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[NextGenderation]
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Justice and peace are feminist issues.
For those who are interested...
A text from Starhawk (feminist witch, peace and earth activist who has done a lot of work with Israeli-Palestinian groups):
Wed 31/12/2008
Dear friends,
All day I¹ve been thinking about Gaza, listening to reports on NPR,
following the news on the internet when I can spare a moment. I¹ve been
thinking about the friends I made there four years ago, and wondering how
they are faring, and imagining their terror as the bombs fall on that giant,
open-air prison.
The Israeli ambassador speaks movingly of the terror felt by Israeli
children as Hamas rockets explode in the night. I agree with him‹that no
child should have her sleep menaced by rocket fire, or wake in the night
fearing death.
But I can¹t help but remember one night on the Rafah border, sleeping in a
house close to the line, watching the children dive for cover as bullets
thudded into the walls. There was a shell-hole in the back room they liked
to jump through into the garden, which at that time still held fruit trees
and chickens. Their mother fed me eggs, and their grandmother stuffed
oranges into my pockets with the shy pride every gardener shares.
That house is gone, now, along with all of its neighbors. Those children
wake in the night, every night of their lives, in terror. I don¹t know if
they have survived the hunger, the lack of medical supplies, the bombs. I
only know that they are children, too.
I¹ve ridden on busses in Israel. I understand that gnawing fear, the
squirrely feeling in the pit or your stomach, how you eye your fellow
passengers wondering if any of them are too thick around the middle. Could
that portly fellow be wearing a suicide belt, or just too many late night
snacks of hummus? That¹s no way to live.
But I¹ve also walked the pock-marked streets of Rafah, where every house
bears the scars of Israeli snipers, where tanks prowled the border every
night, where children played in the rubble, sometimes under fire, and this
was all four years ago, when things were much, much better there.
And I just don¹t get it. I mean, I get why suicide bombs and homemade
rockets that kill innocent civilians are wrong. I just don¹t get why bombs
from F16s that kill far more innocent civilians are right. Why a kid from
the ghetto who shoots a cop is a criminal, but a pilot who bombs a police
station from the air is a hero.
Is it a distance thing? Does the air or the altitude confer a purifying
effect? Or is it a matter of scale? Individual murder is vile, but mass
murder, carried out by a state as an aspect of national policy, that¹s a
fine and noble thing?
I don¹t get how my own people can be doing this. Or rather, I do get it. I
am a Jew, by birth and upbringing, born six years after the Holocaust ended,
raised on the myth and hope of Israel. The myth goes like this:
³For two thousand years we wandered in exile, homeless and persecuted,
nearly destroyed utterly by the Nazis. But out of that suffering was born
one good thing‹the homeland that we have come back to, our own land at last,
where we can be safe, and proud, and strong.²
That¹s a powerful story, a moving story. There¹s only one problem with
it‹it leaves the Palestinians out. It has to leave them out, for if we were
to admit that the homeland belonged to another people, well, that spoils the
story.
The result is a kind of psychic blind spot where the Palestinians are
concerned. If you are truly invested in Israel as the Jewish homeland, the
Jewish state, then you can¹t let the Palestinians be real to you. It¹s like
you can¹t really focus on them. Golda Meir said, ³The Palestinians, who are
they? They don¹t exist.² We hear, ³There is no partner for peace,² ³There
is no one to talk to.²
And so Israel, a modern state with high standards of hygiene, a state rooted
in a religion that requires washing your hands before you eat and regular,
ritual baths, builds settlements that don¹t bother to construct sewage
treatment plants. They just dump raw sewage onto the Palestinian fields
across the fence, somewhat like a spaceship ejecting its wastes into the
void. I am truly not making this up‹I¹ve seen it, smelled it, and it¹s a
known though shameful fact. But if the Palestinians aren¹t really real‹who
are they? They don¹t exist!‹then the land they inhabit becomes a kind of
void in the psyche, and it isn¹t really real, either. At times, in those
border villages, walking the fencelines of settlements, you feel like you
have slipped into a science fiction movie, where parallel universes exist in
the same space, but in different strands of reality, that never touch.
When I was on the West Bank, during Israeli incursions the Israeli military
would often take over a Palestinian house to billet their soldiers. Many
times, they would simply lock the family who owned it into one room, and
keep them there, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days‹parents,
grandparents, kids and all. I¹ve sat with a family, singing to the children
while soldiers trashed their house, and I¹ve been detained by a group of
soldiers playing cards in the kitchen with a family locked in the other
room. (I got out of that one‹but that¹s another story.)
It¹s a kind of uneasy feeling, having something locked away in a room in
your house that you can¹t look at. Ever caught a mouse in a glue trap? And
you can¹t bear to watch it suffer, so you leave the room and close the door
and don¹t come back until it¹s really, really dead.
Like a horrific fractal, the locked room repeats on different scales. The
Israelis have built a wall to lock away the West Bank. And Gaza itself is
one huge, locked room. Close the borders, keep food and medical supplies
and necessities from getting through, and perhaps they will just quietly
fade out of existence and stop spoiling our story.
³All we want is a return to calm,² the Israeli ambassador says. ³All we
want is peace.²
One way to get peace is to exterminate what threatens you. In fact, that
may be the prime directive of the last few thousand years.
But attempts to exterminate pests breed resistance, whether you¹re dealing
with insects or bacteria or people. The more insecticides you pour on a
field, the more pests you have to deal with‹because insecticides are always
more potent at killing the beneficial bugs than the pesky ones.
The harshness, the crackdowns, the border closings, the checkpoints, the
assassinations, the incursions, the building of settlements deep into
Palestinian territory, all the daily frustrations and humiliations of
occupation, have been breeding the conditions for Hamas, or something like
it, to thrive. If Israel truly wants peace, there¹s a more subtle, a more
intelligent and more effective strategy to pursue than simply trying to kill
the enemy and anyone else who happens to be in the vicinity.
It¹s this‹instead of killing what threatens you, feed what you want to grow.
Consider in what conditions peace can thrive, and create them, just as you
would prepare the bed for the crops you want to plant. Find those among your
opponents who also want peace, and support them. Make alliances. Offer
your enemies incentives to change, and reward your friends.
Of course, to follow such a strategy, you must actually see and know your
enemy. If they are nothing to you but cartoon characters of terrorists, you
will not be able to tell one from another, to discern the religious fanatic
from the guy muttering under his breath, ³F-ing Hammas, they closed the
cinema again!²
And you must be willing to give something up. No one gets peace if your
basic bargaining position is, ³I get everything I want, and you eat my
shit.² You might get a temporary victory, but it will never be a peaceful
one.
To know and see the enemy, you must let them into the story. They must
become real to you, nuanced, distinctive as individuals.
But when we let the Palestinians into the story, it changes. Oh, how
painfully it changes! For there is no way to tell a new story, one that
includes both peoples of the land, without starting like this:
³In our yearning for a homeland, in our attempts as a threatened and
traumatized people to find safety and power, we have done a great wrong to
another people, and now we must atone.²
Just try saying it. If you, like me, were raised on that other story, just
try this one out. Say it three times. It hurts, yes, but it might also
bring a great, liberating sense of relief with it.
And if you¹re not Jewish, if you¹re American, if you¹re white, if you¹re
German, if you¹re a thousand other things, really, if you¹re a human being,
there¹s probably some version of that story that is true for you.
Out of our own great need and fear and pain, we have often done great harm,
and we are called to atone. To atone is to be at one‹to stop drawing a
circle that includes our tribe and excludes the other, and start drawing a
larger circle that takes everyone in.
How do we atone? Open your eyes. Look into the face of the enemy, and see
a human being, flawed, distinct, unique and precious. Stop killing. Start
talking. Compost the shit and the rot and feed the olive trees.
Act. Cross the line. There are Israelis who do it all the time, joining
with Palestinians on the West Bank to protest the wall, watching at
checkpoints, refusing to serve in the occupying army, standing for peace.
Thousands have demonstrated this week in Tel Aviv.
There are Palestinians who advocate nonviolent resistance, who have
organized their villages to protest the wall, who face tear gas, beatings,
arrests, rubber bullets and real bullets to make their stand.
There are internationals who have put themselves on the line‹like the
boatload of human rights activists, journalists and doctors on board the
Dignity, the ship from the Free Gaza movement that was rammed and fired on
by the Israeli navy yesterday as it attempted to reach Gaza with
humanitarian aid.
Maybe we can¹t all do that. But we can all write a letter, make a phone
call, send an email. We can make the Palestinian people visible to us, and
to the world. When we do so, we make a world that is safer for every child.
Below is a good summary of some of the actions we can take.
Please feel free to repost this. In fact, send it to someone you think will
disagree with it.
Starhawk
www.starhawk.org
Another email from Starhawk hours later regarding the actions (mostly US oriented):
A number of you have written to say that the links in the post I sent out
last night did not work. You¹re right‹I can¹t get them to work, either, and
I apologize for not checking them before I sent it‹it was very late at night
and I have a very, very slow dialup where most things don¹t work. But
here¹s some better links, that do‹and it¹s quite easy to use them.
Personally, I think mass emails and pressure on Obama might be one of the
most effective things we can do in the long run.
Now, I¹m finding that the click here links below don¹t seem to work when I
either copy or forward them, but I am including this for the useful phone
numbers. You can go directly to two websites:
End the Occupation
http://www.endtheoccupation.org/article.php?id=1773
And United for Peace and Justice
www.unitedforpeace.org and get to working
links.
You can email Obama or post comments at
http://change.gov/.
Good luck!
Thanks to all who have said you are interested in taking action‹and may
this coming New Year be a better one for peace, justice, the environment,
and for all! Blessings, Starhawk
>From United for Peace and Justice
Take Action to Protest Israeli Attack on Gaza
Mid-morning Saturday, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) launched a series of
deadly air strikes on the occupied Gaza Strip. As we write this, an
estimated 275 people have been killed. Hundreds of innocent people have been
wounded. According to news reports today, Israel plans to keep these attacks
going and has brought scores of tanks to the border with Gaza.
These Israeli attacks come on top of a brutal siege of the Gaza Strip which
has been going on for years and has created a humanitarian catastrophe of
dire proportions for Gaza's 1.5 million Palestinian residents by restricting
the provision of food, fuel, medicine, electricity, and other necessities of
life. All of this is happening in the most densely populated and one of the
poorest areas of the world.
Israel is carrying out these attacks with F-16 fighter jets and missiles
provided by U.S. taxpayers. From 2001-2006, the United States transferred to
Israel more than $200 million worth of spare parts to fly its fleet of
F-16's. In July 2008, the United States gave Israel 186 million gallons of
JP-8 aviation jet fuel. Last year, the United States signed a $1.3 billion
contract with Raytheon to transfer to Israel thousands of TOW, Hellfire, and
'bunker buster' missiles.
Israel's lethal attack on the Gaza Strip could not have happened without the
active military and political support of the United States. We need to take
action now to protest this attack and demand an immediate cease-fire.
The U.S. Campaign to End the Israel Occupation (a member group pf UFPJ) has
issued an action alert with these suggestions -- we urge you to take action
today!
* Contact the White House to protest the attacks and demand an immediate
cease-fire. Call 202-456-1111 or send an email to comments@???.
* Contact the State Department at 202-647-6575 or send an email by
clicking here.
* Contact your Representative and Senators in Congress at 202-224-3121 or
find contact info for your Members of Congress by clicking here.
* Contact your local media by phoning into a talk show or writing a
letter to the editor. To find contact info for your local media, click here.
* Organize a local protest or vigil and tell us about it by clicking
here.
* Sign our open letter to President-Elect Obama calling for a new U.S.
policy toward Israel/Palestine and find out other steps you can take to
influence the incoming Administration by clicking here.
In addition, the Middle East Children's Alliance (another member group of
UFPJ) is working with health organizations in Gaza to procure the
most-needed medicines and send them directly to Gaza with the help of the
Free Gaza Movement. You can make a secure online contribution now.
Background Information
Below are three articles you may want to read for background information and
reports on the Gaza crisis.
'If Gaza Falls...', Sara Roy, Professor at Harvard's Center For Middle
Eastern Studies and author of 'Failing Peace: Gaza and the
Palestinian-Israeli Conflict'.
'Gaza Massacres Must Spur Us To Action', Ali Abunimah, Co-founder of The
Electronic Intifada and author of 'One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the
Israeli-Palestinian Impasse' (Metropolitan Books, 2006).
'Report on Gaza', Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, Update December 22,
2008.
