Tikkun Congress htm
NOTE: Thanks to Mary Wade, in Birmingham, director of the Children of Abraham Project (Sis Levin and co-workers in Bethlehem), for nudging me to share this report from Tikkun, a movement with which we in ECAPC share much in common. J. Stoner
Tikkun Meets with Congress
Hundreds of people from every corner of the U.S. gathered in Washington April 25-27 for the annual Teach-In to Congress for Middle East Peace. The major focus was to challenge the Bush/Sharon Axis of Occupation, the construction of the Wall through the West Bank, the targeted assassinations of suspected Palestinian militants—and to champion another path to peace, the path that was articulated in the Geneva Accord. While Ariel Sharon has temporarily succeeded in his goal of switching public attention away from the possibilities of peace and reconciliation, the Teach-In to Congress reminded policy makers that the Geneva Accord will be available as a path to peace whenever the U.S. and Israel decide they are willing to abandon their strategy of domination and control (and deciding the fate of others without allowing those others to participate in the deliberations).
Tikkun Magazine
May/June 2004:
As hundreds of Tikkunistas fanned out across Capitol Hill on Tuesday, April 27th, they encountered a high level of receptivity in many Congressional offices. While the national Democratic Party under the wimpy misleadership of Nancy Pelosi and Tom Daschle seems unable to project a coherent alternative to Bush on either Iraq or Israel/Palestine, many Congresspeople and their staffers recognize that there is a fundamental problem in the thinking that has led to the war in Iraq and to endlessly supporting repressive governments in the U.S. As a result, there is a new openness to the basic Tikkun idea: peace and homeland security cannot be delivered through domination and control over the other, but only through respectful engagement with, generosity toward, and caring for the well-being of the Other, both locally and globally.
The Bush/Sharon Axis of Occupation seems far less successful in 2004 than it did as little as a year ago—because many, many Democrats recognize that the Occupation of Iraq is failing, and this has made them more open to discussing what is wrong with Israel's Occupation of the West Bank. So Tikkunistas often found Democratic Congressional offices open to exploring ways to get this issue rethought. As a result of the Tikkun initiative, a group of Congresspeople are now planning to meet and discuss how they could use this changed atmosphere to provide greater security for Israel by supporting the creation of an economically and politically viable Palestinian state (such as that envisioned by The Geneva Accord). Although there were the usual range of knee-jerk right wing supporters for Ariel Sharon's policies (ranging from the overt supporters of Sharon to those Democrats who hid behind nonsensical themes like "the US should not impose a solution on anyone" that always seemed ridiculous when the US is actually funding the current policies of the State of Israel but even seems more ludicrous now when the US is in fact imposing its solutions on Iraq—to the more wimpy excuses like "I don't want to get involved in this issue until my Jewish colleagues in the congress tell me a given position is acceptable to them, since they know more about Middle East issues than I" or even "I don't want to take a stand that would be hurtful to Senator Kerry's presidential campaign, and it appears as if on this issue he has decided to align himself with Bush and Sharon, so I don't want to undermine his maneuverability during the election.") Yet though there were man
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