{"id":782,"date":"2014-07-09T10:54:50","date_gmt":"2014-07-09T14:54:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/?p=782"},"modified":"2014-07-11T23:05:21","modified_gmt":"2014-07-12T03:05:21","slug":"horror-upon-horror-and-hope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/?p=782","title":{"rendered":"Horror Upon Horror – And Hope?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Three<\/a>
Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar, and Naftali Fraenkel<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There is never enough horror.<\/p>\n

In the first week of July, we learned that Eyal Yifrach, Naftali Fraenkel, and Gilad Shaar, the three Israeli boys kidnapped on June 12 were, in fact, murdered \u2013 within hours of their capture. Likely, the authorities were aware of that fact, given, among other things, the frantic cell phone call from one of the teens played at the burial.<\/p>\n

\"Mohammad<\/a>
Mohammad Abu Khdeir<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Israel reacted with a massive round-up of over 400 Palestinians suspected of being Hamas operatives. Five Palestinians died in the crackdown, including another teen, 15-year-old teenager Mohammed Dudeen.<\/p>\n

The burial of the three Israeli boys was followed, also within hours, by the brutal beating of a Palestinian teen, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, who was then set on fire.\u00a0 He died sucking in the flames consuming him.<\/p>\n

Terrors unfold so fast that there is no keeping up or holding back the bile.<\/p>\n

Yesterday I read an eloquent analysis of the horror of acquiescence.\u00a0 David Grossman\u2019s essay \u201cOn hope and despair in the Middle East<\/a>\u201d was published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cToday,\u201d Grossman wrote, \u201cin an Israel that has known so much disappointment, hope (if ever mentioned at all) is always hesitant, a bit timid, and apologetic. Despair, on the other hand, is utterly confident and self-assured, as if speaking on behalf of a law of nature, an axiom that states that between these two peoples there shall never be peace, that the war between them is a heavenly decree, and that altogether, it will always be bad here, nothing but bad. As despair sees it, anyone who still hopes, who still believes in the possibility of peace, is at best na\u00efve, or a deluded dreamer, and at worst, a traitor who weakens Israel\u2019s wherewithal by encouraging it to be seduced by false visions.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn this sense, the Israeli right has won. The right, which adheres to this worldview \u2013 certainly over the last decades \u2013 has managed to instill it in a majority of Israelis. One could say that the right has not only vanquished the left: It has vanquished Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is eloquent, impassioned reading.<\/p>\n

For days I have remembered the nightmare years of the early 1980s, when I went on radio shows in Columbia, Missouri, as a local peace activist.\u00a0 I was asked to speak about the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon.\u00a0 The Israelis were complicit, it had been discovered, in the Phalangist-perpetrated Sabra and Shatila massacres.\u00a0 Palestinians were murdered en masse while Israeli Defense Forces surrounded both camps, stationing troops in order to stop any residents from escaping the slaughter.<\/p>\n

And now, today in Israel?<\/p>\n

Tens of thousands of \u201clikes\u201d on a Facebook page calling for \u201crevenge\u201d for the murder of the three teens.<\/p>\n

Explicit calls from all directions to kill Arabs (or political leftists).<\/p>\n

Members of the Knesset quoting Torah to prove that there is a God of revenge who backs their murderously inflammatory rhetoric.<\/p>\n

And the like, as one would expect, from the \u201cother side\u201d is just as pernicious, just as hateful, just as ever-present.<\/p>\n

This is not \u201cmere\u201d extremism.\u00a0 None of this is spontaneously generated by the particular horror of the way those boys died.\u00a0 It is the result of years of hope suppressed, perverted, dismissed.<\/p>\n

In my lifetime, I have watched \u2013 yes, in horror \u2013 as Israel\u2019s hope has been highjacked.<\/p>\n

I was lucky to have been ordained by ALEPH \u2013 The Alliance for Jewish Renewal, the same year as Rabbi Simcha Daniel Burstyn, who was born and raised in America and has lived and worked in Israel on a kibbutz for decades.\u00a0 Recently, he wrote: \u201cI am very much aware that history is playing itself out on so many different levels and that recent events look very different from different vantage points\u2026 The more I read, the more I feel that the distinction is not between Jews and Arabs, but really between those who believe in using physical force, violence and fear, and those who believe in \u2018live and let live,\u2019 in using tools of peace and coexistence, in creating peace by de-escalating at EVERY OPPORTUNITY.\u201d<\/p>\n

He signed, as he always has as long as I have known him, \u201cpray for peace.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so I shall.\u00a0 Because there is enough horror.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is not \u201cmere\u201d extremism. None of this is spontaneously generated by the particular horror of the way those boys died. It is the result of years of hope suppressed, perverted, dismissed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[188,184,186,189,187,185],"class_list":["post-782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-extremism","tag-eyal-yifrach","tag-gilad-shaar","tag-israel","tag-mohammed-abu-khdeir","tag-naftali-fraenkel"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=782"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":800,"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782\/revisions\/800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}