http://www.latimes.com/news/comment/20001013/t000097477.html
It's Time to Atone When We See Only Our Own Pain
By MICHAEL LERNER, L.A. Times, 10/13/2000
My son served in the Israeli army in the West Bank, so for me the
barbarous killings Thursday of three soldiers by a lynch mob in Ramallah
made me feel the same anger that must have led Israeli Prime Minister
Ehud Barak to bomb Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's compound in
retaliation and to escalate the war against the Palestinians. Yet I can also
understand that to the Palestinians the three boys killed were just members
of the occupying army, the army that has brutally killed more than 85
Palestinians and wounded more than 2,000 civilians in the past two weeks
and which might have seemed indistinguishable from the Jewish mobs that
attacked random Arab Israelis in Nazareth a few days ago, beating and
burning.
For every outrage on one side, there is a story of outrage on the other.
And yet, in my synagogue on Yom Kippur we atoned for our side of the
story, for Jewish violence. Our atonement was not an attempt to claim that
Israel holds all the responsibility. I believe that Palestinians ought to adopt
a nonviolent pose and reject any leader who advocates violence, because I
believe that violence is always wrong no matter how noble the purpose and
because in the context of the current struggle, it had the predicted effect of
destroying rather than enhancing the chances for peace--an outcome
sought by extremists on both sides.
Palestinian violence is both immoral and irrational. Yet the
preponderance of responsibility lies with Israel and with an international
media that continue to obscure the basic realities facing the Palestinian
people, and continue to treat the death of Israeli soldiers enforcing a brutal
occupation as somehow more outrageous and barbarous than the killing of
many times as many Palestinian teenagers who were resisting the
occupation.
To me, Israeli deaths are a personal tragedy. But have we not yet learned
that in God's eyes every human being is equally treasured? The way we talk
that discounts the huge number of Palestinians killed and wounded
reinforces the desperation that led to the current tragic moment. But, you
might ask, didn't Arafat irrationally reject a wonderful peace accord being
offered him by Barak? Isn't this current outbreak just more of the same
irrational hatred that always leads Palestinians to reject a generous peace
being offered by Israel?
The reality is quite different. Since taking office, Barak has expanded
existing settlements, built new roads into the West Bank and made it clear
at Camp David that he would insist on keeping the vast majority of settlers
in place. The state the Palestinians would then be offered would have within
it a group of Israeli nationalistic fanatics, many of whom moved to the West
Bank precisely to ensure that there would never be a Palestinian state.
The resulting scenario is obvious: The settlers would continue their long
history of violent attacks against Palestinians, and when the Palestinian
state tried to impose law and order, the settlers would demand protection
from the Israeli army, which would use the new roads to send in tanks and
heavy artillery just as it has done in the past week.
These Israeli roads and settlements turn the claim of offering the
Palestinians 90% of the land into a cruel hoax. With the Israeli military
patrolling those roads that crisscross the Palestinian state, Palestinians
would face humiliating searches and would not be able to move freely.
Imagine someone offering you a house in which you were going to have large
rooms but they were in charge of the hallways between the rooms. You
would quickly realize that your freedom to be "at home" was remarkably
compromised. For a people who have endured 33 years of military
occupation, with a long history of documented torture, house demolitions and
harassment, this doesn't sound like such a great deal.
Nor are Palestinian demands for control over the Temple Mount and the
adjacent sections of East Jerusalem irrational. Muslims from the occupied
territories have frequently been prevented from coming to the Temple Mount
when Israel proclaims "security closings" of the border. Israelis who were
rightly outraged at being denied access to the Western Wall when
Jerusalem was under Jordanian (not Palestinian) rule from 1948 to 1967
have effectively imposed similar conditions on the 1 million Muslims in
Gaza.
At the same time, many religious authorities ban Jews from walking on
the Temple Mount until the messiah comes. So ceding sovereignty there
would not have been a religious hardship. Barak could have conceded interim
sovereignty to the Palestinians on the condition that those arrangements
would be reopened when the messiah arrived (by Biblical criteria: nations
beating their swords into plowshares and the lion lying down with the lamb).
Nor has Israel ever acknowledged responsibility for the hundreds of
thousands of Palestinians who were driven out of Israel in 1948, many of
whose descendants today live in refugee camps.
None of this had been resolved at Camp David, and so most Palestinians
realized that the peace process was just another mechanism to prolong the
status quo of an oppressive occupation.
I was honored to attend the signing of the Oslo accords at the White
House in 1993, and in the pages of Tikkun magazine I have severely
criticized those Palestinian intellectuals like Edward Said who did not
believe that Palestinian self-determination would be granted in the five
years that Oslo promised. Now, seven years after Oslo, I can understand
why Palestinians would feel cheated and outraged over the endless
occupation. Add to that the racist attitudes that led Barak to seek Israeli
Arab votes in the last election, his subsequent refusal to allow Arab parties
into his government for fear that their presence would make the government
appear "illegitimate" and the long history of discrimination against Israeli
Arabs in housing and employment, and you get the volatile ingredients that
led to the explosions last week and the subsequent massive violence
against Arabs both inside Israel and in the occupied territories.
None of this justifies Palestinian violence or the far more massive
counter-violence of the occupying Israeli army. But I see no hope that the
disgusting cycle of violence on both sides will stop until Israel is willing to
end the occupation and end its internal racism against Arab Israelis. As a
religious Jew, I know that God and the Torah are served best when we
insist that every human being, including our enemies, be seen as equally
valuable to God and equally created as embodiments of the divine. Given my
own outrage over the killing of Israeli soldiers, this is a moment when it
seems easier to just forget my faith and stay in my anger. But I also know
that when the Jewish people can only see our own pain, however real and
legitimate, it is time to atone.
Rabbi Michael Lerner Is Editor of Tikkun: a Bimonthly Jewish Critique of
Politics, Culture and Society and Author of "Spirit Matters: Global Healing
and the Wisdom of the Soul" (Walsch Books, 2000)
