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Our second article is by Ilan Brandvain of Kvutsat Aseef in Ramat Gan

This is not an article about the latest violence in the Israeli South and the Gaza Strip.

This is not an article about the thousand plus people who died or millions who lived in horror for
three weeks as bombs fell on their houses and pubic buildings.

It's not about the insanely immoral Hamas hiding their bodies and their weapons among children
and mosques or the overly powerful IDF who didn't hesitate to shoot anyway.

It's not about who started what, or whether or not a bullet came out of that school, or what
was written on the leaflets we dropped.

And it's definitely not about "you-can't-say-anything-if-it-doesn't-affect-you-directly",
because now I am here, and it’s frightening, and definitely not the best place to be making life
and death decisions.

It's also not about how bad I feel that the first thing I thought that Shabbat when, after ten
days of out control rocket fire, and I heard on the radio that the IDF had begun an offensive,
was "they had it coming".

But it is sort of about how that is exactly what most Israelis I talked to believed up until the
end of the war regardless of the human toll.

It's kind of about how every time I said "you cannot bomb your way to peace", or "violence
against Gaza only bolsters the Hamas", or that "there is a reason why rockets are flying from
Gaza. Perhaps we should look at where this anger is coming from", or, God forbid, "Instead of
spending millions of dollars on an offensive, we should spend the same money building thousands
more bomb shelters across the south, send aid to the besieged Gaza population, and publish full
page newspaper adds across the world declaring “Israel chooses peace”, I was either laughed at
politely or just taken as insane. “That’s just not how it works around here. The Middle East is
different.”

It might be about how most Israelis think the war was a success, and that we should have
continued, even though today Gaza is certainly angrier, more extreme, more miserable, less
controllable, and still just as short a walk from Israel.

But in the end, what this article is really about, is a Jew raised in Michigan, living in Israel, who
believes in Zionism as the way for Jews to find meaning, growth, inspiration, peace and a moral
basis from their religion, history and culture in our modern world. In fact it may be the only
st
way for non-religious Judaism to continue into the 21 century in any meaningful way; which is
important to him. Not because of Jewish continuity for the sake of Jewish continuity, but
because he thinks Judaism has something really special to offer to those of whose members
who chose to engage and the greater world community, as well. But every time he looks around
at what Zionism has created, he sees nearly the opposite.

And so he educates, relentlessly, towards something better, towards what he knows is right,
from the center, with partners, and with any chanich willing to engage.

Because the only other option is to give up.
And we are not there yet.