Whatever is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow-man. This is the Torah. All else is interpretation.
-- Rabbi Hillel
Between February, 1948 and December,1948 the Israeli army systematically occupied the Palestinian villages and towns, expelled by force the population and in most cases also destroyed the houses, looted their belongings and took over their material and cultural possessions. This was the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. [cite]
This observation was not made by Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Yassir Arafat, or even Mahmoud Abbas but rather, by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe.
Put yourself in the place of the old men of Palestine. Many were but simple farmers or husbandmen, whose families only knew peace. Like Tolkien's Hobbits, the terrifying affairs of the wide world had largely passed them by. But they could not remain isolated forever. They were forced to leave their homes -- at the business end of Zionist panzers.
I used to support Israel in this conflict, but several experiences changed my mind. First was watching a remarkable PBS documentary by two Jewish filmmakers (I don't recall the title, but Promises most closely resembles the plot), in which an exiled Palestinian family returned to the land they owned in what is now Israel -- only to see it obliterated by the Zionist state (confirming Dr. Pappe's scholarly observations). The second was in making friends with a man whose family still had the deed to their land, issued by the Crown -- a further confirmation of Pappe's observations. The third was becoming victimized by an act of domestic official lawlessness, the details of which I will not relate here. Finally, I have had clients over the years who were victims of the Holocaust and with it, a fair insight into their experience.
A lot of you have lived privileged and even charmed lives; the sting of oppression is nothing more than an abstraction. Others have been on the business end of society's howitzer (our LGBT friends being the latest in a long line of victims). Those who have been there understand the victim's emotions from a visceral perspective.
How you react to injustice defines you. The conservative indulges his or her basic instincts; the liberal openly acknowledges and consciously fights them. The conservative favors power and advocates its continuance; the liberal tends to side with the powerless, chastened by the cold, hard truth that what comes around eventually goes around. The conservative enjoys the brute force of numbers; the liberal understands that ultimately, we are all a minority of one. Gerry Spence drives this point home with his customary eloquence, in justifying his defense of white separatist Randy Weaver to a Jewish friend:
In this country we embrace the myth that we are still a democracy when we know that we are not a democracy, that we are not free, that the government does not serve us but subjugates us. Although we give lip service to the notion of freedom, we know the government is no longer the servant of the people but, at last has become the people's master. We have stood by like timid sheep while the wolf killed, first the weak, then the strays, then those on the outer edges of the flock, until at last the entire flock belonged to the wolf. We did not care about the weak or about the strays. they were not a part of the flock. We did not care about those on the outer edges. They had chosen to be there. But as the wolf worked its way towards the center of the flock we discovered that we were now on the outer edges. Now we must look the wolf squarely in the eye. That we did not do so when the first of us was ripped and torn and eaten was the first wrong. It was our wrong.
That none of us felt responsible for having lost our freedom has been a part of an insidious progression. In the beginning the attention of the flock was directed not to the marauding wolf but to our own deviant members within the flock. We rejoiced as the wolf destroyed them for they were our enemies. We were told that the weak lay under the rocks while we faced the blizzards to rustle our food, and we did not care when the wolf took them. We argued that they deserved it. When one of our flock faced the wolf alone it was always eaten. Each of us was afraid of the wolf, but as a flock we were not afraid. Indeed the wolf cleansed the herd by destroying the weak and dismembering the aberrant element within. As time went by, strangely, the herd felt more secure under the rule of the wolf. It believed that by belonging to this wolf it would remain safe from all the other wolves. But we were eaten just the same.
Gerry Spence, From Freedom to Slavery: The Rebirth of Tyranny in America (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993) at 5-6.
We are morally responsible for our fellowmen and more importantly, how we treat them. The Hebrew Scriptures are replete with exhortations to the children of Israel to ensure that even those who were foreign to the Covenant received their just due as members of the human family. E.g., Exod. 23:9; Deut. 24:17. Our test of character is not in how well we treat our friends, but how decent we are to our enemies.
We have failed in this test, precipitating a stat of affairs not unlike that lamented in ‘Second Isaiah’: "The Lord looked and was displeased that there was no justice. He saw that there was no one, he was appalled that there was no one to intervene." Isa. 59:15(b)-16. What we allowed to take place in our name as Americans in Iraq is disgraceful; our only solace can be a private one, to the extent that we did our best to try to prevent it. It is the same species of shame victims of the Holocaust felt: that we somehow let it happen. And as it pertains to Israel, the singular tragedy is that it didn't have to happen:
Ahad Ha'am warned that the settlers must under no circumstances arouse the wrath of the natives ... 'Yet what do our brethren do in Palestine? Just the very opposite! Serfs they were in the lands of the Diaspora and suddenly they find themselves in unrestricted freedom and this change has awakened in them an inclination to despotism. They treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, deprive them of their rights, offend them without cause and even boast of these deeds; and nobody among us opposes this despicable and dangerous inclination ...'
"... The same lack of understanding he found in the boycott of Arab labour proclaimed by Jewish labour ... 'Apart from the political danger, I can't put up with the idea that our brethren are morally capable of behaving in such a way to humans of another people, and unwittingly the thought comes to my mind: if it is so now, what will be our relation to the others if in truth we shall achieve at the end of times power in Eretz Yisrael? And if this be the "Messiah": I do not wish to see his coming.'
"Ahad Ha'am returned to the Arab problem ... in February 1914 ... '[the Zionists] wax angry towards those who remind them that there is still another people in Eretz Yisrael that has been living there and does not intend at all to leave its place. In a future when this illusion will have been torn from their hearts and they will look with open eyes upon the reality as it is, they will certainly understand how important this question is and how great our duty to work for its solution'." [cite]
This is the Judaism I know, have always admired, and gave serious thought to converting to as a lad. The Judaism of the kibbutz, one acknowledging that we are only as strong as the weakest among us. The Judaism of Jesus, who counseled that we are to "do unto others what we would have them do unto us." Matt. 7:12. What we see in Gaza today is not Judaism. It is malicious and cruel.
Go ahead. Take a look at this face. This is the face of Zionism. The use of chemical weapons against defenseless civilians. The willful targeting of United Nations schools with children in them. Look into the face of his father -- whose other children are malnourished, due to the privations you have had a hand in imposing -- and tell him that Israel has a right to exist.
I know what I would do to those who have injured me, if I were given the unfettered power that Israel now enjoys over the largely defenseless people of Gaza and indulge my baser instincts. This, in turn, is why I understand the frustration and just grievances of Gazans, who are forced to live under siege in crowded bantustans with no natural resources -- not even water! This is what they face (as reported in the NY Times):
The settlements also came with greenhouses that offered the prospect of thousands of agricultural jobs. Yet the greenhouses sit idle.
The Palestinians invested millions of dollars to repair the greenhouses shortly after the Israelis left, and had an excellent crop in the winter of 2005 and 2006. But they were unable to export their produce to Europe, the main market, because Israel kept Gaza's main crossing for goods closed for weeks at a time, citing security concerns.
Short of money and fearing a similar fate this year, the Palestinians did not plant a winter crop in the greenhouses. But the goods crossing has been mostly open in recent weeks, when the crops would have been ready for export.
The Palestinian Agriculture Ministry says it will soon start renting the greenhouses to private farmers and will encourage them to grow for the local market, since there are no guarantees that fruits, vegetables and flowers can be exported in a timely manner. [cite (third-party reprint; the Times allows limited access)]
According to a Vatican observer, Gaza "resembles a big concentration camp." Even today, Jews hate Nazis because of the unspeakable treatment their fellows suffered in Auschwitz; is it all that much of a surprise that Muslims from Karachi to Kansas City hate Jews?
Defenders of Israel insist that their fellows have a moral right to "defend themselves." However, as they are now the oppressors, any claim to morality is dubious at best. Pope John Paul II, who grew up under the iron fist of Communism, understood this fact on a visceral level. His Holiness observed in an encyclical that any violent result of a struggle against oppression is morally "attributable to the aggressor whose action brought it about." Evangelium Vitae, Sec. 55, Encyclical Letter on the Value and Inviolability of Human Life, March 25, 1995.