Jews of the Diaspora--End Our Silence

The fabric of incarceration--stretching from the walled checkpoints choking Gaza and West Bank to the prisons of the United States, crossing seas to refugee detention camps here in Australia--on and on it goes. I will write more about this later but  now. this is my plea for Jews in the diaspora to refuse to be the accomplices of genocide, a slow and sometimes not so slow, eradication of Palestinian possibilities of life. No more excuses, no more "but our history holds us hostage," no more allowing the Israeli Prime Minister to use American Jews as assumed members of his own political party--any other leader using special communication lines to demand that American citizens act against the interests of their own government, against world peace, would not be tolerated. American and other diasporic Jews are responsible for allowing the gross injustices of occupation to continue. Netanyahu weeps false tears as the settlers unleash their killing forces--they have been doing this every day with the government's full support. A young gay woman dies because She defiles God--Occupation distorts all it touches--Israel becomes known for its weapons, for its security expertise which it practices on an imprisoned people, not for compassion or its ability to make a better future--every day brutality that passes as normal life takes all down to its level--we have seen this before. History, that drama we invoke so much, will be our own executioner. There will be no safe place for Jews or anyone else unless the production of Palestinian hopelessness stops. We cannot ask a people to live in terror and deprivation every day of their lives, to ask young people whom have never known anything other then the killing hand of Occupation to believe in the possibilities of life. What have we become? Jews of the diaspora we must let the peace activists of Israel know that are numbers are growing, we cannot remain silent as every day another heart falls into hopeless rage, hopeless despair, as another part of the Palestinian homeland becomes a settlers' swimming pool. We too are dying-- in our vision of ourselves as a decent people, as a people with a special insight into human suffering. The occupation drips blood every day and whether we live in New York, Melbourne, London or Paris it falls on our shoulders.