Social Justice

This week, President Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to former Irish president and former UN Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson (together with 15 other honorees).

Although a number of American Jewish organizations, including AIPAC and the Anti-Defamation League, sharply criticized Obama's decision - accusing Robinson of "hostility and one-sided bias against the Jewish state," for example - a coalition of Israeli human rights organizations has publicly backed Robinson.

In a letter to President Obama (or click here), the group of seven, including the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and B'Tselem, defends Robinson's human rights record and rejects the AIPAC and ADL criticism as erroneous, misleading and unwarranted.

The Meretz website (Hebrew only) is calling for donations to provide drinking water to 15,000 Palestinians in desperate need. Four villages northwest of Ramallah have been victimized by the takeover of a nearby water source by "Mekorot", Israel's national water company, and are now receiving less than 1/5 the amount required for basic needs. Some of the villagers have not had running water for more than three months, and are forced to buy water from tankers at outrageous prices. Many lack the means to pay. Some children are drawing water from polluted wells or begging for water. Other residents are abandoning their homes and relocating.

Sometimes the conflict in the Middle East explodes into our consciousness: Buses torn apart by bombs; the Gaza Strip invaded; Palestinians in bulldozers on a downtown Jerusalem rampage; Israeli settlers torching Palestinian fields or uprooting olive trees in the West Bank.

Other times, however, the tensions are fomented in quieter, less palpably violent ways.

And although these seemingly innocuous events generally fail to produce the screaming headlines that warfare and terrorism do, they are just as much ‘seeds of conflict' - keeping the flames of enmity burning, filling the interstitial spaces between one spasm of major violence and the next.

by Ron Skolnik, Executive Director of Meretz USA

I have just returned from a very intensive 12-day stay in Israel, most of it in the framework of Meretz USA's annual seminar in Israel, the "Israel Symposium". It will probably require another few weeks to sort out the many and diverse perspectives that I heard, and synthesize them into a full and organized report, but - with so many raw impressions fresh in my mind - I would like to use this column to share with you a set of initial thoughts.

First, the political context: I arrived in Israel less than a month after the elections that voted a clear right-wing majority into Israel's Knesset, and that dealt a severe body blow to both the Labor and Meretz parties. And it was less than two months since the end of the Israel-Hamas war, a military action that was supported by 96%(!) of Jewish Israelis. An even more telling statistic: 65% of Israel's Jews continue to believe that the government ended the war too soon, and that it should have "finished the job" of eradicating the Hamas in Gaza, regardless of the political and human costs.

Understandably, I encountered an Israeli left that was still in a state of shock and disarray. Nonetheless, amid the pessimism, and perhaps because of it, some on the Left have already begun to address how the peace and human rights camp can redefine and reorganize itself to take up the challenges of the 21st century.

On Friday, February 20, 2009, outgoing Meretz MK Avshalom ("Abu") Vilan spoke to Meretz USA supporters in New York. His remarks were also carried by conference call. The following is a summary of his talk.

Opening on a personal note, MK Vilan noted that, as of February 24, he would no longer be a Knesset Member, since the Meretz party would have only three seats in the new Knesset, and he had been ranked number six on the party list. Vilan noted that he would continue with his effort to promote the One Home initiative for bringing West Bank settlers back to Israel.

MK Vilan first analyzed the results of Israel's February 10 elections, including the setback suffered by both Meretz and Labor. Pointing to the trend shown by the public opinion polls, he reported that the balance between Israel's right-religious bloc and its center-left bloc (65 vs. 55 seats) had been essentially stable - before the Gaza War, during the war, and after it as well. On the other hand, the election campaign saw major shifts within each of these blocs.

Vilan indicated that, in the last weeks of the campaign, the leaders of the two largest parties - Tzipi Livni of Kadima and Binyamin Netanyahu of Likud - had coordinated their strategy, in an effort by each party to grow at the expense of its natural allies. This strategy worked, he said: In the final run-up to the election, Kadima rose by seven seats at the expense of Labor and Meretz. Likud rose at the expense of Yisrael Beiteinu, whose Knesset result of 15 seats was much less than the polls' prediction of 20.

On Wednesday, October 22, the Young Meretz and Meretz Students divisions of the Meretz party sent volunteers to the West Bank to help with the Palestinian olive harvest.

By Meretz USA Executive Director, Ron Skolnik

 

One of my fondest memories of my early years in Israel was the late afternoons. As the sun edged toward the horizon to make way for evening, I would turn the dial of my pre-digitized radio to 1540 AM to tune in to the “Voice of Peace” radio station and listen to the enchanting and tranquil melody by The Eagles, “I Wish You Peace”, which the station played every day at sunset.

The man responsible for the radio station, for the “pirate ship” from which it broadcast “from somewhere in the Mediterranean” (in reality, just outside Israel’s territorial waters, near Tel Aviv), and for the message of peace that it aired between 1973 and 1993 was Abie Nathan.

Last week, on August 27th, Abie Nathan passed away at the age of 81.