Hopeless Hope
Dear friends,
Something extraordinary happened this week. 280,000 people gathered from across the universe, most of them from Israel and Palestine, to mourn those killed on both sides of the conflict. The joint Israeli Palestinian memorial ceremony, hosted by Combatants for Peace and the Bereaved Parents Forum, and sponsored by dozens of organizations including The New Shul, is laying the ground for a different future. In a time when most Israelis are vaccinated and almost no Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are, the ability of people to transform a day of mourning those the other side have killed into a day of affirming our unity in the face of massive pressure to conform filled me with new energy. Thanks to this event I find myself unusually hopeful on this week of the 73rd anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel. This despite any hope for a solution or even an improvement in the situation there any time soon.
Activism is a funny business. It often involves an ongoing sense of failure. In the Israeli left (what remains of it) that sense is acute and un-ignorable. Here in the US too, when we see another video of a black man killed by police, and then the same week one of 13-year-old Adam Toledo shot with his hands in the air, we feel the despair, the failure of our attempts. But the fruits of one’s actions can, like a fig from a freshly planted…
