Tag: Journal Articles

Should the U.S. government be building more nuclear weapons? Residents of Kansas City, Missouri, don’t appear to think so, for they are engaged in a bitter fight against the construction of a new nuclear weapons plant in their community.

The massive plant, one and a half million square-feet in size, is designed to replace an earlier version, also located in the city and run by the same contractor: Honeywell. The cost of building the new plant — which, like its predecessor, will provide eighty-five percent of the components of America’s nuclear weapons — is estimated to run $673 million.

From the standpoint of the developer, Centerpoint Zimmer (CPZ), that’s a very sweet deal. In payment for the plant site, a soybean field it owned, CPZ received $5 million. The federal government will lease the property and plant from a city entity for twenty years, after which, for $10, CPZ will purchase it, thus establishing the world’s first privately-owned nuclear weapons plant.

In addition, as the journal Mother Jones has revealed, ‘the Kansas City Council, enticed by direct payments and a promise of quality jobs, agreed to exempt CPZ from property taxes on the plant and surrounding land for twenty-five years.’ The Council also agreed to issue $815 million in bond subsidies from urban blight funds to build the plant and its infrastructure.

Kansas City residents, however, had greater misgivings. They wondered why the U.S. government, already possessing eighty-five hundred nuclear weapons, needed more of them. They wondered what had happened to the U.S. government’s commitment to engage in treaties for nuclear disarmament. They wondered how the new weapons plant fit in with the Obama administration’s pledge to build a world free of nuclear weapons. And they wondered why they should be subsidizing the U.S. military-industrial complex with their tax dollars.

Above all, those to whom the care of young minds has been entrusted should see to it that they respect both the smallest and largest animals as beings who, like people, have been summoned to the joy of life. — Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, nineteenth-century rabbi and scholar

As Jews, we are obliged to seek peace. What we seek for ourselves, we must also grant to others. It is in our best interest to do so, as all living beings are so intertwined in the web of life that the fate of one is the fate of all.

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We are told that it is our responsibility to hasten the return to the Garden of Eden predicted in Isaiah. We can do so by making lifestyle choices that inflict less harm on the other species with whom we share the planet, and by educating our youth to show respect, responsibility and compassion for the other fragile strands in the web of life.

If you’re like me, watching the news and reading the newspaper, the events of the past summer are disturbing to say the least. Even shocking. Some commentators have evoked the Sarajevo assassinations, which led to World War I.

In Israel civilians remain on alert to duck-and-cover from Hamas rockets should a cease-fire fail. In Gaza our mass media were filled with photos and texts of dead and wounded civilians and soldiers. In Ukraine and in its separatist provinces, the bodies of innocent airline passengers are testimony to the madness of rivalries.

As always, mutual hate and demonization abound, followed inevitably by death and suffering. Some may think me naïve but I see myself as a realist. I suggest we need to try to coexist. Modern warfare does not bring genuine peace. It rarely if ever has.

Several months ago, in a most unprecedented and unexpected act, just before the outbreak of the Gaza War, the uncle of slain Israeli teenager Naftali Fraenkel called Hussein Abu Khdeir, father of a slain Palestinian teenager and offered his condolences. Imagine. An Israeli and a Palestinian sharing their grief over losing their children. What could be more universal: two families who understand the heartbreak of the other.

This miserable cycle needs to be broken if peace is ever to have a chance. There are precious souls on all sides who seek and pursue peace. The conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine could become a perfect model of people-power overcoming the inflexible ideological goals of those who rule.

It happened in the Philippines. It happened in Northern Ireland. It happened in South Africa. Is it not too much to hope that someday Israelis, Palestinians, Ukrainians and the people of its disputed eastern sector can accomplish the same?

A Healthy, Happy and Peaceful New Year from the JPF.

Earlier in March, in the warm spring sunshine, an older, colder Berlin was remembered. In June 1939, 16-year-old Ilse Philips boarded a Kindertransport train bound for London. Her parents Hugo and Flora waved good-bye to her at the station. Three years later they were murdered at Auschwitz and Ilse vowed never to return to Berlin.

But on Sunday, at the age of 88, she came back — accompanied by four generations of her family. Last November I stumbled upon seven glinting, new Stolpersteine along the street from my apartment. An astonishing twenty thousand of these brass “stumble stones” have been planted among the cobbles of 280 German cities, engraved with the name of individuals who were pulled from their homes and murdered during the Nazi years.

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It was sunrise in NYC on Yom Kippur. The night before we went to Kol Nidrei Yom Kippur services at “Occupy Wall Street.” With the loud sounds of drumming from the little Zuccotti Park, five hundred to a thousand Jews participated in a Kol Nidrei service, led by four young people in a building plaza across the street with the big red cube sculpture.

As there was no electricity for microphones, and megaphones were forbidden by the New York Police Department, the leaders/rabbis stood in the center with everyone either seated on the plaza or standing around them. Like other speeches at Occupy Wall Street, the Kol Nidre speaker shouted out phrases for others to repeat.

A synagogue lent us a hundred prayer books, insufficient for the crowd, but many had downloaded and printed it or used their mobile devices to follow the service online. Though a range of ages were present, our congregation was mostly young. It was wonderfully political: in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, peace between Israel and the Palestinians, antiwar, antigreed.

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It’s the show that time and the world forgot. It’s called the Occupation and it’s now in its forty-fifth year. Playing on a landscape about the size of Delaware, it remains largely hidden from view, while Middle Eastern headlines from elsewhere seize the day. [Rest of article content, properly formatted with paragraphs and cleaned up formatting…] For the moment, whatever happens in the coming weeks at the UN, and in the West Bank in the aftermath, isn’t it time for the world’s focus to shift to what is actually happening on the ground? After all, it’s the Occupation, stupid.

The Unmaking of Israel is an angry book about the current state of a troubled and increasingly isolated nation. Its author, Gershom Gorenberg is a prolific American-born journalist who went to live in Israel more than three decades ago and whose children have served in the Israeli military. His absorbing, realistic and disillusioned account of what is happening in contemporary Israel reminded me of May 15, 1948, the day Israel was officially born.

That Israel is no longer, if in fact it ever existed. The Israel to which Gorenberg immigrated is now quite different from what he hoped to find, even though many Israelis still believe in peaceful coexistence with Palestinians and an end to the Occupation. It is now the home of a militarized state with an immense nuclear stockpile, heavily dependent on American domestic support.

Gorenberg details the mounting influence of Orthodox and secular extremists in and out of the Knesset, all of whom are spreading their influence into military and civilian life. Meanwhile, the occupation of the West Bank continues and more settlements are opening, with little hope of peaceful compromise in sight.

Today about six hundred thousand Jewish settlers live in the West Bank, subsidized by the Israeli government and U.S. financial support. Settler sites are often on land stolen from Palestinians. This is only one of the many offenses committed against Palestinians, who are regularly jailed for offenses ranging from trivial to very serious. In contrast, repeated acts of settler violence against Palestinians go relatively unpunished.

Gorenberg rightfully fumes at what he describes as the ‘racist interpretation of Judaism’ preached by many fanatic Orthodox rabbis and their followers. The book presents a critical examination of modern Israel’s departure from its founding democratic principles.

This year has been the centenary of American participation in the First World War. Congress declared war in April 1917; the first detachments of American troops landed in France in January 1918, and five months later, in May, they engaged in their first major combat engagement.

And yet there has been little American commemoration of this war. In truth, this lack is not all that surprising. The fact is that American opinion about the war quickly soured among the generation that lived through and fought it, and that has been the general public’s attitude ever since.

Reasons are not hard to discern: ‘The war to end war’ didn’t end war, and neither did all of the war’s bloodshed make ‘the world safe for democracy.’ What the war did do was to change American society in ways which few foresaw. During the war, manufacturers, munitions makers, and bankers reaped enormous profits, while ordinary folk coped with rationing and inflation.

In the years immediately following, an economic recession, then a depression, put millions out of work; agricultural prices collapsed; and railroad workers, steel workers, and coal miners mounted bitter strikes in industries which fought against unionization. Moreover, the postwar period brought massive cultural changes: Alcoholic beverages were outlawed, women entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers, and the prewar Victorian social order crumbled as the ‘flapper’ emerged as a symbol of 1920s America.

By general consensus among those who fought and lived through the First World War, it was a war about which Americans asked themselves, ‘Why did we fight it in the first place?’ That is the unintended legacy of the First World War. And for that reason, the First World War is one that has deserved to be commemorated—in order that its unintended and unexpected consequences not be forgotten.

[Content has been cleaned and formatted for WordPress, but is too long to include in full here. The article discusses Obama’s handling of the Libyan rebellion, CIA involvement, and contradictions between public statements and private actions.]

Recently, when commentators have bothered to notice the American peace movement, they have pronounced it dead. But this is far from the case. Admittedly, it is remarkably fragmented. Certainly, it contains no organization that plays a role comparable to NOW in the women’s movement, the NAACP in the racial justice movement, or the AFL-CIO in the labor movement.

Instead, the Fellowship of Reconciliation draws together religious pacifists, the War Resisters League enrolls secular pacifists, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom mobilizes women, Veterans for Peace appeals to veterans, and U.S. Labor Against the War rallies unionists.

Peace Action, the largest peace organization in the United States, was born out of the merger in 1987 of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign. With about 100,000 dues-paying members, active affiliates throughout the country, and excellent relations with the Progressive Caucus in Congress, Peace Action has some clout.

The peace movement takes on multiple projects, from opposing military recruitment in schools to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Three main issues currently dominate: ending the Afghanistan war, cutting military spending, and championing nuclear disarmament.

Despite challenges, the American peace movement continues its work. The Move the Money campaign aims to shift federal resources from military to social spending, while efforts persist to push for nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from Afghanistan. Polls show most Americans now oppose current U.S. wars and military occupations, suggesting the movement’s ongoing relevance.