{"id":292,"date":"2009-01-06T15:42:29","date_gmt":"2009-01-06T13:42:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/?p=292"},"modified":"2009-01-06T15:42:29","modified_gmt":"2009-01-06T13:42:29","slug":"an-open-letter-to-rabbi-michael-lerner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/an-open-letter-to-rabbi-michael-lerner\/","title":{"rendered":"An Open Letter to Rabbi Michael Lerner"},"content":{"rendered":"

[This article also appears on Harry’s Place<\/a>.]
\nDear Michael,
\nI’ve just finished reading your article \u201cIt breaks my heart to see Israel’s stupidity<\/a>\u201d and felt I had to reply.
\nI don’t think we’ve ever talked, but I remember well your appearance some years ago before the central committee of the United Workers Party (Mapam) in Israel. You were asked to say a few words, and, to be honest, your Hebrew just wasn’t up to it, and the audience quickly lost interest. As an American immigrant to Israel, I felt empathy for you. You were clearly a fish out of water. To that audience, you were not a guru whose every word was full of meaning. You were just one more tourist, stumbling into a situation you didn’t seem to understand.
\nI felt the same thing today reading your article.<\/p>\n


\nLet’s start with your opening. You talk about \u201cIsrael’s attempt to wipe out Hamas\u201d in your very first sentence. Maybe you are privy to some information that I haven’t heard. Maybe the Israel Defense Forces have let you in on the top-secret next stage of the plan. Or maybe you just haven’t been paying attention.
\nIsrael is not trying to \u201cwipe out Hamas\u201d. They are trying to compell Hamas to stop firing rockets at Israel.<\/strong> There is a difference and I realize it may be subtle, but please pay attention. Most informed people \u2013 including practically all Israelis \u2013 would have stopped reading your article right there. You’d have seemed to be an ignorant tourist.
\nThen you go on to casually refer to Israel’s \u201ccrime against humanity.\u201d I’m not sure if you realize this, but the notion of \u201ccrimes against humanity\u201d is not a literary phrase you just made up. It actually means something.
\nIf you genuinely believe that Israel is pretty much behaving like, say, the Nazis, you really are living in a bubble. Maybe what you meant to say was that the killing of civilians \u2013 which happens in every war \u2013 is a terrible thing and should be avoided. Unless of course you believe that no war is morally defensible, and everyone who fights is necessarily commiting crimes against humanity.
\nYou then go on to repeat the official Hamas line about the cease-fire \u2013 how the Islamist terrorists actually respected it, and wanted to keep the peace, but those damn Zionists kept making it hard for them.
\nYou actually went beyond the Hamas line a little bit there, Michael, when you said that the organization had accepted the Saudi peace plan and really was happy to live in peace, side by side with the Jewish state. You actually wrote that Hamas \u201cwould live peacefully in a two-state arrangement.\u201d
\nSo you mean that all this talk in their charter about \u201cobliterating Israel\u201d is just so much clap-trap? Really, they are reasonable men and Israel is blind not to see this.
\nYou say they’re offering to trade kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit in exchange for 1,000 prisoners. As Israel holds more than ten times that number, that sounds positively cheap. Incredible that Israel didn’t jump at the chance to make a deal. But you know those Jewish businessman, always trying to get a better price.
\nThe Hamas you describe sounds practically loveable.<\/strong> And eminently reasonable. What could have possessed those horrible Israelis to reject such an appealing offer of peaceful coexistence, with Gilad Shalit thrown in at a bargain-basement price? Instead they decided to \u201cwipe out Hamas\u201d and commit \u201ccrimes against humanity\u201d in the process.
\nYou have some really helpful and original suggestions to make for the future as well. Israel should accept 30,000 Palestinian refugees every year for the next 30 years, you say. And apologize for its role in the 1948 \u201cexpulsions\u201d. (Odd \u2013 you didn’t seem to ask Hamas to apologize for anything.)
\nI read in your online biography that you have something of a background in psychology. That certainly explains one passage in your article which stands out like a sore thumb.
\nI’m referring to the bit about a \u201cbasic condition for creating peace is to help each side feel ‘safe’.\u201d The use of quotation marks around \u201csafe\u201d and even the verb \u2013 to feel<\/strong> safe, not to be<\/strong> safe \u2013 indicates to me that you don’t really believe that Israelis (or Palestinians) have genuine reasons to feel for their safety.
\nSo what is the problem? Are the Israelis simply paranoid? Are the 6,000 rockets Hamas fired into Israel (this is all before Operation Cast Lead) \u2013 are those figments of the twisted imagination of an entire nation suffering from a mental disorder? Is the problem really about \u201cfeelings\u201d — or about actually being safe? Safe from rocket and mortar attacks, safe from suicide bombers, safe from the Iranian nuclear bomb.
\nThe more I read your article, the more I felt that in the years since I saw your embarrassing performance in broken Hebrew \u2013 and the arrogance in thinking that you had something to teach \u2013 you had learned nothing.
\nI don’t know if you or your editor came up with the headline, with its arrogant use of the word \u201cstupidity\u201d to describe those with whom you do not agree.
\nI would never describe you as \u201cstupid\u201d. You are what you were when I last heard you speak \u2013 ignorant and arrogant. It’s really the worst combination.
\nYours,
\nEric Lee<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[This article also appears on Harry’s Place.] Dear Michael, I’ve just finished reading your article \u201cIt breaks my heart to see Israel’s stupidity\u201d and felt I had to reply. I don’t think we’ve ever talked,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-israelgaza"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}