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July 7th, 2017 
Awake Goy Haaretz has published a report about a tour by American rabbis of occupied Hebron led by two liberal Zionist groups, Breaking the Silence and T’ruah.
The rabbis are shocked by what they see in the occupied city– in which Palestinians have been moved out from their neighborhoods to make room for religious settlers. “I am terribly sad.. I am also infuriated,” says 93-year-old Stanley Kessler.
But only five out of “about a dozen” rabbis allowed reporter Judy Maltz to use their names.
[M]ost of them are unwilling to have their names or photos published. Their congregations back home, they explain, might not understand their decision to participate in a tour that offers a different narrative about the conflict – one that puts a human face on the other side and doesn’t paint Israel in the usual rosy colors.
“Most of these people have never had an opportunity to see what the Palestinians experience,” says Rabbi Jill Jacobs, the executive director of T’ruah, in a phone call from her New York office.
Maltz’s revelation is very much in line with what I reported in March from the J Street conference after an agonized rabbis’ panel. Their synagogue boards are attached to AIPAC, “we are losing the next generation,” one rabbi lamented; but the rabbis avoid talking about Israel lest they divide the congregation.
The rabbis Maltz accompanied to Hebron are in Jerusalem for a “leadership” program of the center-right Shalom Hartman Institute. They are the heart and soul of “the Jewish establishment,” older American Jews with strong allegiance toward Israel stemming from its creation and early wars. Many of these older Jews have never been to Israel, or only a long time ago, and have a dream-castle picture of the place.
Maltz says these rabbis might finally speak out against Israel over government measures to limit non-orthodox Jews’ access to the western wall– rather than about apartheid in Hebron. Though the rabbis didn’t want to talk about it to her!
These government actions have sparked an unprecedented backlash from American Jewish leaders. Might they now find the courage take a stand against other Israeli policies deemed harmful to the future of Israeli democracy – the occupation, for example? This was not a question any of these particular rabbis was ready to address on this trip, at least not on record.
That’s even after visiting a shrine to a Jewish mass murderer:
Before heading into Hebron, the bus makes a short detour to the nearby settlement of Kiryat Arba. By way of introduction, Frima (“Merphie”) BubisBubis points out two sites that speak volumes about the mindset of the local settler population: a park named after Meir Kahane, the racist American-born rabbi whose political party was outlawed in Israel, and the burial place of Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish-American physician who lived in town and who, on the Jewish holiday of Purim in 1994, shot dead 29 Palestinians praying in the nearby Tomb of the Patriarchs.
The rabbis can hardly conceal their shock at the words inscribed on his tombstone: “His hands are clean and his heart is pure.”
The rabbis also met a Palestinian who described the apartheid conditions:
Muhanned Qafesha, a local journalist and an activist in Youth Against Settlements – a Palestinian organization that advocates nonviolent resistance against the occupation, comes to brief the rabbis in their air-conditioned bus.
“You people don’t live here in Hebron, like I do,” he laments. “You come from America and from Israel, but because of the occupation, ironically, you have more rights in this city than I do.”
Whatever happened to the religious command to bear witness to an injustice? These rabbis may have forgotten that one, but not the young Jews of #IfNotNow. They’re not worried about donor pressure.
The rabbis Maltz names in the article are Kessler, Rabbi Daniel Burg of Baltimore, Michael Adam Latz of Minneapolis, Stephanie Kramer of Santa Rosa, California, and SaraLeya Schley, of Berkeley.
Source Article from http://mondoweiss.net/2017/07/occupation-identified-congregations/
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