Page 67 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015
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Dark Matter: Women Witnessing - December, 2015 Issue #3 - EXTINCTION / DEVOTION
democracy of Israel,” when his own family had lost their home in Jerusalem in 1948 due
to the occupying Zionist soldiers. It was all a sell-out: money, guilt, power. Why couldn’t
a balanced country have been created instead, one which recognized that Palestinians
were already conducting themselves and their precious lives on the same soil (do not for
a minute, please, believe the empty desert-before-their-coming myth which Zionism has
repeatedly tried to perpetuate)? It was a lifelong grief for him and he did everything he
could—speaking, writing, advocating—to try to balance the “dark matter” of lies.
Why couldn’t we more easily imagine one another’s lives? Why was empathy so
difficult? Former President of Israel Shimon Peres once said what surprised him most
about getting to know Palestinians was, “that they had aspirations like ours.” Well, why
wouldn’t they? Do I in my Texas home two hours north of Mexico imagine mothers
across the border don’t love their sons as much I love mine? Since when did human
imagination become so parched and puny?
Many regular citizens of Israel are able to appreciate Palestinians as human beings with
traditions, skills, incredible patience and intelligence—and vice versa. Consider
hospitals. Consider Hand in Hand Schools. Consider the fascinating and balanced-
power Neve Shalom village, etc. Why can’t politicians with tons of cash behind them
imagine a wider horizon of shared lives together, as regular citizens can, and do? Can
anyone even imagine what a tremendous glowing society that might be? And how would
this single shift change the sizzling, awful, underground energy of “terrorism”?
But the “chosen” theory would have to die. You can’t have “chosen” and “unchosen”
dwelling in easy harmony. (How these ongoing, seemingly endless inequities of
consideration might connect to recent Paris crimes, or the popularity of extremism, or
attitudes of American exceptionalism which suggest we are free to do whatever we like
within other people’s borders, is a long discussion for smarter people. I do recall a South
African driver asking me, at the moment the United States was invading and bombing
Baghdad, what would Americans think about us if we did that in Algeria?)
The current crop of Republican candidates, with their righteous spouting of devotion to
Israel (never considering all the crimes against humanity Israel conducts on a daily
basis, or the regular massacres of thousands of innocent Gazans, with American
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