In the name of peace, ‘Chad Gadya machine’ must stop
by dr. michael cooper
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“Chad Gadya” — that old Aramaic fable sung at the end of the Passover seder — is often associated with a sense of relief that the long evening is finally over. It also helps that it comes after four glasses of wine.
It’s also a great metaphor, making its appearance in a painful contemporary poem by Yehuda Amichai:
An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion
and on the opposite mountain I am searching for my little boy.
An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
both in their temporary failure.
Our voices meet above
the Sultan’s Pool in the valley between us.
Neither of us wants the boy or the goat
To get caught in the wheels
Of the terrible “Had Gadya” machine …
The workings of this infernal machine were brought home to me toward the end of a recent medical mission to a hospital in east Jerusalem. A graduate of Tel Aviv University Medical School, I am now a pediatric cardiologist in the Bay Area, returning to Israel a few times each year to do volunteer work in the occupied territories. I come to help because, due to travel restrictions, pediatric specialty care is relatively unavailable to Palestinian children.
After a day of heart surgery in east Jerusalem, I went to a west Jerusalem hospital to be with my cousin and his family after the birth of his second grandchild. After admiring the new baby and sharing a dinner of two large vegetarian pizzas, I said goodbye and left. Passing through the hospital lobby, I stopped to read a large poster depicting the former medical director of the emergency department, Dr. David Appelbaum.
On Sept. 9, 2003, Dr. Appelbaum was one of seven people killed in a suicide bombing at a café in Jerusalem. Among the dead was his daughter, Nava. They had gone to the café for a father and daughter talk before Nava’s wedding, which was to have taken place the next day. Before the burial, her fiancé placed her wedding ring on the cloth covering her shroud.
And the terrible Chad Gadya machine grinds on …
The very next day, back at the east Jerusalem hospital, I was called to the pediatric intensive care unit to evaluate a quadriplegic 4-year-old Arab girl a month after she was paralyzed by a gunshot wound to the neck. Asil Arara had been playing in a field near her home in Anata, not far from the separation wall and the Israeli settlement of Anatot on Oct. 25, 2011.
The Palestinian village of Anata has experienced escalating violence; about a month before Asil was shot, men and women of the village were beaten by Israeli settlers with clubs and pistol butts when they attempted to cultivate their land. And now this — a quadriplegic 4-year-old girl who will require complete and total care every day of her life.
The tragedies of Dr. Appelbaum, his daughter, and Asil underscore the devastating workings of the Chad Gadya machine on both sides — the grinding machinery of an occupation that many Israelis believe must end.
This is not a leftist or defeatist position. This is a practical position — one that’s been promoted by such committed Zionists as David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Rabin, Ami Ayalon and Avraham Shalom.
Ayalon and Shalom are both former directors of the Israeli security service, the Shin Bet. These men and thousands of Israelis like them see that it’s impossible for Israeli democracy to survive while trying to ingest and administer the occupied territories. To quote Shalom, “We must once and for all admit there is another side, that it has feelings, that it is suffering and that we are behaving disgracefully ... this entire behavior is the result of the occupation.”
Isn’t it time to stop the terrible Chad Gadya machine? Isn’t it time for peace?
Dr. Michael Cooper lives in Lafayette. He graduated from Tel Aviv University Medical School and is a clinical professor of pediatric cardiology at UCSF Medical Center. He wrote “Foxes in the Vineyard,” a work of historical fiction set in 1948 Palestine.
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01/11/2012 at 11:19 PM
If only ending the occupation, in and of itself, would lead to peace
If only ending the occupation, in and of itself, would get Hamas to stop calling for “intifada after intifada after intifada” for ALL of Israel.
If only ending the occupation would not place Ben Gurion Airport and all of Israel’s population within direct range of Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s rockets.
If only the jihadists who murdered Dr Applebaum and his daughter merely wanted Israel to leave the West Bank.
If only the occupation, and nothing else, was preventing peace.
If only all this were true—then I would join Dr Cooper’s sincere plea.
But since it isn’t true, (the PA and Hamas BOTH tell us this every day), then the occupation can only end as part of a deal in which each side gives up something. And the only thing Israel can get in return is the declaration—in Arabic, to the Palestinian people from their own leaders—that this is the end of the conflict, that there is no “right” of return to Haifa and Jaffa, that an Arab state of Palestine must agree to live in peace ALONGSIDE Israel, not in place of it.
Until then, ending the occupation simply moves the borders of the conflict that much closer to every Israeli.
Yes, the settler violence—whether against Palestinians or the IDF—is inexcusable and must not be tolerated. But the Chad Gadya analogy is inaccurate—the settlers (of whom only an extremist minority engage in violence) are not the cause of a conflict that began before their communities were even established. The cause of the conflict—in 1947 and in 2012—is the refusal of the Palestinian leadership to accept living in peace alongside the Jewish state.
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