On Israel and judaism

My friend Ayden posted this on facebook. Ive decided not to write anything about the Israeli attacks for various reasons, but I like this text.

“Every bomb dropped, every concrete slab of wall built, every acre of land illegally taken, every demolition of a Palestinian home, should force us to come to grips with the fact that to be Jewish in 2008 is no longer about our cultural ties one to the other, our shared values, our collective history. To be Jewish is now measured by our allegiance to Israel; if it was more than that, then our communities would be alive with protests about what we are doing in Gaza.

…

We are like the child who has been abused and grows up to recycle the abuse on a less powerful woman or child. We make all kinds of excuses for why we have to be abusive; we run the familiar tapes about the threat of anti-Semitism, the hatred of Hamas, the continued shelling of rockets from Gaza into Israel… the list is long and familiar. Yet I have not met a single American Jew (or American, for that matter) who has spent any time in Palestine who continues to recite this list.

…

As a Jew, I take to heart the teachings of Rabbi Hillel, who instructs us across the ages not to do to others that which we would not want done to us. As a Jew, I understand our invocation of “never again” as universal, a lesson from the Holocaust we should apply to all people. As a Jew, I am proud of our strong cultural commitment to justice. I thought once that these were the things that defined what it meant to be Jewish.

…

I refuse to conflate Judaism with Israel. I am driven by my deep concern for our future as a people. We may have already gone too far to reclaim Judaism to itself. I do not know. I only know I do not want us to lose ourselves to the continued justification of that which cannot be justified.”