civilians « I can’t think of a witty title

Israel and Palestine: A time to break the silence…is now.

January 6, 2009, 1:03 am
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: civilians, Gaza, Hamas, human rights, Israel, justice, Palestine, peace, war, zionism

Last week I had a conversation with a co-worker of mine who is an Orthodox Jew about the situation in Palestine. We agreed that Israel is wrong in their actions in Gaza and that the fight is not fair. (Israel recieves around $2 billion dollars in military aid from the United States each year).

My co-worker had one question she said she couldn’t understand. She asked how someone can walk into a Yeshiva and “just kill innocent boys”? (I assume she was referring to the 6 March 2008 attacks on a Yeshiva in Jerusalem). I, not wanting to reveal too much about where my loyalties (if any) lay, summarized a quote by JFK and said, “maybe some Palestinians feel that their peaceful pleas for justice have been ignored so the only thing they have left is violence.” She pondered this and then agreed.

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. (JFK 1962)

To me, the most important thing to remember while reading about and reacting to Israel’s attacks on Gaza, is that the situation is one of David vs. Goliath except that David, in this case is malnourished, injured and oppressed and that Goliath recieves $2 billion dollars a year from the US for weapons to use against ‘David’. In this modern David v. Goliath, the metaphor rises above Israeli vs. Palestinian. That is what the surface of the conflict appears to be; however, the real conflict is military vs. civilian. The fact that a humanitarian crisis has been building in Gaza can not be denyed. Hamas resumed firing rockets into civilian areas of Israel in response to the mounting crisis. Israel responded with an all out war. I have combed over news archives trying to count the total number of Isreali civilians killed by Hamas rockets and I have not been able to count more than 15 in the past four years. In the two weeks since Israel began bombing Gaza between 100 and an estimated 600 Palestinian civilians have been killed.

This un-holy war will continue to mar the supposed Holy Land until both sides, Israeli and Palestinian, are given EQUAL voice. The rights of Palestinians must be recognized and protected before any peace talks can begin. The countries of the world must uphold the rights of civilians to live, have access to health care and education. If the world does not act, our countries, by ignoring and denying the rights and dignity of our fellow humans, are not only committing violence but are also ensuring that violence will continue.

Please read the quotations below, visit the sites I’ve listed and consider doing whatever you can to bring peace to the world.

A few more thoughts to consider from a man much more eloquent that I can ever hope to be, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from his 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam-A Time to Break the Silence“:

“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.“
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“We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls “enemy,” for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.”
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“Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.”
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“A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: “Let us love one another, for love is God. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love.” “If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us.” Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.”