 Thanks a lot. We have a special treat today. Many of you know Arik Asherman. He's been to Washington many times. He is, I think, the preeminent voice in Israel. And he's known around the world for his commitment to human rights. He is the former executive director, now the director of projects and programs for rabbis for human rights. An Israeli organization that has kept the flame burning for recognition and enforcement of human rights in Israel for all Israelis and for all of those under Israeli governance. And he speaks with great passion and wisdom on the synthesis between human rights and Judaism. He has thought and written and spoken regularly on the dilemmas that Israel faces on the debate over Israel as a Jewish state and a democratic state. And today he's going to review those issues and talk about the challenges that all of us are facing. The Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel signed in 1948 in its founding document commits Israel to becoming a Jewish and democratic state. That description was never elaborated and there has been deep controversy over its meaning, indeed, over the meaning of Zionism ever since. It was primarily an internal debate for many years. Now it has become part of the political conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. In recent years, governments of Israel have demanded that as a condition to making peace that the Palestinians recognize and accept Israel as a Jewish state. They have resisted that saying that it's up to the country itself to determine how it characterizes itself and what it is called. But that has become an increasingly emotionally contested issue. I hope Eric will dwell upon that. And what is the synthesis between the issues of Judaism, human rights, security, and sovereignty? So Eric, welcome back. Great to have you. He had to get up at four o'clock in the morning. But we'll speak, Eric will speak for about 40, 30, 40 minutes and there will be plenty of time for Q's and A's. Thank you. So I'm going to stand behind the podium. I'm going to come out in front a little bit. I'd like to do that. I prefer that. So a quick show of hands. How many people here are a little bit familiar in some way with Rabbi's Human Rights? How many people have heard me speak before? Okay. So Rabbi's Human Rights is the only rabbinic organization in Israel explicitly dedicated to human rights and in which Orthodox reform, reconstructionists, and renewal rabbis all coexist in one organization without strangling each other. We were founded in 1988 when our founder Rabbi David Foreman wrote an open letter to the chief rabbinate saying, why is it that the religious establishment in this country seems only concerned with Sabbath observance, with Kashrut, our Jewish dietary laws? Where are rabbis like Abraham Joshua Heschel running around this country and crying give out and speaking to some of the burning moral issues of our society? On principle, we're always involved in at least one issue dealing with human rights of Jewish Israelis, at least one issue dealing with human rights of non-Jews who are part of our society or under control, and so our work includes education with Israeli young people, sometimes with the army about Judaism and human rights, economic justice for Israelis, today the issue of African asylum seekers. I'll be speaking a bit, even more than a bit, about the issue of the Bedouin of the so-called unrecognized villages in the Negev, Israeli citizens, and we're most famous or infamous for the work we do on behalf of Palestinian human rights. So, a few weeks ago, I was on a panel for a premiere of a new film by one of our fellow Israeli human rights organizations, Adallah, an Israeli-Palestinian human rights organization. It's a film which some people like, some people find a bit controversial because it takes two villages, one inside the 67th border, El Rakhib, one of these so-called unrecognized Bedouin villages, and the other is the village of Susia, a Palestinian village in the south-heaven hills, and it makes the argument or it compares the stories and tries to basically say there is a very deep parallel here between these two stories. Between what's happening with these two villages. Some people think that's very accurate. Others, including activists, I mean people on the left as well, say, well yes, but there's so many differences. These people being Israeli citizens, these not, and they are less happy about trying to draw this parallel. So, as a way of trying to think a little bit about democracy and Judaism, and what it means to be a Jewish and democratic state, and what have you, we're going to explore these two stories of Susia and El Rakhib, and we're going to ask the question, is the parallel a good one or not? So, a lot of the work that we in rabbis for human rights do is actually in the south-heaven hills. There's a unique culture of people that live down there. Very likely, some 150 or more years ago, they themselves were descended, the Bedouins that came and settled down in the area, although they very much get very upset if you call them Bedouin. They don't like to be called Bedouin. There's a mother kind of central city of Yata, and then these amazing cave communities where some people, because of poverty, some people, because this is their preferred lifestyle, live at least part of the year in caves. We first got involved in the south-heaven hills back in 1999, when the Israeli army expelled some 700 men, women, and children from these caves. We were part of a coalition that first provided humanitarian aid. It was the middle of winter and people were out in the middle of nowhere, and then raised public consciousness. Eventually, Israel's High Court sent them home. It's an amazing story because the expulsion orders were strange. They said, it doesn't apply if you live there. On the one hand, they said, that's kind of strange. You're going to live in the middle of a live fire zone. The reason for the expulsion was allegedly a live fire zone. Coincidentally, 16 live fire zones had been announced that were going to surround areas A and B in the occupied territories. There is actually one place up north where, for many years, live exercises were conducted in the middle of a village with people living there. But we said, great. Well, they all live there, so there's no problem. Not exactly because the army said, well, in fact, they all have homes in Yata, but therefore they're not really residents of these cave communities. Some people live there 12 months a year, some five, seven. And then about two weeks before this came to court, the army said, all this proof that we said that they all had these homes in Yata, well, we really don't. So let's make a deal. So we will now do a study family by family and whoever has a home in Yata will have to leave, can come back on weekends to farm or something. And if they don't, then they can stay. I mean, a ridiculous argument. If you have a home in D.C. and another one down in Florida, nobody is going to say, you know, take one of your homes. People have a lifestyle where many people do have homes in Yata, but they're not enough for everybody. You know, it's for the elderly, for the school kids. On the day this was heard in court, one of the judges, Justice Durner, asked, well, what's going to happen in the meantime? Oh, they'll stay where they are out in the fields until we can, and she went ballistic and said, you mean you expelled people from their homes on the basis of information you don't have and now they're going to, no, no, no, the status quo will be they go back home. A year later, this happened a similar story of an expulsion in the High Court sending them back. Having twice not succeeded in dispelling these people, the Israeli government and army started a new policy, which was to make life so difficult for these people that they would leave of their own accord. And literally once, I almost got arrested for bringing people food. A soldier said, well, this is illegal because you're helping people hold on here. And through all the years we were trying to figure out why is Israel being so stubborn, not only in the international community, but even inside Israel. The government was getting a black eye about this, but if you look at the maps you see, there's all areas only a few kilometers from the southern border of the occupied territories, the 67 border in the south. And we saw eventually on Ehud Barak who was at the time Prime Minister's maps that without a few pesky quave dollars you could claim this finger of land, this peninsula of land. Remember that every Prime Minister since Ehud Barak talks about redrawing borders, keeping 80% of the settlers inside Israel. We don't have a position where borders would be. That's beyond our mandate. But basically without these quave dollars you could have a stronger negotiating position to annex all the South Hepburn Hills settlements up to Kyriot Arba, one of the major settlements, of course. Now, the community that was expelled the second time around is a village called Susia, the village I just mentioned. Susia, the residents of Susia are people that before 48 they had land on both sides of the border of what became the border in 1948. They were pushed into what was Jordan, came under Israeli occupation again in 1967. In 1982 the settlement of Susia was created and in 1986 an ancient synagogue was discovered in the area where the Palestinian village of Susia was. I think it is important. I don't agree with the, when people say, well, we are colonials, we're just coming out of nowhere. No, we Jews also have deep roots in this land and this synagogue was from thousands of years ago where, but on the basis of this, because this synagogue was discovered the village was destroyed, the people were expelled and they had to go out and live in their farmlands. Now, an issue that because of the fact that some people heard me talk about before and I think many of you know that it is almost impossible for a Palestinian to get a legal building permit because of manipulation of building and zoning laws which we'll get back to in a bit. It is, there was no way that, even though this was the land that these people owned, that they could possibly get a building, a master plan that would allow people to build legally and ever since they were constantly under threat and danger from time to time expelled, coming back, what have you. And most recently, they've been dealing with a wonderful outfit called Regavim. Regavim is an organization and this is a big common denominator between what's going on in the Nagav and in South Africa Hills because in both places, under the guise that they are preserving land for the Jewish people, in the occupied territories, they argue reverse discrimination against settlers to try to get the High Court to order the army to demolish more Palestinian homes than they already are. They almost always lose, but they win when they lose because the defense of the army is, we're okay because we are demolishing homes just at our own pace and there's not, where's the third voice saying, hey guys, why are you demolishing homes at all? Because we are defending Regavim, not defending Regavim, but Sushia, that won't happen this time. That third voice will be heard. And by the way, some of the background, a year or so before this Regavim petition was submitted, one of the settlers from Sushia came to me and over a cup of coffee, begged us to stop our High Court petitions because in that area, we've returned serious amounts of land to Palestinians that have been taken over by the settlers of the area and he was begging us to stop doing that. So this was the way of perhaps counter-attacking. So that's Sushia. El-Araqib. El-Araqib is a so-called unrecognized village inside Israel. They're Israeli citizens. Well, what is an unrecognized village? These are, for the most part, villages, Bedouin villages that existed before the State of Israel. Or remember that until 1966, there was an Israeli, there was a military government ruling over Israeli Arabs. And there are villages already back in the 1950s. The policy was to move Bedouin out of the western Negev, move them eastward, and so some of these people are in areas where the army moved them. In the case of El-Araqib, they, and this is not necessarily representative of all of the Bedouin by any means, they actually have Turkish, British, and even Israeli ownership documents starting from the purchase, Turkish purchase documents when they purchased this land from the El-Nukvi tribe back in 1908. The oldest gravestones in their cemetery go back to 1913. Many Bedouin don't have these so-called western documents. There was a Bedouin system of determining land ownership. The Ottomans, the British recognized it. There are early Zionist pioneers such as David Zalman who actually came and you read their descriptions and they come down and they describe how the Negev was populated by Bedouin. He said, who owned land there, who actually wanted to coexist with Jews who, even in cases of sell land, there are kibbutzim such as kibbutzna havim. A lot of its land is on land that was actually sold to them by the residents of El-Aqib. The proofs of ownership were good enough to buy the land, but things get more complicated afterwards. So in 1953, the army says you've got to move for six months and then we'll let you come back. Well, as in so many other cases, they weren't allowed to come back. Now, some of them came back in any case. Many of them ended up in Rahat. The policy was to try to move the Bedouin out of their villages and Israel created seven artificial townships which some are better, some are worse. Rahat is actually one of the worst, but the big picture is that they are magnets for crime, for drugs, for poverty, for unemployment, for despair. We just were checking Israeli government statistics. If you compare the townships to the recognized villages, the unrecognized villages, there aren't any statistics because they don't exist. Four times greater amounts of poverty and unemployment. So the idea was to move people into these townships. Unrecognized villages, no services, no water, no electricity, as there is no water, electricity, hookups for Sucia. In the 1970s, the government invited the Bedouin to submit their land claims. I think they probably thought this was a trap. It was a trap, probably. Bedouin, what did they know about land ownership? They're nomads. It'll be so jumbled, so confused, that it would be able to have the perfect excuse to throw it all out. Well, they submitted some 3,200 land claims and they fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. So the claims came to about a million, 250,000 dunam, four dunam to an acre, 500,000 dunam the government just said, off the top, we're not going to deal with that. It was grazing land. You can't claim that you own it. In the ensuing years, some 200,000 dunam have been generally through forest arbitration or sometimes in the court, some kinds of settlements, usually not to the benefit of the Bedouin, maybe getting some kind of compensation or alternative land. And there are about 650,000 dunam remaining. And for Gold-plated Montsebleau, if you talk to Israelis, we just conducted a study. You know, the vast majority of Israelis believe even if they are sympathetic to Palestinian issues, when it comes to the Bedouin, they're criminal, they're violent, they're taking over the negative. So for Gold-plated Montsebleau, if all those land claims were recognized, what percentage of the negative are we talking about? Any guesses? 5.4 percent. 5.4 percent. For about 30 percent of the population. So, El-Rakib, the Jewish National Fund started foresting over the land. The forests were encroaching, encroaching, encroaching. They decided to come and people that had already gone to Rod to come back and try to build a community, a beautiful village until it was demolished in 2010. In the meantime, there were a series of commissions to figure out what to do with the Bedouin. In 2007, the Goldberg Commission, many of us in the activist community were debating whether to cooperate or not, and we were pleasantly surprised. It wasn't exactly the recommendation that we would have come up with, but first of all, I court judge Goldberg did something very radical. He actually spoke to the Bedouin. And he didn't recommend preserving all of the 35... Today, there's about 35 unrecognized villages, 11 have already been recognized, but he said that the solution had to be based on the existing villages. Well, the government didn't like that, so what do you do when you don't like the results of your own commission? You create a commission on the commission. So the Prover Commission was created, and the Prover Commission came up with very different recommendations, which would lead to the expulsion of some 30,000 or 40,000 additional Bedouin, moving them into these townships, demolishing tens of villages, dispossessing the Bedouin in most of their land. One of the things that kept that from being implemented was that the right wing doesn't think that goes far enough. People like in Regavim say, this is soft on the Bedouin. So former minister without portfolio from the previous government, Benny Beggin did another round of talks, and he came up just a few months ago with a report which was kind of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or what we say in the Jewish tradition, the voice of Jacob, but the hands of Esau. It had all the warm understanding language of Goldberg about the poverty, about needing to lift Bedouin out of poverty of training, of education, services, infrastructure, but the bottom line recommendations were the recommendations are proper. And on May 6th, the government decided to send legislation based on Beggin Prover, the Knesset. I have to say to you that, and I've been working for rabbi rights for 18 years, I've dealt with countless and a huge variety of human rights violations against Palestinians, against our fellow Israelis, you name it. This to me is the greatest moral tragedy, potentially the moral disaster for the state of Israel that I have dealt with in 18 years. Because if this legislation goes through, 40,000 people, and there have been numbers like that, I suppose, but not on my watch, and many of the violations we deal with are some extenuating circumstances, or it's done in the shadows, not everybody knows, by Knesset decree, in the light of day, we will be demolishing tens of villages of Israeli citizens, expelling some 40,000 people from their homes, and dispelling and dispossessing the majority of their lands. Some of you may have seen the little video clip that we produced with Thito Bickel, one of the best-known Tevye, from Fiddler on the Roof of all time, saying how painful it is for him that the descendants of those expelled from the real Anatevkas in Russia in the 19th century are now about to do the same that Bedouin are recreating. I have back here the bill, you can see on the back page, a map. There will be a new pale of settlement, where Bedouin are allowed to live and where they are not. The village of El-Arquib has no chance. It's outside the pale. It's outside the area where Bedouin are going to be allowed to live. So, those are the two stories, and in a few minutes, we will talk a little bit about are they related stories? How are they related? Let me say a few words about democracy. When you ask your average Israeli, talk it right, and often, the first thing you hear from human rights organizations, from peace organizations, we shout and we get upset and we say, this isn't democratic. And the answer that comes back is, well, of course it's democratic. The Knesset, which has a majority in the Knesset, which was democratically elected, democratically decided to implement this policy or that policy or the other policy. And that is, I have less to say about what it means to be a Jewish and a democratic state. I have more to say about a democratic state living according to Jewish values. But as I think anybody who's a student of democracy knows that the idea that the majority can do whatever it wants is perhaps one definition, a very unsophisticated, of course, definition of democracy, where, of course, I would say, and I think most of us would say, that democracy isn't just about what the majority can do, it's about what the majority cannot do. That democracy also has to have a definition of what the majority cannot do. So now let me give the Jewish part of it. Rabbi Schimson Raphael Hirsch, late 19th-century rabbi, credited as being one of the founders of modern orthodoxy. And some of you may recall that in the Torah, in the Bible, there's the command that when we're reaping our grain, and this is one of the ways, by the way, that the Bible comes alive if you come to Israel-Palestine because just as the Bible describes that around Passover we start the barley harvest, and then by the time we get to Shavuot we're talking about wheat harvest, you see it happening. You also see the Bible come alive in the south of the hills, the fights over wells and water, and nothing's changed in 4,000 years. But the Bible, the Torah says, when you're reaping your fields, you are supposed to leave the corners and any fallen sheaves for the poor to glean. And Rabbi Hersh asks the following question. He says, why is it that the Torah has to get into this? Wouldn't it be enough to say that people with property need to be nice and decent to those who don't have it? Don't have property. And his answer is the following. He says, when those with property and power appropriate for themselves the white man's burden of how to be just and decent to those who are not sitting at the table, those who have no power, have no voice, he says, govel impesha. In borders and criminality it's almost always going to end badly. Now, obviously there's some difference between here there is a difference, the Bedouin and the Negev are Israeli citizens, they vote, there have been Bedouin members of Knesset, they can try to impact on the political process inside Israel in the democratic system. Very limited because they're a small minority. Certainly now if we talk about the Palestinians, how many Palestinians are in the Knesset that decides the laws that decide their fate? Again, there are Israeli Palestinians but in terms of Palestinian from the occupied territories, zero. How many Palestinian judges on the courts that decide their cases? Zero. Again, Israeli are a member of a high court so again, we have to distinguish between inside Israel and the occupied territories. How many Palestinians are on the planning and zoning committees that decide that create the master plans for Palestinian communities in the occupied territories? Zero. Some of you may have heard in this last year something called the Edmund Levy Commission. The Israeli government had a real conundrum. The government, the courts had ruled in several high-profile cases that they had to evacuate to dismantle buildings and settlements because the settlements were built on what the government itself recognized to be privately owned Palestinian land. The government statistics acknowledged some 21% of the settlements that are being built on private Palestinian land. The actual numbers are much, much higher. But that's what the government recognizes. The settlement movement obviously was pressuring not to give in. Eventually, the government had to go along with the courts. They didn't like it, and so they set up a commission with a former high court justice, Edmund Levy to make the Treyf kosher. To find a legal justification why it's okay to build on private Palestinian land that's not yours. And they came up with the goods. They came up with a learned treaties of why this should be legal. How many Palestinians were on the Edmund Levy commission? When those with power write the rules, and Hersh says this as well, said you cannot allow those who have all the power in their hands to write the rules. Borders on criminality it's always going to end badly. Two more comments, and then we'll move to the next part of this program. What is our role? What does our role need to be? Ibn Ezra is a medieval Torah commentator, and he comments on frequently on what is the most repeated in different versions of one another command in the entire Torah? Right, the gear. And there is a problem of course referring to Palestinians either Israeli-Palestinians or in the occupied territories as strangers. But actually the better way of translating it is the non-Jew who lives among you, who kind of lives among you, who accepts the ground rules and is told you have to treat them as you would any other citizen. It appears 36 times. I think God had already figured out that this was going to be the most difficult command to obey, and that's why it had to be repeated so many times. Ibn Ezra says that these commands are particularly directed toward the judge. Because he says when the gear or the widow or the stranger, those without power in society if people in dominant groups in society are wrong they know how to shout, they know how to cry, they know how to hire the high-powered lawyers. But if you're part of these voiceless groups in society, you can shout all you want and no one's going to hear. There's two different versions in the Hebrew. Some that says they have no O's strength, and some they have no O's there, no one to stand by their side to help them. One day in Sushia, we brought down a group of diplomats and Nasser Nawazia, one of the spokespeople down there, said the minute he blew me away, he said when they came to demolish our homes in 1986 there was nothing we could do, we were all alone. We're in huge great danger again today, but there's one big difference. We're not alone anymore. It's not enough, it's not enough to fight the good fight, you've got to win it. But I also think that it's important to look at the connection between O's and O'szoo. I think this is what democracy is really supposed to be about as well. One of our greatest challenges perhaps in the human rights community as Israelis is it so easy for us to see ourselves as the knights in shining armor coming to help the poor natives. But if you're really the O'szoo, the person helping, if you do, you have to make sure that you aren't part of the process that's also taking away the O's, the power of those you're trying to work with. You need to be empowering and not seeping away power, working as partners. And the last comment I want to make and I promise that I would say something about Erie, Pennsylvania, where I grew up. Believe it or not, and not too many people know this, but when I actually in high school played high school football. Now to say that I played high school football is a bit of an exaggeration in four years, I don't think I was in the game for four plays. Now in our varsity team had this record-breaking winning streak with this amazing coach, he was a shrier, he was fibrant, he would shout, he would exhort, he would literally foam at the mouth. But he would always say, I only shout at the people I can make into better football players. In three years he never shouted at me once, okay? There was no point. There was nothing that this wonderful coach could have possibly have done to make me into a good football player. And the reason that I bring this up is because when we in Rabbi's Human Rights and other organizations that are in the peace or human rights community, when we shout, when we go to court, when we use the tools of Israeli democracy, remember that there's parts of this world where if I was doing what I would, if I came and gave this talk I'd go home and it would be a death sentence. But when we shout, when we use the courts, when we stand in front of bulldozers sometimes and do acts of civil disobedience, if I didn't believe in the basic goodness of my fellow Israelis, if I didn't believe in the very basic Jewish teaching which is that people can change and come closer to their highest selves. Even our term in Judaism for sin is het. It's an archery term. We were trying to do our best. We were trying to hit the mark and we just missed it a bit. But maybe next time we'll do better. If I didn't believe those things, there would be no point. I'd be wasting my breath. I'd be wasting my time. So why do I maintain that faith when I see these things going on around us? Well, you know, in a poll that we had commissioned recently, about two years ago, we saw about 77% of Israelis believe in human rights. About 49, if you ask them specifically about Palestinian human rights. Most of them, however, believe that anything that we talk about is an isolated non-representative, non-systematic, irrelevant incident. And they believe that our institutions are doing their best to combat these things. And therefore we're between a rock and a hard place. If we go with this and we don't challenge that, then they say, well, why are you making such a big deal and giving such a terrible name in the international community? These things are so irrelevant. But if we challenge them and say, no, these things are systematic, sadly, they're much more ingrained, we are bursting people's most dearly held, people's most dearly held bubbles. The illusion that they've been able to create for themselves. You know, that most Israelis truly believe that we have the most moral army in the world. Now, I don't think we have any means of the most immoral army. Let me be clear. But they believe these things. But here's also as infuriating, as challenging as that is, what that also means is that Israelis want to have the most moral army in the world. They want to believe that we are observing and honoring human rights. And what that means is that in some way our goal, and that's for example why we're trying to get people like yourselves. If there's one thing everybody can do here, take our literature, get the link to the petitions you can send to Israeli ministers about this Bedouin issue, for example, because we have to hold up a big mirror. One of our Rabbi Larry Kushner tells a story that he brings the nursery school kids in his synagogue to see the sanctuary. But he says, you've got to come back, he tells the kids on another day before I'm going to show you what's inside the ark. And this, the teacher reported afterwards, sparked this debate among the kids. And that's in that ark. And the best answer Rabbi Kushner says is one kid who said inside an ark is a big mirror. Mali Kohn in her story writes about a princess, spoiled princess and she gets everything she wants in the world but now she's got a tough request that no one in the kingdom, in the castle can help her with. She wants to see God. Finally her parents send her out into the real world and seeing all that's out there, she comes back in tears. Her parents hold up a mirror and say, now you've seen God. So, when I think about the challenges that we have to be a democracy when we have such a facile today understanding what democracy is all about, as we confront the basic essence of challenged democracy and of human rights when those with power are making decisions for people who aren't sitting at the table and when I think about what it would be what it would mean to have a country that's not necessarily a Jewish state in terms of Jewish hegemony necessarily but one that's living up to some of our highest Jewish values I think it starts with holding up a mirror because God can't do it alone God needs our help even our word for prayer is a reflexive verb to judge ourselves judging ourselves by that mirror that we call God. Thank you. Thank you very much. We have plenty of time for some questions and answers please identify yourself I'd like to ask the first question the United States went through many generations of conflict over lots of issues but the central issue was the issue of equality and respect for others it did not come spontaneously with the creation of our country it took a long time it took a terrible civil war it took constant evolutions of the American constitution and we are still not there yet but is the national question in Israel and Palestine to competing nationalisms of people who demand their own national entities can this one be resolved before this more difficult question of recognizing the human rights respect for the other protection of minorities which as you say should be the essence of democracy just not majority rule is it going to take that long in Israel or can this process be collapsed and in the end will nationalism prevail or will it be a new kind of entity of Israel and Palestine which is one country so that's an excellent question as always you always have excellent questions and I don't fully have the answer of course we're already in a different kind of position because we don't have a constitution but what I will say is the following I unfortunately right now I think as a society we're moving backwards in other words I think at one point as in this red society we had a much we did have much more of a concept of democracy including some kind of protection for minorities I think we're losing that not gaining that we got to start going in the other direction and here's the dilemma and here is and I've probably said this here before but one of our real dilemmas is that everybody in this room myself included feels that there is no time to waste to dilly-dally every minute that goes by, every day that goes by where we don't have peace where we don't have honoring human rights where we where we don't have a more sophisticated idea of how we those with power treat those the minorities it's a tragedy it's a crime and so we are always living with the hope and acting of what we have to change today and tomorrow or yesterday I often feel like with our organization I'm the fireman, I'm the person dealing with the burning world issue right now like this Bedouin issue which has got me consumed at the moment but the reason that we have also an education department is because even though we have to believe with the Monash Le Mans that we're going to solve everything tomorrow too often we haven't given sufficient thought to what happens if we don't and whereas the Arik Ashrimans get the ego strokes because I can go around the world and people know who I am and this kind of stuff on the so-called other side there are people who are, who will never know their names but they for the last 40 years have been doing what we haven't done sufficiently they've been investing in grassroots education and raising up a generation of people that don't understand what democracy is about for starters and that's what and we've got a lot of make up to do even as we continue to work to change things in here now we've got to be investing more about what are we doing if we don't change things in here now and it's going to take some more time I don't really care that much whether it's going to be a one or a two or a ten state solution not only do I represent our organization which doesn't have a position on that but I think it's a process I don't think the two state solution is dead I don't think it's essential I think it's but one of the reasons one of the reasons that one hears an objection among some Palestinians is precisely that were we to have a one state solution tomorrow even if it was one person one vote there would still be Jewish hegemony and that in fact there's a need for Palestinians to have the experience of having statehood independently before we can talk about a one state solution again I'm going to let the politicians work that one out do you want to take over actually I want to ask a question just following up on what you you just said because you talk about the process of dispossession that's happening ongoing right now inside Israel with respect to the Bedouin with and then inside the occupied territories in the West Bank you don't talk about the dispossession that coincided with the founding of Israel and I wonder why you skip over that piece and and I think as someone that has lived in the occupied territories for a very long time and several years and come in contact with many Israelis I think it's a very important question for the Israeli nation for the Jewish nation to resolve and so I wonder why you you pull on these elements of human rights of justice of equality talk about the process of dispossession but then perhaps feel that it's not necessary to start from the beginning of the story in order to understand the processes that are currently ongoing I think I started almost at the beginning of the story when I talked about already what was happening to the Bedouin back in the 1950s it's true I didn't start with the Nakba 48 or something like this but that was the Bedouin as if they're a separate population from the rest of the Palestinians okay I guess I would say my defense it was giving an example from which one could gather the rest of the story but I wouldn't dispute what you're saying I think how does it fit in your narrative in my narrative and your world view so this is what I would say we Jews prayed till this day but certainly for all 2000 years for our right of return from the time that we were expelled from our homeland it's in our prayers three times a day it's integrated into all of our holidays for hundreds of years many Jews held on to the keys of the homes they were forced to abandon in Spain so obviously it would be very hypocritical for me who wants my right of return to ignore the Nakba to ignore those who are talking about not only the occupation of 67 but from 48 this kind of thing I know I can't ignore that I have a second side to that though because I often feel that many who primarily identify with the Palestinian cause talking about the Palestinian right of return don't get the Jewish right of return and I think that we need a principle that nobody asks for themselves to be prepared to grant to others now this causes another challenge because full well and some of the people I've heard me say this before I personally would be happy to live in a world without borders no more United States, Mexico or Canada no more Norway, Denmark, Sweden as long as we're living in a world of nation states I believe that we as the Jewish people have not a greater but an equal right to a nation state as to the Palestinians or to anybody else and now the conflict because there cannot be full Palestinian right of return and a Jewish nation state because full because they're in conflict and that's why at some point we have to move beyond full actualization of everything that are our rights to how we find compromise and we live together again I think that it's something we have to work out I don't think that there's one right solution I do think that it starts with acknowledging that there's a real issue here, there's a real question here and so I I agree with you that we also have to confront 48 and not just what happened afterwards can you wait for the mic please can you wait for the microphone please thank you Einstein a couple years ago back around 1948 said nationalism is a cancer in our society sometimes I think that John Unin had it right it would be better without nationalism and without religion but they are part of a reality and for me as a religious person faith isn't something you just turn on and off like a light bulb and so again I'd be happy to live in a world without borders the question is how do we do we make the best of the here and now without giving up on what we maybe would like to see sometime in the future hi Eric good to see you again Jim Vitarello could you comment on Beebe's insistence that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a quote-unquote Jewish state which according to my recollection correct me if I'm wrong no other prime minister has ever insisted on that as particularly as a precondition to negotiations and sort of what do you think his motives are do you sort of agree with this assertion or not and if not why I'd be thrilled if the Palestinians would recognize Israel as a Jewish state I think it's absolutely ridiculous to make that a condition for negotiations and especially when from the other side of his mouth as there should be no conditions for negotiation this brings up a very other interesting thing it's not exactly what you asked but it's a good chance to talk about something there's another very interesting thing that's starting to happen right now in Israel Regevim is one of the first examples of right-wing organizations in some ways trying to copy what we human rights organizations do using courts and what have you using our discourse there's now something called of course we have the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and now there's the Association for Civil Rights in Judea and Samaria there is one of the there's a Yoaz Handel has talked about creating parallel organizations to each of our organizations having a a kind of right-wing positions for human rights and so on and so forth and their thesis is that the existing human rights organizations get the Democratic and miss the Jewish one of their corner things that they're pushing more than anything else is that parallel as a counterweight or a balance to our one of our basic laws we don't have a constitution but we do have basic laws which are laws which require an extraordinary majority to change and this kind of thing and one of the centerpieces is the law about the dignity and freedom of humanity of human beings which is a kind of base on our Declaration of Independence but it is a legal basis for the honoring of human rights and these kinds of things and they want to have a hook the one that also grounds in law the Israel the state of the Jewish the country of the Jewish nation that is going to be causing us a lot of challenges because I think they're going to try to continue to push this the other thing that we're going to try to do frankly is see if they can put their money with their mountains and they suppose that they say we also recognize the legitimacy of all the issues that we have been talking about over the years now let's see what they're really going to do as they create some of these organizations but one of our challenges is going to be as the right wing is going to try to continue to say that somehow what they have and we don't have is any sense of Jewish national identity or something like this I have one hand I want to thank you for being here and I want to thank you for everything you stand for I'm Libanese I'm an artist I'm an art professor and I lived in Lebanon for 20 years before immigrating to the United States and I grew up as Catholic and as everybody I think here will know that area of the world is going to burn because of religion and the voices that we're hearing now about Sunni clerics who are claiming holy war against the Shia and I'm getting there I'll try to make it very quick people like you make me believe in humanity again my question to you is when you see the big picture which you tried to talk about and your parallel between the United States and the history and what's happening in Israel as a Libanese American my question to you is are you frustrated or do you celebrate the unconditional support of the United States to Israel I'm obviously frustrated I don't want the United States to abandon Israel but I think the real question is what does it mean to support Israel what is really support for Israel and I think that will be seen increasingly in the United States in recent years I mean until very recently the dominant paradigm certainly in the Jewish community and this was what we the message we projected and the message that we asked the American government to adopt was Israel right or wrong and that what we have to do in the Jewish community is support the elected government of the state of Israel whether or not we agree we don't live there again there's some truth my kids have risks that people here don't share there's some truth to that but I think there's another paradigm which I would paraphrase as and I think it's becoming increasingly legitimate and accepted as a alternative paradigm which I would characterize as friends don't let friends drive drunk okay and what I'm trying to say is we all know whether we're talking about interpersonal relations or between countries that the person or the country that says yes dear anything you want dear is not at the end of the day the person that's really showing real support and I at least think that in the long run that could be detrimental to Israel as someone who is an Israeli Zionist, a patriot again I think that sometimes true support is holding up that mirror can I ask you a follow up question we had two Israeli journalists here last week and they were talking about the impact that the separation between Palestinians and Israeli Jews is having on the consciousness of the Israeli Jewish public is saying we don't have to deal with the conflict and they said that Obama's visit was powerful in the sense that it raised issues that people had preferred to just push aside or neglect and I'm wondering if you can comment on his visit and any impact that you saw and the style and approach of talking directly to the Israeli public and whether that brought out any follow up debate I was at that talk and it was a very powerful talk the whole visit was very powerful let me back I can say a few words about the Obama administration I know that maybe getting into some hot water here but right when immediately after President Obama was elected for this first term he had in many ways Netanyahu and on the ropes I remember our Mayor of Jerusalem Barcut coming back visibly shaken by what he experienced in Washington and also what he was hearing frankly from some of the American Jewish community in August 2009 I guess that the Israeli government sensed a little bit of blood in the water as Obama's polls went down a bit that was of course when the Raui and Hanun families were evicted from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah I think that the Israeli government decided to start pushing back and at that critical moment the administration didn't know how to respond and and what Obama tried to do with his visit was to try to put things on a new track and part of that strategy as you correctly pointed out was to try to on the one hand really he came in and made nice with Netanyahu and on the other hand tried to go around the government and speak directly to the Israeli people I think that was a good start but like with everything else in life as a good start as a good start how do you follow up and I can't say that I've seen a great deal of follow up I do think and again people that have heard me heard me say this a million times there is no lack of peace plans what we really need is a bi-national psychologist I mean when you look at the fact that opinion polls show a same majority consistently of Israelis and Palestinians who want a compromise-negotiate agreement but even a larger percentage of both sides say we want peace they don't it's not that there aren't peace plans it's not that there isn't a majority on people on both sides who would like us to achieve peace sometimes I think particularly on the Israeli side there's a lack of understanding what that might require of us but the will is there the thing that is most missing is belief that it's possible and again I brought this up before whatever we may think about the Egyptian peace treaty the fact is that a week before Sadat came to Jerusalem the polls in Israel consistently there was opposition solidly to what a week later Israelis overwhelmingly endorsed when it became real and you put aside the sour grapes because we didn't think it was possible then things changed I really believe that if tomorrow the representatives of the Arab League would say you've been ignoring our peace proposal for 10 years enough is enough we are coming to Jerusalem next week to solve this halas this is it I think that you would find the same kind of melding and overnight change of Israeli public opinion in a sense that's kind of what Barak was trying to do was go to the people get around the gatekeepers of public opinion but a lot more has to be done and I think it does require kind of these bold moves that doesn't give the gatekeepers on either the Israeli or the Palestinian sides the chance to do what they've done so often in the past I really like I'm Karen Getman I like what you say about reflective point of view and looking in the mirror and I think that's really an important point I heard last week or so in Al Jazeera some new Jewish historians and British historians talking about the Nakba and the point of view of Britain really taking some responsibility for what happened and for Israel also taking responsibility for truth telling in what really happened during the Nakba and I wonder if everybody can step away from saving face and begin to talk about the mistakes and the self-interest that was involved and how this came out so badly could that also help in forging a real conversation of peace I've always been in two minds about that there's a great need by both Israelis and Palestinians to hear from the other side we did wrong we made mistakes, we did whatever whether it be the the massacre or my wife's grandfather was witness to the massacre to the massacre of Jews in 1921 in one of the massacres the I think that does meet a great need that people have I think when we can admit that to ourselves we might start hearing the other side again in a different way interpreting things in a different way when we understand and we acknowledge ourselves what they've experienced and what brings them to the point that they're at and the other side of me says there's a great danger because there's an endless pit of history that we can debate forever and ever and so much time arguing about that that we don't just start moving forward which we have to do sometimes so I really am totally honestly, two minds about that and I go back and forth like everything else, there needs to be a balance the right balance of opening that but not getting so sucked into that that we become incapable of moving forward we have a question which everyone my name is Larry Ottinger and I'm a member of a reform temple in Washington DC temple Sinai I have two questions one is I'd be interested to hear any reflections on the reform movement or efforts in Israel the second is relates to democracy and what seemed to me to be almost a little bit too dismissive what the majority wants we've got here we do have a bill of rights and our democracy is based on that constitution and you do use the basic law but I wonder about whether you are or not engaging in the political process and I don't necessarily mean just your group but human rights or social justice groups generally to be engaged because that's where a lot happens and obviously women couldn't vote in this country blacks didn't have the right to vote and there were we had civil rights movements and even in this last election the fact that so many Latino Americans voted is making a difference now in terms of our ability to potentially pursue comprehensive immigration reform so I just wonder if you don't see it as your role to be involved in politics or political efforts or how that works out so in terms of the reform movement although I am personally a reform rabbi we as an organ and I've actually spoken at Sinai before we don't as an organization get into issues of religion and state and some of these issues which are concerned with the reform movement because that's what allows us to be an organization including orthodox reform reconstruction and renewal rabbis I'm very if some of you haven't seen it one in the last just a couple days in Great Britain we had about 65 rabbis spanning the movements that met with the Israeli ambassador delivered a letter to Netanyahu about the Bedouin issue in here the renewal movement and just yesterday the reform movement issued a statement about the Bedouin issue the statement was a little bit weaker than I would have liked to have seen but nevertheless a clear call to Netanyahu saying hold your horses on this on what you're about to do with the Bedouin and this kind of thing and I'm of course proud of that in terms of the question about politics I often say we are a non-political organization we are not a political organization but we are very political because we operate in a political world so in terms particularly of internal economic justice issues inside Israel we're constantly engaged in lobbying we're writing proposed legislation to try to preserve public housing in Israel for example when it comes I was day and night lobbying on the Bedouin issue speaking member of Knesset to the the aides to the government ministers and our staff and the organizations that we're working with are continuing to do that and so we absolutely do that do you see traction and I'll get that in a second but I want to say is that on the Palestinian issues we basically see almost no hope of accomplishing anything in the Knesset because just the clear majority for the right wing we spend more effort in the legal system now there's also by the way a debate among human rights lawyers there are Israeli human rights lawyers that think we should be boycotting the high court because it's a fig leaf they would argue I could cite a long string of things that we've done through the court system for example as a result of the high court orders returning Palestinians to their home in the south of the hills our 2006 decision as a result of which all the farmers are getting the lands they couldn't get to for 2, 5, 10, even 15 years instead of our volunteers getting their heads cracked open as human shields we now have the by court order the Israeli army protecting Palestinians to get to their olive trees and I can tell you all the things that they've been so disappointing and failed to uphold what I would do the principles of international law and what have you they've never taken a strong stand on home demolitions we actually have coming up on October 3rd if the court doesn't postpone it again what could be the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest high court case in the making where we started back in 2004 our original idea was to ask the Israeli army a demand that they do a fair and better job of planning for Palestinian communities for all the reasons that I already have cited from Rabbi Hirsch and what have you we decided that was kind of like re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic and that therefore our ask has become that planning in Palestinian communities be returned to Palestinian hands in area C but so we do use the courts where we do think there is possibility of traction we do use or we try to influence the government and the Knesset we don't think we're at much chance of traction on the Palestinian issues we sometimes get traction on the internal Israeli economic justice issues and we haven't given up on the Bedouin issues and we don't have any gains to be seen I can tell you that since the government decided to send this legislation to the Knesset there's been a series of postponements when the first reading the first vote was supposed to come up I'd love to say it's because of us I'm a little bit hesitant to say that that there's been so many other things in the docket we thought that the right wing which originally was opposing this was now going to let it go through the first reading so that they could rake havoc and make it all the worse in committee but now they may be that they're opposing it but we also it's not impossible that mirror that we've been holding up with rabbis working through the international community has started to have some effect on the political system it's still ahead of us to see what's going to happen I'm actually going to end it there we're nearly at 10.30 and really that was a message of hope it was one that we don't get so often so I want to thank you Rabbi for coming and for bringing your message I want to thank Alara Thank you all people that didn't get to ask questions you can hang around for a few minutes and maybe I'll just leave with one last thought again it's something that people have heard me say Rabbi Heschel I mentioned he often said in a democratic society some are guilty it's not possible