Monthly Archives: October 2013

Rawabi’s Success will Signal Success for a Two-State Solution – Israel Journal Part VII

31 Thursday Oct 2013

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A highlight of my synagogue’s mission to Israel and the west bank earlier this month was our visit to Rawabi, a model Palestinian city emerging out of the “hills” (Rawabi means “hills” in Arabic) between Ramallah, Nablus and Tel Aviv.

This city will eventually house 40,000 middle class young Palestinians and families in 6000 condominiums on 1560 acres. There will be banks, shops, offices, eight public and private schools, playgrounds, parks, hiking trails, an arts center, two mosques, a Greek Orthodox Church, a hospital, movie theaters, and a 20,000 seat amphitheater for sporting events and concerts.

The construction is using 10,000 workers, and the builders hope that eventually 3000 to 5000 new jobs will be created in the city.

The man behind this project is Bashir al-Masri, a 52 year old charismatic Nablus born and American educated businessman who raised more than $500 million from the oil-rich nation of Qatar and contributed $300 million from his private conglomerate, Massar International.

Each unit will cost between $60,000 and $200,000.  Mr. al-Masri is promoting what he calls “Islamic financing” in which “service charges” will replace interest payments,  forbidden by Islamic law.

We met for more than an hour with Bashir thanks to Felice Friedson, co-founder and Executive Producer for “The Media Line “ (TML) and her husband, Michael Friedson, co-founder and Executive Editor and Director of Media Services for TML. TML is a well-respected non-profit news organization in the Middle East that feeds stories daily to Al Jazeera, CNN, the BBC, Israeli, and American news services.

To a person, our group was impressed not just by the scope of this project (a modern wonder of the world!?), but by Bashir’s staff, organization, expertise, intelligence, optimism, and drive.

Though Mr. al-Masri has met many hurdles along the way since first conceiving this project in 2007 (construction began in 2011), nothing seems to diminish his vision and optimism. Obstacles include a promised $150 million contribution by the Palestinian Authority to build schools and a police station that never materialized, allegedly because the government is broke despite the nearly $4 billion the PA receives from foreign governments and international NGOs each year, and two significant political obstacles presented by the state of Israel.

Though Rawabi is in Area A, controlled by the PA per the Oslo Accords, the west bank is under Israeli military authority. Bashir has had co-operation from Israeli authorities, but Israel approves construction of roads that pass through Area C, which is Israeli controlled. There is an access road for construction equipment, however a road wide enough to accommodate the 40,000 future Rawabi residents has not as yet been approved.

The second obstacle is water. Trucks are bringing water in for construction purposes, but there are no arrangements with Israel as yet to provide water to the city.

Bashir believes that PM Netanyahu is using access roads and water as negotiating chips with the Palestinian Authority in the peace negotiations, thus the delay of arrangements, he told us with bitterness and frustration.

Criticism of the project has come from two quarters. West bank Jewish settlers complain that Palestinians are building new homes by the thousands while the expansion of their settlements (nay – illegal “outposts”) is constrained. Orint Flint, a settler of Ateret (an illegal “outpost” built in defiance of Israeli government policy but with Israel compliance) said “It feels like unfair treatment of Jewish residents.” (The Guardian, August 8, 2013)

There are also Palestinian critics who are part of the BDS campaign (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel) who charge that Bashir al-Masri and other Palestinian business people are helping to “whitewash [Israel’s] ongoing occupation, colonization and apartheid against the Palestinian people” by cooperating with Israeli industry and consulting with Israeli architects and engineers. (The Guardian, ibid)

Al-Masri told us that support is coming to him from every quarter, including internationally famous Israeli architect Moshe Safdie who volunteered to help in any way he could because he was moved and impressed by the scope and vision of the project and its importance to the future state of Palestine.

I see no down side for the Palestinians and Israel because Rawabi will be a stabilizing element for a state of Palestine. Bashir said that though he is happy to contribute to Palestinian nation building, he is not motivated here by altruism. He is a business man and out to make a profit.

With so much capital pouring into the west bank from Qatar and elsewhere, the Palestinians will have too much to lose to break cavalierly an agreement with Israel. The PA has shown, in this regard, its ability to coordinate security with Israel, and this is what Bashir is counting on in a two-state agreement.

I pray Rawabi succeeds as its success will be not only a success for Palestine, but for Israel as well!

Eritrean and Sudanese Asylum Seekers in Tel Aviv – Israel Journal Part VI

29 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by in Ethics, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Jewish Identity, Social Justice, Uncategorized, Women's Rights

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Walking in a three square block area of south Tel Aviv earlier this month with Sigal Rozen, the Public Policy Coordinator for Israel’s “Hotline for Migrant Workers,” was like moving through an urban African slum. This is the neighborhood, run-down, dirty and vastly over-crowded that has been designated by the Israeli government for 35,000 mostly African migrant workers and political asylum seekers to live.

Three years ago thousands of Eritrean and Sudanese refugees began entering Israel illegally from the Sinai desert seeking political asylum. Alarmed by the large numbers and concerned that Israel could be overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands more refugees, the Israeli government began constructing a security fence along the southern border to stop the human flow. As a gauge of the dimension of the migration, in 2012, 285,142 Eritreans and 112,283 Sudanese sought asylum all around the world, and for good reason.

For years the Sudanese government has conducted a genocidal war against the people of Darfur as well as widespread human rights abuse including sexual violence against women, torture, drafting and arming children for the military.

Eritrea, a small African nation adjacent to Ethiopia, is among the world’s most egregious human rights offenders, and Eritrea’s President, Isaias Afewerki, is among the world’s most brutal dictators.

The UN reports that the Eritrean government pursues systemic and widespread human rights abuse including extrajudicial killings, shoot-to-kill orders of those attempting to leave the country, enforced disappearances of citizens without family notification, arbitrary detentions, physical and psychological torture by police and army interrogators, inhumane detention conditions, sexual violence against women and children, drafting children into the armed forces, compulsory and indefinite military service, no free speech, assembly, religion, or movement.

Sigal Rozen told us that there are currently 54,201 African asylum seekers in Israel, among which are 36,067 Eritreans and more than 15,000 Sudanese. However, no one has been granted asylum by the state of Israel despite the fact that 84% of Eritrean asylum seekers around the world are recognized as refugees. In fact, since signing the Refugee Convention in 1951, for unexplained reasons, Israel has recognized only 202 refugees in total for political asylum.

Israel claims that the Eritreans and Sudanese in Israel are “work infiltrators” who come solely to improve their quality of life, and that there is no basis upon which to grant them political asylum.

The presence of so many Africans in Tel Aviv today has provoked a strong negative public outcry by many Israelis. In response the Knesset passed an amendment to the Anti-Infiltration Law to allow the incarceration of asylum seekers for up to three years. However, on September 16 the High Court of Justice unanimously invalidated the amendment as unconstitutional because it compromised Israel’s Basic Law regarding human freedom and liberty. The Court instructed the government to examine all cases of Africans currently incarcerated (i.e. 1750 people) within 90 days.

To Israel’s credit, the government has not deported any of these refugees, most likely because Israel’s leaders understand the fatal consequences should these people be returned to their home countries.

The Israeli public’s ire against African migrants has grown and was heightened this year following two highly publicized criminal acts by Eritreans in south Tel Aviv. One case involved the alleged rape of an 83 year-old Tel Aviv woman in her home. A second was the near fatal encounter of a young Israeli husband and father who was dragged out of his car at a stop light and beaten by five Eritreans as his wife and children watched in horror. As bad as these incidents are, Sigal Rozen says that the actual crime rate among African migrants is six times lower than the crime rate among Israelis.

These refugees want badly to go home, but they fear for their lives. In Israel they quietly do whatever work comes their way in order to survive. They live crammed together in dilapidated apartments, many to a room sleeping on the floor and on boarded-up balconies. Refugee children do attend school, as required by Israeli law, and have done well, passing Israeli High School matriculating exams at high rates.

Sigal urges Israeli employers in agriculture, construction and the nursing sectors to employ these people and help relieve their hardships, and she urges the government to grant them extended work permits so they can remain in Israel legally until they feel safe enough to return home.

Judaism teaches, “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 22:20).

One would hope that the Jewish people and the state of Israel will treat these refugees with kindness and open hearts. As a people we have been where they are today. We know the heart of the stranger.

Why Resettlement of Bedouin Arab Israeli Citizens is a Moral and Democratic Wrong – Israel Journal Part V

27 Sunday Oct 2013

Posted by in Ethics, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Social Justice, Uncategorized

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I am one of 620 rabbis and cantors who signed a letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu (http://bit.y/BedouinRabbis – “Clergy United Against Bedouin Dispossession”, organized by T’ruah and Rabbis for Human Rights) asking the Israeli government to set aside the Begin-Prawer Bill as unjust.

The bill’s authors say that the bill will settle land ownership disputes between Israel’s Bedouin Negev citizens and the state, compensate the 30,000 to 40,000 Bedouin being moved from their homes to new recognized villages, and ensure their well-being by affording them regular access to water, electricity and other services.

However, there is far more here than meets the eye.

The 190,000 Bedouin Arabs of the Negev, among the poorest in the country (71% live below the poverty line), are full citizens of the State of Israel. 90,000 of these Bedouin live in 45 villages of which 35 have not been recognized by the government and are therefore not provided the most basic services. Only ten of the 45 villages are expected to receive formal government recognition.

The bill will forcibly move these Bedouin from villages in which they have lived for generations because the state does not recognize their property claims. Why?

First, the Bedouin who lived on their land under Ottoman and British Mandate control had “understandings” with the authorities about which lands belonged to them. The formal process of regulating land ownership under the British Mandate (1917-48), however, was never carried out in the Negev, though many landholders elsewhere in the country were officially registered.

Second, the Bedouin had their own traditional system of property acquisition that was acceptable under Ottoman and British rule, and so they were given the impression that registering their land in the government Land Registry was not necessary.

Third, Israel’s War of Independence dislocated thousands of Bedouin. Immediately after the 1948 War, Israel declared the lands temporarily evacuated by Bedouins to be “abandoned land.” The IDF confiscated that land and turned it into military training zones and built yishuvim (Jewish communities) on the land of abandoned villages.

Dr. Dan Gazit, an archaeologist who has spent decades living and working in the Negev, claims that an archive in the Beersheba Municipality that existed during the British mandate era documented all land ownership data for the Bedouins of the province, but was “lost” during its transfer to the State Archive. He has written:

“The State of Israel, which disappeared the Bedouin ownership date of their lands in the Negev, is now expelling them from their land, claiming that they have no official ownership documentation.”

This is a classic “Catch 22!”

“The Begin-Prawer Plan” will force the displacement and eviction of dozens of villages and tens of thousands of Bedouin residents, dispossess them of their ancestral property, and damage the social fabric of their communities thus putting thousands of families at risk of falling further into poverty, unemployment and crime.

What is recommended instead is for the Israeli government to recognize formally the unrecognized 45 villages, all of which have met the same criteria required of new Jewish communities to be registered, and thereby afford them adequate water, electricity, plumbing, health care, education, and employment.

The unfairness of this bill is stunning in another way. There are currently 100 Jewish villages in the Beer Sheva District of the Negev with an average population of only 300, far fewer than the Bedouin villages which have between 400 and 4800 residents. Jewish villages, however, have had no difficulty attaining land and formal recognition thus affording them the necessary infrastructure from the Israeli government including water, electricity, plumbing, health care, education, and employment.

The premise behind the Begin-Prawer Plan is that Bedouin Arabs are usurpers of the land upon which they live because they lack documentation, but that is a problem created by the state of Israel, not the Bedouin themselves who are victims of bureaucratic neglect.

The Prophet Micah (2:2) warns us: “And they covet fields, and seize them; and [they covet houses and] take them away; thus they oppress a man and his house, even a man and his heritage.”

What pans out at the end of the day is that this Begin-Prawer bill is a land grab by the state of Israel of property lived on and possessed by Israeli Bedouin Arab citizens.

Jewish tradition teaches that the highest moral duty is to treat strangers and the most vulnerable in our midst with kindness and justice. The irony in the case of the Bedouin is that as citizens of Israel they are NOT strangers at all, but part of the fabric of Israel’s democracy.

If Israel is to embody the best of Jewish ethical tradition (as it does in so many areas) and the highest democratic standards, then the Knesset must defeat this bill.

The Cauldron that is Hebron Today – Israel Journal Part IV

24 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by in Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Jewish Identity, Social Justice, Uncategorized

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I had not visited Hebron for forty years ago until my synagogue group did earlier this month. In this time so much yet so little has changed.

In 1973 the city and surroundings had 40,000 Arab Muslim residents and 150 Jews. Today, there are 250,000 Palestinians and 8500 Jews.

A holy city to both religions because of the patriarchs’ and matriarchs’ burial caves (Genesis 23 – in this week’s Torah portion Chayei Sarah) and it being located along an ancient trading route, Hebron has been vulnerable to multiple conquests and violence since the time of Abraham.

Israel has controlled the area since 1967, and as part of the Oslo process, Israel and the Palestinians signed the “Hebron Agreement” in which the city was split into two sectors: H1, controlled by the Palestinian Authority and H2 controlled by Israel.

Our group visited H2 with David Wilder, the spokesmen for the Hebron Jewish community.

Wilder is a religious settler who packs a pistol on his hip over which is draped his tzitzit. He is a passionate defender of the religious right of Jews to Hebron. He says there is no such thing as the Palestinian people, that the Arabs there have no distinct identity separate from Arabs in the Middle East, and that they have contributed nothing of lasting value to the advancement of civilization, in contrast to Judaism and the Jewish people.

While denying Palestinians their national identity he demands that they recognize our Jewish religious and national rights. He is resentful that Arabs have access to 97% of the city under the Hebron Agreement while Jews have access to 3%.

Wilder denies that he is an “extremist!” Palestinians and most Israelis don’t agree.

He opposes a two-state solution, and when challenged by evidence of settler and Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians, he said these are lies disseminated by anti-Israel and anti-Semitic groups.

Here are some of those “lies.”

In 2013 Palestinians were barred from using Shuhada Street, their principal commercial thoroughfare in H2. In recent years due to settler violence, half the Arab shops in H2 have gone out of business.

The Israeli human rights organization B’tzelem says that “grave violations” of Palestinian human rights have occurred in Hebron because of the “presence of the settlers within the city” and that there has been less than an adequate response from Israeli security forces in stopping the violations. B’tzelem cites regular incidents of “almost daily physical violence and property damage by settlers in the city.”

In 1994 the Israeli Shamgar Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israeli authorities consistently failed to investigate or prosecute crimes committed by settlers against Palestinians.

Though much of Hebron’s Arab community is thriving in business, education and commerce, still the violations continue as is clear by the testimony of many Israeli soldiers who have been stationed there, one of whom said (courtesy of “Breaking the Silence”):

My main difficulty … was the … Jewish community… The feeling was that we were protecting the Arabs from the Jews, … [and] … the Jews really did whatever they pleased and no one would care…I was standing guard duty … and I see a six-year Palestinian girl [whose] whole head was an open wound….Th[is] extremely cute [Jewish] child … would regularly visit our position decided that he didn’t like Palestinians walking right under his home, so he took a brick and threw it at [this little girl’s] head. Kids do whatever they please there. No one does anything about it. No one cares. Afterwards, his parents only praised him. The parents there encourage their children to behave this way. I had many such cases. 11-12 year old Jewish children beat up Palestinians and their parents come to help them along, set their dogs on them; a thousand and one stories.”

The violence, of course, goes both ways over a long period. The most egregious attack on Jews occurred in 1929 when Arab rioters murdered and butchered 70 Jewish men, women and children, and wounded 60. At the same time, 455 Jews survived because their Arab neighbors protected them.

As a delayed payback, in 1994 Baruch Goldstein, a resident of Kiryat Arba, entered the Mosque and machine-gunned 29 Muslim worshipers dead and wounded 130 before being killed.

Just last month, an Israeli soldier was murdered in Hebron.

I asked Wilder what he and his community would do in the event of a two-state solution in which Hebron becomes part of the State of Palestine. He said that it won’t ever happen!

If it does, and I hope that it will, both Israeli and Palestinian security forces are going to have their hands full dealing with these fanatic religious settlers.

I pray that there will be no loss of life on either side when a two-state agreement is reached, hopefully this year. However, the history of Hebron suggests that such prayers are pipe dreams.

If You Want To Be Politically Irrelevant, Support BDS – Israel Journal Part III

22 Tuesday Oct 2013

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I have much respect and personal fondness for Kathleen Peratis, and so I read with interest her thoughtful piece on Open Zion of The Daily Beast, “If You Want Two States, Support BDS.”

I share Kathleen’s sense of urgency to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before it is too late, but I categorically differ with her conclusion about the efficacy and appropriateness of the BDS movement.

I have just returned from ten days of meetings in Israel and the West Bank. I led members of my congregation in talks with Israelis on the left and right, settlers, human rights activists, journalists, and members of the Knesset, as well as with Palestinian Authority officials and Palestinian business and community leaders, excluding Hamas. Our purpose was to gain a deeper understanding of the current situation and of the attitudes of Israelis and Palestinians, as well as to express our American Jewish support for a resolution of the conflict that includes two states for two peoples.

We spent an afternoon touring the West Bank with Leor Amichai, the director of the “Settlement Watch Project” for Shalom Achsav, and saw for ourselves the extent of settlement construction in Ariel and evidence of dozens of illegal Israeli “outposts” (i.e. small settlements) that are flourishing everywhere with full infrastructure provided by regional settlement councils and are condoned by the Israeli military authority.

Seeing these settlements with our own eyes persuaded us that they are a serious challenge to the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In a future peace agreement, there will come a choice; either 100,000 Israelis will abandon their homes and settlements in the new state of Palestine and move into Israel across the Green Line, or, as once agreed upon by Yossi Beilin and Mahmoud Abbas during the Oslo period, Israelis will be permitted to remain in the Palestinian state if they agree to live peacefully under Palestinian sovereignty and if Palestinians are free to live anywhere in Palestine, including inside Jewish settlements.

Though Kathleen and I agree on the necessity of a two-state solution, we disagree about BDS.

Kathleen writes:

The deciders on whether there will be a two-state solution are the Israeli people. It is they at least as much as their government who should be the targets of our advocacy … any pollster will tell you that a large majority [of the Israeli people] says it favors ending occupation. But that majority neither puts pressure on its representatives nor votes in large numbers for peace candidates. Why? Because ending occupation is low on the agenda of Israeli voters, lower even than the price of cottage cheese.

She also says that American Jews should “shake Israelis from their indifference.”

I disagree that our role as American Jews is to shake up Israeli society. Such a position is presumptuous on the one hand and unnecessary on the other. There are, indeed, hundreds of thousands of Israelis represented in a number of political parties including Meretz, Avodah, Hatnuah, Hadash, Yesh Atid, Shas and even Likud who are not at all indifferent to the necessity of a two-state solution.

Even Tzahbi Hanegbi, a former Likud politician who is close to PM Netanyahu, has called for a two-state solution. Tzipi Livni, Israel’s chief negotiator to the Palestinians, who also comes from the Israeli center-right, advocates the same.

J Street’s purpose, in my view, is not to influence Israelis. Rather, the movement was formed to demonstrate widespread American Jewish support for the two-state solution to this conflict and to influence American government officials to do everything possible to assist Israel and the Palestinians in resolving their conflict.

I believe it is a serious political mistake for American Jews to support any kind of BDS (even one limited to the settlements) because we risk having our friends and allies in Congress walk away from us as pro-Israel, pro-peace advocates and align themselves with regressive, right-wing forces that do not support two states for two peoples.

If we do not get the politics right, the consequence could be a serious setback not only to the J Street movement and approach, but, most importantly, to the best long-term security interests of the Jewish democratic state of Israel as the national home of the Jewish people.

Note: My response to Kathleen’s original blog on Open Zion of The Daily Beast appeared there on October 21, 2013 – http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/10/21/if-you-want-to-be-politically-irrelevant-support-bds.html

 

The “Jewish and Democratic” State of Israel – Israel Journal Part II

21 Monday Oct 2013

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The Israeli journalist and scholar Bernard Avishai said in Washington, D.C. at the J Street national convention earlier this month:

For most Israelis and American Jews, the “Jewish” part of the phrase “Jewish and democratic” implies many things, which don’t necessarily work together: a Jewish majority, political representation for world Jewry, the incorporation of Jewish law into civil affairs, an historical attachment to the land of Israel,…

Ask Israelis on the street and most will just default to the idea that a Jewish majority justifies privileges for Jews, individually as well as collectively, [and that] meant that the Jewish state would give privileges exclusively to individual citizens, legally designated as Jewish owing to rabbinic decree or J positive blood.

Jewish prerogatives and democratic rights for Israeli citizens (80% Jewish/20% other within the Green Line) raise confusion about the meaning of citizenship and nationality in Israel. Avishai continues:

…the Jewish state apparatus came to recognize two forms of legal status: citizenship and nationality. Israeli citizenship entitled you to civil privileges: equality before the law in courts of law, the right to vote, etc. Jewish nationality entitled you to exclusive material privileges, privileged access to state controlled lands, housing in Jewish settlements, optional state-sponsored orthodox education, [and] national service,… Jewish nationality [as defined by traditional Jewish law – halachah] also made you subject to the ministrations of a state-sponsored national-orthodox rabbinate overseeing marriage, burial, and divorce [and therefore identity].

In other words, you are a Jewish national if you were born of a Jewish mother or you converted to Judaism. This elevated status affords rights of citizenship to any Jew living anywhere in the world under Israel’s Law of Return (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Return).

The Law of Return, however, does not apply to Arabs even if they once lived in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Ramle, Tiberias, or Haifa. Those who remained in Israel after the 1948 War of Independence were offered Israeli citizenship.

Having said this, Israel’s parliament understood its duty to assure equal rights to all its citizens, even as it sought to further Jewish national and Hebrew culture. Consequently, Hebrew and Arabic became the official languages of state transactions and government (now Arabic and English are taught in non-religious state schools) and the official religion of the Jewish state is Judaism.

My synagogue delegation met with several Members of the Knesset this month in Jerusalem, one of whom was MK Issawi Frej, the only Arab member of the six-member left-wing Zionist party Meretz. MK Frej professed his loyalty to the State of Israel, but acknowledged that Arab Israeli citizens are treated as second class citizens. Arab communities receive only a third of the money available to Israeli Jewish communities despite their paying their fair share of taxes.

The inequities are most apparent in the West Bank because those territories, taken by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War, have never been formally annexed or incorporated into the State of Israel. Indeed, it is those territories that are expected to be the basis of a Palestinian state.

In the meantime, the legal status of west bank Arabs is different than Israeli Arab citizens. West bank Arabs are subject to the Israeli Military Authority without the same democratic rights and protections enjoyed by Israeli Arab citizens living within Israel itself. Israeli confiscation of privately owned Palestinian land in the west bank is the most serious inequity. B’tzelem and Shalom Achshav, Israeli human rights organizations, estimate that fully one third of all land held by Jewish settlements in the west bank is built on Palestinian deeded land.

To add to the inequities in the law, Jewish settlers living in those same west bank territories enjoy all the benefits and privileges of Israeli citizenship.

Avishai put it well when he said:

A democratic state is, by definition, a state of its citizens… Israel must … stop discriminating against, or in favor, of individual citizens on the basis of religion or biology. It must graduate from the Law of Return to a proper immigration law based on naturalization; it must separate the rabbinate from the state apparatus; it must end public support for confessional schools …; it must privatize land and stop including exclusively Jewish institutions like the JNF in long term state planning.

…this does not mean a state of its citizens cannot have a Jewish character. It can protect the “Hebrew national atmosphere.” It can also have holidays and symbols that accommodate what most citizens will celebrate.

An important argument supporting a two-state agreement is that Israel would cease as an occupier of a hostile Arab population not governed by democratic principles and protections. Israel also would be able to correct legal and economic inequities relative to the Jewish and non-Jewish populations of the state thus advancing the principles of Israel’s Declaration of Independence as both a state of the Jewish people and a democracy for all her citizens.

More to come…

Israel Journal – Part I

20 Sunday Oct 2013

Posted by in American Jewish Life, American Politics and Life, Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Social Justice, Uncategorized, Women's Rights

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I have just returned from two weeks of meetings in Washington, D.C., Israel and the West Bank.

Immediately before embarking for Israel, I attended the national conference of J Street in Washington, D.C.  J Street is a pro-Israel pro-peace political and educational organization that has for the last five years been a consistent and strong advocate for a two-states for two people’s resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is the fasting growing political action committee in Washington and though many Jews are supporters, it is has garnered the support of Americans of many religious, ethnic and racial communities who understand the critical importance of a peace resolution of the conflict.

Leading Israeli and American government officials spoke to the nearly 3000 delegates (which included 900 college and university students), along with Palestinian leadership about the challenges and opportunities for a two-state solution. Included among the speakers were Vice President Joe Biden, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Rep. John Lewis, US Chief Negotiator Martin Indyk, Israeli Chief Negotiator Tzipi Livni, Likud MK Tzachbi Hanegbi, Israeli Labor opposition leader Shelly Yachimovich, members of the Knesset from the Avodah, Meretz, Likud, Yesh Atid, Shas, and Tenua parties, Israeli human rights activists, and journalists.

Then my wife and I took off for Israel to lead a mission of members of my synagogue community to meet with Israelis on the left and right, settlers, human rights activists, journalists, and members of the Knesset, as well as with Palestinian Authority officials in Ramallah and Palestinian business and community leaders in Rawabi. We did not nor would we meet with anyone from Hamas.

Our purpose was to gain deeper understanding of the current attitudes of Israelis and Palestinians towards each other, and to express our American Jewish support for a two-states for two peoples resolution of the conflict.

In the next two or three weeks I will post blog entries on many of the themes that J Street and our mission addressed including:

·       Israeli and Palestinian hopes and fears

·       West Bank Settlements, militant and not-so-militant settlers, and the consequences of Israeli west-bank development

·       The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanction) Movement and American Jews

·       Palestinian business development in the West Bank and its role in securing a future peace agreement

·       Political asylum seekers in Israel from Sudan and Eretria

·       “Solidarity Sheik Jarrah” and Sara Beninga’s activism in East Jerusalem

·       The struggle for Judaism in the Jewish State

·       The problem in defining a “Jewish State”

·       “Women of the Wall,” the ultra-orthodox and the Sharansky Compromise

All of these issues are complex. The challenge is to make sense of the numerous ideologies, truths and strong emotions on all sides.

One overriding truth is that Israel, the Palestinians and the peoples and nations of the Middle East are inextricably intertwined with each other and that Israel’s destiny as a Jewish democratic state depends on how it resolves the conflict with the Palestinians.

I do not claim to have answers. What I will attempt to do is shine a light on some of these issues we confronted.

More to come!