A view on the Israeli/Palenstine Conflict

Shabbat shalom. Y’shar kokh’khah to Isaiah on your chanting of the Torah and Haftarah, and your carefully thought out words on this morning’s lessons from Torah and Haftarah. Mazal tov to Isaiah’s family, immediate and extended.

Sometimes it is difficult to determine what to say on Shabbat, but it was clear to me, several weeks ago, that this morning I would continue the discussion initiated by Isaiah, and link it to the issue of anti-Semitism which is being addressed in synagogues all over the world on this Shabbat, in response to a call from the Anti-Defamation League. There are some materials from ADL on the table outside the sanctuary, as well as a reprint of an editorial from Thursday’s edition of The Jerusalem Post.

What a challenge: to hear Isaiah’s call to break the cycle of revenge—what others call the cycle of violence--while insisting on an honest look at the contemporary revival of anti-Semitism.

It is precisely to this challenge, I believe, that Torah responds with words we just heard chanted from Deuteronomy: “You shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget (25:19)

How to blot out the memory and not forget? We people of Israel (Jews wherever we live; indeed all people today) must resist the power of memory to terrorize, while never forgetting terror’s threat to freedom.

History reveals that hatred of Israel is as much of a mystery as Israel itself. It is the barb on the hook of Jewish history. Our challenge, as it is the challenge for all humanity, is to live without getting hooked. In Isaiah’s image, to stop batting the ball of hatred across the net.

Yet, would you not consider with me, that when one is assaulted, there is a measure of self respect that comes from protecting oneself? Is this not a lesson driven home to us by what happened to our people in Europe in the last century?

On this Shabbat Zakhor, this Shabbat of remembrance, along with many rabbis around the world, I would suggest that we wake up to a revival of anti-Semitism in our own time. Since the year 2000, with the United Nations’ Conference on Racism, held in Durban, we have witnessed a growing assault on the existence of the State of Israel and Jews in general. In Durban, the old canard that “Zionism is racism,” which was rejected at the UN after decades of assertion, once again found currency. And now, under the leadership of representatives from Libya and Cuba, Durban II—actually a continuation of Durban I—is being planned for 2009.

Rabbis for Human Rights—an organization of which I am a member—has joined others in signing a petition about Durban II which declares in part: “The global effort to eradicate racism cannot be advanced by branding whole peoples with the stigma of ultimate evil, fomenting hateful stereotyping in the name of human rights. The UN and its human rights forums must not serve as a vehicle for any form of racism, including ant-Semitism, and must bar incitement to hatred against any group in the guise of criticism of a particular government. We pledge to prevent this from happening again.”

Unfortunately, it is happening all over the place. Just turn to Channel 15 and listen to the hatred towards Israel and Israelis which spews from the program sponsored by the organization Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel. The other night, a member of the mainstream Protestant clergy added her voice to the slander. Nationally, voices of hatred towards Israel are being heard within the Methodist denomination as it decides whether to participate in a campaign of divestment from a company doing business with Israel.

When eight yeshiva students recently were murdered while studying in Jerusalem, murdered by a resident of east Jerusalem, it was proclaimed an heroic act by Hamas. These murders sparked celebratory gunfire and the distribution of candy in Gaza, dancing in Ramallah and Jinin, and the setting up of a mourning tent decorated with green Hamas flags by the killer’s family.

Even as this has gone on, there continues to be strong pressure from the United States to negotiate with Hamas, a political party which seeks Israel’s destruction. Others want to go full force into a war with Hamas which will involve many deaths of Israelis and Palestinians. Some suggest that we recognize that war already is being waged on both sides and Israel needs to increase its attacks on Hamas’ leaders. Iran and other Arab states, which actually are aligned with the United States, fund Hamas’ hatred and violence. Those who define this struggle as simply a cycle of violence ignore the fact, as explained by Thursday’s editorial in The Jerusalem Post, that it is “a skewed process. “Since the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, the Israeli public and political system have moved dramatically from a consensus that regards it as acceptable, even a necessity. At the same time, the Palestinians have if anything become more radicalized since 1993, and have not begun to prepare themselves for a two-state approach, let alone embrace it.”

From the distance of six thousand miles, we are not personally threatened by the rockets and missiles falling on Sderot and Ashkelon, and predicted soon to be coming to Tel Aviv. It is not for us to make easy judgments. We read many different things. The Jerusalem Post reported this past Tuesday that an Egyptian-brokered truce has been reached between Israel and Hamas, according to a senior Israeli security official. Around the same time, Israel’s Defense Minister was suggesting that Israeli troops would have to go back into Gaza in the near future.

How do we sort out legitimate security concerns from the virus of revenge that Isaiah warns us against? Calls for revenge are in the air, on all sides. The Palestinian press is full of hateful calls for eliminating Israel. The President of Iran wants to kill Jews. We ourselves hear a cry for revenge from our own people.

“The people directly affected by the deadly terrorist attack on the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva—this is from a report in the Israeli press—“the people directly affected by the terrorist attack . . . are not just the students, their relatives and friends, but the much wider larger segment of the religious Zionist public. This segment of the population, already seething with anger, which started with the Disengagement in 2005 . . . , the government promises to America to remove illegal outposts, the continued diplomatic process launched at Annapolis and its emphasis to talk about all topics, including Jerusalem, is going to be extremely unhappy about this attack. Together with the grief and sorrow, there is going to be a lot of angry talk about good and evil, about a religious war over the Holy Land.

“Many of the top leadership of the religious Zionist movement, speaking at the funerals, spoke of revenge of the blood. The fact that the Jewish students were killed in a house of God touched the most basic nerve of many Israelis, and especially of the religious Zionist public.”

The situation is confused. On the one hand, we have reports of negotiations with Hamas. On the other hand, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who had been going out on a limb, talking with the Palestinians about dividing Jerusalem, said last Sunday that “Israel is obligated to respond to terror, and every process must offer a unilateral response to its security needs. The creation of a Palestinian state is not the required answer to Israel’s security needs.” Israel’s Defense Minister suggests that Israeli troops will have to return to Gaza.

Speaking on Wednesday at a special session of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, Ms. Livni said:

“I want to make it absolutely clear; we don’t want to punish innocent people. The death of a child—any child, Palestinian or Israeli—is a terrible loss. But there should be a moral distinction between those who conduct suicide missions deliberately against women and children and those who do their best to avoid hurting the innocent, even if sometimes it happens in the midst of battle. There should be a distinction as well between those who glorify death, Jihad and martyrdom, on the one hand, and those who cherish life and humanity, on the other.”

Ambassador Yitzhak Levanon, who has spoken from this pulpit when he was consul general in Boston, is now Permanent Representative of Israel in Geneva to the UN Human Rights Council. Ambassador Levanon recently responded to a resolution passed by the Human Rights Council, condemning Israel’s incursion into Gaza with the loss of 130 lives, half of them cxivilians:

“The tuth is, that the Hamas terrorists took over the Gaza Strip by force, and established an irredentist entity. That, they have smuggled lethal weapons into this territory with the sole purpose to kill Israelis. That, since the beginning of this year, in only two months, they have fired 671 missiles at civilians, women and children. That, they received these missiles from countries in the Middle East . . . That, Hamas is . . . collectively punishing a population of a quarter of a million citizens living in Ashkelon, Sderot, the Negev and Netivot. That, they call for the physical destruction of my country and translate these words into deeds . . . That Israel has left no stone unturned in our attempts to alert the international community that the situation is untenable. . . . And the world remained silent.” Indeed, the UN Security Council was blocked by Libya from condemning the murder and maiming of teen-age rabbinical students.

My colleague and former fellow rabbinical student Rabbi Daniel Gordis, in a piece circulated by the Jewish Agency, bemoans the fact that the State of Israel, which was supposed to insure that Jews would never again be sitting ducks in the face of violent assault, now is meek and unable to protect its citizens.

On this Shabbat Zakhor, we need to wake up to the situation Jews now are in. We mourn the loss of the lives of all innocents. All life is sacred. We want an end to all the bloodshed. We pray for the blood-letting to cease. We want to live in peace in the Middle East and, indeed, all over the world.

We are sensitive to the loss of innocent lives of Palestinians. We reject revenge. Many, though not all of us reject, as a form of revenge, Prime Minister Olmert’s decision to build more housing in the territories. Some in Israel cry out for building one hundred apartments in the territories for each of the yeshiva students murdered.

Our God is not a vengeful God. We did not survive the Holocaust to fall prey to the bitterness and hatred of revenge. Just the same, let us know, deep in our hearts, that what is going on in the Middle East is far more than a case of tit for tat acts of violence. The intention of Israel’s enemies, as ever, is to strike a blow against our existence. Sheikh Raed Salah, a leading Islamic cleric said this past Monday at a press conference in Jerusalem, “The claims of the Jews are big lies and they have no right to any speck of dust here.”

And it’s not just the Islamists. The military wing of Mahmood Abbas’ Fatah claimed responsibility last month for rockets attacks on Israelis. Just a few days before the attack on the yeshiva, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said, in Arabic, that he is against terrorist attacks only for tactical reasons “at this time” and that, “in the future, things may change.” He said, “I had the honor of firing the first shot in 1965,” and bragged about Fatah having trained Hezbollah.

We can condemn particular policies of the State of Israel, and sometimes, as a matter of conscience, insist on such criticism. Israel’s own citizens readily criticize their government. I myself have stood with Palestinians as their house was unjustly demolished. I have picked olives with Palestinian farmers under attack by violent Israeli settlers. I know the pain of the Palestinians.

But let us not fool ourselves into equating the existential situation of Jews living in the Middle East with, say, that of Americans relating to Iraq. We Jews are still defending our very lives. Let us blot out the memory of Amalak and never forget. Wherever we live, we must resist the power of memory to terrorize us, while never forgetting terror’s threat to freedom, and, indeed, to our very lives.

Shabbat shalom.

-Rabbi Joshua Chasan