The Cup of Tears is overflowing

I am a 48-year-old American. I have lived through Kennedy’s assassination, the Six Day War, Vietnam, Nixon, Reagan, Bush I…

During the Gulf War, I was engaged to an Israeli in Boston. His family all lived in Israel. His sister and her family had established a home on the West Bank, in the Moshav, where the government was subsidizing housing and new communities in this territory annexed by Israel in the Six Day War. [A Moshav is a farming community where all members own and live on their own farms. There are several on the West Bank.]

We had gone to visit the family in 1989, and everyone seemed happy. It was a nice small community, very green, with simple houses and a shared garden nearby. Larger agricultural areas lay a few miles beyond the dwellings.

In 1991, my fiancé’s brother-in-law was murdered by his Palestinian workers. One shabbat, he did not come home in the evening for the traditional lighting of the candles at dusk, when the first three stars are visible in the sky. In a few days, his body was found stuffed in the trunk of a car. He had been shot several times and knifed repeatedly. He was the kindest person I could imagine, yet his death seemed to be necessary to prove a point: “All Jews are the same in the eyes of the Palestinians.” That was what the Israeli families in the community said, anyway.

The man I was engaged to changed his attitude about everything. I could not blame him. Since I knew I could not live in Israel, the situation soon dissolved our relationship. I think he went back to Israel to help his little nephew, Matan (the name means gift) whom he adored, an incredibly talented and bright child, left fatherless at the age of six.

Imagine thousands of stories like this on the Palestinian side as well. The displacement. The despair. Finally, the emotional and physical poverty. This is the reality of daily life—and has been for years, even centuries— in the Promised Land.

Over the years, I have thought about this incident, which affected me personally, and countless others I have heard of from students or friends who went to live in Israel then returned to the United States. And I wonder, what is the solution?

I sit, now, at a children’s celebration of Israeli Independence Day. I am still thinking.

This day celebrates the establishing of a home, the state of Israel, for millions of Jews. But there is no home for the 3,000,000 Palestinian refugees. I have just been talking with a group of Jews prominent in a prestigious local community; there’s a saying that goes, “If you have a group of five Jews, you have at least six opinions…” So it was a good forum. These are all people who have good jobs and live in nice houses on streets lined with blossoming trees about the size of the trees we all gave coins toward planting in Israel forty years ago.

These folks have apparently also been thinking a great deal about their neighbors in the Middle East. One man said, “ It is disappointing to be living in a country that cannot handle the situation justly.”

Another paraphrased Noam Chomsky’s commentary of last week: “There was a Security Council Resolution in 1976 backed by ‘virtually the entire world, including the leading Arab states’ [“…the PLO, Europe, the Soviet bloc—in fact, everyone who mattered. It was opposed by Israel and vetoed by the US, thereby vetoing it from history.” - Chomsky].” The man continued: “This Resolution guaranteed a place where everyone could live in peace. But Chomsky also pointed out that ‘Ben-Gurion said that whoever approaches the Zionist problem from a moral aspect is not a Zionist.’”

Finally, an old man added, with hands outstretched towards heaven, “It’s like in the Christian Bible—a big power will come and destroy another power, Gog and Magog.”

Ultimately, the consensus was that the situation must become so intolerable that NATO will have to go in—another Bosnia—and that we are already at that point. This from the Jewish community.

There are bitter truths on both sides, and the world has let this situation go on too long. Today, in 2002, it is infinitely worse than it was ten years ago. At that time, there was still an active peace movement in Israel. My future sister-in-law, a teacher, was part of it. The death of her husband changed all that forever.

Establishing a token Palestinian state is not the solution: the issue of the Palestinian refugees is the key to a just peace. Yet this issue was already understood in 1948, articulated by Yitzhak Rabin, then an Israeli war officer: “After attacking Lydda [later called Lod] and then Ramla...What would they do with the 50,000 civilians living in the two cities?...Not even Ben-Gurion could offer a solution...and during the discussion at operation headquarters, he [Ben-Gurion] remained silent, as was his habit in such situations. Clearly, we could not leave [Lydda's] populace in our rear.”

Even if the territories annexed by Israel in 1967 were given to the Palestinians, no solution would now be achieved by forcing these people, who are now several million, into an area 20% the size of their traditional homeland. It is clear that a nation must be established by an international organization or congress equal in energy to the UN which established the state of Israel.

In the Talmud, there is a story about The Cup of Tears: that when the huge cup in heaven is filled with the tears of the world, it will overflow, and the Messiah will come. Surely we can see that it is time…and we must act now, before the end of the world. We must act to create a place for the refugees, providing an example of compassion and morality. Only then will we have the right to monitor or marshal the conditions for peace.