I have no doubt that if violence is permitted against a people, violence will permeate your [own] society, your family, your community and yourself. I think much of the violence in Israeli society comes from occupation. If you can break into someone's house and undermine a family's life and spread fear, then why wouldn't you also do that in your own home? Why wouldn't you do that in your own community? It's a very short distance from there.
Rabbi Nava Hefetz
13
Violence
Occupation
Some people claim that the Israeli army's violent oppression is impossible to struggle against nonviolently.
I agree that it is a problem but suicide is not the right message. I'd like to remind you that in the Jewish world one of the greatest myths is Masada. The rabbis, the spiritual religious leadership, were wise enough to put an end to this myth because they realized its potential danger. Human life is sacred. If you want to struggle, struggle against an army but not against civilians. Don't struggle against civilians, against children. I'm not justifying what our side is doing. Heaven forbid. I think it's an outrage. I think many of the negative things that happen in Israeli society nowadays, like corruption, stem from forty years of occupation. I have no doubt that if violence is permitted against a people, violence will permeate your [own] society, your family, your community and yourself. I think much of the violence in Israeli society comes from occupation. If you can break into someone's house and undermine a family's life and spread fear, then why wouldn't you also do that in your own home? Why wouldn't you do that in your own community? It's a very short distance from there. I can only be responsible for my actions. The responsibility I try to take finds expression in the attempt to open the eyes of as many Israelis as possible. I cannot do more than that. I can try to change perceptions through teaching texts and education. I would like to see similar efforts on the other side. The Palestinian Authority's textbooks - I'm very sorry to say this - encourage violence. I don't see our textbooks educating people to hate Arabs.1 Nowadays the textbooks are very different from the ones I used as a girl - they depicted this land as empty. I see from my son's textbooks that the narrative is very different. It isn't the narrative I knew, of an empty land.- 1For a critical view of and excerpts from textbooks used by both the Palestinian Authority and Israeli public education systems, see Rotberg, Robert I., ed. Israeli and Palestinian Narratives of Conflict: History's Double Helix. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. To see IPCRI's analysis and evaluation of Palestinian and Israeli textbooks, see www.ipcri.org/files/peace-education.html.