Jews Torn by Israeli Behavior

Jews themselves are torn by Israel’s behavior. Many have predicted for decades that Israel could not be Israel and swallow the West Bank. Israel’s “solution” has been to repopulate the West Bank with Israelis and push Palestinians out. Many of us never bought into that “solution”. From what Israelis have told me, Israel made no effort to integrate the populations, to school them together or share space. Israeli policy has been to separate the populations and squeeze the Palestinians out.

That approach has been coming home to roost. Israel appears to be turning itself into an “illiberal bastion of zealotry.” It’s threatening the survival of democracy, quashing the Israeli Supreme Court’s ability to enforce rules, expelling and leaving Palestinians stateless, vulnerable to both settler and official violence, and increasing attacks on civilians. Israel’s been thumbing its nose at American demands to respect Palestinian settlements and preserve a two-state solution. It doesn’t help that Netanyahu’s head of the Office of Jewish Identity doesn’t think most American Jews are Jewish. These policies are very troubling to a large segment of American Jewry. I don’t know whether another solution would work but this has painful consequences.

When I was young, I was outraged by Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians. Tit for tat didn’t seem like smart policy but it seemed understandable. Nevertheless, attacks on civilians are absolutely inexcusable. Collective guilt, blaming or penalizing all Palestinians for the violence of some, makes everything worse.

There’s a bigger issue. If tribalism justifies anything for one’s own tribe, and if might makes right, which of our tribes will survive? Only if we can find ways to unite behind justice, equality, and the Golden Rule, loving and respecting our neighbors and fellow human beings, can any of our tribes, ethnic, racial, or religious, survive intact.

The American Founding generation tried to bequeath us that lesson. Their answer to the religious wars that shredded seventeenth century Europe and would again shred the twentieth was the philosophy of the Enlightenment, of universal principles of justice. They sought a road to peace through tolerance and community.

In the great words of the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

“All” people have those rights though it took a civil war to enshrine those principles in the text of the Thirteenth Amendment, ending slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment, attempting to protect life, liberty and property with equal protection and due process of law, the Fifteenth Amendment attempting to guarantee voting rights to the descendants of those brought here as slaves, and the Nineteenth Amendment finally recognizing women’s right to vote.

We’ll always have vicious people who care nothing for others’ rights, but our defense and attractiveness to the world has always been those universal human rights. We and Israel ignore those rights and support countries which ignore them at our peril and at the peril of our moral responsibility to honor and respect all God’s children.

Having been the victim of Hitler’s Nazi racism in the Holocaust, later euphemized in other contexts as ethnic cleansing, Israel has been engaging in a deal with the devil by trying to swallow the West Bank. It’s a bad deal and the devil is winning.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on February 7, 2023.

Where is the Religious Voice on Climate Change?

(For the podcast, please click here.)

I don’t understand why so many leaders of our religious institutions haven’t zeroed in on the climate crisis as the major moral issue of our time. We are already watching the murder and mayhem it is producing from California to Europe and climate refugees in Africa and Latin America.

Global warming brought devastating floods to the Eastern seaboard, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and the Gulf Coast as well as a large part of Asia.

Global warming changed the climate over the Pacific, bringing drought and huge fires to the west coast. Oregon towns of Detroit, Blue River, Vida, Phoenix, and Talent are substantially destroyed. Ironically, the town called Paradise was largely destroyed in California. Fire took Malden in Washington and hundreds of thousands of acres.

Droughts, fires and floods, kill, devastate and drive people from their homes, towns, regions and countries. These are tragedies of biblical proportions. And they create huge flows of refugees – “climate refugees,” because they’re fleeing places where the natural environment has become unlivable.

If humans can do something to stop or reduce it, dealing with dehydration, starvation, death and displacement of millions of people annually, is a moral crisis. All our religious traditions make us responsible to prevent tragedies if we can. Scientists by the legions across the globe and at all levels, in all relevant fields, are telling us we can stop climate change. That being the case, it is a violation of the word of God, a sin in any language, to turn our backs on the growing problem, to keep silent, and elect leaders who won’t deal with the climate crisis.

The clergy can be a force for change. They played a key role in turning white Americans against slavery and for civil rights. I suspect the reticence of too many clerics in dealing with the number one moral crisis of our time has been emptying the houses of worship for decades as people see religion as less and less relevant.

Religious leaders stood with Martin Luther King. Where do religious leaders stand on the climate crisis? Where are they on fossil fuels that heat up the climate and contribute to forest fires? Where are they on the human origins of climate change that lead to drought in some areas, increase flooding and seawater rise in others, and push us to the edge of tipping points that will put the climate on a glide path to hell and our own extinction? Our kids come home from school and tell us to turn off the lights to save power. Where are the clergy?

Some clerics are too fixated on individual behavior to see our contribution to community, corporate and national behavior? A cleric on a panel with me told us that we have no business making corporations behave because we are the enemy in our individual, private actions. He refused to see the systemic problem, the ways that only organized behavior can solve large social problems, the ways that only popular movement to force our legislators to deal with the climate crisis will make a difference.

It would make a big different if clerics would start using their voices and moral authority to spread the movement to deal with the climate before it is too late to save anyone – ourselves, our children, our grandchildren, and each other’s. Clerics have responsibilities too. And please tell me the exceptions.

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on August 3, 2021.

Should We Just “Get Over it”?

Trump’s supporters claim liberals should “get over it.” Trump was elected so we should “get over it.” Really? What should we “get over”? We should certainly “get over” losing a popularity contest – a high school election or selection of a beauty queen. But getting over real damage is shallow and heartless. It may be our privilege to “get over” our own losses, but we don’t have the moral privilege of “getting over” impending death, damage and destruction to others that we could have stopped?

Trump’s opposition to environmental rules will poison the air and water. Should we get over it before or after people sicken and die? Before or after children are poisoned, injured or permanently damaged?

Trump’s abandonment of green power and his promotion of fossil fuels and fracking will boil our world, flood our coasts, smash our homes with violent storms, unleash new infections on us, and parch our lands and lips with drought. Should we get over it or try to prevent it? Should we celebrate while we’re spared or should we cry for family, friends, and neighbors?

Vive la France! But Trump’s attack on European unity emboldens the world’s dictators and masks his own desire to join them. Should we celebrate unraveling the European union that put a stop to the most deadly wars in the earth’s history and nearly destroyed our closest allies? Or should we try to keep it strong?

Trump’s attacks on regulation threaten to crush the vulnerable. Should we celebrate their misfortune? Trump removed brokers’ obligations to protect their clients’ interests. Shall we thank him for encouraging fraud? For trumping decency.

Perhaps we can get over our own losses, but should we “get over” the consequences to other hard-working and decent people all over the country? Should we get over the decency in our own hearts? Is it weakness to care about others? Or are we strong enough to care?

Trump keeps talking about making the country great again, while selling it out and most of it’s people for the selfishness of a few. Should we reward him for it?

What should we respect in ourselves and each other? That our so-called “Second Amendment rights” threaten others’ lives whenever anyone loses their tempers, becomes frustrated or jumps to conclusions? Are we on the way to becoming a nation of barroom brawlers congratulating whoever is strong or fast enough to kill everyone else? Is that the great new America?

Trump has called off investigations into police killings. Should we respect people we call “lawmen” who are so scared of a man putting his key in his door that they have to shoot him instantly? Do America’s “bravest” shoot men in the back, on the ground or with their hands up? Or is cowardice the new bravery? Is Trump encouraging chaos so that he can step in with dictatorial powers claiming that it’s necessary for our own safety to shoot men in the back?

There is nothing in the White House to get over. There is everything to stop, control, limit, prevent. The imposter-president is a threat to meet, not a bet to get over.

Trumpistas have saddled us all with a doozy. Let them “get over it.”

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, May 9, 2017.