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Jewish Morality Is Criticism of Israeli Policy

Israel is not my birthright writes a U.S. Jewish author, raised to think the country was ours by divine right. But this horror in Gaza has challenged even my deepest beliefs. The Haaretz' Gaza reporter, daughter of Holocaust survivors, writes, 'If victory is measured by the success at causing lifelong trauma to 1.8 million people (and not for the first time) waiting to be executed any moment - then the victory is yours.'

Last week in New York, Jews joined in the protest against Israel's war in Gaza.,Top Info News - Digital News Aggregate

Israel Is Not My Birthright

I was raised to think the country was ours by divine right. But this horror in Gaza has challenged even my deepest beliefs.

By Shira Lipkin

July 26, 2014
Salon

I'm writing this in my new baby niece's room. I am here in Florida visiting my family because of this niece, this tiny pudgy innocent baby. We are Jewish, and it's time for my niece to receive her Hebrew name in a sweet little ceremony at our longtime synagogue.

Last night I sat at the synagogue next to my 19-year-old daughter. I felt a swell of joy as the services began; I'd been away too long. I'd loved services as a child and teenager.

And then we hit the first mention of Israel as the Promised Land, and I burst into tears.

On the way to services, I'd caught up on Twitter a bit. I'd read about the Israeli missiles still falling on Palestine. I'd read about the outright murder of Palestinian children.

And I sat there and listened to the rabbi call Israel our Promised Land, and it broke something in me.

I am an American Jew of a certain age (40), and what that means is that I was raised to believe that Israel was ours by divine right.

It sounds ridiculous when you say it aloud. Especially because, like many of my generation of Jews, I'm not particularly religious. Many Jews my age slid into paganism, a sort of ambivalent agnosticism, or outright atheism; we are cultural Jews rather than religious Jews. And yet when I first spoke about the conflict between Israel and Palestine some years ago, I found that falling out of my mouth - that God promised us Israel. It's ours because God said so.

My daughter, trying to comfort me after the services, said, "Maybe it is the Promised Land, just not right now."

My daughter is an atheist. And the narrative got her, too.

The history we are taught in our Sunday school is that we were there first, and that therefore the Palestinians are occupying our land. How long ago were we there, though? And who, exactly, is we? I find myself using that we - "We need to stop bombing Palestine," "we need to give land back," but I am not Israeli. I have never been to Israel. This is how deep it runs, this idea of possession.

American Jewish teenagers get a free trip to Israel, paid for by a Jewish foundation. These are called Birthright trips.

My daughter went to Israel two years ago. Not on a Birthright trip, the very name of which raises the hairs on the back of my neck, that entitlement to land that others have lived on for generations. She went with my parents, who have gone many times before. She visited various landmarks; she took lots of pictures.

My daughter sat beside me last night at the synagogue, and I was acutely aware that she could not read Hebrew. Neither can my sister, and my husband lost the language right after his bar mitzvah, years ago.

I moved my finger beneath the words as I sang. I whispered to my daughter at opportune moments - this is the R, this is the L, here are the vowels.

Yud. Sin. Resh. Aleph. Lamed.

Yisrael.

I hoped fervently that it would not happen, but it did - the rabbi spoke of those who hate Israel and hate the Jews, but did not speak of the Israeli army, which is burning children alive; did not condemn the hate of Israelis for Palestinians. He spoke of peace, but he spoke of peace as a thing to force on the Gaza strip, not a thing for both sides to work toward. I clutched my daughter's hand, trying not to cry, thinking but we are killing children. Where is the peace in that action?

Who is we?

We. We are killing children, we are killing civilians, because we were told that God gave us this land, and half of us don't even believe.

Our Birthright Tm.

They, not we. The Israeli navy bombed children who were playing on the beach. This is not we, this is not us, this is not in my name. These are nightmarish actions taken by a government I have no real tie to, despite my childhood indoctrination, despite my name, despite my alleged birthright.

At services last night we spoke of peace, but no peace can come of this.

The answer to occupation is not more occupation.

The answer to genocide is not genocide.

I sat there clutching my sefer, wildly praying for true peace, for all of this to stop, and I can't see it from here. I can't see Israel backing off. I can't see an end to the murder, and it horrifies me. I think no one can possibly be reading the Torah anymore because this is not what we were told to do, this is not how we were told to act, and if you believe Israel is yours because God says so, how can you ignore the rest of what he said?

The rabbi encouraged us to go to Monday's pro-Israel rally, and my stomach turned.

I am naïve, I suppose. I know that I am heartbroken. I just want everyone to live.

Shin. Lamed. Mem. I trace the letters and teach my daughter the word for peace.

Updated, 7/27/14:  In the initial version of this post, the author incorrectly referred to a Palestinian child burned  by Israeli soldiers. The child was burned by civilians, and Salon regrets the error.

[Shira Lipkin is a writer and activist. Her fiction and poetry has appeared in Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Stone Telling, Clockwork Phoenix 4, and other magazines and anthologies. Two of her stories have been recognized as Million Writers Award Notable Stories, and she has won the Rhysling Award for best short poem. This is her first non-fiction piece. She co-edits Liminality, a magazine of speculative poetry, with Mat Joiner.]

Israel's Moral Defeat Will Haunt Us for Years
We have passed 1,000 dead Palestinians. How many more?

By Amira Hass

July 28, 2014
Haaretz (Israel)


Palestinian rescue officers removing a body on Saturday from the rubble of a building where at least 20 members of the Al-Najjar extended family were killed in Khan Yunis.
Photo by AP // Haaretz

If victory is measured in the number of dead, then Israel and its army are big winners. From the time I wrote these words on Saturday, and by the time you read them on Sunday, the number will no longer be 1,000 (70-80 percent civilians) but even more.

How many more? Ten bodies, 18? Three more pregnant women? Five dead children, their eyes half-open, their mouths gaping, their baby teeth poking out, their shirts covered with blood and they are being carried on a single stretcher? If victory means causing the enemy to pile up a number of slaughtered children on one stretcher, since there are not enough stretchers, then you have won, Chief of Staff Benny Gantz and Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon - you and the nation that admires you.

And the trophy also goes to the Startup Nation, this time to the startup renowned for knowing and reporting as little as possible with as many international media and available websites as possible. "Good morning, it was a quiet night," the Army Radio host announced cheerfully on Thursday morning. In the day preceding the happy announcement, the Israel Defense Forces killed 80 Palestinians, 64 of whom were civilians, including 15 children and 5 women. At least 30 of them were killed during the same quiet night, from overwhelming shelling, bombing and firing from Israeli artillery, and this is without counting the number of injured or the number of houses blown up.)

If victory is measured in the number of families wiped out within two weeks - parents and children, one parent and a few children, a grandmother and daughters in law and grandchildren and son, brothers and their children, in all the variations you might choose - then we also have the upper hand. Here, names from memory: Al-Najjar, Karaw'a, Abu-Jam'e, Ghannem, Qannan, Hamad, A-Salim, Al Astal, Al Hallaq, Sheikh Khalil, Al Kilani. In these families, the few members who survived the Israeli bombings in the past two weeks are now jealous of their dead.

And let's not forget the laurel wreaths for our legal experts, those without whom the IDF does not make a move. Due to them, blowing up an entire house - whether empty or filled with residents - is easily justified if Israel characterizes one of the family members as an appropriate target (be he senior or junior Hamas member, military or political, brother or family guest).

"If it is legal according to international law," a Western diplomat told me, shocked by his own state's position in support of Israel, "it is a sign that something stinks in international law."

And another bouquet of flowers for our advisers, the graduates of the exclusive law schools in Israel and the United States, and maybe also in England: They are certainly the ones advising the IDF why it is permissible to fire at Palestinian rescue teams and prevent them from getting to the wounded. Seven members of medical teams on their way to rescue the injured were shot to death by the IDF during two weeks, the last two only last Friday. Another 16 have been wounded. This doesn't include the cases is which IDF firing prevented crews from driving to the disaster scene.

You will surely recite what the army says: "Terrorists are hiding in the ambulances" - since Palestinians do not really want to save their wounded, they don't really want to prevent them from bleeding to death under the ruins, isn't this what you are thinking? Does our acclaimed intelligence, which did not discover during all these years the network of tunnels, know in real time that in every ambulance that was hit directly with IDF fire, or whose trip to save an injured person was blocked, there are really armed Palestinians inside? And why is it permissible to save a wounded soldier at the cost of shelling an entire neighborhood, but it is not allowed to save an elderly Palestinian buried under the rubble? Why is it forbidden to save an armed man, or more correctly a Palestinian fighter, who was wounded while repulsing a foreign army that invaded his neighborhood?

If victory is measured by the success at causing lifelong trauma to 1.8 million people (and not for the first time) waiting to be executed any moment - then the victory is yours.

These victories add up to our moral implosion, the ethical defeat of a society that now engages in no self-inspection, that wallows in self pity over postponed airline flights and burnishes itself with the pride of the enlightened.This is a society that mourns, naturally, its more than 40 soldiers who were killed, but at the same time hardens its heart and mind in the face of all the suffering and moral courage and heroism of the people we are attacking. A society that does not understand the extent to which the balance of forces is against it.

"In all the suffering and death," wrote a friend from Gaza, "there are so many expressions of tenderness and kindness. People are taking care of one another, comforting one another. Especially children who are searching for the best way to support their parents. I saw many children no older than 10 years old who are hugging, comforting their younger siblings, trying to distract them from the horror. So young and already the caretakers of someone else. I did not meet a single child who did not lose someone - a parent, grandmother, friend, aunt or neighbor. And I thought: If Hamas grew out of the generation of the first intifada, when the young people who threw stones were met with bullets, who will grow out of the generation that experienced the repeated massacres of the last seven years?"

Our moral defeat will haunt us for many years to come.

[Amira Hass is the Haaretz correspondent for the Occupied Territories. Born in Jerusalem in 1956, Hass, a daughter of Holocaust survivors, joined Haaretz in 1989, and has been in her current position since 1993. She is the only Jewish-Israeli journalist to have spent almost 20 years living in and reporting from Gaza and the West Bank. As the correspondent for the territories, she spent three years living in Gaza, which served of the basis for her widely acclaimed book, Drinking the Sea at Gaza. She has lived in the West Bank city of Ramallah since 1997. Hass is also the author of two other books, both of which are compilations of her articles.]