This Jewish New Year, Let's Put An End to Hope

STOCKBRIDGE, Massachusetts - I approached the Norman Rockwell Museum, a stately monument to pride and shame, unaware that it would be the perfect, if also the most unlikely, place to think about the Jewish year about to unfold, and to look anew at Israel and Palestine.

Unlikely, because it celebrates a man who, perhaps more than any other, spoke to Christian and white America about itself. Perfect, nonetheless, because it celebrates the ability to perform the fundamental commandment of the dawn of a Jewish New Year: to reconsider.

This is an uncommon time in Israel, in Palestine, and, no less, in America. All three peoples are engaged in pitched internal battles, in effect, brushfire civil wars, to recast the futures of their societies. Through it all, there is a distressing, very 21st Century tendency, to reduce debates to twitter-worthy sloganeering.

In America, ever the island in the face of war in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, war in the Holy Land, and confrontation with Iran, the tone of debate over health care reform is no less lethal, every bit as hysterical, as the debate in Israel/Palestine about Israel and Palestine.

The day I visited the museum, a woman who opposed health care reform was photographed at one of the borderline-violent "town hall" public discussions elsewhere in America, holding a sign reading "I Want My America Back."

A visit to the museum might have done her good. It juxtaposes Rockwell's early works, reinforcements of the myths of a deeply flawed but outwardly self-satisfied society, alongside his later pieces, shocking in their power to reflect the stubbornness and potency of bigotry and injustice. The paintings include Southern Justice (Murder in Mississippi), a response to the brutal killing of three civil rights activists, and The Problem We All Live With, showing federal marshals escorting an African American girl to school, the wall behind her stained with hurled tomatoes and the scrawled word Nigger.

A third piece, a prophetic departure, is titled Uneasy Christmas in the Birthplace of Christ. The 1970 cover illustration of Bethlehem for Look Magazine, foreshadows the dark future of the then-nascent occupation of the West Bank.

This, in sum, was what I learned from my summer vacation: Memory and hope make the best liars.

Like the woman who wants her America back, we, the peoples of the birthplace of Christ, remain hostages to unrealizable hopes and to carefully manicured memories of a past which was vastly more complex than we choose to believe.

The minority of Jews who cannot abide territorial compromise are more than content to keep the rest of us from a future shared with the Palestinians, no matter what the burden or the risk. The Palestinians who cannot bring themselves to accept a permanent state of Israel, effectively keep themselves from having any state at all.

Here in New England, even for the visitor inured to missiles, bombs, and the sound of gunfire in the night, there was something frightening in the television footage of apoplectic opponents of health care reforms, in part because the issue seemed a stalking horse for so much more -- in particular, an effort to turn back time itself.

The level of debate, the ferocity of the opposition, appeared incomprehensible. Until, that is, my daughter commented that extremism is a form of mental illness.

On my summer vacation, I came to believe that it is time to put an end to a particularly seductive, endlessly potent form of hope. It is time to put behind us our sentimental fondness for fundamentalism, our childish belief that radical holy men can know what God wants for us, the kind of hope which shrouds our eyes and reduces people we disagree with, to people who are keeping us from having a future.

A hundred years of fighting have proven, if nothing else, that hope for a future in which one side gets all that it wants, and the other goes without, is hope for no future at all.

We know what kind of peace we can expect in the years to come, and it is bound to be, to say the very least, uneasy. We will need to betray our fondest hopes to achieve it. May God speed us in the effort.

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For the full post, please click on http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1111376.html

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Comments

[Fireslayer]

The most despicable thing about the LIkudzis and the Settler theves is that they do not give a damn about the rest of the world. They are so caught up in their amoral, selfish and short sighted agenda that they are willing to hold world peace and the happiness of vast numbers of people hostage to their expansionist, ethnic cleansing agenda. It is an agenda they do not have integrity to concede.

It is a fact that the greatest amount of settlement expansion always happens in conjunction with pompous declarations by the like of Netanyahu and his evil twin Barak about the need to "negotiate­." What carping hypocrisy.­! What a guileful, deceitful lot of so called leaders Israel has vomited onto the world scene. When will Israel have honest leaders.

AT least the arch-racist Lieberman is blatant in his ethnic cleansing agenda. The rest just lie about it.

Increasingly, the World is seeing through the ruses. The boycott is going like gangbuster in Europe.

It is time for thinking Jews to stand up against apartheid and the, slow steady ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. I do not give a hang whether it is a one state or two state solution. I only want the lying, thieving and murdering of the IDF and their religious nut enablers to end.

Justice for the Palestinians is the only sure path to peace of Israel.

[bermanator]

"I do not give a hang whether it is a one state or two state solution. I only want the lying, thieving and murdering of the IDF and their religious nut enablers to end."

1. If you're going to complain about the Likudniks and Settlers, at least recognize that there are far more unsavory players on the Palestinian team.

2. Believe it or not, Israelis and Palestinians DO care whether it is a one-or-two-state solution. Just because you're miffed that your fantasy of world peace is being disrupted, doesn't mean they're going to suddenly hold hands just to appease you. It seems you are the one caught up in an "amoral, selfish agenda", where you somehow expect the Israelis to care about your feelings on the situation.

3. Feel free to condemn the IDF for their perceived injustices. But seeing as Hamas and the dozen other Palestinian factions are armed to the teeth, nobody with a shred of that famed "even-handedness" would frame the situation through your myopic, underdog-s­ydrome-ins­pired viewspoint. To claim Israel is the only party at fault is literally ridiculous, as is your claim that the IDF is run by "religious nuts".

4. Have you ever been to Israel or the West Bank?

[nkhogan]

I loved this line the best, "It is time to put behind us our sentimental fondness for fundamentalism, our childish belief that radical holy men can know what God wants for us, the kind of hope which shrouds our eyes and reduces people we disagree with, to people who are keeping us from having a future."


Well put. If only we can do it and learn to respect the 'gods' that the 'Other' worships and join together in a common hope in the divine in each one of us and in the 'Other'. May we recognize and respect each others' aspirations for a future and a hope and build that future together rather than insist on our own versions of utopia.

Beautiful sentiments expressed here. I share them. Shalom, Salaam, peace.

[gde]

The problem in Palestine is not caused by a minority of "Jews". It is caused by the majority.

The problem is not merely 450 apartments for illegal aliens, criminals armed with automatic weapons. It is all the settlements, and illegal alien criminals wandering around with automatic weapons and armored vehicles, telling people what to do. The key to the 450 apartments is that it sends the Palestinians a clear message: Israel will never abide by any agreement, and will continue to steal and kill. Why should the Palestinians attempt to negotiate under these circumstances?

[mommamia526]

I read today that the fact that Israelis are building 450 new apartments in Judea is enough of a cause for Palestinians to refuse to talk about establishment of a Palestinian state on Israeli soil. Imagine that! 450 apartments are an obstacle for which some people give up an entire country of their own. Not only that they threaten a third intifada, people getting killed an injured, and more. Of course, both parties here have *fundamental* objectives and complaints. And they are blinded by them. Surely, if you can manage to get your own country a tiny block of apartments, 450 total, that is not even a substantial apartment complex, should not hold you back. And IF you would manage to get that whole country of your own, and there are 450 apartments, newly built, already in it, could some Palestinians possibly move in? No, does not make much sense to me. On the other hand, given the example of King Solomon, halving the body (of Israel) through the middle makes even less sense. And IF all those obstacles would be overcome, and the baby (Israel) stays alive, and the Palestinians finally move in, would that mean Peace and quiet in the ME? Not on your life. There is Gaza and Hamas, which has a few pickles it wants to shove down the PA's throat. In fact Hamas is already actively involved in tunneling inside Judea, right under PA's watchful(?) eyes. And let us not forget about Hezbullah.

[Wisdo]

where is judea?