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Friday May 2, 2003

Six-Day War victory has become our prison

Rachel Biale

The counting of the Omer, the period between the Passover celebration of liberation from slavery and Shavuot's commemoration of the giving of the Torah at Sinai, is a time of reckoning. As the Israelites traveled through the desert from Egypt to Sinai, they had to undergo a transformation as individuals no longer enslaved, and as a nation no longer oppressed.

This year, more than 3,000 years later, we are in the midst of a political journey. We must choose our community's response to the "road map" put forth by the Bush administration to Israel and the Palestinians. In assessing our response to this plan, we must ask ourselves in all honesty whether we can continue to support Israeli policies that keep the Palestinians under occupation, enslaved as we were once in Egypt.

As we celebrated Passover this year, my thoughts were split between the Exodus of our past and a new Exodus we must enact in our future. We came out of Egypt at the birth of our nation. Now we must go out from a new Egypt: the West Bank -- Judea and Samaria -- and Gaza, the very lands to which we journeyed from Egypt.

At Passover we celebrated our liberation from the Pharaoh. But to the Palestinians, we have become the Pharaohs. And, for us, too, Israelis and diaspora Jews, the occupation is an oppressor. Just as we were enslaved in building pyramids in Egypt, so we have enslaved ourselves by building settlements in the territories.

This year we will mark the 36th anniversary of the Six-Day War exactly on Shavuot. Just as at Passover, I could no longer fully rejoice in the story of the Exodus, so, at Shavuot, I cannot celebrate the military victory of the Six-Day War. What was once our greatest victory has become our prison. The Torah promises us the whole of the land of Israel and commands us to spare none of its inhabitants. This narrative is the demon from our past that we must exorcise. We must reject it in favor of the Torah's other teachings: "Justice, justice, shall you pursue," remembering that "you yourselves were strangers in the land of Egypt."

The Palestinians certainly have their own demons to exorcise: from the jihad of the Koran and suicide bombings to rejections of compromise from the 1947 partition plan to Camp David and Taba. But regardless of what they do, we must finally take an unequivocal position against the occupation.

I have been working as a professional in the Jewish community in the Bay Area for 15 years. I have always kept my views on the occupation apart from my professional life. I can no longer do so. Over the years, especially since the present intifada began, quite a number of Jewish professionals have approached me "off the record" to talk about their growing distress in continuing to endorse the official line of the Jewish community -- supporting Israel, no matter what.

We all care deeply about the threat to Israelis' personal security and abhor Palestinian terror. But the present Israeli government exploits our fears to pursue more and more aggressive policies to sustain the occupation and the settlements, which undermine the security of all Israelis. Our communal unity and solidarity look more and more like complicity.

Israelis vociferously debate the question of the occupation and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while the American Jewish community has imposed upon itself a code of silence. By adhering to it, we are failing Israel and ourselves as a community. On a personal level, I am failing my friends and family, from my mother standing for years in the peace vigils of the Israeli Women's Peace Movement to my nephew, against his own political convictions, serving in a tank in Gaza.

As painful and divisive as it will surely be for our community, it is time for a public debate about the proposition that the only way to support Israel as an organized community is

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