Author: jpf_24rvpl

In honor of International Women’s Day on March 8 of this year, Activestills paid tribute to more than a quarter century of anti-occupation activism by the Women in Black group in Israel.

Every Friday since 1988, the women have stood in the main squares of cities or at highway junctions with signs calling to end the Israeli Occupation. Often spat at, cursed or violently harassed by passersby, they have become a symbol of persistence.

Dafna Kaminer: “It was the time of the First Intifada, and we wanted to support the Palestinian struggle. So we decided that we would stand out there with signs calling to end the occupation. It was the simplest and most visual thing we could do.”

Edna Glukman: “In the beginning, the right-wing protesters started to attack us during the vigils. We sewed big black banners and with small white letters we wrote slogans against the occupation, as well as for justice, peace and women. By the time we began writing the word ‘women’ on our banners, it was already starting to become a women’s movement.”

Tamar Huffman: “You could say that we are a handful of women with a lot of opinions; it is definitely a feminist group. If we had a man on the board, he would probably be the one making decisions.”

Tamar Lehan: “I didn’t join for feminist reasons, but rather for the persistent and clear statement of the group. However, I think that it is very logical that it is a women’s group, since women are accustomed to doing hard work for long periods of time without seeking immediate results.”

Dafna Kaminer: “In times of unrest, we expect more verbal and sometimes physical violence. People curse at us as if we were the ones responsible for the situation, and not Israel’s policy makers. When things are more calm, people just walk by and say nothing. Like we are transparent or nonexistent.”

Rabbi Michel Serfaty drives to his first appointment of the day, in a suburb south of Paris, just a couple miles from the notorious housing project where gunman Amedy Coulibaly grew up. Coulibaly was the self-proclaimed Islamist radical who killed a police officer and later four people in a Kosher market in Paris terrorist attacks in January.

France has Europe’s largest Muslim and Jewish communities. For the last decade Serfaty and his team have been working in Paris’s bleak banlieues, trying to promote understanding between the two populations. Serfaty is still going to the same places since the attacks, but there’s now a team of undercover police officers who accompany him everywhere.

The rabbi says he’s more determined than ever. ‘These are difficult times for France and especially for French Jews,’ he says. ‘But if anything, we realize our work is even more important.’

The rabbi makes his way into a community center where his French Jewish Muslim Friendship Association has a stand at a local job fair. Serfaty hopes to recruit several more young people to help with community outreach in the largely Muslim, immigrant communities where most people have never even met a Jewish person.

‘In these places they often have specific ideas about Jews,’ says Serfaty. ‘And if they’re negative, we bring arguments and try to open people’s eyes to what are prejudices and negative stereotypes. We try to show children, mothers and teenagers that being Muslim is great, but if they don’t know any Jews, well this is how they are, and they’re also respectable citizens.’

Serfaty takes advantage of funding from a government program that helps youths without work experience find their first job. He takes them on for a period of three years, giving them valuable training in mediation and community relations. His recruits also study Judaism and Islam, and he takes them on a trip to Auschwitz.

With his current assistants, Mohammed Amine and Aboudalaye Magassa, Serfaty works to find young people who harbor no anti-Semitic feelings. Magassa, twenty-four years old, says working with Serfaty has been a great discovery. ‘These people have weak minds and they are easily manipulated by social networks,’ he says of extremists. ‘They also don’t understand a thing about religion and how it should be practiced.’

Amine and Magassa are proud to be French and Muslim. ‘We are waking up people’s consciences,’ says Amine. ‘This is a job that counts and we could have a real impact if there were more of us.’

Why would hardliners in Iran want to forego the prospect of becoming a nuclear power, especially when faced with hardliners in the US and Israel, both in possession of nuclear weapons?

The question is raised again by the condescending little lecture on the American constitutional system, delivered by forty-seven Republican Senators in the form of an open letter. Without Congress or the next president’s approval, they told Iranian leaders, no agreement by President Obama would be honored by Washington.

Undermining the full faith and credit of the US has now been extended from financial matters to foreign policy. Republicans, who lament our supposedly weak president, work relentlessly to weaken him. (Don’t think Vladimir Putin fails to take notice.)

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When I was young, my father always opened our Passover Seder by telling everyone at the table that we Jews had been celebrating and retelling the Passover story for more than three thousand years. I never forgot that. Now, I begin our Passover Seder with the same statement, namely that we have been telling and retelling the narrative of slavery-to-freedom so that every generation celebrates and remembers this extraordinary journey.

Years ago, my wife and I decided to adopt some changes to our Seder. We wanted to emphasize issues we felt the original Haggadah did not. For example: that the drops of wine for the plagues represent what we experienced in Egypt. We realized they were not the same issues we experience today. So we added an option for people at our Seder to add in their own words the things in their lives that challenge and haunt them.

As a result, some interesting conversations have resulted. Some of the more vivid life events encountered by our Seder companions have been racism, age discrimination, police brutality, financial hardships and many more. Our changes have brought the whole issue of the Passover story into the twenty-first century.

But we didn’t stop there. We realized we had to think and talk about the meaning of freedom in our time. What are we modern Jews freeing ourselves from? In the original Passover story we were slaves in Egypt. But are modern Jews slaves? We certainly don’t suffer from lack of freedom, or from oppression or tyranny. But there are some in the world who still suffer under these conditions; and some modern Jews have roadblocks in their personal lives that prevent them from living the kind of life we want to live, regardless of what society and some traditions demand of us.

Why, then, is it so important for Jews to sit every year and retell this story? Because it emphasizes some of the more critical ethical values on which Judaism places so much importance. For example: we cannot and should not occupy or maltreat others — a valued lesson for young and old alike.

Every Passover we have the opportunity to embark on a transformational journey, just as our forefathers and mothers did thousands of years ago when they began their journey with no idea where it would lead them.

The Jewish Peace Fellowship and the editors of Shalom wish you and your family and friends a most happy and healthy Passover.

My family came to this country long enough ago that I heard no foreign accents, let alone languages, while growing up. My forbears in Europe were not poor shtetl Jews. My birth father’s parents came from families of professional musicians. My mother’s father’s family was an interesting mix of wealth and poverty (on one side, property owners and entrepreneurs; on the other side, tanners). My maternal grandmother’s family was descended from a long line of distinguished rabbis and also owned a publishing house.

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I accept people as they are. I do not expect to convert anyone away from their opinions, but I do hope for light to be shed on questions we discuss.

In 1915, a mother’s protest against funneling children into war became the theme of a new American song, ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.’ Although the ballad attained great popularity, not everyone liked it. Theodore Roosevelt, a leading militarist of the era, retorted that the proper place for such women was ‘in a harem — and not in the United States.’

Roosevelt would be happy to learn that, a century later, preparing children for war continues unabated. That’s certainly the case in today’s Russia, where thousands of government-funded clubs are producing what is called ‘military-patriotic education’ for children. Accepting both boys and girls, these clubs teach them military exercises, some of which employ heavy military equipment. There, children as young as five years of age spend evenings learning how to fight and use military weapons.

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How long will we continue raising our children to be soldiers?

William Pfaff died almost six months ago, on April 30, 2015. His death is nothing less than a serious loss to the shrinking number of American daily newspaper columnists who question and contest American “exceptionalism” and its “unnecessary and unwinnable” wars. Pfaff was the singular heir of American writers who preceded him in condemning our historic addiction to war.

The more he criticized the US for shooting first and thinking later, the fewer America dailies printed his columns. The New York Times, which owns the International Herald Tribune (now the International New York Times) where his work regularly appeared, rarely if ever published his piercing anti-interventionist columns. He was, after all, an outspoken opponent of the Iraq invasion when the paper went overboard in favor of the war.

His few daily newspaper outlets were limited essentially to Newsday and the Chicago Tribune, though liberal journals like The New York Review of Books, William Shawn’s New Yorker (which printed some seventy of his pieces), and Commonweal, the liberal Catholic magazine, always welcomed him.

Pfaff was no outsider, despite his dissenting opinions. Reared in Iowa and Georgia, educated at Notre Dame, he served as an infantry officer and Special Forces member during and after the Korean War, unlike the many hawks who had never worn a military uniform. He never denied that he had worked for the CIA-funded Free Europe Committee, a Cold War group that sent broadcasts and literature behind the Iron Curtain.

When Barack Obama first campaigned for president, I felt there would be a change in the wars (Afghanistan, Iraqi) in which America had been involved for too many years. My pacifist desire was to see our country sharply reduce our endless involvement in international conflicts.

Obama seemed to dislike war as much as I did and wanted to change the course of America. Yet over his two terms, I came to realize that he could not stop the wars or tame our bellicose war lovers for long, though he did keep his promise of scaling them back.

Now a new group of politicians, all but one of whom ever served in the military, hope to capture the presidency. I listen carefully, but in neither party do I hear anyone really resisting our culture of permanent war.

Is it so preposterous to hope that sometime in the near future we will stop flexing our American muscles, policing the world, and believing that more and advanced weapons can settle any and all disputes? Sadly, I don’t think so.

The Iran Agreement has brought to the forefront the misunderstanding of what another war will do to our and other countries. If the rich and powerful would put their own sons and daughters in the front lines of any new conflict, they would surely spend more time considering the cost in human life rather that urging other parents’ children be sent to fight in the Middle East or elsewhere.

I believe it is critically important to speak up, individually and as part of coalitions. I did so when, at age eighteen, Selective Service wanted to draft me for a war that should never have been fought and which left a trail of blood and death throughout Southeast Asia and among the US military and their grieving families.

Now, more than ever, we need more people to tell those in power how they feel about young men and women dying on the battlefield. We need some courageous politicians and media pundits to say loud and clear: No More Wars. Is that asking too much?

Since 9/11, the US has flailed away and attacked or invaded at least seven Muslim countries. American presidents now run secret overseas conflicts, including drone wars, without public knowledge or Congressional consent. Since US military presence in Muslim countries was the original motivator for the 9/11 attacks, doubling down on a failed policy seemed a poor bet among many expert analysts.

The US government has never wanted to focus public attention on its own irresponsible conduct before 9/11, instead claiming terrorists attack because of our “freedom” or because of poverty – neither of which stands up to objective analysis. The American public, examining the problem only cursorily, sees it as an us-versus-them phenomenon, never wanting to believe their government had been part of the original problem.

Empirical research has shown an increase in numbers of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) fighters following US air attacks. When civilians are killed, even accidentally, a rally-around-the-flag effect usually occurs. Similar patterns emerged in Somalia, where US involvement led to the formation of al Shabaab.

The US record of meddling in Muslim countries has had numerous unintended consequences. After media images of Americans beheaded by ISIS, Obama returned to Iraq and attacked Syria, with Republicans criticizing him for not doing more. The root of militarism and interventionism lies not with politicians but with the American people.

In a democracy, people can eventually stop counterproductive wars, as happened with Vietnam. But they must first acknowledge that their government’s public and excessive military overreaction to terrorist provocation plays into terrorists’ hands. While military response to terrorism may occasionally be needed, it should be quick, surgical, and covert to avoid becoming a recruiting tool for jihadists.