[Peace-discuss] Letter to editor

[David Green via Peace-discuss]

Here's a letter that I sent to the NG today, that accurately summarizes my views. 

DG

Israel’s recent/current onslaught against Gaza is consistent with long-term ambitions for controlling “Greater Israel.” Gaza has since 2005 been a prison, with its economy and borders tightly controlled by Israel’s siege. This is a planned consequence of Israel’s withdrawal of settlers in 2005—not a response to Palestinian resistance. Recurrent massacres by the IDF constitute maintenance for this state of affairs.
Israel’s hegemonic ambitions are promoted by all major political parties in Israel and the U.S., and by mainstream Jewish organizations. Our government provides weapons and diplomatic cover, including a “peace process” that is really a settlement process. Palestinian communities on the West Bank live under the constant threat of Israeli terror, from settlers and the IDF, before and after the murder of three Israeli youths (but not by Hamas) in June.
In our community, religious and secular Jewish leaders and institutions follow the dictates of national Jewish organizations in their support for right-wing Zionist extremism. Instead of consulting with the local Jewish community at large, they ally themselves with plutocratic U.S. geopolitical and military interests and their strategies to control Middle East energy resources; and with Christian Zionists—right wing fundamentalists who view the region in apocalyptic terms that are anti-Semitic and Islamophobic (and un-Christian) at their core.
It is in this context that those who have been hired as leaders of the Jewish community lend institutional spaces to a small but vocal minority of Jews and their racist agenda, while marginalizing the majority of Jews who oppose these ongoing crimes.
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