Liza
> From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2002 14:00:01 -0500
> To: lbo-talk <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
> Subject: Lerner: condemn Palestinian terror
>
> Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2002 13:24:43 -0500
> From: <RabbiLerner at tikkun.org>
> Subject: Condemn Palestinian Terror
>
> 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).
>
> -----------------------------------------
>
> 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
>
> *************************************************************
>
> 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.
>
>