It is not only Four Mothers who can change government policy, is it? - by Sheri Oz

...Just having to reflect on this pains me and weighs heavy on my heart. My whole body trembles. But God-forbid my contemplation be mistaken for weakness. I will struggle with these conflicting values — we will struggle with these conflicting values — and I feel caught up in the undertow in a raging sea. We will come up to the surface for air, our will to survive against all odds not the least bit impaired.The point is coming near when we will say: Enough! And we will make a din so loud that our leaders will come to their senses. 

Sheri Oz..
Israel Diaries..
08 October '18..

Jew: You want to do what is right and what is humane. You want to live up to your own cherished values and you want the values of your nation to be true to those you were brought up to see as the values of your tradition and the sages, whether you are religious or not. And then these values come into a collision course with the equally important values of self-respect and survival.

We were taught that THIS life (this incarnation, perhaps) is not of lesser significance than after-death, no less significant than the rewards or punishments we can expect upon moving on to the next realm of existence. THIS LIFE must be protected. And we are our brothers’ keepers.

We did not do well with keeping Ari Fuld and Kim Levengrond Yehezkel and Ziv Hajbi and countless others who were stabbed, shot, hit with rocks, run over. Who is next? Has it already been written? We did not do well (and still are not) with the wildlife and plant-life, natural and sown, on the other side of our Land. For how long? Has that also been written?

I guess what I am wondering about is how we make sure our boundaries are clear, how we protect ourselves, how we weigh the actions we must take in order to be our brothers’ keepers, truly, while not betraying our other values.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Israeli Jews And Palestinian Arabs: So tell me again, Sarah, how will friendship bring peace? by Sheri Oz

...Sarah claims that if Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs just make friends with each other, everything will be fine. I guess she has not been here long enough to know that many of us already have made friends with each other, have been friends for decades. She thinks she knows what is going on and what we need to do differently

Sheri Oz..
Israel Diaries..
25 December '17..

Grassroots organizations and many well-meaning individuals tell us that regular people, Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, have to dialogue with each other in order to break through the walls of hate and make bridges that can lead to peace. . . that we regular people can do what our own leaders and world leaders cannot do. Through friendship, we can bring peace to the Middle East or at least to our little corner of the Middle East.

There are some who say things like how we just have to spend time with Palestinian Arabs, for example, to have coffee with Arab shop keepers in the Old City of Jerusalem and elsewhere and listen to them and get to know them. Here is the latest public Facebook post of one well-known person who believes this (I quote and relate to the most relevant pieces of this post in the sections below the FB embed):




A brief comment on the final line in this FB embed. Most people who live in this country for more than a few hours to days to weeks know how to use some choice Arabic swear words. I do not think that merits great celebration of her burgeoning language skills — and nobody using those words would be assumed to have Arab friends. That comment seems more a gratuitous celebration of the writer’s penchant for vulgarity and inappropriateness than anything salutary.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Coexistence of the blind

Seth J. Frantzman..
Terra Incognita/JPost..
27 November '12..

In Israel almost every person who talks about coexistence presents a false and ill-conceived plan whose results will produce no change whatsoever. The reason that almost all coexistence programs are doomed to fail is that they are often predicated on creating a false reality for one half of the coexistence pie. This usually takes the form of mandating that Jewish people in Israel embrace coexistence, a rosy picture of the “other,” the Arabs, that rarely involves any immersion in the other’s society.

Consider Roger Cohen’s description of Parent’s Circle, which “brings together Israelis and Palestinians who have lost family in the conflict.” Israeli Robi Damelin’s son, who was a soldier at the time, was killed by a Palestinian sniper in 2002. Her reaction was to say that Israel “may not kill anybody in the name of my son” and become involved in Parent’s Circle. According to Cohen, “Damelin has written to the imprisoned killer of her son...she plans to meet him through a mediator one day.” Parent’s Circle “gives talks to high school students, mainly Israelis. In general these Israeli kids have never met a Palestinian. They have no way to know the conflict is a two-sided story.”

A similar story was related by Douglas Alexander, the British Shadow Foreign Secretary for Labor in the UK. He writes about visiting the Eshkol regional council bordering the Gaza Strip and meeting a Jewish teacher who educates for coexistence.

“She told me that her job was to teach [Jewish] children the curriculum, but she felt impelled to try and teach them something else...her ambition was that no child leave her classroom believing that the Palestinian children on the other side of the border were the enemy.”

See, these Israeli children get the wrong idea from the missiles that fall on their kibbutzim – they feel Gaza is a place that breeds hatred and murder. But in fact, as the Israeli coexistence-monger wants to show, those on the other side are not enemies.