Israel/Palestine
Related: About this forumKidnapped Teens Are ‘Us’
There are rallies for politics, and for social causes, but here was a rally of such intimacy, so intensely personal, that the most frequently heard words were us, love, imagine and kidnapped.
The sidewalk opposite the Israeli consulate in Midtown was as somber as a chapel, though hundreds were jammed from the building line to barricades spilling more than a lane into Second Avenue. The people came, of course, for the three Israeli teenaged boys who, while hitchhiking, opened a car door and stepped into oblivion, driven by terrorists on the West Bank roads, away from Gush Etzion.
The kidnapping of Eyal Yifrah, 19, Gilad Shaar, 16, and Naftali Frenkel, 16, was not something over there, this was us, as close as a phone call. Rabbi Avi Weiss, whose Amcha group organized the rally, was quiet, contemplative, standing alone before the event. He said that his daughter Elana lives in Efrat, a town in Gush Etzion. Elana telephoned her father and said that she looks at the mothers of the three boys, and theyre us. Rabbi Weiss spoke to his grandson, an Israeli soldier, who called after 48 hours of searching the dusty Hebron alleys just blocks from Isaacs tomb; if only an angel would appear, as it did to stop Isaacs sacrifice.
We have to be very careful that this not be politicized, a right-wing yeshiva thing, said Rabbi Weiss. This is all of Am Yisrael [the Jewish people], no matter our denomination or politics. This is not right to left, its human.
Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun, a far-left publication, agreed, e-mailing us that he was shocked and outraged by the kidnappings, adding that it was ridiculous for anyone to try to contextualize the crime within the futility of West Bank politics. These teens, e-mailed Rabbi Lerner, were not the perpetrators or the creators of the occupation. They were children doing what their parents had brought them up to do and to be.
http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/new-york/kidnapped-teens-are-us
R. Daneel Olivaw
(12,606 posts)two Nakba day killings as you do about the three Israeli settlers?