November 26, 2014--Sacred Spaces

I once had a colleague who for his doctoral dissertation wrote about scared spaces. Mainly those places that held special, spiritual meaning for native peoples. Places that they attempted to hide and if necessary defend against outsiders.

I asked him if there were equivalent places that were held to be scared by people in the so-called developed world. He smiled at me, as if to indicate how naive I was.

"Just look around you," he said.

"Even here in Midtown Manhattan?"

"Even here. During lunch let's walk over to Saint Patrick's Cathedral and look at the people worshipping there. Sense what that physical place means to them."

I didn't take up his offer but two years later, in Jerusalem, I understood all to well what a sacred space is and how those for whom it is sacred, who couldn't hide it from "outsiders," were willing, eager to defend it. Even to give up their lives to protect it from encroachment.

This was most emotionally vivid at the Western Wall. A sacred place to observant Jews who claim it is one of the walls of the Second Temple, which itself stood on the site of the even more sacred First Temple, constructed, it is believed, nearly 3,000 years ago by King Solomon. And it is at this very place where the Third and final temple will be built, the intra-orthodox fervently believe, when the Messiah appears.

They await him now and some are making preparations for his arrival, including moving in on the Al-Aqsa Mosque which sits on top of the Temple Mount, one of the most sacred places for Muslims, the place from which it is reported the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven. All of this not very far from a number of sacred places for Christians--the Via Dolorosa, the road along which Christ was said to have  borne the cross as he proceeded toward Calvary and the Church of Holy Sepulchre, which was built to mark the sacred place where he was crucified, entombed, and resurrected.

All of these places--central in meaning to Jews, Christians, and Muslims--are located literally within a square kilometer of each other. Those who are skeptical, even non-believers (me included) when there feel overwhelmingly that this is a special place, charged with spiritual power.

A sacred space, a site where our search for meaning, truth, and divine inspiration commingles with religious beliefs and practices in the attempt to find the most fundamental of answers--just what my long-ago colleague was attempting to get me to understand.

How then, with so much at stake, in the world's most-contested piece of real estate can there ever be a resolution to the conflict between Israeli Jews and Muslim Palestinians, both claiming, in the flow of blood, that they have special rights and historical, divine, prerogatives for exclusive control of the place that one side calls the Temple Mount and the other the Dome of the Rock?

This is not a situation where compromise and splitting-the-difference has much chance of working.

October 30, 2014--Time Wars

I hate it it when the clocks spring forward or fall back. I like my routines and this disrupts them.

Sunday they fall back when Daylight Savings Time ends. The worst of it is not a jet-lag-like hangover but the fact that it will be dark up here before 5:00 in the afternoon. Not my favorite thing; but we head for NYC early Sunday, and I suppose it will be light enough when we leave for us to see the first snow of the season that is forecast for then.

But over in the Middle East, as with virtually everything else, one more thing the Israelis and Palestinians aren't on the same page about is Daylight Savings Time.

The Palestinian Authority ended DST two days before Israel, out of stubbornness more than anything else, or as a pathetic declaration of independence, and so for those two days, those few workers allowed to cross the Gaza or West Bank border to get to jobs in Israel, going one way arrived, by the clock, at an earlier time that when they left and their return commute took an hour more of seeming clock time.

According to the New York Times, the website timeanddate.com reports that over the past 15 years the Palestinians and Israelis have changed time at the same time just seven times, for some unknown reason always when springing forward. Making matters even worse--which is difficult to achieve in that fraught region--three times it took a month before their clocks were in sync.

So here's my plan--

Forget entirely about Daylight Savings Time. I have confuted a decidedly unscientific survey and have found hardly anyone all that passionate about retaining it. They tell me that whatever time it is they get used to it. Even darkness in late December in northern places such as Maine that falls by mid afternoon.

On the other hand, I doubt Israel and Palestine would any more agree to this than settlement policy or work permits for Gazans. It seems the more things they have to disagree or fight about the better they like it.

August 5, 2014--Brothers Under the Skin

I always wondered why the late Chairman of the Palestinian Organization, Yasser Arafat, looked so much like my Uncle Louie.  Now I know.

We're related!

Take a close look at that punim, that face.

And then take a look at mine--just over there on the right.

Get the picture?

But there is more evidence than just from photos.

According to Wikipedia--

Genetic analysis suggests that a majority of Palestinians, including Arab citizens of Israel, are descendants of Christians, Jews, and other earlier inhabitants of the southern Levant whose core may reach back to prehistoric times. A study of high-resolution haplotypes [DNA sequences] demonstrated that a substantial portion of Y chromosomes of Israeli Jews (70%) and of Palestinian Muslim Arabs (82%) belonged to the same chromosome pool. 

So there you have it.

What is happening in the Middle East is a "family dispute" and we know how ugly these can be.

July 31, 2014--Blood Feud

This is the first Arab-Israeli war that isn't about territory--about expanding or protecting borders.

It is about hated and blood letting. Pure and simple, killing. That's the agenda. For both sides.

It is about Palestinians associated with Hamas trying to kill or capture any Israelis they can get their hands on purely in order to murder them or use them as bargaining chips. And on the other side, it is about the Israeli military, in spite of its denials, attempting to kill as many Palestinians as possible without regard to the distinction between fighters and civilian innocents.

There is no place to hide in Gaza--all available land is built up and there are no open spaces where refugee camps can be established and declared safe havens for non-combatants. And so those whose homes have been destroyed or live in fear are either trapped where they live, continuing to be subject to bombing, or flee to shelters provided by the United Nations.

But then, while cringing in these, they are not immune from attack. Just yesterday one of these shelters was destroyed and 20 more civilians were killed, many children. This is the third or fourth time a UN facility was destroyed with significant loss of life. In an era of smart bombs this cannot be explained away as "collateral damage."

So the Israelis claim it is the Palestinians themselves who have been attacking what should be sanctuaries. Hamas is doing this to its own people, they say, to make it look as if Israeli forces are intentionally targeting women and children.

The UN says it has evidence that it has been Israeli rockets and bombs that have destroyed these so-called sanctuaries.

And so it goes.

Each day we have updated body counts--remember body counts? More than 1,200 Palestinians have been killed and nearly 100 Israelis.

Both sides are seeing "progress" in those numbers--Israelis believe that if they kill enough Arabs Hamas will give up its struggle to expel Israelis from land they claim to be theirs while Hamas, recently losing power and influence in Gaza, will become resurgent if they kill enough Jews and thereby reestablish their credibility as warriors for the Palestinian cause.

This is thus a blood feud fueled by decades of hatred on both sides--equally vicious ethnic stereotyping and bigotry that is promoted in schoolbooks and popular media. Recall that this most recent conflict began after an exchange of barbaric killings of Israeli and Arab teenagers. It is Old Testament retributive tribal warfare waged lustfully and hatefully by both sides.

Both have legitimate issues. Israeli has the right to live securely within some version of its current borders and Palestinians have the right to a contiguous state of their own. Both have ancient claims to these lands. But both have moved beyond the normal range of political and geographic struggle, even warfare, and descended into hatred-drivien, senseless slaughter.

February 5, 2014--Boycott Israel?

When the American Studies Association late last year voted to exclude Israeli academic institutions from participating in events it sponsors, it was a blip on the academic landscape. After all, the ASA has only a few thousand members and, truth be told, who cares.

But when Secretary of State John Kerry made some relatively innocuous comments about a larger, economic boycott of Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nearly had a stroke.

Forget for the moment that Kerry was not advocating a boycott but rather referring to talk about it that he feels will grow louder if the American-sponsored peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis fail to produce even a fig leaf of results, the very fact that Netanyahu went, pardon the reference, ballistic should tell us something.

That "something" being that there is a growing movement among some Western people (Jews as well as non-Jews, which is significant) and corporations to boycott Israel if the government in Jerusalem continues to expand the occupation of the West Bank and refuses to get serious in negotiations with the Palestinians.

Netanyahu and his associates can try to ignore more local calls for a boycott (by New York Times op-ed columnist and Palestinian human rights activist, Omar Barghouti, for example) but they cannot so easily  shrug it off when the $200 billion Dutch Pension fund PGGM begins to divest itself of investments in Israel and Secretary Kerry says that unless there is serious progress on a deal the nascent boycott will be dwarfed by what will follow--in his words, a "boycott on steroids."

That's what friends are for--not to threaten (as Netanyahu sees it), but when necessary for your well-being, to tell you the unpleasant truth. And, in Kerry's case, to, by implication, imply such a boycott would be understandable. Kerry also knows how to play hardball.

So, he's not Netanyahu's best friend.

A boycott would be understandable because even reasonably objective observers are seeing comparisons between today's Israel and yesterday's South Africa.

How else to put it--with so many Palestinians forced to live behind militarized fences, allowed to enter and leave at the behest of Israeli occupiers of their territory, it feels to many to be too much like the old South African apartheid state.

And, recall, the worldwide imposition of economic sanctions ultimately brought an end to that hideous era. And, it appears, equivalent sanctions may be gaining the attention of even Iran's formally impervious "supreme leaders."

Perhaps, then, an expanding boycott of Israel may be the best and only thing that will enable the peace movement there to again assert itself.