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For Israeli and Palestinian Survival, Let the Goodwill of the American People Flourish

This article was originally published by Anglican Ink, August 17th, 2025

In a recent column for Religion News Service titled “As Gaza starves, churches must lead on Palestinian recognition,” the Rev. Jim Wallis made the same case that increasing numbers of European governments have already been making: specifically, that recognition of a Palestinian state, ASAP, is the best way to end Palestinian suffering.  Churches, Wallis argued, can play a critical role in backing up this strategy, writing in RNS: 

Governments hold the power here, and any U.N. resolution in September recognizing a Palestinian state can be vetoed by the United States.  But what if the churches in the U.S. and around the world took the lead in recognizing a Palestinian state? That would send a clear moral message – the recognition and protection of the Palestinian people is a matter of faith and conscience, grounded in a commitment to sovereignty, security, and multifaith pluralism for all  Elevating these moral truths in the public narrative is now essential.  It may be the only path forward.

A clear moral message?  A commitment to sovereignty?  

Exactly whose sovereignty, one might ask Rev. Wallis, are we speaking about here?  Does a 14 or 15-year-old Gazan boy recruited by Hamas to be a soldier on the battlefield have any say in the sovereignty discussion?  Does an eight-year-old little Gazan girl whose Hamas father hides RPG missiles under her bed have any say when the official bigwigs of Mainline Protestantism take their “votes of conscience” on Palestinian sovereignty?  To be sure, Wallis writes, and with almost perfect perfunctoriness, that “Hamas cannot be a part of a future Palestinian state.”  Yet he provides no guarantee that the group itself, or another one with similar aims but better window dressing, won’t win landslides in Palestinian elections.   

Yet there is no question that images of starving men, women and especially children, which have flooded television, computer and cell phone screens across the entire globe are not only gut-wrenching, but have sent a singular message to all of humanity.  The message is this: the American people, who have principally provided the Israeli government with the funds to implement its war strategies, simply don’t care about the Palestinian people.

Our moral standing as a nation in the eyes of the global community is at its lowest point, and it is not because the war to defeat Hamas is unjust. Rather, it is because the American people and the United States government continuously give Israel one tool, and one tool only, to defeat the genuinely existential threat posed by Hamas: namely, weaponry.  As a consequence, our goodwill as a nation inevitably gets lost in geopolitical translation.

The Hamas government of Gaza, which should never be referred to as a mere “terrorist organization,” as the title only obscures both its hard and soft power in world affairs – including its de facto takeover of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) – must be completely defeated if there is to be any hope of a normal life for both Palestinians and Israelis.

The United States government, under this and the previous administration, has been completely derelict in aiding Israel’s defeat of Hamas while ensuring Palestinian civilians are not harmed.  The evidence of that harm is overwhelming, and it is shaping our national character on the world stage.  

It is this that has to change immediately, not, as Jim Wallis and others would have it, forcing from outside, and from on high, a two-state solution when there is no consensus between Israeli and Palestinian societies on what a two-state solution would mean.

The United States can turn a new page on the Gaza humanitarian crisis as well as Israel’s increasing international isolation if we, the American people, had the will to resolve our own domestic political conflict: namely, working on ending the bitter enmity that exists among Palestinian sympathizers and the pro-Israel American Jewish community, whose approaches to this conflict span the entire political spectrum.  Only when these various camps, which currently see each other as mortal enemies, decide to work together on some Mideast policy area that they can agree upon, even while disagreeing in other areas, can members of the U.S. Congress pass legislation that is genuinely pro-peace, pro-human being.

For example, as a workable two-state solution will most likely take many more years, if not decades, to come to fruition, as will a safe cleanup of the live ordinance-littered Gaza Strip, an entirely separate constructive diplomacy track could be taken that would not prejudice the ultimate political resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; other than, of course, to make the American people’s commitment to the safety, health and well-being of both peoples perfectly and abundantly clear.

The United States should seek to lease from Israel, for a period of 99 years, an uninhabited swath of land in the Negev Desert for the express purpose of building up a massive medical and housing hub, staffed by American medical professionals who wish to participate, to serve the needs of Gazans who have specifically renounced Hamas and all other groups and ideologies bent on seeking Israel’s destruction.   

The entry and exit points of this state-of-the-art medical and housing hub would be under the full control of the IDF, operational details of which would be spelled out between U.S. and Israel under a Memorandum of Understanding.  The Israeli government, working in tandem with the U.S. State Department, would determine which Palestinian civilians would be allowed entry into the medical and housing hub.

No U.S. troops would be deployed in conjunction with this 99 year land lease.

Congress would appropriate funds to this land lease and its infrastructure, which would include massive incentives for America’s premier medical institutions to establish satellite hospitals in the Negev medical and housing hub.  Israel could use the funds from this U.S.  land lease – which would be an entirely separate package from its current U.S. funding package that is subject to increasing congressional scrutiny – to shore up its border security on all fronts.  Indeed, former IDF spokesman and commentator Jonathan Conricus has frequently remarked that terrorist networks are still managing to smuggle arms right into the West Bank from the Jordanian border, to say nothing of the violent chaos on the Syrian border. 

While this Negev medical and housing hub cannot address all the complex variables required to bring about peace between the two peoples, it could achieve what U.S. foreign policy has very clearly failed to do: assert our collective American commitment to the lives and security of all the people in that troubled land, without exception.   

Indeed, after a May lecture at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London addressing the spiritual legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams was asked about the war in Gaza, and how Bonhoeffer, himself murdered by the Nazis, might assess this crisis were he alive.  His Grace responded with this reflection:

Never forget why the state of Israel exists, whatever you think of what it’s doing, never forget why it’s there. It’s us. Don’t just point fingers.  I think he might say…maybe this is Williams rather than Bonhoeffer…he might say that the whole situation illustrates what happens when communities are convinced that no one is with them or for them. Israel has long believed that no one is really with them and for them.  The Palestinians believe, with a good deal of justification, that nobody is with them and for them.  What happens when that sense of abandonment prevails?  Nothing to lose.  That’s the tragedy.  Whatever solution we are praying for and working for has to be something which says to both communities, you are not as vulnerable as you fear because we are committed. 

Perhaps with the establishment of a long-term medical and housing hub inside Israel’s Negev, the American people will finally be able to demonstrate that we are committed to the safety and security of both peoples, and that we will not tolerate the abandonment of either. 

The world is too complex for one-note dissent on Syria/Iran policy

(Originally published on Tikkun Daily, August 31st, 2013)

Yesterday, before the British House of Commons voted against British participation in any Western military intervention in the wake last week’s sarin-mustard cocktail gas attacks in the northern suburbs of Damascus, protesters gathered in London to demonstrate. The protesters indignantly shouted “Hands off Syria! Hands off Syria!”

Yet the complicated question that I would like to have answered from President Obama, which he did not address in his White House press conference, is this: How exactly can the U.S., along with the French, prevent Assad and his henchmen from committing more atrocities, capture them dead or alive, and if alive, bring them before the International Criminal Court, and all without inadvertently empowering the Al-Qaeda affiliated Syrian opposition groups? Complicated, indeed.

The question I would like to have answered from the London protesters, and those on this side of the pond with a similar outlook, is much more basic: How would you feel if you and your family were gassed by a brutal dictator as major world powers sat back and did nada?

The questions of exactly what to do in the wake of the Syrian gas attacks, and how, are excruciatingly difficult, but a simplistic “Hands off Syria!” is nothing but a signed, sealed and delivered memo from the Western liberal camp that Bashar al-Assad should have a free hand to gas as many men, women and children as he damn well pleases. If the reality of over 1,400 Syrian men, women and children awoken in their sleep by explosions of poison gas that attacked their entire nervous systems, and which then suffocated them to death, is not a sufficient threshold for international intervention what would be? 14,000 sarin gas murders? 140,000 sarin gas murders?

President Obama has not yet laid out anything that resembles a coherent post-chemical weapons massacre strategy to the American people and the Congress, but simple assertions that any Western response to this chemical weapons atrocity is somehow untoward sends an unmistakable message to Bashar al-Assad: Kill as many of the people in your country that you think you own as you like, we just don’t give a damn.

The tide of one-note dissent that we have seen since the Syrian chemical weapon attacks ought to quickly give way to a genuine debate about policy options, including the crucial question of how to respond to Iran’s recent saber-rattling. As reported by the Wall Street Journal:

Officials from Iran, Syria’s chief ally, said publicly for the first time that U.S.-led strikes on Syria would provoke retaliation on Israel. “Any attack on Syria would burn down Israel,” Iranian news media reported Maj. Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi, chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, as saying.

So let’s get this straight: a U.S.-led humanitarian intervention in Syria intended to stop a murderous dictator from gassing innocent civilians would be so morally offensive to Iranian General Hassan Firouzabadi that he would want to burn down Israel.

Make no mistake, the intent of such a statement is to hold the entire world political hostage to a cult of mass murder.

There is nothing inconsistent, morally or strategically, about pressing for a Middle East nuclear weapons-free zone, which includes bringing Israel into the NPT, and urging President Obama to give the Israeli government the bunker-busting bombs and aircraft that country needs to prevent psychopath Iranian generals from getting their hands on nukes.

The world is too complex for one-note dissent on Syria/Iran policy.

Moving from the cusp of nuclear war

(This article was originally published in the Sunday, September 21st 2008 edition of the Wisconsin State Journal.)

In a recent New York Times column, Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote that the Israeli government would be willing to use its own nuclear weapons arsenal to turn Iran into a “nuclear wasteland” if such an action were necessary to thwart the Iranian nuclear weapons program.

Morris’ de facto ultimatum was chilling to its core: the Iranian nuclear standoff must be settled Israel’s way, or it’s the nuclear highway.

Yet tragically for the cause of world peace, the reaction of many on the left to Israel’s saber-rattling toward Iran — of which Morris’ high-profile piece in The New York Times was doubtless a part — has been to deny increasing evidence that Iran is simply hellbent on obtaining the bomb.

Liberal opponents of military action against Iran consistently invoke the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that Iran suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

Leftists and peace activists have historically never had a kind word to say about the U.S. intelligence community, and yet now that community’s estimate on the Iranian nuclear program is treated by the left as if it were a divine revelation.

How sad it is that a significant portion of our country, and particularly those who claim to be peacemakers, have chosen a “see no evil, hear no evil” posture on the Iranian nuclear program, in lieu of demanding from our political leaders that they get serious about advancing a rigorous and comprehensive nuclear nonproliferation agenda in the Mideast — pronto.

Presumably, the “see no evil, hear no evil” crowd would need an Iranian nuclear whistleblower with photographic evidence of Iran’s nuclear weapons program in order to be convinced that the Iranian government is simply dying to get its hands on the bomb. What a shame.

If past is prologue, and if history is laced with irony, by the time such an Iranian nuclear whistleblower emerges Iran will already have amassed upwards of one hundred atomic warheads. And the knowledge of those atomic weapons will be met with a familiar refrain: Iran is a responsible government and can be trusted to maintain its nuclear deterrent with nothing but, how shall we say, the utmost of moral decency.

The only real way to ensure that the Mideast region does not plunge into all-out nuclear war is to rid the Mideast of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons programs.

This, of course, is not a terribly fashionable concept, at least in practice.

Israel’s ardent defenders often shudder at the suggestion that Israel should even acknowledge its nuclear arsenal and sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, let alone start the pathway toward nuclear disarmament.

Perhaps the first thing these defenders of Israel could do is explain to their fellow Americans how an Israeli nuclear strike in the Islamic world, for whatever reason, would be consonant in any way, shape or form with U.S. national security interests. If they can’t make that case — which they never have and never will — then the appropriate U.S. position should be nothing but a full demand for Israel to be incorporated into the nonproliferation regime.

With respect to those in the anti-Israel crowd — those prone to a malicious mentality of “why not give em’ a taste of their own nuclear medicine” — let them serve as nothing more than Exhibit A for why a Jewish state must be, and why the U.S. must help the Jewish state get on far more solid footing among the community of nations.

The Holocaust, after all, was at its core a failure of human conscience, and as these small-minded nuclear karma types prove, the human conscience is light years away from tipping the scales of its impulses from destruction and persecution to protection.

The United States should commence negotiations with both Israel and Iran with aim of producing a tripartite treaty committed to resolving this nuclear standoff and riding the region of nuclear weaponry once and for all.

First and foremost, the United States must acknowledge our own moral failure: Turning a blind eye to the nuclear weapons arsenal of Israel — while in the same breath lecturing others about the importance of stopping the spread of nuclear weapons — is a slap in the face to the entire Islamic world.

The starting point of these negotiations should be a clear commitment from the United States to get Israel into the nonproliferation regime.

Secondly, because this standoff has arisen from circumstances unique to the region, it is only fitting that any resolution to the crisis be uniquely tailored to the region’s needs.

Israel, in short, has little faith in international institutions, and understandably so.

A key component of these tripartite negotiations should be an acknowledgment that Israel itself must have the ability to assess threats to its own security, like the Iranian nuclear program, and not rely solely upon the I.A.E.A for verification.

Therefore a key aim of these negotiations should be a commitment from Iran to allow both the United States and Israel, in addition to the I.A.E.A., access to all of its nuclear installations for random, rolling inspections.

In return, Israel would commit to a specified date to abandon its nuclear weapons program. Once Israel has lived up to that commitment and declared itself nuclear weapons-free, the U.S. and Iran would then be permitted to inspect Israel’s nuclear installations for verification.

A major part of this nuclear crisis is the fact that aside from not signing the NPT, Israel is continually sending the message to its regional neighbors that its nuclear arsenal will remain the linchpin of its national security strategy— indefinitely.

By negotiating a specified date for its nuclear disarmament, Israel would be sending the clear message to the region that this state of affairs is not everlasting, and yet the date provision would still give Israel the room it needs to pivot its posture from nuclear fortress to a full regional partner for peace.

Without an immediate infusion of more tools in our diplomatic quiver, the region appears to be plunging full-speed ahead toward nuclear calamity.

May a concerted effort from our government to prevent nuclear destruction in the Mideast be the first step in our national atonement for ushering in the nuclear era; an era where the worst of the human imagination threatens to overwhelm its promise.

With commitment and good faith negotiations, I believe the people of Israel and Iran will realize that the path of destruction they are now on is nothing but an affront to the beauty and dignity of both Jewish and Persian civilizations.

Lawmakers need to give nation a chance at real liberty

(Originally published in the July 13th, 2016 edition of the Albany Times-Union.)

Philando Castile, the 32-year-old Minnesotan shot dead last week by a police officer, was lawfully carrying a gun. He had a concealed weapons permit. Now he’s dead.

Some liberty.

To avenge the killings of black men by police,  Micah Johnson shot 12 Dallas police officers, killing five. He too had no criminal record and lawfully owned the guns that were used to kill the officers.

Some liberty.

Two-thirds of the American people do not own guns, and yet we have a two-party system in which both parties vigorously defend the moral stain on our founding document: the Second Amendment. Why are both parties so invested in a constitutional right that has turned our nation into a war zone?

An emotionally-searing testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2013 may yield some insight.

The testimony was given by Neil Heslin, whose 6-year-old son, Jesse, was one of the 20 children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting. The chair of the hearing, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who knows how handguns, not just assault rifles, can take human life, struggled to hold back her tears. Feinstein discovered the bodies of her colleagues, San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk, both killed by a revolver. In the witness chair was a Sandy Hook father grieving the loss of his son, supporting the senator’s proposed legislation, even as he firmly supported the Second Amendment.

Feinstein’s assault weapons ban would have allowed the Sandy Hook shooter legal access to the same weapons that killed Harvey Milk and George Moscone. The ultimate political appeal of the hearing went like this: Please, N.R.A., help us to lower the killing capacity of the people who want to shoot our nation’s children.

Some liberty.

The moral logic being foisted upon us by those defending the Second Amendment requires urgent attention. We are living under a two-party system in which both parties impose the ethics of warfare — the cost-benefit battlefield analysis of human lives saved or killed — on our everyday civilian life.

Debates still rage over whether Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan ultimately saved more human lives or not. Regardless of one’s position, the debate is within the brackets of reason: Japan and the Allies were at war. The American people, theoretically, are not supposed to be at war with their neighbors, and yet our gun policy debate is framed as though we are.

If it is not reason that is guiding the gun debate in this country, what then could be?

Arguably, it is the experience of personal resilience on the part of the shattered. Dianne Feinstein herself had a crash course in resilience with the Moscone-Milk assassinations. Resilience is the key to our survival, our ability to function, and our guard against depression.

Yet just like the question of whether a person is operating from authentic faith or mere blind faith, none of us has a right to judge whether our fellows are operating under authentic resilience, which never abandons reason, or mere blind resilience, which does by rote. That is between them and God.

What we have a social obligation to judge, however, is whether the policy output that flows from that resilience produces reason.

When we are asked to invest in piecemeal legislative efforts, like assault weapons bans, to merely lower kill counts, we are being asked to ratify a de facto state of domestic war: a war that has no single political objective, but empowers grievance killers to engage in battle at the time and place of their choosing. We are likely to hear more arguments from gun control politicians that the Dallas shooter, who passed background checks, should have only had access to a handgun, not a long-gun. Perhaps two or three Dallas police officers would have been killed, instead of five, so the irrational thinking goes.

The Second Amendment is an engine of domestic war and instability and must be repealed. Defending it has no basis in reason. All civilian firearms, including for routine police patrols, should be banned.

If we can send robots to Mars, surely we can come up with technology to create a new class of non-lethal weapons that would allow Americans to safeguard their homes by disabling intruders long enough for police to arrive.

Making a legislative investment in personal defense technology would marry our resilience in the midst of these horrors to actual reason. It would enable us to demand real liberty from our politicians, rather than ratifying their acceptance of domestic warfare.

The Tango of Bowe Bergdahl’s Unreality

This article was originally published in Patheos on June 11th, 2014.

A striking 2009 photo of one of the nation’s most talked about people, Bowe Bergdahl, recently surfaced: the then 23-year-old, wearing his Army fatigues and a yellowish scarf around his neck, is standing at an Army outpost in Afghanistan. He is smoking a pipe. His right hand is on a sand bag, the left hand comfortably in his pocket. The young soldier’s entire pose, down to his right foot about to casually cross the left, bespeaks a man living in an alternate universe. That universe might well be one of classical Greek warrior statues, standing contrapposto, too confident in their martial mastery to be perturbed. Whatever Bowe Bergdahl was thinking when he struck that pose, it worked: the photo illumines a young man trying to square his conceptions of himself into a wartime reality that did not fit.

Public opinion polls on the Bergdahl-Taliban prisoner exchange don’t look good for the newly-freed 28-year-old: Most Republicans, according to one poll 71 percent, opposed President Obama’s prisoner exchange, while even among Democrats, according to the same poll, support for the deal stands at 55 percent. Simply put, there is no ticker tape kind of love affair between the American people and this soldier who once dreamed of military gallantry in faraway places, according to published accounts.

Perhaps one day the American public will find out if Bowe’s alleged inquiry to his platoon mates about hiking over the Afghanistan mountains to China is fact or fiction. Whatever the case, Bowe would not have been able to indulge his fantasies about war and his own being but for one overarching, yet entirely overlooked, fact: the civilian population of the United States began indulging in fantasies about war, and our own virtue, long before Bowe ever did.

Though there seems an increasing national awareness over the sheer immorality of sending a tiny portion of the U.S. population off to die in wars in the name of this country, while the rest of us are instructed to “go shopping” – as President Bush once told Americans – the American people retain something of a Bowe-like fantasy about our own personal attributes in a time of war. Like Bowe, many Americans have a compelling need to mark out their own virtue, specifically the virtue of love for country; putting “Support Our Troops!” bumper stickers on one’s car is a favorite.

Yet this gulf between documented displays of patriotic virtue and putting one’s body where one’s mouth is – or one’s bumper sticker – is arguably just one among many signs of our times. For instance, according to a recent poll by the Public Religion Research Institute, a certain portion of the American people are apt to inflate their weekly church attendance when asked. Social scientists refer to this as the “social desirability bias,” namely people knowing full well what is considered to be a socially desirable attribute, and doing what they have to do to project a distorted reality of who they are, in this case devout church-goers, and thereby win the respect of their peers. The poll begs the question: If some Americans are prone to inflating their religious observance for their own social advantage – thus distorting their relationship with God to do so –  is it not reasonable to ponder if some Americans inflate their admiration for the troops – thus distorting their relationship with their country and fellow citizens – for the same darn reason?

Unless the U.S. military justice system files charges against Bowe Bergdahl and proves him guilty of a heinous wartime offense, nobody should be calling him a traitor. Based on now ample documentation in the public domain, Bowe is a young man whose heroic conception of himself and his own virtue was 180 degrees at odds with the reality of the war he found himself in. In a published e-mail to his parents before his disappearance, for example, in which he criticized the U.S. war in in Afghanistan, Bowe wrote, “I am sorry for everything…The horror that is america is disgusting.” Those are tough words indeed, and entirely indicative of an inner break of mind and spirit that led to what seems a reckless and dangerous decision to leave his post. As Congresswoman Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) stated this week in a House hearing with Defense Secretary Hagel about this prisoner exchange controversy, the military justice system will have to determine if Bowe’s actions met the precise legal definition of desertion.

But before casting stones at Bowe, the American people need to take a look in our national mirror: How are our own false conceptions about our devotion to country shaping our government’s response to the wider world?

Do you love America so much you are willing to die for it? For that matter, are you willing to die for NATO member states, like Poland, a country for which President Obama recently described U.S. military support as sacrosanct?

Let’s hope we grapple with the reality of who we are as human beings, and as Americans, before we repeat the same exploitive cycle of the last decade in yet some other part of the globe.

Until then, we are bound to heap the emotional burden of our national fiction – our embrace of national unreality – onto the shoulders of a tiny portion of young Americans, indulging as we do in that additional, and self-serving, fiction that it somehow doesn’t take two to Tango.

Nuns Who Commit Sexual Abuse (from Tikkun Daily, August 15, 2013)

Steve Theisen, 61, is the Iowa director for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP). Unlike the vast majority of men and women whose lives have been positively affected by the support SNAP provides to victims of clergy abuse, Theisen was not sexually abused by a Catholic priest: he was sexually abused by a Catholic nun.

The abuse began in the 4th grade, when Theisen was just nine-years-old. He stayed after class one day to wash the blackboards. Alone with the nun in the classroom, she showed him how the Eskimos kiss: by rubbing noses. Some weeks later, she then showed him how Americans kiss. Then a few more weeks passed. The nun then said to the boy, “This is how the French kiss.” And with that, the forty-something nun stuck her tongue in the boy’s mouth. It escalated from there. As Thiesen recalls, the nun never touched his genitals, and neither of them were ever disrobed. But from 4th through 6th grade, after school and sometimes on weekends, the nun would have him on the floor, French kissing and necking. Sometimes the nun would be on top of him, other times she put the boy on top of her.

Theisen also recalls sitting next to the nun in chapel. She would hold his hand under her religious habit so that no one would see.

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