Dear Chevra,
Gush Shalom, the Israeli ” Bloc of Peace, ” is one of the strongest, clearest,and most consistent voices in the Israeli peace movement. Many of us have metits founder, Uri Avnery, and been moved by his courage and commitment. (Ifirst met him in 1969, when the Occupation was only two years old and he wasalready clear about the dangers it posed to Israel.)
Today, Israeli authorities are threatening Gush Shalom with prosecution fortreason — because they have warned Israeli soldiers that it is illegalunder international as well as Israeli law to comply with military orders tocommit acts that are manifestly illegal and that such acts might lead totheir being charged with war crimes.
(The group’s catalog of such acts routinely committed by specific persons inthe Israeli security forces includes execution without trial, preventingmedical help from reaching the injured, shooting at ambulances and medicalteams, allowing populations to starve, dropping bombs onresidential areas,wholesale destruction of houses, penalizing families for the deeds of one oftheir members by expulsion and home demolition.)
I very much remember the years when I and others with me were accused by USauthorities of violating the law through our firm opposition to the VietnamWar, when it was the US government itself that was violating internationaland domestic law.
Today Israel is certainly caught in a much more difficult situation than theUS was then. We did not have to contend with Vietnamese suicide bombers inour cities, for example. It is clear that some among the enemies of Israelare themselves committing war crimes.
Yet as Torah, Israeli law, and international law — the contemporaryequivalent of the ” Seven Mitzvot of the Children of Noah ” — make clear,there are acts we are forbidden to do even in time of war, and some Israelisoldiers under orders from the current Sharon government seem to becommitting such acts.
The Sharon government has claimed that such actions by Israeli forces arenecessary in order to prevent and deter the war crimes of our enemies. Farfrom deterring, however, these acts by Israelis have served to inflame stillmore outrageous attacks against us. It is not surprising that every act thatshatters the agreed ethical and moral standards of the human race makeslikely the commission of more such acts by others.
Indeed, the teaching of our own tradition that we must ” love our neighbors asourselves ” can be understood not as an admonition to be nice but as aprediction of reality, to mean: The ways in which we fail to love ourneighbors will recoil upon our own heads, often in worse form than theunloving actions that we take.
Or to put it in the words of the first ethical teaching that we give ourchildren, simple and profound: Two wrongs don’t make a right.
So I have decided to join with others in making clear to the Israeli publicmy own personal and individual support for Gush Shalom’s courage andtenacity, by signing and helping to purchase a support ad in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz. (This initiative is being coordinated by Chicago’s Not in MyName, but participation in the initiative does not require support for any ofNIMN’s other work.)
To see the text of the ad, learn more about the issue, add your name, orcontribute to the cost, log onto
http://www.nimn.org/gushad“>http://www.nimn.org/gushad
(Please note that you don’t have to contribute in order to sign the ad, andconversely you can contribute to publishing the ad without adding your nameas a signer.)
Shalom, Arthur