THE ISRAELI PALESTINIAN CONFLICT

There are Israelis who want to have the additional defensible territories, the West Bank and Gaza, as part of Israel, without the Palestinians. There are Palestinians who want the land that is presently Israel without the Israelis. The overwhelming majority of both sides agree that neither of these extremes is morally justified, appropriate or attainable.

I would support Israel as a democratic secular state, whose majority is Jewish, which state would include the territories of the West Bank and Gaza and the Palestinians living in these areas. I would be pleased if Israel could fill out its natural borders such that all of the West Bank and Gaza became part of Israel. I think it could make very productive use of these additional territories, and its situation would be very much more defensible.  I think it would be good for everyone. But, both sides agree that this can't work.

So, what we have, and what we must have, is two peoples. One people have a state, Israel, that is strong militarily, economically and politically, allied with the United States, its staunchest supporter. The other is a weak, disorganized and impoverished people, with allies nobody would trust or want. The strong power, Israel, impelled by foreign Arab aggression, conquered the territory of the weak power, the West Bank and Gaza and has controlled it for over thirty years. I think we would agree that this control (military occupation?) has not been good for either side. The Israeli character has been influenced by their having to be an occupying force, never a promoter of humanitarian sentiments, and the Palestinian character has been influenced by the arbitrary injustices forced on an occupied people, causing hate and anger.

Both populations, and most of the rest of the world, including most of us, want the situation changed. About 10 years ago, talks were initiated to change the situation. The object of these talks between the two sides was to produce an independent viable Palestinian state, fully recognized by Israel and the rest of the world, and to have such a state and its population recognize, respect and cooperate with the existing state of Israel. The original basis for these talks was UN Resolution 242, requiring that Israel relinquish control of all the land it had conquered in 1967. This solution would also produce, it was thought, peace with some if not most other Arab countries.

As we both know, negotiations are often based on who has what to negotiate about. Israel needs the promise of security and peace. Palestine needs the absence of control and domination. These ten years, up to the beginning of this Intafada, were marked, in my estimate, with a certain asymmetry, the product of power and who held it. The Palestinians have been relatively peaceful, due in some part to Israel's military might and in some part to the promise of a viable Palestinian state. Israel has, on the other hand, set about making sure that it will not be threatened by a future Palestinian State by carving these occupied territories into unmanageable and indefensible sectors through the building of settlements and their access roads in what was conquered territory, and by annexing Palestinian sections of Jerusalem.

When it finally came down to the negotiations over a final settlement at camp David, the facts on the ground were taken by Israel as the starting point, while the PLO believed that the facts in existence at the start of the process, ten years earlier, UN Resolution 242, was the right starting point. So the two narratives diverged. Barak thought he and Israel were very generous in their offers of relinquishing some settlements and giving the Palestinians back most of their territories, including some political jurisdiction over particular parts of Jerusalem. Arafat, and the Palestinians, thought that Israel reneged on most of their original promises and failed to address Palestinian grievances. Their position was that this final offer was nowhere in keeping with UN Resolution 242, and that the resulting Palestinian state being offered by Israel, would not be respected, viable or independent. Nor was the Palestinian refugee problem addressed.

So, here we have a powerful, prosperous, middle-class, democratic nation, Israel, going on with their primarily affluent lives, willing to continue with the status quo, which, after all, has allowed such prosperity. And on the other side an impoverished population, degraded and insulted daily by an occupying power, sinking deeper into poverty, anarchy and destruction with each passing month, with their only recourse to change being the disruption of the lives of their masters. Remember their original negotiating power was the peace and security of Israel, which they were willing to guarantee for a viable Palestinian state. They have nothing other to negotiate with.

Now in all this summary of events, I have no need to explain Palestinian actions by introducing Palestinian corruption, of which I'm sure there is plenty, nor the incompetence of Palestinian leadership, nor of the interference of other Arab powers, nor of the motives and intentions of these other Arab powers, nor of the "Jihad" values of Islam, nor of the crazies that are on both sides, nor of Israel's survival, nor of the Holocaust. I am merely making a reasonable case for explaining the dreadful scenarios that we are all witnessing. Both sides can easily distract attention by pointing to past or even recent atrocities or the deplorable excesses of small fractions of both populations. We shouldn't be distracted into a hateful position and thereby refuse to see the understandable human motives that fuel the conflict.

I am a peaceful person who hates violence and have never used it in any form to further my interests. I abhor its use. I believe that all human beings are worth my understanding and sympathy, in addition to my sense of justice. I also believe that listening to higher values yields better results than listening to baser ones. These beliefs lead me to the conclusion that Israel would be better served, would be more secure, would be better positioned to lead, would be happier, would be of strengthened character, would be better prepared for the future, and would be stronger, if it listened to the Palestinians, addressed their grievances, and produced a settlement that resulted in a viable and self-respecting Palestinian State which it could then help to become democratic and prosperous. I think Israel has the power to do what it wants with the Palestinians. I don't think the reverse is true. And so I voice my point of view with the best interests of Israel, my people, in mind.

If Israel would remove the settlements and return to security adjusted pre '67 borders, including the Arab parts of Jerusalem, what I would deem a trade-off between disappointing and displacing 200,000 Israelis for the sake of making peace with, and addressing the grievances of, several million Palestinians, including Israeli-Palestinians, and would indicate it was ready to start a compensation fund (aided by the UN) to resettle Palestinians in exile either in the new Palestinian state or elsewhere in the Arab world, and if Israel indicated it was willing to have a viable Palestinian State as a neighbor, if it offered to do these things in a timely fashion, and then the Palestinian authorities continued the Intafada, by coddling terrorists, or encouraging stone throwers, or had its uniformed officers shoot at Israeli Border Patrols, or promoting in any way any of the activities many are blaming on its corrupt leadership, then I would agree with these blamers, and agree with a stern response from the IDF. But if the Israelis are not willing to risk that amount of discomfort for the sake of the Palestinians, but instead are willing to use their superior arms to powerfully crush those Palestinians who, through their defiance, demand these things, then I'll stick to my judgements as voiced above.

Morty Breier
June 5, 2001
Kailua-Kona Hawaii

A R T S Y    O F F E R I N G S

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PAINTED FACES.... By Morty
Morty and Karen came as "Your Worst Nightmare"
at Meggies Farewell Party at the Holuakoa Cafe in Holualoa.

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S A G E   R E M A R K S

PARSHAT BEMIDBAR - ORDER FROM CHAOS
MIDRASH GIVEN TO CONGREGATION KONA BETH SHALOM
May 25, 2001, SHALOHA SHABBOS SERVICES By Morty Breier

“Order is heaven’s first law”… This phrase is found on the bottom of page 573 of our Chumish, a comment on the portion we have just read… and I thought cleanliness is next to Godliness. Maybe cleanliness is a kind of synonym to orderliness. Most of my parent’s complaints were about how orderly my room was. They actually took care of how clean it was. Well, enough of this reminiscing. Is order indeed heaven’s first law?

The Book of Numbers starts with counting and ordering. The twelve tribes are counted. Of course this being a male dominated culture, only the males of fighting age and ability were counted. To be fair they were going to attempt conquering Canaan so I guess fighting men were in the forefront of their thinking. At any rate they didn’t order the counting, HaShem did. And the count numbered over six hundred thousand, divided into twelve groups and then the Levites who were counted separately.

So, being an engineer I’ll attempt extrapolating on these numbers to get a full picture of the size of the Israelite horde moving through the desert. If we assume that the Levites had an average number of males over 20, around fifty thousand; and we assume that 15% of the males over 20 were 4-F and therefor not counted; and that every male Israelite had a wife and an average of two children that were not counted; we arrive at a population of three million six thousand three hundred. That’s almost three times the population of the entire state of Hawaii. On the move. Through the desert.

And then HaShem ordered them to order themselves. We’re standing still in known locations and we still have trouble ordering ourselves. He, or She, arranged everyone into a square configuration surrounding the tabernacle with the Levites as the inner ring and the other twelve families, each of which were about two hundred and thirty thousand souls, as the outer rings. Everyone positioned just so, these families along the North face, those along the South, etcetera, etcetera.  It seems from these instructions that HaShem likes order. He didn’t say, for instance, intermingle and make friends. Or mill about aimlessly. Or find a comfortable spot and claim it. He said you go here and you go there and don’t you forget it. Infact some serious loss of life might occur if you wandered too close to the tabernacle. An old Kapu.

So I mean its true, order seems to be part of our heritage. I don’t mean as Jews, although my father, a proofreader on the Yiddish newspaper “Der Tag, Morgen Djournal” was certainly fond of order.  And he made me fond of it also, maybe that’s why I became an engineer. I mean as human beings. Maybe it’s a male thing. Women seem to have a greater tolerance for disorder… that’s what makes them great mothers and mavens on interpersonal relationships, which are never that orderly. Although I thank him for sending me Karen who, beside her loving presence, is also partial to orderliness.

On the other hand we men like order so much that we end up liking machines. We like the orderliness of machines. They are restrained to move in particular ways only. We like their simplicity, their understandability, and their predictability. In the past we’ve modeled the cosmos around the gears of machines… little did we know that probability functions of disappearing psi muons would be our latest answer. We get more indeterminate, more feminine every day.

But what we are actually saying is that order is more subtle, more exquisitely dependent on our gloriously active consciousness, more interactive with the universal forces of physics and the living web of nature. Less easily comprehensible than we originally thought but ordered nonetheless. The order, being more subtle, is closer to the innermost meaning of reality itself.

The way our cosmology reads right now is that it all started about fifteen billion years ago, with a singularity, the Big Bang, an event never repeated. At this singularity, this beginning moment, this first cause, energy ruled, matter was inherently unstable. Probability functions were continually collapsing into infinitesimal material realities that lasted billionths of a second before collisions transformed them into yet other extremely short lived collapsing probability functions. All was ever shifting, shimmering, undisciplined chaos.

HaShem didn’t like that so he set the whole reality on a mission to make order out of that original chaos. Of course, according to Kabbalah, his holiness was already in the shattered vessel. The infinitesimal continuously exploding pieces, the profane chaos, already had the potential of becoming larger constructs, more orderly configurations, capable of being imbued with meaning, starting their journey toward holiness. Because they partook, in some hidden aspect of their essence, of the serene orderliness of their creator.

You and I, sitting here, are the result of that mission. We are made in the image of HaShem because, like HaShem, not only are we ourselves exquisitely ordered, but we order things we come in contact with. We do HaShem’s work. We make the profane, the unordered mish-mash of sensory data, into meaningful arrangements and relationships, into ideas and concepts, into families and congregations, into homes and gardens, into Torahs and Aaron HaKodeshes, into cities and nations, into science and cosmology.

So who says order is the business of small minds. I say small order is the business of small minds, cosmic order is the business of cosmic minds. And we Jews have always prided ourselves on our cosmic mindfulness. That’s why we zeroed in on monotheism. Barry and I had this discussion on the very white sand beaches of Midway Atoll, competing with the intricately dancing Gooney birds. What does God is One mean? It means that all things are related, are in relationship with each other, are alive because of their interaction. All things are because they have an effect on their surroundings and their surroundings have an effect on them. It is all one fabric, one tapestry, one unfolding, one happening. And we, each of us, each consciousness, each spark of the divine, are asked to give meaning to it all, to put it all together.

HaShem wants to have us make the profane holy. We do that whenever we act as though our lives are meaningful, our activities productive, our relationships creative. We do that whenever we clean up the mess we make, whenever we scrub exhaust gases from smokestacks, whenever we treat effluents before we discharge them into the sea. I do that whenever I extend love to my neighbors, advocate peace in the world, do my civic duty. I do that whenever I honor my wife and friends, whenever I build a pleasing addition to my house, whenever I order my thoughts, whenever I straighten my desk. These are my mitzvahs.

But beyond these everyday acts of organization, discipline and conservation sits a consciousness whose very purpose is to give meaning to our lives and the universe we find ourselves in. We are birthed by the cosmos and HaShem’s cosmos is meaningful. Our Torah was the first to tell us that and our sciences, more recently, much as they fail to acknowledge it, confirm the integrated lawfulness of it all. We are perhaps the first consciousness developed enough to put it all together. That’s why we are described as being made in the image of God. Not only do we put the observable together and give it meaning, we create new configurations, new constructs, new identities and fit them in with the given.

Reading from our Siddur we say God spoke and it was.  God speaks us into existence. Speaking is language. Language is syntax. Syntax is order. Order forms existence. Our universe is the playing out of HaShem’s primal laws. We ourselves are both the results of that play, and players of our own creative impulses. We conceive of an idea and, sooner or later, we create it. Our concepts are the words from which our reality is created. We, humanity, dreamed of high speed comfortable transportation and then we invented, designed, built and improved trains, cars and airliners. We, each of us, earlier on, imagined ourselves partnering with a loved one and then we married. We imagined ourselves as parents and then we raised children. We imagined ourselves as practitioners of some skill and then we became doctors or engineers or homemakers.

We ourselves create meaning. HaShem wills the universe into existence and I help Him or Her by willing Morty into existence. That’s my job, just like each of your jobs is to will your own character and story line into existence. We say thank you HaShem for reviving my soul, my consciousness, each morning so that I might climb into the driver’s seat of my life’s drama. That is the order HaShem offers us. This Torah portion asks that each family be itself, wear it’s unique name proudly, take up the position it was meant to have and wield the standard that represents it. In this way Israel was to march toward the new horizon prepared for it, the Promised Land. Let it be that way for each of us. Let us each ground ourselves in our being, bear our name and its history proudly, occupy our existential positions with grace and dignity and lift our moral and ethical standards high so that, with HaShem’s help, we might also enter the promised land of our enlightenment.

Thanks
Morty Breier.

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THE ATHEIST

On the Upper West Side of NYC lived an assimilated Jewish
man who was now a very militant atheist.  But he sent his
son to Trinity School because, despite its denominational
roots, it's a great school and completely secular.
 

After a month, the boy came home and said casually, "By
the way Dad, I learned what Trinity means!  It means
'The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.'"
 

The father could barely control his rage.  He seized his son
by the shoulders and declared, "Danny, I'm going to tell
you something now and I want you never to forget it.
'There is only one God...  and we don't believe in him!'"

emailed to me by Harold Meltzer

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Shining like a jewel in the Pacific Ocean, 1,200 miles to the Northwest of Honolulu, Midway Islands welcomes visitors for unparalleled adventures in eco-turism, history, diving and sport fishing. Once the scene of fierce fighting during WWII, this coral atoll with its azure lagoon is now part of The U.S. National Wildlife Refuge system. And here we are... Barry, Gloria, Karen and I. What a great week of nature walks, sunning, bird watching, bike riding, snorkling, looking at WWII relics and good food. 34 other guests and us... that's it... we had the fine white sand beaches and the wooded trails all to ourselves... except for the 500,000 Gooney Birds, up close and personal.

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This E-Zine of sorts is being started with no expectations. I need not earn a living so my time is my own and I elect to play with some of that time by launching this MONTHLY MISSIVE. It is a creative act inspired by Rabbi Zalman Schechter-Shalomi, my guru once removed, who said "It's time to download our wisdom on the hard drive of humanity." He was speaking to those of us who prefer sageing to ageing.

The idea is to get a bunch of hip contributors, secret sages,  to comment on the passing scene, to offer creative work and to wax philosophical about perennial issues.  The tribe's elders, and I count myself among them, need a forum and at least this is a start. To begin with, I hope that my dear friends become this E-Zine's regular contributors. The trouble is that they are, as is perfectly appropriate for this mission, iconoclasts to the core and getting them to cooperate is like hearding cats.

And that's just the part that tries filling these electronic pages... trying to get readers is an entirely different proposition. I remember an actor telling me that it's better to be in a play with a large cast because then all the family and friends of the cast are at least sure to help fill the seats. The start of this E-Zine readership will be like that. Friends have friends and family. And who better to make contact with than our friends and family.

Even though we now have had only three other contributors, my cousin and dear friend Marcus Uzilevsky, my old buddy, the wonderful poet Rose', and posthumously, the legendary Tony Price, the rest being my stuff, I hope these pages might inspire others to join in. I will be sending email messages to those I particularly want to contribute but everyone is welcome to try their hand. I hope to have several different views on a particular topic that needs addressing and I'll let you know each month what those topics are.

Feel free, of course, to submit anything you want. I would like your submittal to be accompanied by your photo and an autobiographical piece. I can read attachments in Microsoft Word or in Corel WordPerfect and I prefer JPEG formatted images. My email address is morty@aloha.net. Let's see what we can do together. Remember:

POWER TO THE PEOPLE.
SHALOHA
MORTY BREIER, Editor

Marcus Uzilevsky: We are proud to have as a contributor distinguished California artist and musician Marcus Uzilevsky. Talk about hip, he's in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, for his 1965-68 group The Third Bardo, (he jammed with Dylan in the Cafe Wah). Under his present name Uzca, he has two world music CDs Slice of Light and Gypsy Dreams, this last he calls Nouveau Klezmer. Klezmer, the Jewish music of Eastern Europe with its weeping and laughing clarinets and violins has always been in Uzca's heart and soul and his latest CD blends Gypsy guitars, African talking drums, Middle Eastern belly dancing rythms, Klezmer violin and clarinet and hypnotic vocals in his intuitive universal language. We are invited to join in the dance of life to celebrate our common humanity. As an artist Marcus is well hung in permanent collections and 50 one man shows, selling over a half million lithographs. Born in Brooklyn, migrating to California in the late sixties he is now esconsed in an old railroad building on the fringes of Marin. Uzilevsky has long been a spiritual journeyer, creating his poetry in both the visual and musical arts. The man is out there and be here to tune in on his poetic offerings..

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Rose': Rose' was born deep in the Bronx in 1934. He began crafting his poetry attending a number of colleges during the 50's. After a stint in the army he bounced around working as a lifeguard, masseur and astrology writer. He saw his heaviest combat duty teaching High School English in New York. In the early sixties he assiduously pursued Ancient Greek while dining on Mexican beaches, toping in European cafes and slumming in Moroccan dives. Between a stint of acting, including the movie "The Edge", he published a book of drawings and launched skin diving trips throughout the Yucatan and the Florida Keys. His "School of the Night" specialized in occult classes and his "Liquid Wedge Gallery" made media history with sculptor Tony Price's first "Atomic Art Show" in NYC in 1969. Struck with what he calls his "Man-o-pause", Rose' started his epic poem "The Pearl in the Crown", still a grand work in progress. He performs as a stand-up poet in salons, homes, theatres, clubs, sushi bars, on radio and television in New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Santa Fe. Rose' now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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Tony Price, 1937-2000: Thomas Anthony Price wa born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1937. He began his art career in the Marine Corps, painting sixty-foot murals and portraits of generals. After his stint in the marines, 1955-57, he painted and illustrated books, poetry and magazines in New York City and Mexico. Price then worked from 1962-3 as an art director and set designer in films and television for Studio 30 in New York and Brazil. In 1963 Price left for Paris and Rome to paint. His European work is held by collectors in Italy, France, Holland, Germany and Spain. In 1964 he returned to New York and began sculpting in stone, metal and electronic materials. Since his move to New Mexico in 1965, Price has worked with nuclear scrap materials exclusively from Los Alamos from which he has created icons of world religions. Tony died in early 2000 after a yearlong battle with a stroke that had left him partially paralyzed.

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HOLIT BAT-EDIT.   The term that I made up, SPIRITUAL BIVOUAKING could be seen as a “conceit” — that is, each word has the opposite meaning. This is not my intention. For me the meaning is that I have found both a safe and nurturing place to be/live.
    It has taken me 55 years to arrive! First I had to acknowledge that the ancient rites or customs of my tribe could seep through to me over thousands of years - and that was hard to conceive. My tribe wandered around the middle east, then got exiled into Europe, Asia, Africa and the Northern Hemisphere taking us through different customs, different colors, different foods and different languages — it certainly rubbed off on me and my family. I spent nearly half a life time, trying to return to the metropolitan desert of unleavened bricks (Israel, Greece, Egypt) and then, the second part, trying to spiritual bivouak here on the Pacific Rim of the Big Island.
    At the beginning of the 90’s, I landed on the Big Island, and with just a few escapes back to my roots in the middle east, I have bern sinking healthy roots into this rock.
    Luckily I have crossed paths with a Hawaiian woman sage — The Messenger-Mahealani. Many spirits here have visited, tested and frightened me at the beginning. Semi-conscious, I went through some ceremonies, perhaps they were initiations of which I knew nothing; of seeing marchers go by, of having animal guardians that I was too ignorant of understanding and accepting. Sometimes I tried not to see it negatively and just to interpret it as wild, dramatic and inexplicable!
    Ultimately I crossed Pele on her own summit — Kilauea, and she gave me a lesson that I still shudder to remember. I was thrown flat into a deep crevice of newly dried lava one night. When I was helped up by a friend, I was unscathed, not one scratch! We screamed with surprise that I wasn’t bloody. Mahealani explained to me later what I had done and how Pele taught me a lesson and she did!
    Humbled by my actions, starting to feel how I fit into this powerful place. I know this as a warrior — biivouak is a fitting word. For me it means: finding a place to protect myself, while also nurturing myself with the spirit of Pele, her people and her island.

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