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In the evolving world of social media, we have started a weekly podcast exploring positive paths to change. In our first podcast, we talk about our diverse backgrounds and recent advances in peacebuiding. Click here to listen . To subscribe through RSS feed click below, then click on CRDC Podcast 

This is an interesting discussion between two thoughtful Jews, Erica Brown and Jeffrey Goldberg, who cannot fathom why Jews, religious Jews, have given birth to so many ethical scandals of late. I sympathize with much of their analysis, except one elephant in the room that is always left out: a modern Jewish education focused on defense of a country, Israel, rather than a set of values that are non-negotiable. That has turned away millions of Jewish kids who look to liberalism or Buddhism instead for peace, quiet and nonviolence, and it has made a mockery of Jewish ethics. You can’t teach hate of billions of people, Muslim or Arab or Palestinian, and expect people not to sell kidneys, torture animals, and destroy foreign workers’ lives. The human psyche does not work that way. And this is an overwhelming reason for the sorry state of Jewish religious life.

This is something to watch. Ashkenazi believes Hezbollah may be instigating tensions with Israel. But we don’t know who else is operating in Southern Lebanon, including Israel and Al Qaeda. Would it not be terribly convenient if Katyushas fly over and hostilities break out with Lebanon just as Israel is against the wall about a settlement freeze? Lebanon is and always has been the plaything of international forces. Now that it appears that a Syrian/Saudi/American rapprochement is at hand regarding Lebanon this does not mean that others want the situation stable. Even Ashkenazi could be undermined by other forces inside. Mitchell is right and must keep pressing comprehensive peace settlements, and they must nip every attempt to destabilize right in the bud, calling it for what it is, and holding the parties implicated responsible. The intelligence services know, and it is time for the political peacemakers to hold everyone publicly responsible as they did in Northern Ireland.

Here is a touching encounter between a Muslim shopkeeper and a robber, suggesting a different approach to religion, violence and justice.

This is just ridiculous. One more humiliation for Palestinians, one more embarrassment for Jewish identity, which, by the way, justifies Jewish attachment to the land of Israel through a religion that completely outlaws withholding food or wages from workers. It is even forbidden to withhold food from working animals. It is time for Israel to live up to the past of Jewish ethics. I invite anyone reading this to join Mahsom Watch for just two weeks to find out that this is not about security or saving lives. Israel and its supporters must change, and it is hearing that now from the whole world, including the American Congress. This is slow but inevitable, so why prolong the humiliation of all of this?

Privately run checkpoint stops Palestinians with ‘too much food’
By Amira Hass

A West Bank checkpoint managed by a private security company is not allowing Palestinians to pass through with large water bottles and some food items, Haaretz has learned. The checkpoint, Sha’ar Efraim, is south of Tul Karm, and is managed for the Defense Ministry by the private security company Modi’in Ezrahi. The company stops Palestinian workers from passing through the checkpoint with the following items: Large bottles of frozen water, large bottles of soft drinks, home-cooked food, coffee, tea and the spice zaatar. The security company also dictates the quantity of items allowed: Five pitas, one container of hummus and canned tuna, one small bottle or can of beverage, one or two slices of cheese, a few spoonfuls of sugar, and 5 to 10 olives. Workers are also not allowed to carry cooking utensils and work tools.

MachsomWatch discovered the policy, which Palestinian workers confirmed to Haaretz.

The Defense Ministry stated in response that non-commercial quantities of food were not being limited. It made no reference to the issue of water.

MachsomWatch told Haaretz that Sunday, a 32-year-old construction worker from Tul Karm, who is employed in Hadera, was not allowed to carry his lunch bag through the checkpoint. The bag contained six pitas, 2 cans of cream cheese, one kilogram of sugar in a plastic bag, and a salad, also in a plastic bag.

The typical Palestinian laborer in Israel has a 12-hour workday, including travel time and checkpoint delays. Many leave home as early as 2 A.M. in order to wait in line at the checkpoint; tardiness to work often results in immediate dismissal. Workers return home around 5 P.M. The wait at the checkpoint can take one to two hours in each direction, if not longer.

The food quantities allowed by Modi’in Ezrahi do not meet the daily dietary needs of the workers, and they prefer not to buy food at the considerably more expensive Israeli stores.

Read more here.

This video just blew me away. I know the secular progressives among  you will be horrified. How can this man try to convince everyone that Palestinians are actually Jewish and THAT is why Jews should care for them and treat them as brothers. This does not conform to the classic enlightenment and democratic approach to social justice. On the other hand, I never cease to be amazed by how many conflicts around the world seem to be solved in some people’s world view by an appeal to kinship and family. Kin means everything to billions of people. I frankly don’t care at this point how people come to a nonviolent politics, just that they do. Tell me what you think?

Analysis continues on the reality of Hamas’ powerful role in Palestinian politics, whether or not their popularity at this moment is going up or down, in itself a contest topic.

Here is an excerpt from a recent USIP report, no less interesting because it is USIP that has published it. Tell me what you think:

Discussion in the United States regarding Hamas is usually framed by two somewhat contradictory assumptions: (1) that Hamas is ideologically incapable of evolving to accept the existence of Israel and (2) that isolation and strong pressure are the only tools that may force it to recognize Israel. This controversial report challenges both assumptions. On the one hand, the authors, make a case for recognizing that Hamas has already, in certain respects, changed and has sent signals regarding its possible coexistence with Israel. On the other hand, they conclude that Hamas might never “recognize” Israel in the conventional sense and that, since Hamas apparently cannot be eliminated, attempts to engage it must take into account its commitment to the strictures of shari’a.

In other words, the report attempts to inject some gray areas into an issue that is often framed only in black and white terms. In a unique approach, the authors do not ask us to necessarily change our conclusions about the value of such engagement. Instead, they invite us to reevaluate our assumptions by providing a new prism through which to analyze Hamas. The authors themselves–one Jewish and the other Muslim–have very different lenses on this conflict. They disagree on the definition of the conflict and have differing views of how it can be resolved, but they share the goal of providing a framework for understanding Hamas, its motivations, and its self-concept, and of presenting alternative criteria for interpreting the signals that it sends. The authors neither endorse Hamas’ actions or positions nor advocate taking Hamas’ claims at face value, and they certainly do not argue that Israel, the United States, and the West should drop demands for changes by Hamas. On the contrary, they offer a framework to help policymakers develop and deliver such demands more effectively, a framework that takes into account how Hamas views itself and how many in the Muslim world understand the movement. With U.S. allies such as Egypt and Jordan pressing for a Palestinian unity government inclusive of Hamas, it is imperative to consider what kinds of conditions and safeguards would contribute to a successful peace process rather than derail it.

Even if readers accept the authors’ interpretation of Hamas’ thinking, many may still question whether engagement is worthwhile, particularly given–as the report describes–the limits for Hamas to compromise and the very real risk of renewed and potentially more dangerous conflict should a truce end. Others advocate engagement, even in Israel where the debate remains robust and diverse. Experience with intractable conflicts in Northern Ireland, Aceh, and elsewhere suggest that ideologically rigid movements can change over time and that a peace process itself can play a critical role in shaping such an evolution. The report argues that it is not inevitable that Hamas will accept coexistence, only that its acceptance is more likely if framed within its Islamic ideology.

In a region where hopes for peace have been raised and dashed again and again, cynicism is the biggest obstacle facing the Obama administration’s new peace initiative. While no one should be expected to trust blindly, repeated failures to achieve a lasting solution to this seemingly intractable conflict suggest that a reexamination of our assumptions and our analytical frameworks is essential.

Hello from Switzerland and Caux. I am curious what my readers think of this video.

In a December 31, 2008 conference call with Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, an American grassroots Jewish organization dedicated to promoting a negotiated two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Marc shared his “on-the-ground perspective of the…violence in Gaza and southern Israel and the need for U.S. Leadership.”

Listen to the call here or read a transcript of the interview here.

Marc reflects  now:

I stand by much of what I concluded in that interview. I remember vividly the circumstances of that interview. I was on the floor of a very cold apartment at night, unsure if i would be heard because my only connection was skype (as usual no budget for my work), and my computer only worked with skype on the floor.

I was impressed with the questions I received, and it was rather a relief to reflect on the issues instead of living it. In the first days we had no idea what the repercussions would be in Jerusalem, or whether the Gaza War would cause an all out war with the Palestinians. There were small riots in some nearby villages, and I was amazed at how much Israeli society is designed to make the ongoing tragedy rather nonchalant. I remember taking a cab and roads being blocked on the south side of Jerusalem where I was staying. I asked the soldier why it was blocked. He looked away, not wanting to bother answering, and then just said, “Just a little bit of trouble”. Yes, a little bit of trouble. My Palestinian friends were crying their eyes out, the bitterness and worry for family was all around us, and yes, some teenagers in various small villages were burning tires.

Until I sat with friends in tears over relatives in Gaza I never related to male teenagers burning tires in protest, a television scene that I have literally grown up with for forty years. But on that trip in those circumstances I somehow could just see inside the homes. People are screaming in anguish, mothers crying for cousins and relatives, and so the teenager goes out and burns a tire, not knowing what else to do with the rage.

And in the Jewish homes, it was all fireworks all the time, just a dazzling display on the television screen of modern Jewish fireworks, modern rockets, pouring into Gaza, in revenge for years of the humiliating Sderot and Ashkelon rockets.

Cycles of revenge, two eyes for an eye. I was sick to my stomach from this new Jew and new Judaism. When I grew up  in my traditional Orthodox environment I understood guns and weapons and police and militaries to be tragic necessities at best, mostly horrible realities for which one fast day after another were instituted. I was shaking walking around Jerusalem, always passing in between Jewish and Arab worlds, frankly afraid of all of them. But mostly realizing just how many people, how many Palestinians were truly innocent civilians, and how destructive and inconclusive this war would be.

But there is something I did not know then that I know now. Now I know that there were scores of influential Jews and non-Jews  at the highest levels of American politics, who knew full well that this Gaza war was a last hurrah of neoconservative faith in beatings and humiliation as diplomacy. And they were angry, much angrier than they ever told me. They were about to take over the reins of government in every branch, with a massive mandate for change. This war, they saw, as an attempt to etch in stone the impossibility of a settlement between Israel and Palestine, thus destroying the momentum of a new Middle East policy. And that is why I think that the Obama Administration, all of its Jews and its supportive senators and congressmen, embarked on such a resolute stance to Israeli policies.

Gaza broke the back of Israeli/American cooperation. I do not for one believe that it is only Bibi and Avigdor’s right wing universe. The camel’s back of American solidarity has been broken on Israeli military solutions, period. And what may frighten Jews is that there is such a massive split between American Jewish attitudes and Israeli Jewish attitudes to this very change. I think that in hindsight, the major era of Middle Eastern suicide bombing, from the 90′s in Jerusalem through 2003, including the bombings in the U.S. and Europe, solidly put much of the world behind Israel’s radical solutions, overwhelming punishment and imprisonment in Gaza and the West Bank, the Wall, the starving of Gaza.

But that started to ring hollow the more that the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld nightmare in Iraq unraveled. And Israel’s war in Gaza was the last straw. Israelis really did not see this coming, but I knew in my heart that Mr. Obama must have been seething at the destruction in Gaza, and he planned real change with a very willing constituency. The so-called pro-Israel Lobby did not see it coming either because they had grown so used to gathering Congress to their imperial gatherings, always saying everything their donors want to hear, and then keeping inside every frustration they had with suicidal violent policies that were bad for America and bad for Israel. Some of us in Washington knew, because so many of these folks only expressed their anger in the most oblique and indirect ways so as not to be targeted. But now, in the last six months, we see the change, we see what was inside, spoken of only in bathrooms and private dinners, now emerge into a fundamental shift.

So, as I reflect on the last six months of change in policy, I keep having a vision of listening to Bogey Yaalon, now Deputy Prime Minister, coming to Washington time after time talking about how ‘they’ needed to teach the Palestinians and the Arabs ‘a lesson’. And so he did, as he has done decade after decade, a lesson that pain is the only thing the enemy understands.  But who got punished? Whose hands have been slapped? Who is not believed anymore when it really counts, like with Iran’s nuclear policy?

Those of you who know my writings and work know that I do not have a huge amount of faith in elite peace processes, nor in elite impositions of peace on unwilling populations. And to make peace here we must impose it on those who put Bibi into office. We will see what happens, but I believe that the overwhelming lesson of the 90′s and this present concluding decade is that force, Islamist or Jewish, does not work, it gets nowhere, and that the only relationships I see working are between very special Arabs and Jews who have deep friendships and equal partnerships. That is the only future without war. I wish President Obama well, and I support him every step of the way, but he stands atop an infrastructure of Western imperial selfishness that does not know or understand subtlety, respect, anti-corruption, listening, humility, equality and social justice. And there is no way that the Palestinian people will come to the table in massive numbers unless there is a profound change in their treatment by everyone. And, in turn, I know the Jewish people very well, and there is no way that the rank and file supporters of militarism will aquiesce unless they see a profound change in attitude of the Arab world to them. In other words, this is a very messy, damaged psychological situation, and I hope that President Obama and Senator Mitchell understand their limitations, no matter how excellent their skills and intentions. They need the rest of us to help, to gain far more ‘buy-in’ from these damaged peoples. I see it coming, but it is all so slow, so slow. We need more people to engage and show the policy makers the way forward.

Frank Luntz has done it again, putting his prodigious talents to work for reactionary causes, finding amazingly simple–though not simplistic–communications strategies to obstruct basic truths and delay a little longer the march of history. All the major issues that the world now sees as obvious and plain as day–climate change, tobacco as a killer, for example–were at one time subject to the brilliant obfuscations of communications manipulation. Now Frank has turned that to the purposes of the so-called pro-Israel community, which is not and does not represent a pro-Israel position but rather a pro-settlement and pro-war position.

Newsweek has exposed Frank’s playbook, over a hundred pages of it. The pro-peace community, the community that considers itself pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian should study this method and turn it on its head. Exposing it and reversing its use is the best way to neutralize its fundamental dishonesty.

In the report, Luntz describes the “best settlement argument” as one that draws a parallel between the Arab communities in Israel and the Jewish settlers in the West Bank—and refers to the idea of evacuating Jews as racist. “The idea that anywhere that you have Palestinians there can’t be any Jews, that some areas have to be Jew-free, is a racist idea,” he suggests saying. “We don’t say that we have to cleanse out Arabs from Israel. They are citizens of Israel. They enjoy equal rights. We cannot see why it is that peace requires that any Palestinian area would require a kind of ethnic cleansing to remove all Jews. We don’t accept it. Cleansing by either side against either side is unacceptable.”

One line of argument that Luntz says actually harms the cause is Israel’s policy of restricting Arab housing construction in East Jerusalem: “The arguments about demolishing Palestinian homes because they are not within the Jerusalem building code tested SO badly that we are not even going to dignify them with a Word’s That Don’t Work box. Americans hate their own local planning boards for telling them where they can and can’t put swimming pools or build fences. You don’t need to import that animosity into your own credibility issues. Worse yet, talking about ‘violations of building codes’ when a TV station is showing the removal of a house that looks older than the modern state of Israel is simply catastrophic.”

So whatever Frank says to avoid, according to his polls, is exactly what the pro-peace community should emphasize. Whatever he says is appealing as an argument, should be turned on its head. Messages should be simple, powerful and convincing. I will never forget being invited at the beginning of the Bush Era to a far right religious gathering of elite political leaders in Washington, maybe thirty in the room (they mistakenly thought I was one of them because I am for religious people participating in peace process. Who was I to disagree, I went, I saw, I was revolted, and I learned). One of the leaders said to the group again and again, “Keep it simple,” just like Frank told them. So we need to study this and learn from it. By the way, Silverstein has done a fine job of analyzing this document.