its horrendous imperialist policies have led to the deaths of
hundreds of thousands in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, and the countries
of South and Central America. Building on the criminal legacy of previous
European colonialists, the U.S. has perpetuated and exacerbated the
impoverishment of millions through its imposed trade agreements and
unequivocal support for a global economic system that leaves 2.5 billion
people living on less than $2 a day and 1.5 billion living on less than $1
a day. The UN estimates between 6,000–10,000 children under the age of five
die every single day around the world because of curable diseases linked to
malnutrition that the U.S. could end were that our priority (see our Global
and Domestic Marshall Plan at www.tikkun.org/gmp
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=WIfrj1SrOKPlOY0gmy%2BEgfbC72QVmgA%2F>
for
details).

We know that we live in a country in which over 2,000,000 people are
imprisoned, African Americans are often unsure whether they will be
arbitrarily arrested or even physically assaulted (in many cases murdered)
by racist police, Native Americans’ rights are are similarly violated on a
daily basis (our treaty arrangements with them ignored and their land
violated in dozens of ways, most recently at Standing Rock in North
Dakota), and millions of undocumented workers live in constant fear of
arrest and deportation to countries they escaped in order to avoid being
killed, raped, imprisoned, or simply returned to the ranks of those slowly
dying of malnutrition (repressive policies dramatically escalated by the
Obama Administration and we fear worse from the Trump presidency).

We know that we live in a country where haters and overt racists can win
elected offices and where sexists and homophobes continue to degrade women
and LGBTQ people. We at *Tikkun* have embraced much of the platform of the
Movement for Black Lives because it so effectively nails the racism in this
country and provides powerful counter-measures (even while taking exception
to their description of Israel as engaged in genocide).

And yet, many of us, while using our political energies to nonviolently
struggle to change this system, nevertheless love the U.S. and the American
people, appreciate the complexities of their lives which have led some to
respond to their class oppression by joining hateful movements, and others
to endorse militarism out of fear that they and their families may someday
become targets of radical extremists and terrorists. These people have much
pain in their lives, and the response of *Tikkun* is not to disparage them,
but to help them see that there are other paths to dealing with and
relieving that pain besides demeaning others.

There are very few of us on the American Left who call for the United
States to be dismantled for its crimes, though they far exceed those of
Israel, as do the crimes of Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia,
Turkey, Syria and so many other countries. No wonder, then, that we can
understand Israelis whose fears are leading them in destructive directions,
particularly when they hear about people calling for the actual dismantling
of Israel. Just as we can love our fellow citizens in this country, we can
love people in Israel and in Palestine even as we disagree with the paths
they have chosen to deal with past pains and current fears, and even as we
are outraged at the continuing oppression and racism against Palestinians.

So, yes, we have complex feelings about Israel. In my book *Embracing
Israel/Palestine: A Path to Middle East Peace* I try to tell the story of
the past 140 years of this struggle in a nuanced way, demonstrating that
both sides of this struggle have legitimate claims, and both have been
inordinately insensitive to the needs of the other side. In each case, the
partisans of one side have focused on the extreme haters on the other side
and used their actions to justify acts of violence or oppression that have
incensed the citizens of the other side and made each people more likely to
embrace their most extreme elements. Order it at www.tikkun.org/eip
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=mh1tiDKAlJ1LTt9yK9NF%2BPbC72QVmgA%2F>
.

But seeing this as a situation caused by the ethical failures and
psychological blindness of many people on each side of the struggle does
not lead us at *Tikkun* to conclude that there is nothing to do to heal the
situation. The reality of 2017 (and this has been the reality for a good
part of the past fifty years) is that Israel has vastly more economic,
political, and military power than the Palestinian people and hence has the
greater responsibility to solve the problem.

The first step would be to end the Occupation, and in a generous spirit and
honoring the Torah’s command “Justice, justice shalt thou pursue/chase
after,” create a Palestinian state.

Yet the political reality at the present moment makes that highly unlikely
no matter which major political party in Israel would win the next
election. Though we’ve been strong advocates for a two-state solution for
the past thirty years, and still believe that to be the best achievable
path for the next thirty years until our more visionary plan—the no state
solution, which includes the transformation of the global political reality
from a nation-state configuration to an environmental district
configuration—becomes obtainable. Given the reality on the ground, I now
believe that the best way to reach a two state solution is to advocate for
a short-term solution: inclusion of all of the Palestinian people inside
the West Bank and Gaza in the democratic processes of those who rule over
them. Simply put: “one person, one vote.”
One Person, One Vote

We need to build on the movement for One Person/One Vote in
Israel/Palestine (including the West Bank and Gaza). If Israel is not
prepared to end the blockade of Gaza and help Palestinians create an
economically and politically viable state of their own, then it must give
all Palestinians a vote in the Knesset elections, since de facto all
Palestinians are living under the control of the Israeli state.

The demand for One Person/One Vote brings attention to the central problem
that most Americans have to face: that although we claim to be for
democracy, we are supporting the denial of democracy for the Palestinian
people. This is nothing new. America’s hypocrisy about democracy has been
revealed over and over again: The counting of African Americans as 3/5 of a
human being in order to give slave states more representation in the
Congress, denying felons who have served their time the right to vote,
blocking a direct democratic election of president by creating an electoral
college which gives disproportionate power to small population states. But
it is also true that tens of millions of Americans used democratic
processes and mobilized to support the Civil Rights Movement, oppose the
war in Vietnam, the suppression of liberation movements in South and
Central America, and U.S. support for apartheid in South Africa.

One Person/One Vote has a strong resonance in the U.S., the West, and even
among many Israelis who have long believed that their strength and support
in the world comes from being “the one democracy in the Middle East.” This
strategy confronts that false belief, challenges the U.S. and the West to
support their own commitments to democracy, and opens the door to speaking
to the American majority whose loyalty to Israel is based more on guilt at
what the world had done to the Jews than on any serious thought about what
the Palestinian people deserve. The guilt is appropriate, but the response
of giving Israel blind support is not.

The One Person/One Vote strategy must differentiate itself from those
calling for an end to the State of Israel and the creation of a secular
state with no particular allegiance to the Jewish people. After two
thousand years of oppression, most Jews will not accept the elimination of
the only state in the world that has a commitment to provide safety for the
Jewish people. Hence, there would have to be a voting requirement for those
invited to participate in the elections of this state or to serve in its
Knesset: that they sign an agreement that until all anti-Semitism has been
eliminated in the world, the State of Israel will continue to give priority
to Jews seeking to move to Israel who can demonstrate a well-founded belief
that they are in danger because of their Jewishness in the country where
they currently hold citizenship (just as the laws governing immigration to
the U.S.). As I argued in *Embracing Israel/Palestine*, when Palestine
comes into existence as a separate state, something I still hope for, I’ll
be advocating for it to have this same kind of affirmative action for
Palestinians around the world who can demonstrate a well-founded belief
that they are in danger because they are Palestinians, or Muslims.

Meanwhile, once this newly democratized Israel is created, Palestinians
will be able to use their democratic rights to create full equality for all
its Palestinian citizens as well as for anyone else to whom the State of
Israel has offered asylum or has brought in to work in Israel. They should
have the right to give equal public recognition to the holidays and
religious observances of all of Israel’s different populations, not only to
the Jewish ones.

In such a state, Israel’s observance of the Sabbath can have equal status
with Christian observance of Sunday and Muslim observance of Friday as
their “weekend,” and Hebrew should have the same status of being one of the
two official languages of the state along with Arabic. In this way, we
differentiate what part of Israel as “the Jewish state” is legitimate and
needs to be preserved (its guarantor as a safe homeland for Jews from
around the world) and what part should be subject to democratic negotiation
(the integration of Arab culture and practices into the fabric of Israeli
education, and the separation of synagogue and mosque from the State). Of
course, once established, leaders of a democratized Israel will have to
address how to handle the many questions of citizenship, Palestinian
refugees, immigration, reparations and the like.

The One Person/One Vote strategy will only catch on if its supporters
champion a democratic ethos that many Americans hold, but have not yet
applied when thinking about Israel and Palestine. If this “one person/one
vote” movement grows, and simultaneously and unambiguously affirms Israel’s
right to exist and provide a guaranteed homeland and place of refuge for
Jews, but only as a democratic state, its power will move many Israelis
back to the peace camp.

Indeed, such a movement would be the very thing that might push Israeli
right-wingers to believe that the one way they can stop this kind of a call
for democracy is to engage for the first time since the Oslo Accords in a
genuine negotiation with Palestinians about how to create an economically
and politically viable Palestinian state and how to deal with Palestinian
refugees. I suggest that in such a negotiation for two states that Israel
accept 20,000 Palestinian refugees into the pre-67 boundaries of Israel
every year for the next thirty, a number small enough to not upset the
demographic balance, but large enough to be seen as a genuine move toward
peace, particularly if accompanied, as it must, by the other countries of
the world who have a stake in Middle East Peace funding reparations for the
Palestinian people as well as reparations for Jews forced to flee Arab
states from 1945–1960. I also suggest that a viable peace deal, sponsored
by the Israeli right-wing as a way of escaping the global pressures that a
“one person/one vote” movement would likely spur, would allow West Bank
Israelis to continue to live in their settlements, but only after accepting
Palestinian citizenship, agreeing to live by the laws and court decisions
of the Palestinian state, disarmed, and giving up their Israeli
citizenship. Israel would agree to never intervene on behalf of these newly
minted Jewish Palestinians in the court decisions of the Palestinian state.
As Orthodox rabbi and West Bank settler Menachem Fruman (z”l) told his
followers, the Torah command and right of the Jews to live in any part of
the holy land (Eretz Yisrael), preserved in the approach I suggest here,
did not entail the right to live in a Jewish state, but did obligate Jews
to love their fellow human beings (the geyreem/or Other) as themselves.

If millions of Americans rallied around this demand for One Person/One Vote
for Israel and Palestine, and if they supported candidates for public
office who held that same position, it could within the next sixteen years
change a great deal in U.S. politics and in Israel. Ironically, it may well
be the most realistic strategy to achieve an Israeli majority for a
generous two state solution along the lines suggested in the previous
paragraph!

While pushing for this inside the U.S., an intelligent peace movement would
also work to create an “empathy tribe” of thousands of peace oriented
people from around the world who would go to Palestine, Israel, and to
Jewish communities in the U.S. and other major populations of Diaspora
Jewry with the aim of helping the Israeli people and world Jewry heal from
their PTSD and develop empathy for the suffering that their country’s
policies have inflicted on the “others.”

*Tikkun* has long advocated that what would make such changes possible
could come from the U.S. and the West abandoning its belief that “homeland
security” can best be achieved through domination (military, economic,
political, cultural and diplomatic). Instead we should all be adopting the
Strategy of Generosity, manifested in part in the Tikkun version of the
GMP—a Global and Domestic Marshall Plan with the advanced industrial
countries of the world donating 1–2% of our Gross Domestic Product each
year for the next twenty—sufficient to end, not just ameliorate, global
poverty, homelessness, hunger, inadequate education, inadequate health
care, and repairing the damage 150 years of irresponsible forms of
industrialization has done to the life support system of our environment.
It’s not just the money that would be important, but the new way of
thinking that is crucial—thinking that caring for others is the path to
security because it will eventually elicit from others that same caring.

We are not suggesting that the most extreme haters and terrorists will
suddenly become transformed through this approach, but rather that their
ability to recruit support from the rest of their communities will
dramatically decrease.

If a Bernie Sanders-type candidacy for president in the 2020 presidential
elections went beyond the stale economistic rhetoric that failed to win
Bernie the Democratic nomination in 2016, and adopted a heart-centered
spiritual progressive politics, s/he might not only dramatically bring back
sanity to American politics but also create a strong American incentive to
push Israel toward either a single democratic society or a two-state
solution based on generosity and empathy for both sides of the struggle.

This could in turn create an Israeli majority ready to not only free the
Palestinian people but also create a movement in Israel that was its first
genuinely Jewish political movement—namely one that actually believed in a
world of love and justice and had the backbone to say that it was these
values that were the only authentic ones for a Jewish state. Such a
movement, advocating generosity in providing reparations to the Palestinian
refugees and support for creating an economically and politically viable
Palestinian state living in peace with Israel, and eventually becoming its
strongest ally, would be more rational, realistic and sustainable than the
movement that now seeks to perpetuate the Occupation for another fifty
years or longer!

No strategy that seeks to coerce Israel to end the Occupation and create a
Palestinian state has a chance at this historical moment. According to a
Pew Research Center poll in May of 2016, “Far more Americans continue to
sympathize more with Israel (54%) than with the Palestinians (19%) in the
Middle East dispute.” If those of us who want to free Palestine from
Israel’s domination focus on what tactic to use to coerce Israel to change
while we don’t have close to a majority of Americans believing that
Palestinians are basically right in their cause, we are unlikely to be
successful though we may get lots of attention. But attention is not our
goal—reconciliation between Israel and Palestine and lasting peace is our
goal.

An Israeli soldier points his gun at protestors during a demonstration
against the Occupation and separation wall in Al Walaja in the West Bank in
September 2007. Oren Ziv | Ryan Rodrick Beiler | Activestills

And let’s stick to the actual facts. Rather than using inflammatory words
like “apartheid” and “genocide,” as some of the authors in this issue of
*Tikkun* magazine are doing, we will be far more effective if we simply
describe the conditions under which Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza
are living. Those facts are powerful enough to help people see why the
Occupation needs to end. Once we get into these more global claims, we end
up giving those who wish to discount the oppression Palestinians face daily
a way to switch the topic to whether this is “really” apartheid or
genocide. Not a smart strategy when facing an American population that has
just elected in November 2016 Republicans and Democrats who seem nearly
totally united in defense of Israel’s policies. Let’s be smart if we want
to actually win a change in consciousness in the American people. The same
diversion happens when peace-oriented progressives try to organize people
around specific strategies to coerce Israel to change its policies—the
conversation switches to the legitimacy of the coercions being proposed,
and away from the outrage people might feel if the focus was on educating
them to what is the daily experience of living under Israeli occupation!

Far more plausible is the strategy proposed here: focus not on the tactics
of political and economic coercion, but on changing the American public’s
view of the fundamental legitimacy of the Palestinian’s cause for equal
rights with Israelis. That could happen if the peace movements here, in
Israel and in Palestine endorse the version of the “One Person, One Vote”
strategy proposed here by *Tikkun*. And this will only happen if all of us
unite and launch a multi-year education campaign similar to that of the
Civil Rights Movement and the teach-ins that energized the movement against
the war in Vietnam in the 1960s. With sufficient sensitivity, empathy and
generosity of spirit, we could accomplish a powerful change of
consciousness!

This is the real challenge—not headline grabbing, but the day-to-day,
neighborhood and community group organizing around a vision of the world we
want, not just what we are against. We at *Tikkun* and the Network of
Spiritual Progressives can play our part, but this will take the
participation and support of all those who really want to achieve the kind
of liberation from Occupation that will benefit the Israelis, the
Palestinians, the Jews, and all others on this planet.

In this issue of Tikkun we invited a broad swath of people, including many
who disagree with us to our left and to our right, to comment on what the
Occupation has meant to them and/or their ideas about how to end it. For
space reasons, or because some of those writers didn’t meet the deadline
for our print version of *Tikkun*, some of those articles will appear only
on our website, but most are printed here. If you appreciate *Tikkun* being
this kind of forum in which you can hear ideas openly debated, trusting our
readers to make up their own minds rather than just presenting our own
perspective, help keep us alive. We count on your tax-deductible donations
to keep *Tikkun* going. If you appreciate what we do, stretch beyond what
you would normally give to a cause you believe in, make yourself a bit
uncomfortable, but help keep this important voice alive!
www.tikkun.org/donate
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=TURaMUQCWvezAql2e6vp6fbC72QVmgA%2F>
 or send a donation by check to *Tikkun*, 2342 Shattuck Ave #1200,
Berkeley, Ca. 94704.

And may peace, justice, security and well-being come to Israel, to the
Palestinian people, and to all people on this planet, speedily and in our
own day!

Tikkun 2017 Volume 32, Number 2: 5-11

------------------------------
web: www.tikkun.org
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=ILWd%2BoYjc%2B7VI3ARpdEaEPbC72QVmgA%2F>
email: info@...
*Click here to unsubscribe*
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=TDTqXelHBygJj9WdFFkbSPbC72QVmgA%2F>
------------------------------
Copyright © 2016 Tikkun® / Network of Spiritual Progressives®.
2342 Shattuck Avenue, #1200
Berkeley, CA 94704
510-644-1200 <(510)%20644-1200> Fax 510-644-1255 <(510)%20644-1255>
[image: empowered by Salsa] <http://www.salsalabs.com/?email>

Adjuntos

text.html (text/html) 48.9 kB