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A LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL IN LEBANON
According to Israeli daily Haaretz , over 5000 people marched on Aug 5th against the war in down town Tel Aviv. Among the demonstrators was Yael Dayan the daughter of late Moshe Dayan, who also spoke in the rally. She is currently the vice mayor of Tel Aviv. In the rally all the speakers called for an Immediate cease fire, negotiations for prisoners exchange and for Israel to pull out of Lebanon: Allen L Roland
The light at the end of the tunnel in Lebanon is a lone voice raised from a Jew whose parents escaped the Holocaust in 1938 and now rightfully asks, along with thousands of other Jews ~ Why doesn't Israel work for peace ?
Sylvia Tennebaum writes in Common dreams of the need " for Israel to work as hard for peace as they do for war. "
She touches a chord which the world is slowly and painfully becoming aware of ~ that the only way we can survive as human beings is to eventually unite with one another in the spirit of cooperation and altruism versus separate from each other in the spirit of hate, resentment and terrorism.
How can we defeat terrorism if the building blocks of terrorism are ignorance, poverty, hunger, hopelessness and despair.
The more bombs we drop, the more people we kill, the more
people we unjustly jail, the more we are hated , the more
the disenfranchised resort to their only available weapon
and voice ~ terrorism .
Under these circumstances the most powerful weapon
that can be used against Terrorism is social cooperation
and altruism .
And there is much evidence that these twin weapons of
mass outreach to the poor and disenfranchised are the
very foundation of our evolution as a human species.
In the June 1995 issue of Scientific America ~ Nowak, May
and Sigmund co-wrote an article entitled THE ARITHMETICS
OF MUTUAL HELP .
In that article they demonstrate , through computer experiments,
how cooperation rather than exploitation can and does dominate in the Darwinian struggle for survival.
" Throughout the evolutionary history of life,
cooperation among smaller units led to the
emergence of more complex structures, as, for
example , the emergence of multicellular
creatures from single-celled organisms.
In this sense, cooperation becomes as essential
for evolution as is competition........
In the course of evolution, there appears to have
been ample opportunity for cooperation to have
assisted everything from humans to molecules .
In a sense, cooperation could be older than life
itself . "
And what else but Love, social cooperation and altruism
could be older than life itself.
As such, WAR is not the natural state of man (as Dick Cheney says) but instead LOVE, SOCIAL COOPERATION and ALTRUISM are the driving forces of evolution and are the true natural state of man.
Are we denying our deepest and most basic urge to unite and cooperate with one another ~ for the false values of greed, power and hatred.
Teilhard de Chardin clearly defined this universal urge to
unite when he wrote ;
If there were no real propensity to unite , even
at a prodigiously rudimentary level, indeed, in
the molecule itself ~ it would be physically
impossible for love to appear higher up in
the ' hominized ' or human form.
This universal urge to unite is also the central property of my Unified Field which states that the basic underlying and uniting force of the Universe is a psychic energy field ( Unified Field ) of love and soul consciousness which lies not only
beyond time and space but also beneath our deepest fears.
So the light at the end of the tunnel in Lebanon is the growing
awareness of the Israeli's themselves that violence and
bombing no longer serve their purposes and Sylvia
Tennenbaum articulates this view quite powerfully .
Allen L Roland
WHY DOESN'T ISRAEL WORK FOR PEACE?
By Silvia Tennenbaum
" Holocaust victims would decry the slaughter of innocent children during attacks on Hezbollah "
August 4, 2006
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0804-27.htm
As a Jew who escaped the Holocaust by moving with my family to America in 1938, I turn on the BBC at night. And what I see are clouds of black smoke, explosions; the dead and the dying -- children crying bitterly, cities in ruins. Only yesterday, these piles of rubble in Lebanon were home to thousands. Now, the cars roll out onto the highways, white flags attached to the windshields and doors. More than half a million are homeless.
The Israelis told them to leave, but then strafed one convoy from a helicopter. The military people exert their force without pity. They win their wars proudly. They are the masters of force.
Using the most modern weapons the United States can supply to search out the Hezbollah guerrillas, the Israeli soldiers destroy Lebanon. They wreck all of Gaza, seeking to murder the leaders of Hamas.
Many American Jews gather proudly to cheer them on. The face of the American president remains blank. A patter of platitudes issues from his lips. He is not interested in peace. He is happy to see Israel do the dirty war for him.
Diplomacy is a word not in his dictionary.
But lo and behold -- even as the destruction builds and the war continues through its third week -- it seems suddenly no longer such a lark. Success is hard to come by; Israel is no longer the perennial victor. But will it know what to do when faced with the need to talk with the enemy? It has always felt so invincible that discussion seemed the weapon of fools and weaklings, much like the way the earnest work of its principled and dedicated peace camp ~ Jewish to the core, in an "old-fashioned" way ~ seemed pathetic and misguided.
But the peace camp knew that each and every Israeli atrocity nurtured another enemy, a potential terrorist, while every Palestinian home that the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions helped to rebuild, every olive tree it planted tenderly in occupied soil, brought another possible friend, another partner in dialogue.
Meanwhile, back at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, deep in the heart of the Jewish Lobby, the call to action is, as always, a call for solidarity, for good public relations. Denounce terrorism, suicide bombers, and anti-Semitism in all its endless variations, which includes the "self-hatred" of the misguided Jew who asks us to give some thought to where we -- obsessed with brutal retaliation -- may have gone wrong.
And, it goes without saying, loyal Jews must talk about the Holocaust. Ignore the images of today's dead and dying, and focus on the grainy black-and-white pictures showing the death of Jews in the villages of Poland, at Auschwitz and Sobibor and Bergen-Belsen. We are the first, the only true victims, the champions of helplessness for all eternity.
No matter what great accomplishments were ours in the diaspora, no matter that we produced Maimonides and Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, and hundreds of others of mankind's benefactors -- not a warrior among them! -- look at the world of our long exile always in the dark light of the Shoah. But this, in itself, is an obscene distortion: Would the author of *Survival in Auschwitz* [Original title: *Se questo è un uomo* (1947 and 1958) (translation *If This Is a Man*, in the U.S., *Survival in Auschwitz*)], Primo Levi, or the poet Paul Celan demand that we slaughter the innocents in a land far from the snow-clad forests of Poland?
Is it a heroic act to murder a child, even the child of an enemy? Are my brethren glad of it and proud?
I am heartsick, and still I see a glimmer of hope (there must be that glimmer, to go on at 78 years).
The American peace camp reports a sudden massive increase in membership. All over the country, Jews whose consciences have not been crippled are writing in, speaking up, gathering, to raise their voices. Is this not what we have always done? What we were brought up to do? What -- since the days of the Bible and the prophets -- our forefathers taught us?
If Israel had worked for peace as hard as it has worked for war, might it not all be settled now?
Three hundred British Jews took out an ad in the *Times* of London to ask the question, "What is Israel doing?" This question has now been taken up by Jewish Voice for Peace, and by Alan Sokal and Bruce Robbins who, some years back, placed an ad in the *New York Times* that read "Not in Our Name."
The time is long overdue for Jews to return to their role as the world's conscience, who come to the aid of the dispossessed, the wretched of the earth. Once again, we must join those who demand the end to unjust wars -- in Iraq as well as Lebanon -- and an unjust occupation in Gaza. We must honor the example of American civil rights workers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, not that of the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein or Yigal Amir, killer of Yitzhak Rabin.
And perhaps the day will come that we will be counted -- by Jew and Arab alike -- as among the Just, perhaps even given a place at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, for the lives we helped to save in a lawless, savage time.
Silvia Tennenbaum, a writer in East Hampton, is author of the novels *Yesterday's Streets* and *Rachel, the Rabbi's Wife*.
Catch me on the first and third Monday of every month
7 AM and 4PM PST
TRUTHTALK
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