Occupation? What Occupation? - Israel's 46th year of occupation of Palestine

It is deeply troubling and sad to watch not only Israelis, but the major institutions of American Jewish life remain in complete denial of the pain caused to the Palestinian people by the continuation of Israel's occupation and its still effective blockade of Gaza. Yet I witness a new generation of Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox rabbis who seem completely blind to the contradictions they embody when they pray for the welfare of the State of Israel and for the IDF (a separate prayer) but never the welfare of the Palestinian people over whom Israel rules.

They ignore the contradictory position of Israel: occupying another people and refusing to give them citizenship or the vote inside Israel. Thus Israel and its supporters openly accept the systematic call of Torah, not only to "love the stranger as yourself" but also, as in last week's Torah portion (shelach lecha) Numbers (Bamidbar) chapter XVI, sentences 15 and 16: "One law shall there be for you and the stranger (Other) who dwells with you--it shall be a law for all time thorughout the ages. You and the stranger shall be alike before the Lord, the same ritual and the same rule shall apply to you and ot the stranger who resides among you." And in dozens of other places the Torah reminds us variants of the following command: "When you cime into your land, DO NOT OPPRESS THE STRANGER (THE OTHER). REMEMBER THAT YOU WERE THE OTHER IN THE LAND OF EGYPT (tha land of narrow consicousness)."

What Uri Avnery describes in an article published in Ha'aretz, Israel's most respected daily newspaper, is not a forgetting, but a willful repression of one's own awareness of how much the Jewish people are turning their back on their own conception of God when they give a nation state, ANY nation a blank check of ethical approval. This is the exact 100% opposite of what the Prophets did in their time.

Israel can no longer claim it's occupation is just temporary--not after 46 years, and Israel refusing still to even temporarily stop building new settlemenrs. The minimum we should be hearing from the spiritually sensitive in our religion or any other religion or non-religious Jewish institution is this demand: One person one vote wherever Israel is occupying or exercising power. And one law for the Jew and for the non-Jew--the very demand that we Jews made historically of all the countries in which we resided as second class citizens. And yes, religious institutions should be explicitly praying for this, and secular humanists should be demanding it of their own state and mobilizing support. AND NO, THIS IS NOT AN ISSUE JUST FOR JEWS WHILE OTHERS STAND BY AND LET THE STATUS QUO CONTINUE. PALESTINIAN SUFFERING IS AN ISSUE FOR EVERY ETHICALLY SENSITIVE PERSON ON THE PLANET. If you feel you don't know enough about it to engage in a conversation with a a legislator or to raise it in your own congregation, read my 2012 book Embracing Israel/Palestine and you'll get all the tools you need to be an advocate for reconcilation, plus you'll find there a streategy to make all this possible ( www.tikkun.org/eip ).

We at Tikkun continue to focus on this, not because Israel is the worst human rights offender on the globe (it pales before Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, North Korea, and many other states) but because Tikkun, while equally open to non-Jews of all religions and secular humanists, is especially rooted in the Jewish tradition, and want to defend Judaism from those who would identify it with the policies of any nation state, just as the Prophets of the bible insisted on this separation, and because we believe that Israel's current policies are leading to an upsurge of anger at the Jewish people globally which may (God forbid) lead to the destruction of Israel and to a renewed assault on all Jews everywhere.
It is out of love for our people, the Jewish people, that we seek allies to push Israel in a different and new direction, a direction I detail in Embracing Israel/Palestine.--

RabbiLerner.tikkun@gmail.com