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September 2001 Sept 25 2001 The Shalom Center Website, maintained by Rabbi Arthur Waskow, has opened a section called After the Atrtack: Facing the Present Crisis, in their Seeking Peace Section. There are many articles, links and other resources pertaining to the spiritual as well as political issues raised by the terror attack on the U.S. Particularly useful for these Days of Awe. Sept 20, 2001 What good would really be done by bombing Afghanistan? September 14 2001 By Robert Rosenberg There is a very simple proposition -- terrorism, meaning violent attacks on civilians, is no longer an option. Calling it the poor man's weapon, saying one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, or all the other ways to "explain" terrorism and thereby legitimize it, can no longer be allowed. National liberation movements, ethnic liberation movements, cultural liberation movements all have one basic choice -- to engage their enemies politically or violently. If they choose violence, they will rule out any chance of political engagement. As the world lines up now on this issue, there are steps the U.S. government and NATO can take that do not involve immediate military action. Inform all those states and semi-states -- Iran, Iraq, Cuba, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria -- that are known to harbor known terrorists, meaning people who have used the deliberate strategy of attacking civilians as a means of political struggle, that they have 30 days to deliver those people to the international court of law in the Hague. At he end of those 30 days, those states who refuse to comply are evicted from the United Nations, lose all aid packages, their national arilines are no longer allowed to land in any North American or European airport, and all commercial trade with them, whether importing or exporting, is deemed illegal and punishable by fines of 10 times the value of the transaction. Yes, innocent civilians in those countries will suffer. But the power centers in those countries will not be able to last very long, because in all those countries, the power centers are identical to the main business interests and those interests will be fatally damaged. Those states and their power centers will have another 30 days after the expulsion from the UN and the imposition of the above steps, to hand over the known terrorists. At the end of those 30 days, the U.S. and NATO will undertake full-scale military war with those countries. At the same time as the above takes place, something else takes place -- a concerted international effort to force warring parties in regional conflicts to engage in political dialogue. This means instructing Israel and the Palestinians, for example, to immediately begin good faith negotiations for a final settlement to their conflict. The WTC disaster is an opportunity -- if the democracies have
the stomach to say aloud what is well-known in private: that in each and every
regional conflict there is an obvious compromise to be made between the parties
that requires both sides to make concessions that neither is ready to do as long
as they are not both "punished" for their refusal. It is time to start punishing
the recalcitrant. "You declare that you do not hate Jews, you are merely anti-Zionist. And I say, let the truth ring forth from high on the mountain tops... When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews... What is anti-Zionist? It is the denial of the Jewish people of a fundamental right that we justly claim for the people of Africa and freely accord all other nations of the globe."Reverend Martin Luther King, 1968. The time has come to shout this from the rooftops. The collection of racists parading on the stage at Durban after distributing anti-Semitic propaganda needs to be addressed. We ask all good people to get the message out: Anti-Zionism = Anti-Semitism. Don't let our enemies hide their Jew hatred in the suddenly politically correct packaging of Israel-hatred. Be a Zionist. And be proud of it. August 31 2001 On the opening of the World Conference Against Racism by Robert Rosenberg A major problem in the whole Zionism=racism issue is the perception that Judaism is religion, which is simply not the case. Judaism may or may not be unique, but it is not simply religion, and certainly not in the sense that Americans understand religion, as a private matter between the individual and God. And Judaism is also not only cultural, in the sense of bagels, dreidels and faigels (if you'll pardon the off-the-cuff wordplay, and no anti-gay bias intended). Judaism is first and foremost a sense of peoplehood because there is a common national history of Jews (albeit one that as had interrupted periods of national sovereignty over a given piece of territory --and occasional disruptions of cultural contiguity with other Jews, as in the case of the Ethiopians) even when they have been dispersed and under other people's sovereignties. And in that sense of peoplehood, the Zionist ideal in its most basic form is no different from any "peoples liberation movement" that exists anywhere else in the world. One does not need to be religious, know Yiddish, Ladino or Hebrew, keep kosher, pray on Yom Kippur, or keep track of Jewish athletes to have the sense of belonging to the Jewish people. It can be one small thing -- or it can be many big things -- but it first of all is a matter of identification with other Jews, just the way Amercans identify wth other Americans (especially when they are in trouble overseas), or for that matter, any person identifies with a larger collective identity. Is it a form of tribalism? perhaps. But does "the chosen people" concept mean better people -- on the contrary, at least as far as 99 percent of the rabbis in the world teach it (or are supposed to teach it). The chosen people means Jews are supposed to regard themselves as having more responsibility -- as Michael Lerner has been for so long pointing out -- to do tikkun, to improve the world. Do Jews do that? Ahh, do Americans live up to the constitution and bill of rights? D the English live up to the ideals of the Church of England? Do the Iranians live up to the ideals of Isam? And so on and so forth. From Goree to Auschwitz... human beings are not yet human beings. As for discrimination against non-Jews in Israel -- a couple of points. there are many, many reasons to be critical of Israeli governments since the state's establishment in 1948 -- and there are many, many Israelis, both hawks and doves (a far better way to describe Israeli politics when it touches on the "conflict" than left and right), who are critical of those government policies, lapses, etc. Zionism, at least the Zionism to which I adhere, does not include Jewish supremacism. While there are strains of Jewish supremacism in many of the actions of the Israeli government resulting from the foolish occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and its defense of the many Jewish supremacists who were encouraged to move to settlements there, those strains -- and the settlement movement -- have been long opposed by a vibrant, even if not yet completely successful, dovish camp. Does that excuse stupid policy by the Israeli government. No. But nowhere in Zionist writing will a reader find Jewish supremacism as a core ideology, indeed not even a minority ideology. It was Zev Jabotinsky, the father of the israeli "revisionist right" who proposed that Arabs in the Jewish state have equal epresentation in government. That his followers have not fulfilled that political axiom is not a fault of Zionism, which basically says that the Jews have a right to a state of their own, just like the Palestinians have a right to a state of their own. It is a fault of his followers. One of the most disturbing aspects of the way the World Conference Against Racism was turned into an israel-bashing event is that it was done so by many states that claim Islam as a state religion, indeed impose Islamic religious law on the residents of the country, whether Muslim or not. Yes, there are some odd elements of Judaism that are part of state law in Israel, but all include loopholes enabling a "non-believer" to conduct their affairs wthout compliance with those rituals. Nobody's ever been put on trial in Israel for blasphemy, while it's a not irregular practice in countries like Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and of course, Afghanistan -- all of which have state religion far more intrusive into the lives of the people than the Judaism of Israel. I don;t mean to bash Islam on this, by gthe way, just the governments... Are non-Jews in Israel at a disadvantage in the country -- yes. But if anyone can point to a country where minorities are not at a disadvantage -- including the united states -- I'd wonder why they aren't living there. All this is not to defend any government practices here that discriminate against non-Jews (more precisely, non-Jewish residents or citizens). Thankfully, above all, there is a free press in Israel (and on the internet), which enables people to criticize those practices, and in fact, those practices are regularly criticized in the press, and often stopped by the courts. Are the Palestinians being screwed? Yes. By Israel and the Arab world, and by their own leadership. In Israel, at least, there's self-criticism, which unfortunately is all too rare a voice in Palestine. I don't mean kowtowing to Israel. I do mean such simple things as Hanan Ashrawi, for example, certainly knowing that the Jews have a reason they care about the Temple Mount and when Arafat says there's no such historical reasonm, she should speak up and correct him. And for the Palestinians' sake, in this era when wars are really fought on TV screens to capture public opinion, she should make sure Israelis hear her say it. Sorry for the length of the post. It's a subject that I can obviously go on and on about and I may have been carried away this Friday morning. I rarely have time for writing anything nowadays, but this morning, finding the time, I have the feeling I've made up for lost time... Shabbat Shalom Robert
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