Open letter to Israel

Israel, O Israel, why hast thou forsaken me?

You were a country I wanted to admire and respect.

You were the birthplace of the kibbutzim — the socialist utopias that cultivated the desert and nourished the people.

You were the stronghold of a union that stood firm for its workers, a country where strikes were integrated into the very social fabric.

You were the harbinger of a new social justice movement, an Occupy Rothschild before there was such a thing as Occupy Wall Street.

You were born in sin, but then again, who among us was not?

And yet, somehow, along with the way, you began to shift and change.

You have become a nation in which democracy is simultaneously under siege and on the run, those who question the government are denied licenses and those who oppose the government are investigated.

You have joined the ranks of shame along with the United States in your use of unlawful “administrative detention,” a perverse distortion of justice.

You have played with fire in the most volatile environment possible, allowing the hyper-delicate balance surrounding the Temple Mount to be manipulated by extremist Jewish groups.

You have become the perpetuator of an occupation that deprives the Palestinian people of their right to a state, an occupation that every compassionate person knows is wrong.

And your leaders? Where do I begin?

Your Prime Minister is a liar of the first degree, by the words of Sarkozy. But worse than that, he is the man who murdered Rabin, who strangled the Oslo Accords and who has no intention of ever making peace while his father lives.

And what’s more, your Foreign Minister is a radical lunatic, a former Moldovan bouncer whose vision of the Holy Land involves chucking all those who are not like him into the seas.

And the valiant opposition? What opposition?

Israel, you have become a country teetering on the edge of the abyss, moving in slow motion toward a future in which the Palestinian occupation never ends, an Israeli apartheid. And we all are standing here watching with our mouths open.

But this year, as we pause to mark Israeli Apartheid Week, I still have hope.

For 66 days, not a morsel of food passed between the lips of Khader Adnan.

The baker of Arraba, ripped from his wife and children nine times to be placed in unlawful captivity, became the man who can’t be moved.

Khader’s weapon against his administrative detention was not violence but satyagraha, the silent struggle of strength against a mountain of lies and distortions.

Faced with the fragility of life and the mounting pressure of the world around, Israel agreed to conditionally release Khader.

A small victory for a David, undoubtedly, but a source of hope for us all.

There are those out there who say this is an intractable conflict, that as the years drip by, they suck away the dream of reconciliation — but they are wrong. For as long as there are brave men such as Khader in the Holy Land, the dream that one day Israeli and Palestinian children will walk together in the streets lives on.

And on that day, the Palestinian people, in the breath of a people oppressed far too long, will cry out that they are free at last — free at last — thank the Lord, free at last!

O Israel, return to thy true morals, for your sins have brought you down.

­— sidfletc@indiana.edu