High Holy Day Messages, Refuser Persecuted, Letter from A Palestinian Child, More...

October 5th, 2006 Jewish Peace News now has over 14,500 direct subscribers, and is forwarded and re-printed widely to many thousands more. Help us spread a deeper understanding of events in the Middle East. Click here to let your friends know about JPN. The views expressed here are those of the editors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Jewish Voice for Peace.

Today's Contents:

Yonatan Shapira: Freedom of Conscience and the Militarization of Israel's Civic Society (New Profile) a military refuser loses his job over his politics, and sues

When Bombs Fall (Starhawk) on responding to Lebanon and learning from nature

Slichot Ceremony (Yesh Gvul and Rabbis for Human Rights) A contemporary High Holiday atonement ceremony for the

A Night in Heaven (Direct E-mail) Palestinian 7th Grader's dream of a life without occupation

Uniting with Themselves (Ha'aretz) on the absurdity of legal policies intended to decrease the numbers of Palestinians

More Important Articles Links to other important news articles for today

[JPN Commentary: The piece below gives important information about one of the miriad ways militarization istaking over civil society in Israel. It also tells us about an effort to turn the tide, which we can be a part of. RG]

New Profile would like to urgently ask your support for a case of unlawful dismissal of an employee on grounds of his conscientious objection to certain types of military service. Attorney Michael Sfard, representing the employee, Yonatan Shapira, on behalf of New Profile, defines the case as: "above and beyond anything else, a case which explores the right to freedom of conscience in the private sector". In an unprecedented law suit filed September 28th 2006 with the Haifa Israeli labor relations tribunal, Sfard will accuse an Israeli commercial helicopter company of unlawfully discriminating on grounds of moral conscience against its employee, Yonatan Shapira. Yonatan Shapira became publicly known when, in September 2003, he as one of the initiators and representatives of the "Pilots' Letter" in which twenty-seven Israel Airforce pilots stated that they "are opposed to carrying out attack orders that are illegal and immoral, of the type the state of Israel has been conducting in the territories." The army responded by dismissing Shapira from further (reserve) duty in the airforce. Shapira has been working for the abovementioned commercial helicopter company since 2000. His expertise is dangerous airborne maintenance work on live electricity cables. In 2004, the employing company was joined by a recently retired high-ranking airforce officer, prominently placed during the period when the "Pilots' Letter" was published. Since the officer, who repeatedly and openly expressed his disagreement with and contempt for conscientious objectors like Shapira, became chief pilot of the company, in 2006, Shapira has effectively been barred from work.

Together with New Profile, attorney Michael Sfard, points out that this is a blatant case of discrimination resulting from the far reaching militarization of Israeli civic society. Israeli industry – among other spheres of civic society – is run, to a significant degree, by ex-members of the military establishment who frequently do not observe the legally underwritten distinction between army and civic society. As a result conscientious objection in the military context can be penalized and sanctioned in the world of work. Such penalties – usually invisible to date – have never before been challenged through the Israeli legal system. New Profile views this groundbreaking case as a vital part of the struggle to expose the deep running militarization of all strata of society in Israel and a meaningful opportunity to advance de-militarization while defending freedom of conscience.

New Profile urgently asks you to support Yonatan Shapira in his struggle against unlawful discrimination due to his conscientious objection. Litigation may be a time and resource-consuming process. FOR DONATIONS PLEASE WRITE A CHEQUE TO NEW PROFILE, MENTIONING "ON BEHALF OF YONATAN SHAPIRA"TO: New Profile, POB 3454, Ramat Hasharon 47100/ or directly to POALILIT 12,769 Bank branch,421121 account(let us know)

You may want to contact us via Bilha Golan, New Profile,972 (0)50 763 8568 bilhagolan@bezeqint.net

[JPN Commentary: Starhawk's article "While the Bombs Fall" seems like the right thing to read any day, but especially in this part of the year when Jews put some extra time and energy into looking deeply into themselves. In other words, at a time when a suggestion of a new paradigm might have a better chance of falling on fertile ground. One of the things I especially like about the essay is the way Starhawk uses permaculture principles to try and assess what it is that needs to change/be done differently, if survival is of real concern. Certainly sticking with the old rule of applying even more force where force had been applied over and over before is worse than futile...For a happy new year, and towards a more peaceful world. RG]

Aug. 11, 2006

http://www.starhawk.org/activism/activism-writings/while_the_bombs_fall.html While the bombs fall in Lebanon, I’m teaching a two-week course in permaculture: regenerative, ecological design, with a schedule so demanding that I find it hard to check email every day, let alone watch the news. But it comes in, between lesser messages about leaks in the watering system in the garden and flight cancellations: pictures of dead children on the road. I feel horrified, angry, frustrated, powerless…all the things I’m used to feeling about the situation, but more so. I try to write something in the spare moments when my teaching partner Penny is covering rain catchment or graywater systems, but all I keep writing, over and over, is “Killing children is wrong.” That sees so self-evident and banal that I can’t quite bring myself to send it out. Or rather, it doesn’t seem to add much to a discussion in which the decision makers are so convinced that killing our children is very, very wrong, but killing their children is the Path of Righteousness. While the Congress and Senate are voting their support for Israel’s actions, I am teaching systems theory and strategy, including an essay by Donella Meadows, “Nine Ways to Intervene in a System (in increasing order of effectiveness.) The least effective way, she says, is by changing amounts. Please, General, can we drop fewer bombs? Can we keep it proportional? Could we scale down to killing just maybe two of their children for every one of ours, instead of ten? The situation itself is a perfect example of what she calls a positive feedback loop. I find the term confuses people, as there is often nothing positive about it. I call it a self-reinforcing cycle. Whichever, it means a situation in which the more you have of something the more you get, and the more you need. You kill some of my children so I kill more of yours, so you kill more of mine, so I kill even more of yours. Self-reinforcing cycles are engines of change, for better or worse. They get more and more extreme, until either some new constraint enters to impose a new equilibrium, or they crash. Hurricanes suck up energy from the heat in the sea, and grow bigger, sucking more energy, which makes them bigger still, until they hit land and blow themselves out. Addicts keep taking more of what they’re addicted to, until they hit bottom, whether the addiction is to alcohol or heroin or military intervention. This quality of systems does not bode well—either for the children of Beirut or those of Haifa. Europe and the UN might make some weak attempts to intervene, but as long as the U.S. is cheering the Israeli government on, no serious constraints will be imposed. And why shouldn’t we cheer them on, when Israel’s addiction to force as a solution is the mirror of ours? We’re the big guy and the small guy, standing each other drinks at the pub and throwing the chairs at anyone who threatens us, until we smash the place. It is this very self-reinforcing cycle that keeps power in the hands of the neo-cons, whose answer to every fear and insecurity is more force. Force which creates more fear, which generates more violence, which requires more force to keep down. It’s an inherent aspect of being caught in this sort of system that as it begins to spiral out of control, and starts to break apart, the only solution you can see is more of the same. An alcoholic gets fired for drinking on the job, and drinks more to forget. Iraq is not working out well for Bush and the neocons, so bring in more troops, or expand the war—Lebanon, Syria, Iran. You can’t change a self-reinforcing system by changing amounts. Recovering alcoholics know this, generals and politicians don’t. Try to limit yourself to one drink before dinner, and somehow you still end up behind the wheel of the car that careens into the bus full of schoolchildren on the road. Tell yourself that you are using a measured, limited response for well-thought out political aims, and you still end up with blackened torsos and the severed limbs of infants in smoking piles on the motorway. Here’s some other things we know about these cycles—they are expensive. They consume resources. Drinking up the children’s milk money down at the local. Starving every social program to fund our military. And when they crash, they often fall hardest on the undeserving. The drunk behind the wheel rolls out of the crushed car, unharmed, while the family of five lies dead. The policy makers are not cringing in tenements as bombs fall, or crying over the bleeding body of their most beloved child. Nor are most of those who support the policies. Yet. To change the system, you need to change the paradigm, the way you frame the situation and think about it, the deep assumptions that shape your viewpoint. That’s Donella Meadows’ most effective way to intervene—changing the world view and the constructs that support the system. It’s also, generally, a hard and painful process. A new paradigm, a new construct of self and world, goes against everything we know and believe. If I’m telling myself that I’m a fun-loving, party kind of a gal—how painful to instead admit that I’m an alcoholic! If I’m justifying the deaths of children by telling myself that I’m bringing democracy to the region, or safeguarding my sister’s children in Hadera, or fulfilling God’s plan, how painful to look at the broken bodies on the pavement and say, “I did that. I have blood on my hands.” I’m thinking about one of the many fruitless arguments I’ve had about the issue, this one with an ultra-Orthodox rabbi’s wife, shortly after I’d returned from doing solidarity work with the nonviolent Palestinian resistance in Gaza and the West Bank. I tried to describe to her what I’d seen in that bullet-riddled, shell-shocked land, the ongoing, everyday horrors and humiliations and frustrations, the houses bulldozed, the farmlands confiscated, the lives blunted and stunted and blasted into oblivion, and at the end she said to me: “But we’re good. So if we’re doing it, it must be good.” That’s one hard paradigm to shift, because there is nowhere to go from that pinnacle but down, no change we can make that doesn’t require us to face the possibility that maybe we are bad, or at the very least, that we are good people doing some bad things. From that vantage point, of course any critique, no matter how measured, seems anti-Semitic, an assault on that basic self-definition of Essential Goodness. While the killing escalates, I am teaching about soil. How to feed the life of the soil, how to encourage and nurture the worms and the beneficial bacteria and fungi and other soil organisms. How a healthy soil will grow healthy plants, that can resist pests. Industrial agriculture, in contrast, is based in the same exact paradigm as our Iraq policy, one that was succinctly expressed in a bumper sticker my first husband applied to his van shortly before we broke up: “Force, It Works!”

So, if corn borers are attacking your crop, blast it with insecticides. Kill the bastards! Are there weeds among the fields? Zap them with roundup. Root feeding nematodes, perchance, below ground? Blanket the whole thing in plastic, and gas it with methyl bromide. Force—it works, for a while, perhaps for short term goals. But force is costly. And, whether we’re employing force against bugs or bacteria or human beings, force breeds resistance. And so insects that survive the onslaught of the pesticides breed young that are not affected. We up the doses, and breed more and more resistant pests, which require more insecticides to kill, in another self-reinforcing cycle. The helpful insects, the predators that might have kept the pests in balance, are wiped out. And the residues of poison remain, in the soil and in the crops themselves. Human beings are not insects or bacteria. The human resistance that force breeds is not in the genes, but in hearts and minds. And so the bombing of Beirut breeds rockets falling on Haifa and airplane bombers in London, and all the assaults on South Lebanon, the bombs and blown-up bridges and armed teenage boys in uniform on the ground will breed more rockets yet, more suicide bombs of the future, more death in retaliation.

And the devotion to force is itself a toxin, poisoning the soil of Israeli society, starving its own social programs, warping the very soul and ethics of the religion it purports to defend. How do we get out of this mess? What would a regenerative paradigm look like as a policy? If compost, worm castings and plants that feed beneficial bugs are the gardening alternative to chemical warfare, what would be the political parallel? From a purely self-interested, Israeli point of view, a policy maker coming from a regenerative paradigm might say: “We can never stamp our hatred, but let us not create habitat that favors its growth. Instead, let us nurture health wherever we find it, and create conditions that let flourish those who favor peace.” So, in the nineties, Israel could have said, “We have a small window here, when the Palestinians have settled for less than they could have demanded. Let us move quickly to establish a Palestinian state, with true areas of self determination for its people. If the Occupation is a running sore, inflaming rage and hatred throughout the Arab world and undermining our moral credibility, how do we swiftly end it and transform the region into a place of opportunity and hope? Where can we support people’s legitimate dreams and aspirations? How do we support the health of the region’s actual soil, the vitality of its crops, the abundance of its markets, the excellence of its Universities? How do we create such flourishing abundance that this region becomes a shining model for the whole Middle East?” Instead, Israel built settlements, began a long term program of encroachment on the tiny territory allocated to the Palestinians, and maintained an Occupation backed by force. When Abbas was elected, Israel could have said, “How do we give him victories and real gains that will strengthen his own people’s allegiance? And if corruption runs rampant in the Palestinian Authority, then where are there leaders of integrity we can ally with? And if Hammas is winning over the people with its social programs, how do we feed a healthy economy so that they become unnecessary?” Instead, Israel continued to build a wall which confiscates huge amounts of Palestinian land without compensation, destroys the very communities which historically have been most friendly to Israel, unilaterally ‘withdrew’ from Gaza while keeping it surrounded, an isolated, open-air prisons with its resources destroyed and its factions inflamed—creating a perfect breeding habitat for yet more violence. There are a hundred other missed opportunities. And there will be more. But the longer the cycle goes on, the more damage is done, and the harder it is to stop. Am I ‘blaming’ Israel unfairly? Couldn’t Hezbollah just stop shooting rockets, and the Palestinian factions stop bombing? Yes, certainly they could, and it would be good if they did. Children would live who otherwise would die.

When we’re caught in a self-reinforcing cycle, it’s a fairly useless exercise to ask, “Who started it?” Or to debate whether one side or the other has the ‘right to defend itself’ by continuing the cycle. Far better to ask, “Who is in position to stop this cycle?” And it is Israel, the occupier of the territory, the fourth largest military power in the world, that sets the conditions of the region, that has the power to create a habitat where violence flourishes, or peace is favored.

And I admit that I want Israel to act as the moral agent it claims to be. I’m a Jew who was raised with the dream of Israel, as a safe place after the Holocaust, as a refuge in that visa-denying world which sent boatloads of my people back to their deaths, as a place where we could finally, after two thousand years, be ourselves, in our own home. Among the many casualties of this war is all that was good in that dream. Because of the pennies I saved as a child to buy trees for the promised land, because of the songs I grew up singing, because of the deep well that was carved in my heart for that dream that now spews anguish and blood, I have the right ot an accounting from those who have replaced the God of Justice with the God of Force. The place has a history of great prophets and lousy kings. There is nothing more Jewish than thundering at the policy makers, saying “Jahweh and Allah and all good-hearted people agree: killing children is wrong. Just plain wrong, and when you do it you have left the Path of Righteousness. The cost of force is too high—it includes your soul.” Even as the bombs fall, there are people choosing to come from new assumptions. They are the Palestinians of the villages where the wall is confiscating their farmland, choosing nonviolent means of struggle, returning day after day to demonstrations in which they get beaten, tear-gassed, arrested. They are the Israelis and internationals who cross borders to stand with them, saying, “We are not ‘Palestinians’ and “Israelis’, we are people together struggling against injustice. They are the Women in Black, who stand in silent vigil for peace, year after year, fleeing Katusha rockets and returning back to their stand for peace. They are organizers of cross-cultural dialogues, soldiers who refuse to serve in the Occupied Territories or to kill civilians, youth who refuse to don the explosives belt. That these people still exist, that they somehow grow out of the blasted, toxic soil of the Middle East, gives us some reason to hope. In spite of the million missed opportunities, the oceans of spilled blood, the escalation of stupid policies, the situation is not yet utterly without hope. But what can we do, we who are not policy makers or generals or Queens of the Middle East, who are simply ordinary people of compassion, wringing our hands in front of the TV set. Every day, I hear people ask, “What can we do that will be effective?” And for once, I can’t think of a damn thing. Never has political action felt so futile. But I think about the advice the great war journalist Robert Fisk received, for surviving decades in Lebanon and other war zones. “Do something,” he was told. “Don’t do nothing.” So do something. While we’re waiting for the effective thing, do something even if it seems small and futile. Write your representatives. Go to the demonstration, or organize one. Educate yourself more deeply, then talk to someone who has less information. Stand in vigil with the Women in Black. Some of the founders of the International Solidarity Movement in Palestine are organizing nonviolent civil resistance in Lebanon. Join them, or support them. Pray to those Gods who may secretly resent being cast as child killers. Do something. We don’t know what the effective thing will be, may never know. But if we do nothing, we will surely have no impact. And what do we say? How do you stop a vicious cycle? Just stop. Stop now. Don’t wait until the enemy is utterly defeated, because your every effort to defeat them strengthens the forces that created them. Just stop. Not tomorrow, when our position is stronger. Not the day after, when you have neutralized more territory. The longer the cycle continues, the worse the crash will be. Just stop. Stop now. Come from a new paradigm. Feed the soil of the Holy Land with something other than blood. Cherish all children, ours and theirs.

[JPN Commentary: An alternative Yom Kippur ritual took place in Tel-Aviv on Saturday night. Perhaps those who need to have rituals which are meaningful to entirety of their lives could use this as a model or as a source of inspiration. - RG]

Saturday evening, September 30, 2006 at 8:30PM Yesh Gvul and Rabbis for Human Rights invite you for a – `S`LICHOT CEREMONY` (Plea for Forgiveness) At the event we will remember the sins of harm to civilians during the past Jewish year, and we will cry out for protection for all civilians, whomever they may be, starting with this New Year. * For the sin that we have sinned before You in carrying out a futile war and in committing major violations of the laws of war, And for the sin that we have sinned before You in killing hundreds and injuring thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians. For the sin that we have sinned before You in hardening our hearts, And for the sin that we have sinned before You in abandoning thousands of Israeli civilians to the crimes of Hizbollah and the negligence of the Israeli Government. For the sin that we have sinned before You in inequality, And for the sin that we have sinned before You in hindering and humiliating the minorities and the weak amongst us. For the sin that we have sinned before You in the oppression of others, And for the sin that we have sinned before You in the justification of a `war of no choice`. For the sin that we have sinned before You by our indifference, And for the sin that we have sinned before You by obedience to orders that serve the military system, the occupational regime and the oppression and weakening of Palestinian, Lebanese and Israeli civilians. And for all of these, we have no right to beg forgiveness, until we acknowledge the humanity of others and our responsibility to protect them. * Taking part in the ceremony will be: citizens whom the socio-economic policies of the Government of Israel intentionally harmed, civilians for Northern Israel who were the intentional target of the Hizbollah, Palestinian civilians who are harmed daily by the IDF in the Occupied Territories, and Israeli citizens who refused to harm other civilians in Southern Lebanon. The ceremony will take place on Saturday night, September 30, 2006 at 8:30PM at the Emil Gruenzweig Square (opposite the Prime Minister`s Office in Givat Ram) in Jerusalem.

[JPN Commentary: Areen Bahour is a 7th grade student. She has also the distinction of being the daughter of Sam Bahour, a Palestinian American living with his Palestinian wife and two daughters in Al-Bireh - but possibly not for long. He has been struggling, like many other Palestinians, to have his visa renewed. He is a tireless peace activist, so the fact that the occupation regime is trying so hard to get rid of him should tell us something. To find out more about him, read Amira Hass's article, here. Areen's article might not say anything we don't know already, but somehow there is a difference in hearing the words directly from a child's point of view, a child who experiences oppression every single day of her life. - RG]

I woke up that day to the sounds of the singing birds. I opened my eyes and I was not in my room! I walked out of that strange room and found myself in a palace with my family. I asked if I can go walk outside and my parents replied yes without thinking, unlike always. I went out and walked and walked, all what I saw around me was green fields and green streets, all with trees and different kinds of flowers. It was a clean place with no pollution. No one stopped me because I am Palestinian. I found out that I was in heaven. Where there is no occupation, no borders, and no walls in your way. It was a place where you don’t need any visa to be renewed to stay in. No one was worried. It was a place where everyone was friendly. There were no people sitting in those green streets asking for money. Everyone was living peacefully. There, where you can’t find anyone screaming or crying or annoying others. Everything was organized as if this strange world was controlled by a remote or a computer. Then, I opened my eyes to the sound that was waking me up. It was my younger sister. I realized it was all a dream. I wished I didn’t wake up from this dream for the rest of my life, and remained in that place where I can live in peace, in a smiling world, where everyone cares about you, where there is no racism, and where you feel like a bird flying in a free world. All what I mentioned was what heaven really looks like in my eyes. Areen Bahour Class 7C, Friends School September 24, 2006

[JPN Commentary: Is Kafka rolling in his grave yet? If not, he certainly should. Here is one example of the craziness - embedded in endless procedures - that the occupation inflicts on innocent people. Note that in this case it's doing it to people who are, according to Israel, Israeli citizens - since they live in annexed East Jerusalem. As Shahar Ilan writes: "Sometimes, it seems that there is no end to the ways the Interior Ministry finds to abuse residents of East Jerusalem, as punishment either for having received Israeli residency, or for requesting it." The seeming craziness does have an underlying logic: Make life of Palestinians so unbearable that they'll pack up and leave. - RG]

Uniting with Themselves

Shahar Ilan

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/768120.html

September 28th, 2006 Can a person have a family unification with himself? Seemingly, nothing could be more absurd, because family unification by definition is a process intended to unite a citizen or resident with a person who is neither. If someone is a citizen or resident, he does not require family reunification. And if he is not, how would he invite himself to unite with himself? This is not an exercise in logic. "Self family unification" has become a common term in East Jerusalem's Population Bureau over the last two years. In the past, when Israel deprived Arab residents of Jerusalem of their status as residents after a few years' absence, they could ask to reinstate it via a simple process. Today, they are required to apply for something called "self family unification" and start a process similar to family unification, which could take up to a year or two. In June 2005, Hamoked - the Center for the Defense of the Individual, a human rights organization that helps Palestinians, asked the Interior Ministry for the "self family unification" procedure. "Recently, our office has encountered a new trend in your bureau - demanding that permanent East Jerusalem residents whose residency was revoked apply for self family reunification in order to get it back," the center wrote. "In a conversation with officials in the East Jerusalem bureau, it emerged that this is a new procedure introduced about two months ago." About a year later, when it had still not received a reply, Hamoked asked the Interior Ministry again for details of the procedure. Attorney Yotam Ben Hilel of Hamoked wrote that the "self family unification" process is a deviation from the policy in place for many years, under which requests to restore residency rights were not treated as requests for family reunification. In June, a year after the first letter, the Interior Ministry official in charge of Freedom of Information, Shalom Benamo, replied: "Self family reunification is an internal term we use that means asking for a permit to live permanently in Israel ... There is no procedure for self family reunification. There is a procedure for requesting a permit for permanent residence." However, this internal term reflects the absurdity in the best possible way: The State of Israel is asking people to unite with themselves. Sometimes, it seems that there is no end to the ways the Interior Ministry finds to abuse residents of East Jerusalem, as punishment either for having received Israeli residency, or for requesting it. The line at the entrance to the old Population Bureau in East Jerusalem used to be the most notorious in the country. On the face of it, service has improved greatly since the bureau moved to a newer building. In fact, attorney Oded Feller of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel says that the long line has simply been replaced by four different lines, which are almost as exhausting as the old one. The first line, which looks more like a gathering, is outside the building, at the entrance to the security check corridor. The second line, inside the corridor, is especially slow, so as not to create pressure inside. The third line is outside the yearned-for bureau door. People waiting in the first three lines must sometimes remain on their feet for several hours. Those fortunate enough to reach the end of the first three lines will be required to wait for an additional lengthy period (sitting down) for service at the counters. Administrative Court Judge Boaz Okon wrote: "In a few years, we'll be rubbing our eyes ... How did we put up with what is already clear? Piling up bureaucratic obstacles is another way of saying what is self-evident, which is that these requests [for family reunification] are not pleasing to the respondent [the Population Administration]." Granted, these things are happening beyond the hills, in East Jerusalem, which is part of the state of Jerusalem, and very far from the Dan region. But in practice, they are happening here, across the road, and we are responsible for them. The religious public loves to accuse the secular establishment of enacting the laws of Sodom. The laws of Sodom are not the laws that enable homosexuals to live proudly. The laws of Sodom are the Population Bureau's procedures, which decree that so many of East Jerusalem's residents have no rights, until proven otherwise, or until the court rules otherwise. And even if the authorities concede a person's right to live here, they will make his life a misery for years on end as punishment for having had the temerity to ask.

More important news articles:

Jewish Peace News Editors: Judith Norman Alistair Welchman Mitchell Plitnick Lincoln Shlensky Rela Mazali Sarah Anne Minkin Joel Beinin Racheli Gai