Lihish’ta’weel
by RicardoTo comment publicly on Lihish’ta’weel: The Strategic Basis for Peace in Palestine, add your response here. Feel free to respond to other people’s comments. Please only participate if you have read the essay.
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To comment publicly on Lihish’ta’weel: The Strategic Basis for Peace in Palestine, add your response here. Feel free to respond to other people’s comments. Please only participate if you have read the essay.
Hello!
I guess I’m lucky enough to make the first stab at this here and well you know…I’ll go for it:
This is the best, most concise and important text I have read about Israel, and one that both answers and extends the understandings and experiences I gained by visiting Israel this summer as a birthrighter, a lone Jewish traveller, and an activist meeting friends of activists.
It does an incredible job of presentating the REALITY of the situation as it stands at its best and worse, nearly escapes all cliches (love vs. fear manages to be in there) by providing stunning examples and dis-examples from the history of similar situations, and provides a framework for reclaiming Israel, Judaism, and Justice…in one little 50 pages swoop.
This is done by laying out the most important and generally misrepresented historical engine of the conflict, Zionism, (and its commitment to repeat American colonial genocide) and the small, largely military elite that continues to keep this vision in the driver’s seat in Israel in Israel and their unmentined allies (dubious reactionary elements including extremely conservative Jews, the Bush adminstrative, and radically conservative evangelical christians in the US and arms dealers and arms dealing nations across the world including those ‘hostile’ to Israel).
But as I said this is a hopeful vision. By pinpointing and umasking the key engine benefiting from the cycles of violence–a genocidal and suicidal vision to eliminate non-Jews from Israel so as to start from a purity of place, people, and a ‘necessary’ obliteration of history, and its key rhetorical device, inevitable dystopia–Ricardo Levins Morales creates a crucial and imperative counternarrative to those who believe the conflict is natural, inevitable, or hopeless.
This vision of an Arab-free Palestine is killing Israel… and this vision is not realistic but suicidal. Creating everlasting war at all costs, and constantly preventing and in fact disavowing the possibility of real peace (as RLM breathtakingly demonstrates) is suicide. It is suicide for the state of Israel and as such a huge and historic contingent of the Jewish People. It is suicidal for a Judaism based on justice as opposed to war, on ethics as opposed to genocide or appartide. It is suicidal for creating a safer middle east and safer world, and is one of the key facts keeping so many Arabs in bad shape under the shitty Arab regimes that have consistently played along and continued the conflict for their own benefit.
There is of course, more that could be said on this conflict, more perspectives to be included, more history, more…scholarship. This is not what is needed. What is needed is people to stand up and Save Israel! Save Judaism! Save justice! Save the Palenstinian and Israeli people who are being either starved in Gaza or exposed every day to the horrific logic of their own leaders and the constant war which that logic engenders.
“No war but the clown war!” (a slogan from a radical Israeli clown brigade for peace). Enough of the clowns in power, enough of them spreading suffering down to too many…especially to their own people who have suffered so much and need not suffer this horror any longer.
Spread the word. Get Israel and Judaism off this suicidal path, and this path for suicidal souls. Read this short little book, and then work with your friends and allies in Israel and around the world to make good on a Judaism worth living.
David Foxman Boehnke
↓ Quote | PostedFebruary 14, 2008, 10:50 pmEXCO Organizer (www.EXCOtc.org) and Childcare/Afterschool Laborer
freedb.wordpress.com
dboehnke(at)gmail(dot)com.