A mid-Passover message during a time of pain in Israel and Palestine

News

Posted on April 20, 2022

Three sacred seasons are overlapping - Passover, Ramadan, and Easter - days of holiness that celebrate liberation, humility, compassion, and rebirth. We dearly wish that we could be marking this confluence of holy days with celebrations of steady and courageous steps forward towards peace, justice, and co-existence in Israel and Palestine. And while it is true that many brave and creative NGOs and civic movements continue to organize, teach, and grow their impacts in Israeli and Palestinian society, nevertheless the headlines of this season tell a painful story we have come to know all too well. 

It is a story of terrorist attacks against Israelis in pubs and residential neighborhoods, and of unchecked settler violence against Palestinians in their orchards and villages. It is a story of Israeli military raids that kill non-combatants caught in the crossfire or exercising their right to demonstrate, and a story of Hamas and Islamic Jihad publicly praising terrorist attacks. It is a story of Israeli evictions of longtime Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem neighborhoods, and of demolitions of Palestinian homes when impossible-to-obtain building permits are found lacking by Israeli officials. It is a story of Hezbollah building up rocket arsenals and fanning flames of hatred of Israel in religious terms. And it is a story of a 54-year-long Occupation at the heart of an asymmetrical power dynamic that maintains an unjust and unsustainable order in which Israeli authorities rule over and control the daily lives and physical movements of millions of Palestinians. 

In the last few days, the downward spiral has accelerated dangerously. Israeli extremists have staged provocative marches in Jerusalem and the West Bank. Palestinians have thrown stones and Molotov cocktails at Western Wall visitors. Israeli police have raided the Al-Aqsa mosque during Ramadan, injuring hundreds of worshippers. Once again, Israel and Palestine are on the brink of the kind of war that took place last spring - a war of rockets fired on Israeli civilians and Israeli aerial bombardments of crowded Gazan neighborhoods, accompanied by street violence between Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel.

What can we do, as members of a small, creative movement of Judaism centered in the Diaspora? Facing these times is not easy. We have deep bonds of love, family, and tradition with the Israeli-Jewish community. We fear for their survival. We know the lessons of the long course of Jewish history, of what Jewish powerlessness has led to repeatedly.  

At the same time, we also reckon with the reality that Israel has far more military, economic, and political power than does Palestine. Our tradition teaches that those with greater power have greater responsibility for taking action to prevent violence, safeguard innocent life, and guarantee justice for all. It also teaches that everyone, whether powerful or not, has some moral agency - everyone has a responsibility to do what they can to act with restraint and move back from the brink. 

Knowing all of that, there are some things we can do. We can reach out to our family and friends in Israel and Palestine and ask how they are doing, and listen to them with open hearts and minds. We can call on our own political leaders to do all they can to help defuse the situation and strengthen Israeli and Palestinian groups who continue to work tirelessly for tzedek (justice) and shalom (peace), in keeping with the highest teachings of Judaism, Islam and Christianity. We can model civil discourse in our conversations and social media posts. And we can pray for peace and support the organizations we believe are working for a better future.  

Statement on Terrorist Attacks in Israel

News

Posted on April 8, 2022

Reconstructing Judaism and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association are horrified and saddened by yesterday’s terrorist attack in Tel Aviv, and by the recent attacks against Israelis in Beersheva, B’nei Brak, and Hadera. For those of us with friends and family in Israel, or who call the land home ourselves — these attacks are all the more frightening. Terrorist violence is unjustifiable, cruel, and devastating to the possibilities for greater peace and justice for all who live in the region. We pray for comfort for the families and friends of all those killed and for speedy healing for the wounded.

Responding to Amnesty International’s report on Israel and the charge of apartheid

News

Posted on February 7, 2022

Reconstructing Judaism and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association have issued the following statement in response to the recent Amnesty International report:

Apartheid is one of the most shocking words in the English language, conjuring images of the brutal and racist South African regime that decades of struggle brought to an end in 1994. Last week, Amnesty International became the latest human rights organization to accuse Israel of the crime of apartheid. Amnesty’s report follows reports by Human Rights Watch and by the Israeli human rights organization, B’Tselem, both of which level the same charge. Over the past several days, we have taken the time needed to study Amnesty’s 280-page report and develop our response.

Like B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch before them, Amnesty states that they are not making the claim that Israel is enacting the same kind of racialized system that governed apartheid-era South Africa; rather, they are claiming that the crime of apartheid as defined in international law covers a much broader set of circumstances, and that Israel is in violation of it. 

Amnesty’s report claims that from its founding, Israel’s efforts to ensure a Jewish majority within its boundaries were inherently discriminatory and fostered an apartheid system. The report emphasizes the ways in which Israel’s creation has been catastrophic for Palestinians, including Israel’s policies of designating lands previously owned by Palestinians as “abandoned” and then claiming them for the State, and its refusal to readmit Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war. The report calls for a total and unrestricted right of return for all Palestinian refugees and their descendants. It also recommends bringing diplomatic pressure to bear on Israel’s government until it outlaws not only all forms of unequal treatment of Palestinians, but also any policies intentionally designed to maintain a Jewish-majority state. 

Problematically, the report downplays the ways in which Israel’s creation provided refuge for and saved the lives of many of the world’s most desperate Jews in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. It does not address the historical reasons why Jews have needed refuge from systemic and recurring antisemitic violence in many parts of the world, nor does it address the existential threats that Israel has faced and continues to face today.

As a movement, we affirm our longstanding position that the state of Israel as a democratic national homeland for the Jewish people is historically just and necessary. To the authors of Amnesty’s report, we ask how the recommendations of their report would account for Jewish safety in the future, and why their report appears to dismiss the idea that there was any justice or wisdom behind the U.N.’s 1947 decision to partition the land in order to ensure that it would include a Jewish state capable of receiving a massive influx of Jewish refugees as a humanitarian imperative? We ask how the report accounts for the unique situation of the Jewish people before 1948 –  dispersed, repeatedly persecuted, and nowhere sovereign – yet maintaining profound historical, spiritual, and cultural ties to their ancient homeland?  

At the same time, we cannot ignore or dismiss the report’s documented examples of systemic Israeli human rights abuses, especially relating to the now 54-year-old Occupation, which our movement has opposed for decades. The Occupation’s web of military checkpoints, disproportionate use of West Bank natural resources for the settlements, land confiscations, home demolitions, and its two-tiered legal system represent serious human rights violations. In light of this report and many of the recent events we have witnessed, including evictions of Palestinian families in East Jerusalem and increased violence by extremist settlers against Palestinians, we urge our political leaders in the US, Canada, Israel, and elsewhere to act boldly to stop settlement expansion, to prevent Israeli annexation of West Bank territory, and to reinvigorate a serious Israeli-Palestinian peace process that will end the Occupation and the unequal treatment of Palestinian citizens of Israel, and that will result in compromises on all the outstanding issues, including refugees and Jerusalem. 

Amnesty’s report comes to a world that is surging with renewed antisemitism, as well as a world in which Palestinians have no state of their own and continue to face daily humiliations, losses, and systemic violence from Israel. While we do not use the word “apartheid” to describe the basic notion of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, we also take seriously the warnings of Israeli leaders like former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who in 2017 warned that Israel is on a “slippery slope toward apartheid,” and would inevitably reach that status if a Palestinian state is not established alongside it. We want the human rights violations that Amnesty’s report documents to end, even as we worry that Amnesty’s report will be misused by those who fuel antisemitism or seek to endanger Jewish communities around the world. As Jews whose lives are deeply connected to our Jewish-Israeli brethren, we cannot turn our backs on their safety and vulnerabilities, but we also cannot turn our backs on our Jewish vision of justice for all, and on the many Israelis who are fighting for it in their own country.