Gaza

Rabbi Donniel Hartman's Blog on the Times of Israel page describes the ambivalence that confronts everybody who is troubled by the casualties on the Gaza border, yet sees no immediate solution to the lethal confrontation. It is not that sixty people were killed in one day, or that some fifty people were killed since the beginning of the protest, had one person been killed it would have been one too many. I feel for the Israeli soldiers, one of whom may be my grandson, who are ordered to shoot to kill to prevent a breach of the Israeli border. They have to bear the burden of guilt for taking a life. Yet I don't want to contemplate the slaughter that would ensue if the militants of Gaza would breach the border and rampage through Israel. I believe in Israel's right to exist. Despite those who refuse to accept Israel's existence and want to relitigate the history of the last seventy years, Israel is there, a prosperous democratic middle-eastern country. The problem is that the hatred of Jews, the delegitimization  of Israel has no cost to the perpetrators. Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the other Arab countries that waged war against the nascent State of Israel seventy years ago, put the issue of Palestinian refugees in the too hard basket. Over the years they have persecuted, murdered Palestinian refugees, isolated them from the rest of their society, resisted their absorption and assimilation, but used them to confront domestic issues that had real costs. Syria is fractured, Persia is divided with the chasm between the urban cultured Persians and the impoverished underdeveloped and superstitious countryside can only be contained by the use of force, but painting Israel as the source of the problems unifies the warring factions.  There were 13 million refugees after the Second World War, which included a million Jewish refugees, there were hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees that fled from Arab lands. They were all absorbed over the years. The only ones who remain refugees to this day are the Palestinians, because it suited the rest of the worlds to keep them separate, keep them in refugee camps. Palestinians and Israelis could live side by side in prosperous cooperation, were it not be in the interest of others to foment this antagonism. I feel sorry for the Arab young men and some women, who in desperation seek a martyr's death in the frontier, though not for those who take their children to expose them to the danger and should they be killed in the skirmish use their death for propaganda. I feel sorry for the young Israeli soldiers who are tasked with holding back the rabble trying to breach the border. I feel for the people of Ashkelon, Ashdod, southern Israel, who would be in imminent danger should the Palestinians rampage across the border. My only hope is that by next week this confrontation will be old news, that the leaders of Hamas would think of those killed and sit down with the Israelis, the Egyptians. the Jordanians, and above all, with their brothers in Judea and Samaria and work towards a peaceful resolution of the conflict and try to achieve a better, prosperous life for their people. 

Liberal humanist ideals

Some years ago I posted a blog about the Relevance of teaching about the Holocaust. I can't remember what prompted this post, but my brother, who is also involved in Holocaust education, in Japan, recalled it, and now. I shared it with volunteers and educators at the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand. It is now posted among the Blogs on its website. It prompted the question by one of my respected senior colleagues asking me what I meant by "embracing the liberal humanist ideals that permeated Western culture". It is a fair question. If I can't explain it to a high school student  it has no meaning for educators. Perhaps I should only use the term “humanist”, the word “liberal” is redundant except in so far it refers to the concept of freedom as understood in the last 300 years, but “humanist' means for me some specific ideas.

• It asserts the right of every human being, as distinct from the group the individual belongs to. Every human being is valued, respected and has rights not as a member of a group, a nation, an ethnic group, a class, or rank, but as a discreet individual.
• Knowledge is based on empirical experience, not on dogma. Knowledge is not absolute and unchangeable, it needs to be constantly evaluated in light of empirical evidence.

I don't know whether this clarifies what I wrote. It is open to discussion, and like most of the things I assert, to argument. So bring it on. Let's argue. That is part of the privilege implied  "humanism".