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Rabbi Michael Lerner
Editor, Tikkun Magazine
There are many ways to write history and tell any story. It's never the case that the facts speak for themselves because there are so many facts that if we allowed them to speak for themselves, it would take much longer than any of our lifetimes to allow them to speak. There's always the principle of selection in doing history or in looking at contemporary events. So I want to tell you my principle of selection. I look at history and I look at the contemporary realities from the standpoint of tikkun. And tikkun is a Hebrew word. It means to heal, repair, transform, as in the Hebrew phrase tikkun olam, to heal, repair and transform the world. So I tend to highlight those aspects of reality that make it possible for us to move toward a healing and transformation, even though I can easily understand other readings of the same events of any set of events that would come from a different reading. For example, those who want to highlight the impossibility of human beings ever doing anything but hurting each other. That worldview that is another worldview that's out there.
What worldview is predominant at any given time has a great to do with the interests of the powerful. Jews entered history some 3,200 years ago at a time when societies were already class stratified and when there was unequal distribution of wealth and power. At that point and ever since, ruling elites have maintained themselves in power in three predominant ways. Number one, through force and violence. Number two, through convincing people that the way things are is the only way things can be, and that nothing fundamental can be different. Whether that was through religious belief systems, whether that was through Platonic visions of human beings being born with certain metals in their soul, or whether that's the various contemporary versions of social science. There are various approaches to psychology and sociology that have that consequence of trying to convince you that the way things are is stuck, is fixed, is not transformable.
The Jews came into the world with a very different message, and that message was that the world could be fundamentally transformed - that tikkun was possible. And the reason for that was that there was a force in the universe: Yud-Heh-Vav-Heh. It was translated into English as "God" ---- a force in the universe that makes possible the transformation of that which is to that which ought to be. To be a believer, to be somebody who believes in Yud-Heh-Vav-Heh, to believe in God, is to believe in the possibility of possibility; that it is possible to move from that which is to that which ought to be. Hence there are many people in this definition who claim to be religious who are not. That is not because they believe in the wrong name for God, but because they actually don't believe that the world can be transformed and healed. They don't believe that there is a transformative power in the universe. And, conversely, many people who think that they're atheists actually are believers in God, at least in the sense of what I'm talking about.
In any event, the Jewish people played a certain kind of role in history, having articulated this view. We got ourselves into a lot of trouble because ruling elites were doing everything they possibly could to keep our message from being heard by other people, because they used the notion that nothing could be changed as a way to keep people in place. Anti-Semitism, hatred of Jews, developed early in the Jewish history and it was fostered by ruling elites against Jews because of a sense that our message was dangerous, and that if they could warn their own people to not listen to the Jews, to stay away from the Jews, that would be a smart thing to do.
Don't get me wrong, Jews were not as revolutionary as our message implied, because Jews themselves understood that although the world could be transformed, if they were to proclaim that too frequently, they would get in a lot of trouble from the powerful. Even in the ancient world, Jews were doing whatever they could to play up to the powerful and say, "Hey listen, it's only a religion; we don't really take it that seriously." The truth is that the Jews were the most cantankerous force in the Roman Empire. They engaged in overt military rebellions against Rome at a time when it made no sense militarily. They kept on rebelling against Rome until the Romans threw us out of that land. And then for the next 1,900 years Jews were very much at the mercy of many other peoples where we were allowed to live only under certain conditions, thrown out of one country after another, subject to sets of restrictions and laws against us and murdered, raped -- you know the story.
In the late 19th century a significant section of Jews decided the only way they could deal with the oppression they were facing in the rest of the world was to go back to their ancient homeland: Palestine. They were not going back there with the sense of, How can we dominate and control another people? Those who originally sought to go back to Palestine sought to go back with the intention of trying to create a homeland that would make Jews like normal people. The Zionist movement put normalization of Jewish existence as a high priority. "Treat us the same as everybody else," we said. If you get that, you can understand how it could be that even as late as the 1950s and 1960s it was a source of great pride in the Zionist movement when they would point to Jewish prostitutes or criminals and say, "See, we're just like everybody else. We've normalized our existence in Israel. We've got Jewish policemen, we've got Jewish criminals, we've got all the things. We're regular people."
When small groups of people at first chose to go back there with a vision of what we were going to be needing, that was summed up in a Zionist phrase something like this: Palestine is a land without a people for a people without a land. It was a very sweet idea, but the problem was - is - that there was a people there. And the people who were already there were not that excited about people coming to their land to reclaim their ancient homeland. I'm not going to try and tell the whole story of this period. But when you tell the story of the Jews coming back to our ancient homeland and the response of Arabs who were not really yet conceptualizing themselves as Palestinians at that time, there are many different ways to tell the story. What I want to highlight is: Both sides have a reasonable story to tell. You have a people who had no land, had been thrown out forcibly from their ancient homeland; they sought return to it. You have another group of people who were living there already and working the land at least many hundreds of years. When you hear the story told from either perspective it makes sense, and you do not need to postulate some fundamental evil as existing in either the Jewish people and their intentions in returning to our ancient homeland, or the Palestinians who are there and are beginning to feel, or are interpreting their experience in ways that make them feel, threatened by Jews coming back to that land.
Both sides had a reasonable story to tell, but both sides were incredibly screwed up in the way that they treated each other. Both sides took the most paranoid possible reading of the other's intentions and behavior and acted on the assumption that the other was in fact there to hurt them. That assumption became self-fulfilling because as they acted from that fear they provided evidence to the other side for the other side's most paranoid elements. If you trace the Zionist movement you'll see that interpretations of the other's behavior and their own behavior became more and more militaristic, interpreting the other as an impossible, a force that could never be reconciled with. The voices inside the Jewish world who said that were given more and more evidence by the behavior of some people in the Palestinian world just as, conversely, the most extreme interpretations of what Jews were about was given evidence by some of the behavior of Jews in the first 40, 50 years of the 20th century.
There was a Palestinian or Arab leadership - a feudal elite - that had deep suspicions about the intentions of these Westerners coming. And fears that these Jews would bring an ideology, a way of thinking, that would disrupt the old feudal order and undermine their ability to maintain power in their own communities. That led them to then interpret the behavior of Jewish immigrants in ways that accentuated the following picture: Westerners had been coming to this country for the past seven hundred years. Ever since the Crusades they've been out to try to conquer us. The latest wave of that are the contemporary forms of European colonialism, and the latest manifestation of the European colonialism is that they are sending these Jews here to be the vanguard of taking over our land. And you will be expropriated from this land unless we resist this with armed force.
On the other side of the picture you have the Jews, most of whom were poor socialists from Eastern Europe, with little connection to Britain or France or colonial vision. Insofar as they had any ideology it was anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, pro-socialist, anti-capitalist and so forth. But their experience coming there and being greeted with hostility was one that led them to be more responsive to the most right-wing forces in their community that were saying, "You're getting greeted with hostility from these Palestinians; do you know why? Because the goyim always hate Jews. When you came from Eastern Europe, what were the non-Jews like there? What were they like if you came from Algeria or Morocco? There was a great deal of hostility towards Jews. You've had that experience, and so we can transport that to our experience here in Israel, in Palestine, and understand their upset at us as part of a larger picture of anti-Semitism."
Jews in that period began to build defensive institutions that were just for Jews, namely the labor movement, the Histadrut -one of the most progressive labor movements in the world in terms of the social benefits it fought for for working-class people. But it excluded Arabs. Remember that this was a minority group inside a majority culture. They were not the majority running the society in the 1910s through 1930s; they were a small group in the population. A growing group to be sure, and as fascism became more and more powerful in Europe they became more intent on getting out of Europe, and many more people wanted to come there. But they perceived themselves as a fragile entity who needed to create institutions for Jews only in the same way that, 30 years later, blacks and then women and then gays in this country came to the conclusion that they needed women-only institutions, black-only institutions, gay-only institutions to compensate for a long history in which their experience in the larger culture had been one of being demeaned and put down.
Arab leaders interpreting that behavior to their population said, "These Jews are building up an economic infrastructure designed to exclude you and they're going to push you out."
Each side was able to interpret the behavior of the other in the most paranoid way. As a result, the great catastrophe for the Palestinian people was the creation of the state of Israel; for the Jews it was a great liberation and a moment of exhilaration.
From 1940 to 1947, when Jews were being murdered in the hundreds of thousands and the millions in Europe, the Palestinian leadership did everything it possibly could to keep the Jews from coming to Palestine; it used its influence to make sure that the British wouldn't let Jews come there. Even after 1945, to 1947, when Jews were living in camps in Europe, the Palestinians would not allow, and pressured the British to not allow, any Jews to emigrate to this land. It wasn't a question of there not being enough land, because they didn't have any such policies with regard to non-Jews; it was only Jews that would be excluded in this way.
What happened from 1947-49 was a civil war compounded with an external war by surrounding Arab states. In the course of that war, many Arabs lost their homes. Some fled voluntarily. Most did not flee voluntarily. Most fled out of fear of what was going to happen to them. And the fear was well-founded, because there were extremist groups of terrorists in the Israeli world that intentionally tried to target those Arabs who were friendly to Israel. They wanted to get as many Arabs out of there as possible. And there were at least a significant number of Arabs who were forced out of their homes at gunpoint. There were forced marches. This is documented by Israeli historians who in the past 15 years have had access to the archives of the '48 war: tens of thousands force-marched out of their homes and into what became the refugee camps. Ever since that time there has been this struggle. And this struggle is of two peoples, both of whom have a very reasonable story to tell about what they wanted and both of them claiming the rights to the same land. Both of them having good grounds for their claims and both of them telling a story of how crazy and how immoral the other side has been towards them. And I would say most of the stories on both sides are true.
To understand this is to understand that you've got decent people engaged in horrendous acts of hurt against each other. If we're going to change, if there's going to be healing of Israel/Palestine, there needs to be a fundamental transformation in the consciousness of the people of that area and a whole fundamentally new attitude. And that's why I do not believe that any political program will be sufficient in and of itself to transform that area to a peaceful area. There needs to be a transformation that is not only political but spiritual. There needs to be a transformation of heart. A new openness to recognizing the other as created in the image of God and deserving and having rights the same as our own. Being just as precious as we are. Their blood as important. Their children as important. It's only that consciousness that will make it possible for there to be a transformation in the Middle East.
But having said that you might then think, Is this guy now going to just tell us to go get religion? Well, a little, not traditional religion, but a change of heart and a change of discourse; a change of attitude of how we think about this in which we stop trying to prove one side is right and the other is really screwed up, because they're both right and they're both deeply screwed up. It's the frame that's so important, because within the frame you can understand and interpret any particular situation.
Oslo
In 1993, with the creation of the Oslo Accords, the promise made to the negotiators was, If you Palestinians recognize the existence of the state of Israel and change your charter and repress the violence, we will within five years give you a state in the West Bank and Gaza and we will return to the pre-1967 borders more or less and then we'll determine the exact borders, but you'll have the West Bank and you'll have Gaza. The people who negotiated that treaty in Oslo now tell us that's exactly what they were saying to the Palestinians. So it wasn't any surprise when after the prime minister who had validated that was murdered by right-wing Jewish extremists and right-wing governments were elected in Israel that refused to implement the Oslo Accords. The idea of Oslo was land for peace. Critical to that was ending the settlements or dramatically reducing the number of settlers in the West Bank. In 1993, the number of settlers was 120,000. In 2000, when they met at Camp David, the number of settlers was 200,000. So the experience on the ground for people living there was not the experience of what was being said in the newspapers. On the ground more and more land was being taken. Far from a peace process that they had agreed to in '93, leading to an exchange of land for peace, it had led to an increase in the oppression that people were experiencing. Because the more there were settlements, the more there was the demand on the Israeli government by the settlers to create checkpoints to protect the settlements from the hostility of the surrounding neighborhood. (By the way, I'm not in favor of attacking any of those settlers.)
In 2000, at Camp David, President Clinton and Barak (both of whose parties were up for elections soon thereafter) presented what they claimed to be the the most wonderful deal. It said that the Palestinians would get 87 percent of the West Bank and Gaza. Other people said 89 percent. Some people said no, it was 92 percent. By the time these negotiations had got into Taba, it was up to 95 and some people said 98 percent. Since it was never written, there were alternative offers being put forward at Camp David, and it was never clear what exactly was being offered in the way of the land. You might say, who cares? Eighty-seven percent - what's wrong with that? Eighty-nine percent, 92 percent, what's wrong with that? But remember that this is 92 percent of the 22 percent of pre-1948 Palestine that was the West Bank and Gaza. The standpoint of Palestinians: We're coming here to negotiate what we were already promised the last time and we're going to get a percentage of that? You might say, They should have settled. I agree. I think they should have settled.
Then they said, "We want access to our holy sites." Barak said, "You can't have contiguous access. You can have parts of Jerusalem, and you can have your capital there, but you can't have contiguous access."
Why is contiguous access important? Whenever the Israeli army had declared there was a potential threat they closed off access to the Temple Mount, as it is closed off today. Many Palestinians are unable to get to the Temple Mount. But the biggest issue, and the one that was in fact the deal breaker, was that for the refugees -the 800,000 refugees who had grown by this point to someplace between 3 and 4 million people living on the West Bank and Gaza - there was nothing. There was nothing in the deal offered for them. No Palestinian leader could sign a deal that said, We're leaving that to the next stage. In fact, I'm in favor of that. But Barak demanded that they sign a statement saying all remaining issues have been resolved as of this agreement. The rights of the Palestinian refugees had been totally ignored. No Palestinian leader could buy that. So they continued to negotiate, and they negotiated into Taba in 2001. They were very close to an agreement and then a week or two before the elections the negotiations were cancelled by Barak. Sharon won and he said, Forget all about what's happened up till now.
Subsequently, there's been this terrible struggle in which Israel has increased its domination over Palestinian people. And there have been horrendous and in my view morally inexcusable acts of terror against Jewish civilians. You can say to me, as many Palestinians will, "Why don't you call it terror when the Israeli army is targeting one person and kills everybody else in the area? Is it really so much different?" Three times as many Palestinians as Israelies have been killed in the past two and a half years, virtually all of them civilians. In general it's wrong to kill people, and it's certainly wrong to kill civilians on both sides. And both sides have engaged in acts that were horrendous and provocative. But how are we going to get out of this situation?
It looked for a while as though we might get out of it with a new leadership in Palestine willing to overtly commit to a non-violent approach. The Abbas leadership was trying to say, Maybe we can go back into negotiations. Certainly violence doesn't work; it's not producing anything more but giving the most extreme elements on the Israeli side the legitimacy to intensify their oppression of us. It's not working - just as one might argue on the other side, as many of us in the peace movement have, that the occupation was not working to protect Israeli life. The number of Jews killed between 1993 and 1995, when the peace process was at its height was something like 1/80th the number of Jews that had been killed since Sharon has engaged in his escalation of assault on the Palestinian people, allegedly to protect us. It's made it worse. From the standpoint of security it hasn't worked. It's a failed strategy. Both sides have engaged in failed strategies.
The Road Map
The road map was a hopeful sign, particularly when both sides signed on and said, This will take us someplace. However, the road map also had critical flaws. The road map seemed to imply that the process could be derailed at any point if there was violence coming from one side or the other. This is a crazy way to develop a peace plan because you have on both sides elements in the population that are absolutely against a peaceful resolution because they do not want to see a two-state solution. There are people inside Israel who have a deep religious commitment to the belief that the whole land of Israel has been given to us by God; it says it right in Torah, and therefore the creation of a Palestinian state would be a betrayal of what God has given us, and hence it is appropriate to fight against not only Arabs who are trying to do that but against Jews who are trying to do that. That was the justification for killing Rabin. After Sharon made his statement accepting the road map, there were leaflets going around in the West Bank saying that he too was a betrayer of the Jewish people and deserved to be killed. Similarly, there are some people in the Palestinian world who, no matter what deal is offered, they will not accept it. They do not want to see Palestine living in peace with Israel. They do not believe Israel has a right to exist whatsoever in that land.
Flaw number two is a deeper one. The Palestinian leadership was supposed to go to their people and say, Here's a three-year process. If we do all the steps outlined here, we're going to a negotiation with Sharon to create a Palestinian state. But where? What size? What is this Palestinian state going to be? You say, Shouldn't they just open their hearts and trust that Sharon will be generous? The day after Sharon made a statement saying that the occupation wasn't in Israel's interest and it had to end, he then turned to the Israeli settlers in the West Bank and said, Don't worry, your great-grandchildren will be born in these settlements. Now, was Sharon lying to either side? No. He does want a Palestinian state but, as he's let it be known through his associates, in 42 percent of the West Bank and Gaza. That 42 percent is basically the cities that would be linked with a small road so that he could claim that they were contiguous. That will never be acceptable to any Palestinians. They're being asked, "Go through three years of a process, at the end of the three years you'll get a negotiation and you'll be presented with something that's impossible." And as soon as the process is agreed to, Sharon starts to accelerate the construction of a wall through the West Bank; not a wall separating the two sides of the 1967 border, but through the West Bank to make sure that big chunks of the land that were supposedly going to be negotiated three years from now would already be inside physically this expanded land of Israel.
Palestinians are seeing this and saying, "There is nothing real that's being offered." You've got the Palestinian leadership being told, Use this time in the road map time to wipe out Hamas and Islamic Jihad and the other terrorists. The police force being asked to do this had just gone through two years in which virtually every unit that they had had been wiped out by the Israeli occupation. They had virtually nothing but moral suasion on their side. And what moral suasion could they have against the terrorists if what's being offered to them is some nebulous thing at the end of a three-year process that's a negotiation in which they don't know what they're going to get?
End of the Road
End the notion that terror will stop the process. Terror accelerates the process. Bring the negotiations to a start right now. Let the negotiations begin immediately. Instead of it being at the end of the three-year process, let's now, with the United States involved, begin a process of the negotiations for the outcome. When an outcome has been produced, that will motivate people to make the rest of the compromises necessary. You'll have a road map that will be accepted by both sides.
We are saying to the president and Congress: We need to articulate in a very clear way what the end product will be - "A Resolution for Middle East Peace." The resolution says the following that we want an international force to separate the two sides if the violence continues, to separate and protect the two sides from each other. Some people have put forward the idea that maybe that should be in the form of an international protectorate for Palestine until Palestinians can establish their own internal government in a way that it can create its own independence. We call for a resolution of the conflict based on the following principles: return of Israel to the pre-'67 borders with minor border modifications. This is the language that was adopted by both sides at Taba and will eventually be adopted. (Whether the eventually is three years from now or 20 years from now and how many people die in the meantime, that I'm not predicting.) Minor border modifications means that a few of the border settlements that are in the West Bank will be incorporated inside Israel, with an exchange of equal amount of land from Israel to Palestine at some other place in the border. And it means that the parts of Jerusalem that had Jewish majority in 1993 at the time of the signing of the Oslo Accords will remain part of Israel. Why 1993? Why not today? We've already seen over the course of the past ten years a dramatic acceleration of Jewish settlements in what was previously Arab parts of the city. And if you put that forward as a principle, you would have many, many more sections of Jerusalem being taken over by Jewish settlement in order to establish it as a Jewish city. You have to go back to where it was when the agreement was signed in '93.
The Temple Mount will be in the hands of the Palestinian state and the wall will be in the hands of the Jewish state. Some people have said, Don't Jews really have a right to the Temple Mount? As a religious Jew I can tell you that Jews don't go up to the Temple Mount. There's at least one strong tendency or in the Jewish world that says the Holy of Holies is up on the Temple Mount and it's forbidden to go on the Temple Mount because you might step on the Holy of Holies. Until the temple is rebuilt Jews are not allowed to go there, which will happen at the time of the Messiah. I've suggested to them that they take the following position if they want to get into the details: We will grant you the right to control the Temple Mount until the Messiah comes. At that point we get to re-raise the issue because then we can rebuild the Temple. So once the lions and the lambs are lying down together, then that issue will be re-raisable in a different kind of spirit. But in the meantime, we don't need it, because we're not allowed to go up there and to rebuild the temple. It wasn't a religious Jew who went up to the Temple Mount; it was Ariel Sharon, an ultra-nationalist Jew, not a religious Jew, who went up to the Temple Mount to claim it for Israel for nationalist reasons.
An international fund should be established to provide funds to resettle settlers from the West Bank into the pre-'67 borders of Israel; for reparations for Palestinian refugees who would be resettled inside the Palestinian state; and for Jews who fled Arab lands from 1948 to 1967. Some ask, Are you saying that all the settlers will be forced to move from the West Bank back into Israel? My view is that there should not be any country which legally prevents Jews from living there. Jews should be allowed to live in the West Bank and Gaza. They should be allowed to stay in the settlements if they wish to stay in the settlements, but they should be there as citizens of the Palestinian state, not as citizens of Israel, living under the laws of the Palestinian state and being tried by the courts of the Palestinian state - just as Arab Palestinians live inside Israel, they are citizens of Israel. That is how I would deal with the question of the settlers. I don't believe that a very large number of the ideological settlers would remain in those conditions, and those who would remain would probably be those who were least ideological and might actually live in peace with Palestinians.
The resolution calls for a treaty with surrounding Arab states and ending the hostilities and creating normalized relations; for the creation of a joint force to cooperate in preventing further acts of violence. There is no way that a peace treaty between Israel and Palestine is going to keep the crazies on either side from trying to take actions, just as the establishment of the United States of America 200 years ago doesn't prevent somebody from wanting to go and blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City. The civil rights bill did not end resentment of blacks against whites, nor did it end crime in the cities. There is no way that you can make any deal conditional on it ending all violence, because where do you know a society that doesn't have violence? The point is that the difference is that, at a moment when people have hope in the possibility of living together in peace, then the extremists no longer swim in a sea of support, whereas today when people are in great despair they do swim in a sea of support.
Finally, the resolution calls for the creation of institutions to accelerate reconciliation between the two peoples, including transformations in the educational system, in the media and in religious teachings to undermine any teachings that lead people to hate the other.
We had a gathering in Washington - the Tikkun Community Teach-in for Middle East peace in June. And our organization brought people from over 200 congressional districts all over the country to meet with congressional people. The result of those meetings was quite astounding. We got a reception of many, many people in Congress saying, What you're saying makes a great deal of sense. We presented ourselves as we are: the progressive middle path, both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine. But they told us, This makes a great deal of sense, but I'm scared to do it. And you'd be amazed at how many Congress people and/or their staffs were telling our people straight off, We can't do this because we are faced with a very powerful lobby. The pro-Sharon lobby in this country is endangering us and makes us feel that if we take a stand that they judge to be not pro-Israel that we are going to face an infusion of money and political forces against us that may push us out of our congressional seats.
We sort of knew it, but it's very different when somebody actually says it to you straight out and says it's just like this: We're scared. So what can we do? Their answer was very clear: Go back into my district and make it safe for me to say the things that you're saying without fear of losing my congressional seat.
Marwan Muasher
Arianna Huffington
Ben Stein