[GJM] Fwd: Fw: AN OPEN LETTER TO THE WORLD

[Norman Kurland]

Thanks, Bob, for the thoughtful response in a tipping point of world 
history where lines must be drawn between right and wrong.  The creative 
tension that servants of justice have been seeking is mounting at an 
accelerating pace. As threats to survival of global civilization open 
the minds of ordinary people who preceive that their so-called leaders 
have no answers, certainly no moral answers, the ideas of the American 
Revolutionary Party will move forward like a tsunami.  Here's another 
quote from Emile Zola that I like: "When truth is buried underground, it 
grows, it chokes, it gathers such an explosive force that on the day it 
bursts out, it blows up everything with it."  The late Father Ferree 
would have added a more moderate tone by suggesting that revolutionary 
ideas are best implemented in an evolutionary way, to minimize violence 
and allow the social order to be transformed as quickly as people can 
clear the mental cobwebs out of their minds.  There's still time to 
follow Ferree's wise advice.

Let's hope that those who receive this exchange and have not yet 
enlisted in the cause will want to sign up as participants to 
automatically keep up with our progress by clicking on 
http://listserv.kent.edu/archives/kelso_binary_economics.html.  Whatever 
time it takes to participate in our movement they can count as their 
"social justice tithing time."  Justice is not advanced by those who sit 
on their hands.

Ptwcj,
Norm

Robert Crane wrote:

>  
> Harriet,
>  
>     Your letter below makes an essential point in a very telling way.  
> There is a history that precedes 1896, 1929, and 1948.  The solution 
> for the Jews to fulfill their divine mandate of justice, however, does 
> not consist in competing at the level of state sovereignty, even 
> though once one is caught in this trap, one must extricate oneself 
> from it slowly.  The solution is the spiritual power of Judaism as a 
> religion and of the spiritual Jews who embrace it, because this same 
> power can be embraced by everyone else in the world.
>  
>     As a footnote to the writer's history that you bring to our 
> attention, we should note that the intifadas of 1921, 1929, and the 
> first great intifada of 1936-39 were against Western imperial 
> oppression, not against Jews.  Unfortunately, the mass riots targeted 
> everything and everyone indiscrimately, just as did the riots in Watts 
> and in Washington in 1968 and as riots stemming from intolerable 
> frustration over insults to human dignity always do.
>  
>     The strategic error of the Jews over the past century or two has 
> been to abandon their religion and rely on competition at the secular 
> level, just as the radical Muslims are doing all over the world 
> (usually in the name of a perverted parody of religion), and as a 
> goodly number of Patriotic Americans are also doing today.  This can 
> result eventually only in mass suicide by all concerned, including 
> America.
>  
>     Norm's reply is a frontal attack on the false premises of 
> extremists in both the Israeli and Palestinian governments.  Perhaps 
> the most hopeful aspect of this is that the people who are motivated 
> by religion should be the first to see the error of their ways.  The 
> solution to peace through justice in the Holy Land will come only from 
> the "Orthodox" within the three Abrahamic religions, not from those 
> who no longer care about or even understand their heritage.
>  
>                               Peace through wisdom, courage, and justice,
>  
>                                                                           
> Bob

Harriet,

This is a wonderful letter.  It justifies, with facts pre-dating the 
Zionist and the American neoconservative movements and the formation in 
1948 of a Jewish State, the natural law rights of Israelis to defend 
themselves with all the military might at their command against any 
forces that would otherwise destroy them.   It throws out a challenge to 
the civilized world to support the suppression of terrorism from 
non-state actors and to demand that all states suppress terrorists 
within their borders and immediately cut off any form of support to 
terrorism against Israeli civilians or in any nation-state.

However, contrary to the overtly nationalistic tone of the writer, 
Israel is not alone today.  The unamimous  vote yesterday in the U.S. 
Senate to support Israel's right of self-defense demonstrates that the 
American people strongly support Israel's right to exist as a sovereign 
state within the global nation-state system, a system that is 
structurally incapable of achieving a sustainable peace in today's 
troubled world.  Without US support at the UN in 1947 Israel would never 
have existed, and without massive financial and technological aid from 
the US since the artificial "two-state solution" was imposed on the Holy 
Land, Israel would have been destroyed years ago. 

Israel's continued existence would be better secured if Israelis, 
political Zionists and neoconservatives recognized the inherent 
divisiveness of  Israel remaining a "Jewish state", thus implicitly 
justifying such Jew-hating and Western-hating theocracies within such 
"Islamic states" as Iran and Saudi Arabia as well as a rallying call for 
the "global Caliphate" envisioned by such non-state Jew-hating terrorist 
groups as al-Queda and the Taliban.  Any nation-state whose policies are 
dictated by any religious or ethnic majority threatens the freedom of 
thought and spiritual beliefs, equality of opportunity and other 
inalienable human rights of minorities and individual citizens and is 
therefore fundamentally unjust, exclusionary and therefore a continuing 
root cause of internal disorder, rebellion and external condemnation.  
This necessarily includes by its nature the "Jewish State of Israel."

Not immediately but in the long-run,  Israelis would be vastly more 
secure, in my opinion, moving toward a secular constitutional democracy 
that protects the God-given sovereignty of every human person, even over 
the will of the majority or the force of the state.   I can think of two 
long-term options (there may be more) for the survival and well-being of 
Jews in a democratically governed Holy Land: (1) the Israelis could 
apply to become the 51st state of the United States, where any 
"established religion" is wisely forbidden but every person is free and 
protected to follow any religion or spiritual belief system that does 
not infringe on other people's rights; or (2) Israelis could, assuming a 
suppression of all terrorist activities by Hamas and Hetzbollah, support 
the phased evolution of a religiously pluralistic Abraham Federation 
approach, starting in the pre-1968 West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, 
as described in 
http://www.cesj.org/homestead/strategies/regional-global/abrahamfederation-nk.html.

What's missing in today's struggle is an awareness of options more 
powerful than, but would reinforce, the use of military force or 
conventional nation-state diplomacy.  The cry for Justice from alienated 
have-nots of the world and the Abraham Federation solution are still 
below the radar screens of Israeli leaders, their American supporters or 
their nation-state allies.  But as Emile Zola said, "I do not despair in 
the least of ultimate triumph.  I repeat with more intense conviction: 
the truth is on the march and nothing will stop it."

In Peace, only through Justice,
Norm

Harriet M. Epstein wrote:
Another letter from Israel.
 

 Dear World, I understand that you are upset with us, here in Israel.

Indeed, it appears that you are quite upset, even angry. (Outraged?)

Indeed, every few years you seem to become upset by us. Today, it is the 
"brutal repression of the Palestinians"; yesterday it was Lebanon; 
before that it was the bombing of the nuclear reactor in Baghdad and the 
Yom Kippur War and the Sinai campaign. It appears that Jews who triumph 
and who, therefore, live, upset you most extraordinarily.

Of course, dear world, long before there was an Israel, we - the Jewish 
people - upset you.

We upset the German people who elected Hitler and upset the Austrian 
people who cheered his entry into Vienna and we upset a whole slew of 
Slavic nations - Poles, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Russians, 
Hungarians and Romanians. And we go back a long, long way in the history 
of world upset.

We upset the Cossacks of Chmielnicki who massacred tens of thousands of 
us in 1648-49; we upset the Crusaders who, on their way to liberate the 
Holy Land, were so upset at Jews that they slaughtered untold numbers of 
us.

For centuries, we upset the Roman Catholic Church that did its best to 
define our relationship through inquisitions, and we upset the 
arch-enemy of the church, Martin Luther, who, in his call to burn the 
synagogues and the Jews within them, showed an admirable Christian 
ecumenical spirit.

And it is because we became so upset over upsetting you, dear world, 
that we decided to leave you - in a manner of speaking - and establish a 
Jewish state. The reasoning was that living in close contact with you, 
as resident-strangers in the various countries that comprise you, we 
upset you, irritate you and disturb you. What better notion, then, than 
to leave you (and thus love you)- and have you love us and so, we 
decided to come home - home to the same land we were driven out 1,900 
years earlier by a Roman world that, apparently, we also upset.

Alas, dear world, it appears that you are hard to please.

Having left you and your pogroms and inquisitions and crusades and 
holocausts, having taken our leave of the general world to live alone in 
our own little state, we continue to upset you. You are upset that we 
repress the poor Palestinians. You are deeply angered over the fact that 
we do not give up the lands of 1967, which are clearly the obstacle to 
peace in the Middle East.

Moscow is upset and Washington is upset. The "radical" Arabs are upset 
and the gentle Egyptian moderates are upset.

Well, dear world, consider the reaction of a normal Jew from Israel.

In 1920 and 1921 and 1929, there were no territories of 1967 to impede 
peace between Jews and Arabs. Indeed, there was no Jewish State to upset 
anybody. Nevertheless, the same oppressed and repressed Palestinians 
slaughtered tens of Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Safed and Hebron.Indeed, 
67 Jews were slaughtered one day in Hebron in 1929.

 

Dear world, why did the Arabs - the Palestinians - massacre 67 Jews in 
one day in 1929? Could it have been their anger over Israeli aggression 
in 1967? And why were 510 Jewish men, women and children slaughtered in 
Arab riots between 1936-39? Was it because Arabs were upset over 1967?

And when you, dear world, proposed a UN Partition Plan in 1947 that 
would have created a "Palestinian State" alongside a tiny Israel and the 
Arabs cried "no" and went to war and killed 6,000 Jews - was that 
"upset" caused by the aggression of 1967? And, by the way, dear world, 
why did we not hear your cry of "upset" then?

The poor Palestinians who today kill Jews with explosives and firebombs 
and stones are part of the same people who ­ when they had all the  
territories they now demand be given to them for their state -attempted 
to drive the Jewish state into the sea. The same twisted faces, the same 
hate, the same cry of "itbach-al-yahud" (Massacre the Jew!) that we hear 
and see today, were seen and heard then. The same people, the same  
dream - destroy Israel. What they failed to do yesterday, they dream of 
today, but we should not "repress" them.

Dear world, you stood by during the holocaust and you stood by in 1948 
as seven states launched a war that the Arab League proudly compared to 
the Mongol massacres.

You stood by in 1967 as Nasser, wildly cheered by wild mobs in every 
Arab capital in the world, vowed to drive the Jews into the sea. And you 
would stand by tomorrow if Israel were facing extinction.

And since we know that the Arabs-Palestinians dream daily of that  
extinction, we will do everything possible to remain alive in our own 
land. If that bothers you, dear world, well ­ think of how many times in 
the past you bothered us.
 

In any event, dear world, if you are bothered by us, here is one Jew in 
Israel who could not care less.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/discussion_globaljusticemovement.net/attachments/20060719/4661198e/attachment-0001.html