Yom Kippur approaches at the end of another year of violence between Israelis and Palestinians. As a Jew living this year in Israel, I've been thinking a lot lately about the Biblical injunction to "seek peace and pursue it" (Psalm 34:15). I'm sad to say I believe that we've pursued war when peace was possible. And so, we must atone.
One would hope that it would be uncontroversial to be for peace in Israel, but these days, I'm sorry to say, it is not. I believe in the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, which makes me an enthusiastic Zionist. I also believe in the right to exist of a free, sovereign Palestine in the Gaza Strip and the contiguous West Bank, free of Israeli military occupation and with a stable, productive economy that offers employment, education, and opportunity. Both peoples, Jews and Palestinians, are indigenous to this place, as has been amply proven by mainstream academic history, and both have the right to be here.
Unfortunately, the Netanyahu administration has seized every opportunity to take Palestinian land in the West Bank and convert it to Israeli-only settlements. Just this week I saw two reports of new settlement construction, plus a plan to forcibly relocate 12,000 Bedouins to make space for yet another settlement.
Never recognized by the United States or any other country, these settlements are a textbook case of bad-faith negotiation: a brazen attempt by the Israeli right wing to create a Jewish population in the West Bank in an effort to skew, delay, and—I think it's reasonable to surmise—prevent a peace deal between Israel and a future sovereign state of Palestine.
I confess that I feel conflicted even as I make these observations. There is a stream of commentary in Haaretz (a left-leaning national newspaper) and other sources to the effect that the ascendant far right acts with impunity, while the global left seems to have adopted an anti-Zionist stance that is beyond the stated position of the Palestinian Authority.
The political left in Israel is dispirited. It looks to me not qualitatively different from the American left circa 1994 or 2004—deeply disappointing election years (during the latter of which I was a senior official in a state Democratic Party) when we failed to convey our message, and we knew it. But those dark times give us space for reflection and can be opportunities to develop new strategies. We could learn from J. K. Rowling, who said, "Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life."
So where do we go from here?
The Talmud reminds us that repentance needs to be sincere and full, for, "If one says: I shall sin and repent, sin and repent, no opportunity will be given to him to repent" (Mishnah Yoma 8:9). What can we do to effect a sincere repentance, the kind that will actually change events on the ground here and not subject us to the accusation of having given empty lip service to peace while whipping up ethnic hostility for the past 40 years?
I think the answer starts with a closer look at Psalm 34. The preceding text says: "Who is the person who delights in life, lover of days, seeing the good? Guard your tongue from evil, and your lips from speaking falsehoods. Depart from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it" (Psalm 34:13-15).
Jewish legend teaches that God created the world through words, through speech. The Hebrew alphabet is the building blocks of creation, a mystical table of the elements. It forms words, and words are things; in fact the same Hebrew word, davar, means both "word" and "thing." To the Jewish mind, the reality we inhabit is built of words. And in Israel, words really do seem to create realities.
So it is with the conflict. Ugly words have created an ugly situation. Right-wing Jews are fond of calling Israel "a land without a people for a people without a land." By refusing to accept the peoplehood of Palestinians, we perpetrate the same verbal violence that anyone with a working knowledge of Jewish history ought to decry. Maps used across American Jewish religious schools, including the one where I taught last year on field education, show an Israel undifferentiated by the Green Line, ignoring the Palestinians entirely and imparting falsehoods to our children.
Meanwhile, many supporters of what must be the future state of Palestine still refuse to join the Palestinian Authority in accepting the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state at all. There are many claims that Zionism is colonialist, or equivalently that Jews are not indigenous to this land, which are entirely specious by the standards of historical scholarship otherwise generally applicable. The rampant Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement is a logical outlet for people hostile to Israel's existence, but by driving a wedge between American progressives and the Israeli left, it has been a gift to the Israeli right wing.
Leveler heads know that Israel is here to stay—and has a right to. They also know that the State of Palestine has a right to the same recognition and permanence. I am certain that if I pulled 10 people off my street and asked them to draw a map of what the likely solution would probably look like, I would get 10 nearly identical maps.
The only reason we have not progressed toward resolution is foot-dragging by those who have made a political calculation that they benefit from the status quo—and the poisonous atmosphere of ethnic hatred that pervades so much of this discussion, whether in Khan Younis, Jerusalem, or New York.
In this place as in no other, our words create realities. By denying the peoplehood of the other, we have given ourselves license to deny their humanity. By denying their humanity we have given ourselves license to kill them instead of speaking with them.
I do not mean to suggest change will be easy; a lot of damage has been done. People are not going to drop their hatreds all of a sudden. The best we can hope for, I think, is something like the American South's treatment of slavery and Jim Crow: a mixture of embarrassment, denial, occasional relapses, and a general prevailing and sincere desire to be better. So, this year, on Yom Kippur, I offer this prayer for atonement and peace:
Eternal God, may it be Your will that Your people take the Psalmist’s advice.
Let us depart from evil and do good.
Let us leave the status quo behind and try something new and better.
Help us guard our tongues from evil speech and falsehoods,
So that we may find more room to make peace.
Amen.
—by Jeremy Sher, master of divinity degree candidate