We at Tikkun unequivocally condemn the attack on and murder of innocent Israeli civilians riding a bus from the occupied territory of Gilo into Jerusalem. There is no excuse for this violence. It is morally outrageous, It is humanly disgusting. It is politically the perfect gift to the most fascistic elements in Jewish life, and has already provided an excuse for the Ariel Sharon/Shimon Peres coalition government to grab back more of the West Bank and increase the misery of the Palestinian people.
     Of course, these are acts that are aimed at destroying the possibility of peace and reconciliation, and at undermining the efforts of those in the U.S. who wish to support the creation of a Palestinian sttate and end the occupation and provide reparations for the Palestinian people. The victims of these acts of terror are not only the immediate victims, but also the entire Palestinian people who are punished for acts they neither authorized nor support. But since on the crazy logic of Ariel Sharon the entire people must be punished, more and more Palestinians get to feel that their only recourse is to violence. And this gives more support to Hamas, which is exactly why these people engage in these acts in the first place. Sharon's response thus rewards the terrorists, and gives them more incentive for more acts of violence.
     Yet the Palestinian people also deserve some serious condemnation for not producing an alternative leadership to Arafat --a leadership willing to stand up both to Israel and to other Palestinians in the name of non-violence. Until the Palestinian people embrace non-violence, they will be captives of the crazy defacto alliance between Sharon and Hamas, an alliance which works to the detriment of the Jewish people and the Palestinian people.
     Of course, we don't have to be reminded that the central stumbling block for Palestinian non-violence is the massive violence of the Occupation itself, the despair that it has engendered, not to mention the frequent response by the IDF of violence to non-violent Palestinian demonstrations. We who support Israel and want to preserve a Jewish state believe that the Israeli people will never be safe until the Occupation ends and a new spirit of repentance and generosity spreads through the Jewish people, and we are able to atone for the pain we have inflicted on the Palestinian people in thirty five years of brutal occupation, and in forcing so many Palestinians out of their home and not allowing them to return in 1948-49.
     No political settlement will convince Hamas and Islamic Jihad that they should stop their violence--they want nothing less than the full destruction of Israel. But a political settlement, if done with a spirit of atonement and repenatance on the part of the Jewish people, is the only possibility of breaking through the accumulated rage and anger of a Palestinian people who have been brutalized for many decades. If some turn to violence because of ideological certainty that Israel must be destroyed, many others have begun to support those acts and because they have experienced Israeli brutality, and see nothing hopeful being offered to them as a way out of the continuing Israeli oppression. It is these people who can be moved to stop supporting Hamas, and to isolating them, even though the Hamas and Jihad violence may well continue even after a poltiical settlement is in place. Ultimately, that violence can be reduced to the level of, say, the violence we face daily in the US--violence that we define as crime. But that will only happen when the vast majority of Palestinians believe that they have not only had their basic rights met, but also been treated with dignity, and have seen the face of a Jewish people that is generous, forgiving, and repentant for our part (which is not the totality of the blame, only our part) of causing this terrible struggle.
      Of course, on a moral plane, the Palestinian people too have much to atone for, and these acts of violence are only one part of a long picture of unwillingness to affirm the validity of Jewish national aspirations. But the first steps of repentance must come from the more powerful force, and at the moment that is Israel and the Jewish people.
So the real pro-Israel forces will be those who have the courage to stand up to Ariel Sharon and say: End the Occupation NOW. Israel doesn't need American Jews demonstrating against terrorism, though of course we all oppose it. It needs Americans, both Jewish and non-Jewish, to insist that the US government support an international intervention to separate the two sides from each other, stop the violence, end the occupation, provide reparations, and create the objective conditions in which the process of repentance on both sides can begin.
     In the meantime, just as we have mourned the deaths of Palestinians, created in the image of God, we deeply mourn the deaths of Israelis killed in these disgusting terror attacks. No amount of oppression can ever justify this kind of murder. It is wrong and it is horrible. We mourn these as crimes against humanity. And apart from all political contexts, we mourn the terrible loss of life and the terrible pain of the victims, the survivors, and the people of Israel who must live in ever greater fear, and with doubts that anything will ever give them peace.
     We pray for a new spirit of gentleness, kindness, genorsity, peace, justice and love to flow to both peoples, and through them to the rest of the peoples of the earth. And we pray that both peoples can overcome their justified anger at each other, stop the blame game ("you did it first" "no, you did it first") and be capable of seeing each other as beings created in the image of God and deserving of real respect and love. Nothing less will work, and nothing less is worth our efforts and energies.

-Rabbi Michael Lerner
June 18, 2002