On Israel’s 67th birthday, Rabbi Arik Ascherman, President and Senior Rabbi of RHR, shares his thoughts on the vision and dream of our people, the struggle ahead, and why we must be strong, stubborn and persistent.
Dear Friends and supporters,
Before I share with you my Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israeli Independence Day) thoughts, I want to let you know how proud we are that the head of our Socioeconomic Justice Department, Rabbi Idit Lev, was chosen by Ha’aretz newspaper for their symbolic choices for this year’s Yom Ha’atzmaut torch lighters. RHR’s unofficial English translation can be found here, while the Hebrew is here.
This is also a good time to mention that Idit will be at the JTS conference marking 30 years of women in the Conservative rabbinate next week, April 27th-29th. She has time for additional meetings on the evening of the 25th, April 26th and 30th in New York, and on May 1st and 3rd in Boston. She will give a d’var Torah at Nehar Shalom in Jamaica Plains on Shabbat morning.
Currently Rabbi Yehiel Grenimann is on a speaking tour in Europe, and I will be in Chicago May 14th-17th, San Francisco Bay Area (19th-21st), Boulder/Denver (21st- 25th), Portland (26th), Seattle (27th), Boston/Stamford (28th), Durham/Raleigh/Chapel Hill (29th-30th), with the first week of June still open. For more information or to schedule an event, please contact Sara Zur at rhr.sara@gmail.com.
For those of you who read Hebrew, you can also find the Yom Ha’atzmaut thoughts of RHR board member Rabbi Professor Yehoyada Amir on his blog. Finally, click here for RHR’s prayer for the State of Israel in Hebrew and in English. Scroll down for downloadable versions.
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WE ARE MUCH STRONGER THAN YOU, MUCH MORE STUBBORN THAN YOU, MUCH MORE PERSISTENT THAN YOUImage may be NSFW.
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On Stubbornness and Stark Choices Facing Us on Israel’s 67th Independence Day
Rabbi Arik Ascherman
RHR President and Senior Rabbi
Don’t read this if you aren’t strong, stubborn and persistent. Or, just skip to the final three paragraphs. If you don’t believe in the basic goodness within us as Jews and as Israelis, and in our ability to change for the better, everything I have written will just cause more despair, at least as far as Israelis go. I am looking for those among you who have faith in the good that is within us, who believe that it is important to work for internal change alongside pressure from without, and for whom hard truths and stark choices increase your determination to fight.
Last week two settlers “visited” my home while I wasn’t there. They spoke with my wife about the trauma their children were suffering because I/we were going to expel them from their homes. I understand they were quite polite, and my heart goes out to any person who is facing eviction from his/her home, certainly children. I am sorry that my wife didn’t get contact information. We Israelis simply must talk with each other.
If either of you who were at my home happen to read this, or somebody who knows them, my email is ravarik@rhr.israel.net.
This past Monday RHR was involved in Palestinian agricultural work in several very sensitive locations in the Shilo Valley. I arrived at one of them before the farmers. A car driven by a settler passed me, turned around and came back. The settler called me by name. As you can see by watching the the video with English subtitles below, he launched into a speech.
His basic grievance, similar to my visitors, was that I was expelling Jews from their homes. This was an opportunity for dialogue, but was unfortunately his monologue while he videoed. Before I also began filming (and therefore, not in the film clip), he responded to my suggestion that we have a serious talk by saying that it is forbidden to speak with somebody like me. I didn’t even have a chance to explain to him that RHR almost never deals with the evacuation of settlements. We concentrate on preventing new takeovers and ensuring that Palestinian farmers have safe access to their lands. In order to prevent a new takeover, we did recently successfully pressure the State to dismantle a new outpost. (However, as you can see here, the outpost was quickly rebuilt and soldiers even participated in the celebration. We now need to get it re-removed.) To his credit, the man in the film clip emphasized that they will fight peacefully. He wasn’t violent, and he didn’t try to stop the work of the Palestinian farmers. (Although somebody pressured the army not to let the farmers return at the end of the day by the same way the soldiers themselves brought them in the morning. We were therefore forced to find a truck to bring the people and their donkey back via a long route.)
I have already written that my heart goes out to all children who are facing eviction from their homes. However, when I received the report from my wife about the “home visit,” I asked myself, “Why doesn’t this terrible feeling of anxiety sensitize these people to the trauma of Palestinian children who are evicted from their homes and/or whose homes are demolished?” In many cases, settlers are directly or indirectly responsible for these traumas. When I asked the settler in the film clip why he doesn’t care about the people whose lands he has taken over, he answered, “We were here over 2,000 years. When we now arrived there were absolutely no Arabs, until you came and created provocations.” The truth is a bit different.
Is it fair that I am presenting this man as representative of Israeli society, or even of settlers? And, why is this what I need to be writing about on Yom Ha’atzmaut? This man’s extreme statements are not representative. However, they do reflect the fact that settlers really think they are the victims. More importantly, his words simply take to the extreme an ethos that does characterize Israeli society. I already wrote in an email after the elections that there is a genuine desire among Israeli Jews to better safeguard the human rights of fellow Israeli Jews living in poverty. There is a good chance that the new government will make some significant progress in this regard. However, the way most Israeli Jews relate to Israeli Arabs, Palestinians, asylum seekers and almost any non-Jews living among us varies between lack of concern, and outright hostility.
In my “Passover Thoughts” I wrote about encountering police officers coming to confiscate solar panels in Khan El Akhmar. They knew how to repeat time and time again that the entire community was “illegal,” but weren’t able to respond to the fact that Jews only decide what is legal or illegal in Palestinian communities in the Occupied Territories. There was a similar disconnect in the second High Court hearing April 12th on our petition (along with the village of Diraat and others, JLAC, ICAHD and St. Yves) to fight home demolitions by returning planning authority for Palestinian communities to Palestinian hands. The judges understand very well that there is terrible injustice in two separate and unequal planning systems for settlers and Palestinians leading to hundreds of families losing their home every year. The disagreement is whether it is sufficient that Jews will be slightly more fair towards non-Jews when planning their communities for them, or whether non-Jews need to have real authority to plan their communities. The State attempts to portray planning as something between beneficence and the political. We say that planning is neither beneficence that we can decide whether we deign to bestow upon an occupied population, nor a political football. Today, when everybody across the spectrum understands that there will not be a political resolution of the conflict anytime soon, the State must finally squarely face its obligations as the ruling power for the foreseeable future.
On the eve of Passover, asylum seekers received a new decree proclaiming the Jewish State’s intent to detain them indefinitely if the State does not accept their application for refugee status, or if they don’t “voluntarily” leave. (When a professional committee approves these applications, a higher political committee almost always nixes these decisions.)
On Monday the Jewish State demolished the “unrecognized” Israeli Bedouin village of El-Araqib for the 82nd time. The previous day, perhaps in response to the fact that the Israeli High Court for the second time has ruled that the District Court must hear El-Araqib’s land ownership claims, the Jewish State demanded that the Court levy a NIS 50,000 per day fine (5,000 per day for 10 people) for contempt of court because they are not abandoning their land.
On our 67th anniversary we face stark choices:
1. Will we be true to our Declaration of Independence’s commitment that Israel will “maintain total social and political equality for all of her citizens, regardless of religion, race or gender”? Or, will we use State power and our Jewish majority to determine the future of those non-Jews who are either voiceless or whose minority opinion will always be superseded by the tyranny of the majority in every “democratic” vote.
2. Will we succeed in obeying the Torah’s command both not to oppress the non Jews living among us, and to identify with them, “You shall not oppress the non Jew living among you. You know the soul of the stranger because you were resident aliens in the land of Egypt” ?
3. As a human rights organization, we believe that it is forbidden to make human rights dependent on political considerations. However, now that it is clear too all that there will not be a political solution in the near future, nobody can any longer avoid our obligation to honor the human rights of Jews or non-Jews by excuses such as “That’s political” or “That must be left to negotiations about a political solution.” We must decide if we will honor human rights in the territories that will apparently be with us for a very long time.
Finally, I admit that I had some ambivalence and even some fear about writing these words. My fear is not because they will make some very angry, or that some of you may feel they are inappropriate for Yom Ha’atzmaut. They are my/our truth, come from our understanding of the Jewish tradition’s demand to honor God’s Image in every human being, and accurately reflect the true challenges we must be reflecting upon on this day. As I wrote at the outset, I am most concerned about those of you who will agree with every word. You also have a choice to make between despair and a fighting spirit. Pay close attention to the words of the settler in the video clip, “We are much stronger than you, much more stubborn than you, much more persistent than you.” Who among you believes that this man is correct? For whom do his words serve to fire your determination? I believe in our people. When those not supportive of human rights say to me that the majority is with them, and there will never be change, I answer “I have more faith than you in our people. I believe that our people are better than that. ” We saw this in our poll showing that the opinion of the majority of Israeli Jews changes regarding the Negev Bedouin when we peel away disinformation.
I am concerned about those who may use my words to delegitimize Israel altogether, but they will do so in any case. We are clear that Israel can and must successfully become a more just society for both Jews and non-Jews.
I can’t prove my faith to either the those who despair or to those who delegitimize or to those who deny human rights. Neither can I teach fighting spirit.
On this Independence Day, I wish for all of us freedom from the mentality that says hope is lost. I am looking for those who are sufficiently strong, stubborn and persistent to continue with all your heart, all your soul and all your might to come with us into the field, to help fund, to write, and to demonstrate, precisely because the situation is so difficult. For my part, I promise in the name of all of the fighting staff at RHR that we will continue with all our heart, all our soul and all of our strength to return lands to Palestinian landowners, to make sure they safely work their lands, and to fight for Israelis living in poverty. We will not rest until we put an end to home demolitions in the Negev and in the Occupied Territories, until we find decent homes homes here or somewhere in the world for all the asylum seekers until there is public housing for all who need it – until we have achieved our peoples’ destiny and dream:
“The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the ingathering of the exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or gender; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”
Happy Yom Ha’atzmaut
Arik
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