HEALING ISRAEL/PALESTINE
A Path to Peace and Reconciliation
by Rabbi Michael Lerner
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INTRODUCTION

JEWS DID NOT RETURN TO THEIR ANCIENT HOMELAND to oppress the Palestinian people, and Palestinians did not resist the creation of a Jewish state out of hatred of the Jews. In the long history of propaganda battles between Zionists and Palestinians, each side has at times told the story to make it seem as if the other side was consistently doing bad things for bad reasons. In fact, both sides have made and continue to make terrible mistakes. Yet it is also true that both sides can make a reasonable case for their choices, given the perceptions they had of their own situation and of those who opposed them. As long as each side clings to its own story, and is unable to acknowledge what is plausible in the story of the other side, peace will remain a distant hope.
 
In this book, I offer a more balanced perspective of this story - a perspective that seeks to highlight the way that decent human beings on both sides could end up perceiving each other as irreconcilable enemies, and how, within their own frameworks, they became blind to the legitimate needs of the other side and the ways that each side contributed to the current mess.
 
The first step in the process of healing is to tell the story of how we got where we are in a way that avoids demonization. We need to learn how two groups of human beings, each containing the usual range of people - from loving to hateful, rational to demented, idealistic to selfcentered - could end up feeling so angry at each other.
 
Here's the short version: From 1880 to 1950 the Jewish people jumped from the burning buildings of Europe. We jumped not because we wished to, but because of a legacy of hate that culminated in our being the victims of genocide. And we landed on the backs of Palestinians.
 
The Palestinians and the Arab people of the Middle East were in the midst of a struggle to free themselves from colonial powers, and were afraid of the Zionist dream of the creation of a Jewish state right on top of their own fledgling Palestinian society. They viewed the Jews who came to Palestine not as desperate refugees but as Europeans introducing European cultural assumptions, economic and political arrangements, and thereby extending the dynamics of European domination. So the Arabs in general, and those who lived in Palestine in particular, were unwilling to give Jews a safe place to land.
 
The Palestinians used acts of violence and the influence of Arab states with the British to deny Jews a refuge. Their insensitivity to the Jewish people and our needs helped create a dynamic in which Jews actually became what the Palestinians had feared: a group that would cause Palestinians to become refugees. Years later, Jews responded in kind when we refused to provide Palestinians with a way to return to their homes when it was we who had power.
 
As Jews established our state in our ancient homeland, we hurt many Palestinians and evicted many from their homes. When the Palestinian people cried out, we could not hear their pain - because we believed that the genocide we had barely survived proved that our pain was so much greater. Israelis defended themselves against knowing how much violence they had done to the Palestinian people by telling themselves that the Jewish people have never done anything to the Palestinian people even vaguely comparable to the genocide that was done to us in Europe.
 
But from the standpoint of the Palestinian people, the pain they suffered at our hands was very real. Yet, because we are stiff, so traumatized by our own pain, we Jews still have difficulty acknowledging that we have caused any pain to the Palestinians, just as Palestinians continue to be unable to acknowledge the pain they caused to the Jewish people when it was we who were the powerless and the homeless. That denial on both sides has made it impossible for each of us to talk honestly to each other, or to find a path to heal the wounds. Neither of us can acknowledge the pain we caused each other, and instead, we continue to inflict new pains that intensify the old. For decades Israel has ruled over the Palestinian people, and as Palestinians responded to that Occupation with armed struggle and acts of terror against Israeli civilians, Israelis have increasingly used methods to secure the Occupation that violate international standards of human rights and make a mockery of the highest values of the Jewish tradition. Both sides act in ways that are cruel and insensitive to the other. This book is written as a contribution to those who wish to break this cycle of pain, mutual indifference, and cruelty.
 
There is never any one "right way" or "objective approach" to tell an historical story. There is no way to avoid one's own bias and interests. The Tikkun Community's goal is to build a peaceful reconciliation between Israel and Palestine, so we tell the story in a way that emphasizes that both sides have co-created the current mess (helped along by world powers, whose particular interests have frequently led them to intensify rather than ameliorate the Arab-Israeli struggle).
 
For those who have grown up within the dominant Zionist narrative which is told and retold in the schools and media of the West, the way I tell the story may seem weighted on the side of the Palestinians, because the very act of telling their perspective seems radical and foreign to most people in the West. On the other hand, those who are familiar with the Palestinian experience will likely feel that the way I tell the story is inadequate - a story told by a Jew who doesn't fully understand or know the psychodynamics and realities of Palestinian and Arab history and society. (I hope to find a nationally-known Palestinian historian, theologian, or social change activist who could work with me to write a version of this story that would do fuller justice to the dynamics of Palestinian history. Such a person would have to be as willing to critique Palestinian society as I have been to critique Israeli and Jewish society.) I acknowledge the validity of these critiques. I can understand why both sides would feel uncomfortable with my attempt to tell the story in ways that give the other side's narrative more validity than they have ever considered giving it in the past. And they will be right to point to tne limits of my perspective, inevitably I shaped as it is by my own background and assumptions.
 
I am Jewish and the rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue in San Francisco. I grew up in a Zionist household. My father was national vice president of the Zionist Organization of America. As a result, I was able to hear the Zionist account from the inside. David Ben Gurion, Abba Eban, Golda Meir, and Abba Hillel Silver visited our home, and their perceptions of the world shaped the discourse in my family. My parents believed that their own role as political forces inside the Democratic Party (my father was a judge, my mother a political advisor to a U.S. Senator and to several governors) made it possible for them to do more for Israel than they could by making aliyah (moving to Israel).
 
Israel was not a huge issue in public consciousness during my years at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, nor was it a central issue in Jewish thought. I shared with my mentor Abraham Joshua Heschel a clear commitment to Israel's well being, but also an understanding that the central issue on the Jewish agenda must move from "security" and "defense" to spiritual grounding and a relationship to serving God and healing the world.
 
I waited until I was twenty-two to spend my first extended stay on a kibbutz - and I loved it. Yet I was stunned by the lack of a strong commitment to the socialist ideals that had originally motivated that kibbutz - the ideals of equality and social justice that were supposedly going to be instantiated in the life of the kibbutz and which would, the early kibbutzniks believed, shape the larger Israeli society. It was only when I began to ask about the origins of the kibbutz in the struggle against the Palestinian Arabs that I stumbled upon a terrible truth: the land on which I was working had been owned by Arabs who had been displaced by the Zionist enterprise. In the course of that struggle, many people picked nationalist loyalties over internationalist commitments, which played a powerful role in undermining the larger socialist commitments that had led the founders of this kibbutz to start the enterprise in the first place.
 
Still, I loved the kibbutz and loved the people I met on it. When the 1967 (Six Days) war happened, I cheered Israel's victories and defended it against some of my friends in the anti-Vietnam war movement who were hostile toward Zionism. I had no hesitation in identifying with the State of Israel.
 
The next year, in response to the challenges to Israel from lefties on the campus where I was doing my Ph.D. and organizing against the war in Vietnam, I started an organization called Committee for Peace in the Middle East, together with my co-chair Mario Savio. We spoke then for a position that both validated the Zionist enterprise and also validated the claims of Palestinians for their own national self-determination. Even then the response of the Jewish world was outrage at our daring to criticize Israeli policies and the American Jewish institutions that supported it. The Jewish world reacted with fury and outrage at anyone who articulated criticism of Israeli policy toward Palestinians, and it has gotten steadily more repressive toward dissenters. The next year the American Jewish Congress fired the editor of Judaism magazine, Stephen Schwartzchild, for the "sin" of having reprinted a section of our founding statement of the Committee for Peace in the Middle East.
 
As I am writing, this spirit of denial of free speech has gone much further so that today most people refuse to even vaguely criticize Israeli policy unless they are willing to face loss of jobs or promotions, isolation in many parts of the Jewish world, and outright slander and abuse. There are few Jewish families in the United States in which some member has not been accused of being a "self-hating Jew" because she or he raised some questions about Israeli policy. As a rabbi, I find that one of my most difficult tasks is to bring people back into the Jewish world who have come to believe that their own independent moral judgments are so unwelcome that they had to leave their Jewishness altogether in order to maintain their own ethical and spiritual integrity.
 
Since then, my study of the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict has led me to a deeper understanding of some of the pathologies and evils that have been perpetuated by people on both sides. That understanding has reinforced my view that both sides have legitimate claims, both sides have legitimate grievances against the other, and both sides have made terrible errors.
 
In my study of the history of past societies and their conflicts and also in my work as a rabbi and psychotherapist working with couples, families, and individuals, I've seen that most struggles are co-created by the people involved; it is very rare that one party to a struggle is "right" and the other "wrong." In fact, most people who engage in discourse about the Middle East know this. In the rest of their lives they are far more sophisticated, and they look for economic, social, and psychological factors to explain the realities that they encounter. But when it comes to the Middle East, their prejudices require that they suspend their own intellectual and psychological sophistication and use their smarts to weave tales that "prove" that their side is right and the other is wrong. They justify this failure of nerve by saying, "The Middle East is different, the people there are unlike other people, so you can't apply what you know to this reality." And what they are really saying is, "the people I disagree with there are evil and you are naive not to believe that."
 
I have not discovered a bad guy and a good guy in this situation, any more than I found a good and bad guy in my therapy office. Reality is much more complex. In fact, overcoming this narrow way of thinking is one of the necessary preconditions for building lasting peace and safety for the people of that region.
 
It is the contention of this book that people on both sides have caused unnecessary suffering and done terribly evil things, but that "evil" is not a very useful category to explain why things have happened - if you stick with "evil" you soon end up in despair. And this book is meant to be a contribution to activism aimed at healing and transformation, not despair and resignation. Of course, activism cannot be based on naive optimism -because it will quickly "burn out" when the world doesn't change overnight. But neither can it be based on the cynical logic of those who see every fact in light of their deep belief
in Evil as a central aspect of human reality.
 
We are publishing this book at a time when there are many reasons for people to despair. But we are committed to the view that tikkun (the Hebrew word for healing and transformation) is always possible, though rarely in any simple or easy way. A major contribution to that healing can occur when people begin to tell the story of the Middle East in ways that validate the truth on both sides, validate the pain and suffering that both sides have had to endure, and affirm the fundamental decency of people on both sides of this struggle. I am both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine, and this book will show you how that can be possible.
 
Peace can be achieved in the Middle East. The scary news is this: it depends on ordinary people like you and me to make it happen. One reason I've written this book is to give you some tools which may help you be more effective when you talk to others. Please use this book as a basis for a small study group to read and discuss the issues raised here, and as a jumping off point for future readings, study, and action. Please get it into the hands of others, and encourage them to read it as well. You'll find that many people have never heard a balanced perspective, never really tried to think themselves into the mind of those with whom they disagree, and that even if they still disagree after reading this book, they may have less anger and less willingness to totally dismiss the other side as "evil."
 
This is not meant to be a new work of scholarship, but rather a way to understand the contemporary reality in order to have the tools to change that reality. It is not a book of history, but a framework through which one can understand the history. I don't use footnotes because I don't want to interrupt the flow of the argument to "prove" my historical reading. I make no claims to have unearthed new historical facts. I'm not an academic seeking to use this to prove my credentials. Rather, this book is heavily dependent on the works of many other historians and Middle East scholars, social theorists, political activists, psychologists, poets, novelists and philosophers. In some places I've nearly just summarized the writing of these scholars. I encourage you to read a set of books that are listed at the end and will provide some of the empirical basis for my reading. Don't be surprised if you find sentences that are almost straight out of their work. What is original here is the attempt to provide a way of thinking about the facts that tells both sides in a compassionate way - and that is something that you won't find too often in any of the history books.
 
I rely particularly on the work of Benny Morris and Samih K. Farsoun, whose writings are sometimes taken into this text without direct attribution. Yet my perspective is also influenced by the writings of or the personal conversations (and sometimes intense arguments) I had with Shulamit Aloni, Yehuda Amichai, Hanan Ashrawi, Shlomo Avineri, Uri Avnery, Mubarak Awad, Aaron Back, Uzi Baram, Mordechai Bar-On, Zygmunt Bauman, Yossi Beilin, David Biale, Azmi Bishara, Tsvi Blanchard, Cherie Brown, Avrum Burg, Yael Dayan, Abba Eban, Bassern Eid, Akiva Eldar, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Yoram Ezrahi, Yaakov Fogelman, Yitzhak Frankenthal, Tom Friedman, Mordecai Gaffii, Galia Golan, Yosef Gorny, Yitz Greenberg, David Grossman, Bonna Devora Haberman, Moshe Halbertal, David Hartman, Geoffrey Hartman, Naomi Hazan, Yoram Hazony. Hanan Hever, Arthur Hertzberg, Anat Hoffirtan, Faisal Husseini, Rashid Khalidi, Baruch Kimmerling, Michael Kleiner, Daoud Kuttab, Irwin Kula, Daniel Landes, Yishayahu Leibowitz, Akiba Lerner, Debora Kohn Lerner, Joseph Lerner, Mark Levine, Ian Lustick, Tzvi Marx, Uri Milstein, David Newman, Micha Odenheimer, Adi Ofir, Wendy Orange, Amos Oz, Ilan Pappe, Pinchas Peli, Shimon Peres, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Yehoshua Porath, Yitzhak Rabin, Avi Ravitsky, Amnon Raz, Michael Rosenak, Mordecai Rotenberg, Edward Said, David Saperstein, Yossi Sarid, Uri Savir, Ze'ev Schiff, Jonathan Schorsch, Jerome M. Segal, Tom Segev, Gershon Shafir, Alice Shalvi, Anita Shapira, Stanley Sheinbaum, Avi Shlaim, Uri Simon, Ze'ev Sternhell, Ehud Sprinzak, Shabtai Teveth, Eric Yoffie, Yossi Yonah, David Vital, Michael Walzer, Arthur Waskow, Avi Weiss, A.B. Yehoshua, Oren Yiftachel, and Idith Zertal.
 
I would be surprised if any of these thinkers really agree with me, and I suspect some (like Morris) would probably be upset that I had used their research to come to different conclusions than they had arrived at. Needless to say these historians and thinkers bear no responsibility for any of my conclusions.
 
More than any of the reading and thinking I have done, I have learned the most about Israel/Palestine from the thirty-two months I've spent there since 1984 - in conversations with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, in interviews with Israeli government leaders (some of which have appeared in TIKKUN Magazine), in the endless meetings of various Israeli peace organizations, in my time visiting West Bank settlements, in study sessions at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, and in time I spent studying in yeshivot, davening at Kehilat Yedidya and many other orthodox synagogues in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and in the many pleasant but sometimes upsetting Shabbat afternoons spent in the homes of Orthodox Jews and labor Zionist secularists talking about what had happened and what could yet be.
 
From all my reading and studying and talking, I have learned that there are many perspectives on the same facts, and that many of them make sense. In all humility I offer up the deepest truths that I have been able to learn from the combination of books, study, conversations, firsthand experience, and my training as a psychologist, philosopher and rabbi. I offer my perspective not as "the truth" but as a truth, rooted in the worldview of the prophets of Israel and their teachings as transmitted to me personally by Abraham Joshua Heschel, Zalman Schachter Shalomi, Joachim Prinz, and Emanuel Levinas, and, in secularized form, by the writings of Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, and Martin Buber.
 
I am, like everyone else on the planet, a flawed and limited human being. I speak the deepest truths I can access, and I've been blessed with incredible teachers and the opportunity to meet and learn from many wise people. I urge you not to rely on my perspective, but to use your own intelligence, creativity, moral sensitivity, and connection to God or Spirit or whatever transcendent connection you have - and then apply that to the reality of building peace and reconciliation between Israel and Palestine. Go and learn - and then go and make tikkun.
 
"Tikkun" is a Hebrew word that means "healing" or "transformation." I believe that a central task facing us today is the spiritual healing of the planet, a healing which requires both a fundamental transformation of our economic and political lives as well as the development of strong inner lives.
 
None of us can do this by ourselves. I've been working with thousands of people in a new national organization called The Tikkun Community - a group I co-chair with Cornel West and Susannah Heschel. The Tikkun Community seeks a world based on love and caring, generosity and open-heartedness, compassion and celebration of the grandeur of the universe.
 
We are a group of people, interfaith, interethnic, spiritually diverse, who believe that social healing requires a much deeper level of psychological and spiritual analysis than is commonly available in the major liberal, progressive or social change organizations, movements or political parties. We are convinced that the fundamental contradiction of advanced industrial societies lies not only in their rapacious search to dominate the economic markets of the world, but in their systematic attempts to flatten human reality into a narrow utilitarian and materialistic reductionism, valuing money and power while ignoring the fundamental human needs for mutual recognition, love, communal solidarity, spiritual integrity, and a connection to a meaning for one's fife that cannot be reduced to the accumulation of things or conquests (sexual or power or fame-oriented). It is this hunger for a framework of meaning and transcendent purpose for our lives, a framework that can encourage us to develop an inner life and a capacity to respond fo the mystery with awe and radical amazement to the mystery and grandeur of the universe and to the miraculous preciousness of other human beings that is systematically undermined by the technocratic rationality of market-driven societies. So our critique is not only of the dynamics of the capitalist market, but also of the one-dimensional nature of the liberal and progressive movements which tend to ignore the deep hunger for meaning and love, and hence develop political strategies that can never fully understand the pain so many people experience in daily life in advanced industrial societies (a pain which then gets addressed and manipulated by the Right).
 
We in the Tikkun Community seek to develop social theory and strategies to social healing and transformation that can address these issues. We are developing a global network of social theorists, social change activists, professionals, business people and healers of every sort who are committed to this vision, and who wish to share their ideas and experiences with each other, both through TIKKUN Magazine, through the creation of local Tikkun Communities, through regional seminars, and through an annual international conference Over five thousand people have joined, and we hope to extend this network and to make it a powerful way to provide avenues of support to those who are involved in social change not as a momentary spurt of energy before they go on to other concerns but as a lifetime commitment. Our first major focus is the topic of this book-building the infrastructure for Middle East peace. But our interests are much wider and deeper. If you want to know more about the full scope of our project, or would like to join us, you can visit our website at vr%lvwtikkun.org, email us at magazine@tikkun.org, or call us at 510-644-1200.
 
Meanwhile, I invite you to take the perspective in this book, build upon it, refine it, correct my mistakes and overcome my limitations, and use this book to help build peace and reconciliation in the Middle East.
 

--Rabbi Michael Lerner

July 10, 2003

 

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