Israel's rabbis urge investigation of flotilla incident

[struggle4progress]

... Rabbi Arik Asherman of Rabbis for Human Rights is a familiar figure to Palestinians in the West bank as he spends his summer helping them harvest their olives. In calling for an investigation, he invoked a story in the Torah in which a dead body is discovered in a field and no-one knows what happened.


The elders are gathered to explore the question of "not only did someone from our town (or) village kill this person,” Asherman says. “They have to ask the question did this person die because we did not help them?" That question seems to encapsulate the philosophy behind his movement.

Rabbi Avraham Gisser from the settlement of Ofra on the West Bank also believes it is important to investigate the flotilla incident. His guiding principle is that the bible does not build the case for good and bad on the basis of compassion.

“You can have pity for a son that kills his father and becomes an orphan only if you see him as an orphan,” Gisser says. “But if you check and discover he killed his father, there are other parameters of justice and morality that need to be considered.” Similarly, Gisser believes the pictures of the flotilla incident fail to tell the full story of what happened, leading to a flawed public understanding of the event.

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/06/06/israels-rabbis-urge-investigation-of-flotilla-incident/

[Jim__]

1. It sounds like 2 of Israel's rabbis want this investigated.

That a disappointingly low number.

[TZ]

2. But Helen Thomas thinks all the Jews should go back to

Poland and Germany! :banghead:
I wish Israel would figure out that this kind of shit they pulled raises anti-semitic incidents world wide....

[struggle4progress]

3. One would have hoped that Thomas, in years of covering public affairs,

would have picked up the fact that quite a lot of people don't ever want to set foot in Germany -- or in Poland, either, for that matter, since Polish anti-semitism contributed to the Shoah and even after the war led to continuing massacres such as the Kielce pogrom. But since her self-identity is strongly Lebanese, and her parents' home country is thoroughly smashed up, with a significant Palestinian population, perhaps Israel's repeated actions in the country dominate her thinking

What is interesting, in the article I linked, is the fact that Israelis with different political perspectives would support for different reasons an investigation into the events surrounding the flotilla

[TZ]

4. Oh of that I'm sure of.

There are plenty of secular/reform liberal Jews that are willing to question their government actions. Despite what some think, not all Israeli's are represented by the radical RW government they have. Netanyahu makes Bush look middle of the road....