[mgj-discuss] starhawk on judaism and reconciliation

[mike sysiuk]

FYI,

Mike


Heresies in Pursuit of Peace: Thoughts on Israel/Palestine
By Starhawk
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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 ridden 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 theologian 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.


http://www.starhawk.org

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