It is so hard to see such violence, racism and hate within your society. I am crying.
I feel shame and I’m worried.How did we get here?
Israel is being attacked by Hamas who in the last 72 hours has launched hundreds of deadly rockets at civilians throughout the South, at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The Israeli army is retaliating, bombing dozens of Hamas and Islamic Jihad military targets, toppling high-rises and other infrastructure that the terrorists plant in Gaza’s heavily populated civilian areas.
With every new cycle of violence between Israel and the Arab countries that surround us, or with the Palestinians living next to us in Gaza under the Hamas terrorist organization, or in the West Bank under Israeli occupation since 1967 in Palestinian "islands" under partial Palestinian National Authority civil rule, we set back once more, fostering more fear of the other, hate, suspicion and the drive for revenge to yet another generation. It’s tragic.
Once and again, and once again now, extremists on both ends kidnap the region’s agenda enforcing upon us all this unwanted reality of conflict rather than peaceful coexistence. And now, the worse has happened, a combination of events has triggered an eruption of internal Jewish-Arab polarization within Israel itself, among Israel’s Jewish and Arab populations, that is threatening to tear apart the delicate fabric of our society and sink us into anarchy and civil war. It is hard - hard to believe, impossible to process. How did we get here?
To many of us, the answer is quite apparent. Fifty-four years of occupation of another people, the Palestinians living in the West Bank, with no peace process in sight that would offer a horizon of hope for a two-state solution that would provide them an independent state living side by side Israel. Never mind that many Palestinians may still harbor dreams of living over all of Palestine, many others have also accepted Israel’s right to exist on its historical land within secure and recognizable borders.
The immorality of this occupation so detrimental to the democratic values and vision of our country’s funders, is coupled with a corrupt prime minister whose sole concern is how to stay in power and out of jail by fueling division and national and religious extremism, delegitimizing the legal system, attacking the free media, threatening the very essence of our democracy. To advance his goals, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has forced four rounds of elections in two years, causing among other things a total collapse of governance.
All this does not give legitimacy to Hamas launching rockets. Firing rockets is unacceptable. Hamas is a terrorist organization that seeks nothing less than the complete obliteration of Israel in order to establish an Islamic republic. Nor does it remove the responsibility for the stagnation in negotiating the political solution from the Palestinians, who were never the most earnestly willing partners for reconciliation, quite the opposite. And yet.
There is a historical context to everything, one that carries with it an essential moral rightfulness for Israel’s existence, to me, uncontested. Yet, I recognize that there is more than one historical narrative that, however conflicting, is equally valid.
The recent roll of events that led to the current eruption is a convergence of this historical conflict with current events – Jewish settlers trying to evict four Arab families from Jewish owned houses in the Arab neighborhood of Sheik Jarrah in Jerusalem; the cancellation of elections in the Palestinian Authority under the pretext that Israel prevented Palestinians in Jerusalem to participate, but in actuality the Palestinian Authority feared Hamas would use the elections to position themselves as an alternative to the P.A.; Israeli police preventing Arabs from convening at the Damascus gate during Ramadan, storming into Temple Mount to stop rioting there, and stopping Israeli Arabs along Route 1 for hours to prevent them from reaching Temple Mount; along with a series of terrorist attacks against Israeli military and Jewish settlers in the West Bank. The ground was ready for the next explosion.
Against this backdrop, Hamas for the first time shot rockets at Jerusalem, making a connection between what was happening there and Gaza, and this woke up the demons of the Arab population within Israel as well, igniting the internal havoc we are now witnessing inside Israel, alongside the disastrous human pain and destruction that Hamas and Israel are permeating on one another.
So now what?It’s hard to predict how long the futile military battle will last. Perhaps a few more days or weeks. But it will come to an end. And then, we will have a lot of healing to do, going once again to square one to begin rebuilding external and internal trust, tolerance, understanding and acceptance, through education, community and social services, justice and governance.On the national level, it will mean pursuing our efforts to bring about political change that will bring forth a courageous, visionary leadership on both sides to work toward peace and coexistence. To work toward hope.