Hello Benjamin, I speak to you as one who appreciates our friendship but realise that it may be on the line of what I am about to say about Israel’s actions on Palestine. I am appalled and deeply angry. I also have humane Jewish friends who share my utter condemnation of Netanyahu and his gangster mob.
While we can all agree that the actions of Hamas were terrible and had to be condemned, the response of Israel is equally contemptible. I am not antisemitic by the way and I happen in my prayer time of a morning to read the psalms of David. Yes, literally every morning I pray the psalms for up to 20 minutes. But what is happening now in Palestine is a second holocaust and it will be held in history, that is if we survive as a planet, just as the first holocaust itself will always be remembered. My heart bleeds for the suffering and the death of 26,000 and still more to be counted. How can this be justified? It cannot and in truth we all know that. America a totally broken democracy with its messiah complex is seen for the way it combines fanaticism and ideology. I am up to date on the real reason America is so generous to Netanyahu. If we ever share a conversation, I’ll explain why.
The whole point of institutions, one that I belonged to for so many years, was not to take sides, so I didn’t identify as pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian. What is happening now is a warrior mentality in force and religious ideals are compromised { god is on our side] and what results is a destructive dualism. So, we are good, and they are evil mentality. So very sad. This cult of hatred of Netanyahu [ a corrupt personality who clings to power so that he will not go to jail] leads nowhere except to sow the seeds of future conflict.
The ingrained conflicts of the Middle East are so strong. We need only look at the Greek and Roman colonisation and ultimate destruction of the kingdoms of Israel and Juda. The history of animosity brought about entrenched convictions of righteousness and grievance are not just simmering now but rather they are exploding. Truth is never totally on one side. There lies the problem for one side lives with the certainty that they are right. Certainty doesn’t exist except as a concept and a concept is not reality. To live in the real world means that we move from comfortability to authenticity. It is only then that we can claim to be fully human and that transcends both ideology and institutional religion.
I remember reading about an American Rabbi Marc Gopin who had worked in the West Bank for many years. He once gave a talk on reconciliation, and he spoke about when the parties to the conflict are encouraged to fall back on the values they cherish most, and which make them unique and then to search for compatibility and complementarity with values of their enemies. Where the system falls apart is when external mediators come with ready-made universal principles ill equipped to achieve anything because their theories are seen as a threat to the uniqueness which the parties to the conflict feel is at stake.
