One cause: Reflections on the true roots of the conflict

[Jefferson23]

17 July 2014

Yonatan Shefa is Assistant Director to RHR’s Department of Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. Amidst the whirlpool of violence and racial tension threatening to swallow the Israelis and Palestinians this summer, he reflects on a truth whose knowledge can only lead to peace.

I think it unlikely this piece will get published.

But since I work for Rabbis for Human Rights, an organization that, I hope, has the Torah at its heart, I can at least find a voice for my feelings here. I’m taking the liberty to write what might not seem at all newsworthy, but just might be relevant.

A few weeks ago, before all of this mess between Israel and Gaza re-erupted, when Eyal, Naftali and Gilad were thought by most of us to be only kidnapped, RHR was invited, along with a handful of other NGOs and human rights lawyers, to sit with a member of Israeli Knesset. The purpose of the meeting was to strategize ways to strengthen the voice of the Israeli public calling for human rights, coexistence, peace.

A Defining Narrative

Above all, what the member of parliament urged us to do was to come up with a cohesive narrative, an overarching storyline that, no matter what discrete issue we were working on on the ground, or which organization was involved, we could refer back to. The idea, he said, was to learn from the effectiveness of the right. With a consistent narrative, with all of us reading from the same page and hammering home the same message, we could break through the apathy and dislocation and help people to see that all of the abuses and challenges we highlight in the field are not disparate, isolated incidents, but part of a greater, consistent reality they can no longer ignore.

He’s right. There is a consistent story; there is an ongoing reality that we’re not naming, that perhaps most of us are not seeing.

We want, so much, to believe that it’s their fault; that if only they would change, stop, or leave, it would all be okay, we’d have “peace”.

in full: http://rhr.org.il/eng/2014/07/one-cause-on-bringing-harmony-to-all-disparate-parts/

[Fred Sanders]

1. The voices of peace and solutions do not get near recommended enough..bloodlust is thicker.

[Jefferson23]

2. Agreed. Rabbis for Human Rights is an exemplary outfit..outstanding, really. But they are

ignored by the Israeli government and the pro-settler crowd.

[Jefferson23]

3. Images of Gaza war shift perception of Israel

War is often remembered by images. Who can forget the photograph of the Vietnamese girl running naked down a road after being exposed to US napalm bombs? Or the American sailor kissing an anonymous nurse in Times Square following the announcement of the end of World War II? For the current war on Gaza, two images that have gone viral and the stories behind them are reflective of the real price of war in terms of human suffering, unbridled hate and revenge.

The first image is of a young man carrying a dead Palestinian boy on the beach in Gaza and the tweet by NBC reporter Ayman Mohyeldin that he had just been playing soccer with the slain child and the three others killed along with him. The boys, ages 9, 10 and 11, were attacked by the Israeli navy for no reason other than they lived in the overcrowded and besieged Gaza Strip.


Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/07/gaza-israel-war-ayman-mohyeldin-nbc-diana-magnay-cnn.html#ixzz37vAWmkPF