Daniel Lubetzky

It sounds so crazy.  With growing climate change, planet earth as we know it is on the brink of a radical transformation that could endanger the very survival of the human race, if not at best require the most painful and radical adjustments for us all.

Why then would any rational human being want to stand in the way of finding solutions to prevent an epic catastrophe?

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OneVoice Israel just commenced an exhibit titled "Till White Smoke Emanates" urging the Israeli and Palestinian heads of state to continue negotiations non-stop till they strike an agreement (the only missing ingredient in the leaders’ commitment to "ongoing" but not "uninterrupted" negotiations, as the OneVoice Mandate urges). 

The "white smoke" concept is borrowed from when Archbishops close themselves off and don’t come out of a big hall till the Pope has been selected.  The Exhibit revolves around 24 wood chairs that Israeli artists were asked to transform into statements about this issue.

Their Exhibit is now on display at Itzhak Rabin Square in Tel Aviv.  Another article about it in Hebrew is here.

News reports have alluded to the fuel shortage in Gaza, with complaints from Hamas officials about Israel chocking Gaza off, and most recently a retort by the Israeli government that Hamas is intentionally causing the shortage (by avoiding pick up of fuel trucks) to create political crisis.

I decided to ask a couple of colleagues living in Gaza how the people on the streets saw the situation.  Here is one response:

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Perri Klass wrote a very interesting article on the interplay between modern medicine’s use of anesthesia and its interplay with the far less scientific and more mysterious concepts of consciousness and self.  Anesthesia, as he writes,  encompasses "the allure and the terror of leaving yourself behind."

British Ex-Jihadists are changing course and not only renouncing terrorism, but organizing themselves to counteract it. The apt term for people who wrap themselves under the the mantle of Islam to justify inhuman acts of terror that are inconsistent with the religion’s core tenets is as pseudo-Islamic terrorists.  Here is an example of people that are starting to reject them.

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Something serious is going on when rice is rationed by the largest retailer in the world in the wealthiest country in the history of the world.

My team member Phil caught this story about it!

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When I wrote Re-Imagining Ourselves in Our Fallen Heroes, I was inspired after starting to read the first couple paragraphs from Taylor Branch’s op-ed in the Sunday New York Times’ Week in Review and his comment that "more than once, the dominant culture has turned history upside Down to make itself feel more comfortable."  After reading the whole article, I was also struck by his comment that the "civil rights movement rose from the the fringe of maids and sharecroppers."  This should resonate among modern activists…

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A couple years back, a comment that was making the rounds among Israeli policy-makers was that "Palestinians need to have their own Altalena."

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Here is a teaser of two separate parallel campaigns about to be launched to mobilize  Palestinian and Israeli citizens to push for a two state agreement in 2008.

The guy in the picture, by the way, is Sefi Kedmi, a OneVoice Youth Leader who used to belong to the right-wing Moledet party and then changed his political outlook and has been one of our most committed youth leaders on the Israeli side.  He took the initiative to create an Israeli college campus network of activists and several other grassroots campaigns.

It is undeniable that AIPAC has tilted to the right over the last 10 years, almost hijacked by hawkish constituents.  Perhaps then the birth of JStreet is an unavoidable outcome.  My concern though

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