WHY WE MUST UNEQUIVOCALLY CONDEMN PALESTINIAN ACTS OF TERROR (and mourn the dead at Kibbutz Metzer) --Rabbi Michael Lerner
The murder of five Israeli civilians at Kibbutz Metzer (a kibbutz famous for its cooperation with Palestinians and its support for peace) by a group affiliated with the military arm of Fatah (Yassir Arafat's branch of the Palestinian national liberation movement), underscores afresh the position that we at Tikkun and the Tikkun Community have taken from the start: First, we mourn and cry for the victims, and pray for consolation and healing of the Israeli people who have been subjected to this kind of terror for decades. Second, we loudly proclaim that Palestinian acts of terror against Israeli civilians are immoral, outrageous, and cannot be excused away by reference to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. These acts are totally destructive to the Palestinian cause.
I am sick with pain, anger, rage at those Palestinians who did it and at the failure of others to stand up publicly and condemn these deeds. And I am filled with grief and sorrow at the terrible suffering of the Israeli people.
There are people who say, "Yes, but there is greater violence being done to the Palestinian people by the Occupation--and Palestinian children killed in their beds by Israeli bombs from the sky are no less victims than Israeli children killed by terror." But this is a crazy and sick way to think. I hate it when a similar argument is made by Jews ("the killing of those Palestinian civilians by Israeli planes and bombs is not morally equivalent to the acts of Palestinian terror."). THERE IS NEVER ANY MORAL EQUIVALENCE BETWEEN ONE ACT OF MURDER AND ANOTHER--BECAUSE EACH ONE IS A UNIQUE TRAGEDY IN ITSELF, AND NOT TO BE EXPLAINED AWAY. HUMAN BEINGS ARE CREATED IN THE IMAGE OF GOD, THEIR LIVES ARE SACRED, AND IT IS IMMORAL TO TAKE SOMEONE ELSE'S LIFE TO ACHIEVE YOUR POLITICAL ENDS. Period. So don't tell me about the pain of the Occupation, because I've been spending my full time energies trying to build a political movement to try to end it, at great personal cost, facing abuse and denunciation from others in the Jewish community, losing financial support for Tikkun, enduring threats of violence almost daily, and finding my ideas misrepresented and distorted in disgusting ways. I don't have to be told that the Occupation itself is disgusting, immoral, and outrageous. But that fact is no justification for killing innocent Israelis. The mother at Kibbutz Metzar who threw her body over her two children, only to have the thugs who claim to represent the Palestinian people come closer to her so that the bullets would pass through her body and kill her two children, is the martyr--not the "al Aska Martyrs Brigade" who are simply disgusting criminals.
Those who excuse this behavior away are doing no service to the Palestinian people. When Israelis and others hear these excuses, they conclude that the entire Palestinian people have lost their moral compass. That is not true. As Amira Hass explains below, many Palestinians abhor what is being done in their name, but feel scared to speak out. Well, those of us who support an immediate and unconditional end to the Occupation and who don't live under the tyranny of Arafat's uncontrolled thugs do have the freedom to speak out--and we must. So I say it as clearly as possible: these acts of murder, and all acts of murder by Palestinians against Israeli civilians (whether inside or outside the Green Line) are immoral, crazy, evil, and we demand that they be stopped by the Palestinian people!!!
None of us are doing the Palestinian people any favor by keeping silent on this point. On the contrary, it is critical to reassure the Israeli people that should they agree to end the Occupation they will NOT be empowering a people who are ready to excuse away this kind of immorality and violence.
It is particularly we who support peace who must be loud and clear in our condemnation of these hateful and immoral acts. Just as we have been clear in our condemnation of Israeli violence and the hidden but very real violence that is a daily reality of the Occupation, so we unequivocally condemn Palestinian vioilence as well.
--Rabbi Michael Lerner Editor, Tikkun Magazine <rabbilerner at tikkun.org>
P.S. Please read the article by Amira Hass in today's Ha'aretz (the most respected Israeli newspaper) and the editorial from today's Ha'aretz. They help to clarify why every humanity loving person, and particularly those who support the rights of Palestinians to be free of the Occupation, should be joining us in mourning the victims and in condemning not only the perpetrators of this act but those who remain silent among the supporters of Palestinian liberation.
P.P.S. And as Ha'aretz points out in its editorial, there is still a sign of hope. Even at the most difficult times, Metzer members received their friends from the neighboring Arab villages of Kafin and Meisar (whose children attend joint activities with the kibbutz children) and did not alter their opinion that it is possible to have peaceful neighborly relations based on dialogue and agreement. This modest friendship between Metzer and its Arab neighbors in Israel and in the Palestinian areaswhich now stand under a terrible strainis a solitary reminder of what the real aim should be. One can only hope that the voice heard in Metzer and Kafin will eventually drown out the cycle of bloodshed. (full editorial from Ha'aretz is printed below).
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Wednesday, November 13, 2002 Kislev 8, 5763 Israel Time:Ý 17:32 Ý(GMT+2)
Back Home Fatah's failure By Amira Hass
Among Palestinians, the Fatah movement is known as a "supermarket" - a mix of ideologies, with a variety of social and behavioral movements. Left and right, religious and secular, with those who support the right of return and those who gave it up, fabulously rich and desperately poor, sycophants and self-critics, senior officials who still refer to Israel as "the Zionist entity" and believe in the one-state solution (in which the Jews are a tolerated minority) and those who are friends with Zionists and dream of two states living side by side with excellent relations between the two countries. As long as the common goal is achieving independence, say Fatah members, this messy business can continue existing. But when it comes to the liberty some members of the movement take unto themselves with the use of weapons, that already goes beyond the charming folklore of ideological chaos.
The murder of five Israeli civilians in Kibbutz Metzer by a member of the military wing of the Fatah once again proved how the senior and mid-level echelons of the Fatah don't have real control over those who pick up a gun in the name of Fatah. As opposed to the centralized decision-making processes in Hamas and Islamic Jihad, in Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement any three youngsters can join together, decide they are a military cell, and conduct this or that "operation" sometimes "responding" to a call by their leaders not to go over the Green Line, and sometimes going over the line. Maybe they get a green light from this or that Fatah official in their neighborhood, but they allow themselves to take action that blatantly contradicts the logic and common sense of the Palestinian Authority's diplomatic campaign to win active Western support for a solution leading to the Israeli withdrawal from the territories captured in 1967. On the one hand they allow themselves to threaten those who criticize Arafat, and on the other to kidnap suspected collaborators out of the hands of the Palestinian police and murder them.
Many well-known Fatah activists are disgusted by the criminal behavior in the guise of the national struggle of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades. In the last two days, those who tried speaking out against the attack heard the well-worn counterarguments: Aren't our children murdered in their beds? Does it matter they were killed by a shell or bomb and not by a rifle? Don't the Israeli bombs leave widows and orphans on our side? Wasn't it the Israelis who began the shooting on September 29, 2000 before Fatah began striking back at their civilians? And does anyone notice our suffering at the checkpoints? The humiliations by the soldiers?
Apparently the criminal and infantile characteristics in the behavior of the armed youths of Fatah in the Tanzim is balanced out in the eyes of the Palestinian public by the fact they are perceived as people who are responding with their weapons to the collective pain. But the military arms of Hamas and Islamic Jihad do it better - because their leadership sets a clear policy and openly encourages mass attacks on Israeli civilians. Thus, the Fatah youths and their field commanders find themselves in an internal competition with the other Palestinian movements. The competition determines their "decisions" about using weapons more than the declared policies of their leader, Arafat.
There is no Palestinian who disagrees with the well-known arguments from other national liberation struggles in the Third World that a fighter jet dropping bombs is the real terror. But there are enough activists in Fatah - who kept their jobs in the civilian and security apparatuses of the PA - who are convinced the national liberation struggle cannot be based only on the motive of revenge, but that it must be wise enough to take into account external and not only internal factors. But apparently the failure of the utilitarian reasoning doesn't even allow the moral reasoning to be heard.
Academic researchers will no doubt come up with many answers why those activists allowed the armed groups to act in their name and dictate such a disastrous agenda. It's impossible, after all, to blame it only on Arafat's personality and the quality of his volatile leadership. One of the answers was provided recently by a senior Fatah man in Gaza, who personally benefited from the creature comforts devolving to him and his entire class through their support of the Oslo agreements; "Thanks to the Al Aqsa martyrs, they don't kill us," he admitted with frank honesty. "Thanks to their existence, we stay alive."
It was an indirect reference to the failure of Oslo's promise. In other words, the Fatah leadership failed to create a clear and logical plan for an independence campaign when it became clear beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Israeli occupation was not coming to an end through pleasantries, because the PA found it difficult to give up the benefits of being a ruling movement under the auspices of Oslo. The Fatah leadership did not dare demand obedience of its people in the national liberation movement and prohibit methods that were "popular" because of their vengeance, but damaging in the long run, because Fatah's failure as a government disappointed most of the Palestinian people.
--Amira Hass, West Bank correspondent for Ha'aretz
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Editorial in Ha'aretz:
A glimmer of hope from Kibbutz Metzer
Once again, to our great horror, it has transpired that Palestinian terrorism contains within it a blind and callous cruelty, undeterred by any humane inhibition. No cause, no faith and no national aspiration will ever cleanse the hands of the villain, who in the thick of the night burst through a young woman's door, and while she covered her young children with her own body, shot her at such close range that the bullets ripped through her killing the children as well.
The Palestinian murderer who shot Tirza Damari, Yitzhak Dori, Revital Ohayoun and her two children, Matan and Noam, in Kibbutz Metzer apparently came from the Tul Karm area, from a particularly savage cell for whom even the rules of Fatah's military wing are not sufficiently extreme. To our great horror, this is not the first time that parents and their children have been slaughtered at home, in their beds. And to our great disappointment, there is no one in the Palestinian public to stand up bravely against this contemptable phenomenon and its awful consequences.
In a conversation with Amira Hass (see page 4), members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade bragged of the murders they had committed and claimed that the death of a fighter hurt them more than the death of a child. These violent and ignorant youths, who spread terror all around them, have forced their sickening agenda on the entire Palestinian people. In their bloody race against their rival gangs - Hamas and Islamic Jihad - Fatah leaders have apparently followed the most distorted fringes who wreak terrible damages on both the Palestinian public and its leadership.
At times like this, the Israeli public becomes oblivious to the suffering of the Palestinians and the implications of the renewed occupation of the West Bank. At times like this, the Israeli government is pushed to extreme decisions backed by hard-line military thinking. Attacks such as these distance any hope of settling the conflict and strengthen the fringe elements who wish to enflame it.
But, out of the chaos, arises a human phenomenon of sublime solemnity. From the abyss of mourning and grief can be heard the voices of members of Kibbutz Metzer, who wish to guard their relations with their Arab neighbors and continue to kindle friendship and coexistence with their Palestinian neighbors on the other side of the Green Line. The determined struggle of the kibbutz, along with neighbors from the Palestinian village of Kafin, to prevent the separation fence from going through the village's lands is one of the notable paradoxes of the conflict. Metzer members do not oppose the fence. On the contrary. But they insist that it pass along the o riginal route of the Green Line and not along the new route, which would lead to the appropriation of land from Kafin and the uprooting of some its orchards.
Even at the most difficult times, Metzer members received their friends from Kafin and Meisar (whose children attend joint activities with the kibbutz children) and did not alter their opinion that it is possible to have peaceful neighborly relations based on dialogue and agreement. This modest friendship between Metzer and its Arab neighbors in Israel and in the Palestinian areas - which now stand under a terrible strain - is a solitary reminder of what the real aim should be. One can only hope that the voice heard in Metzer and Kafin will eventually drown out the cycle of bloodshed.