Good Afternoon. I am a doctoral candidate at Saybrook Graduate School in San Francisco; I am honored to be here today to share my perspectives alongside my colleagues. My academic field is systems science and we systems folks are keenly interested in patterns of connection and wholeness. You will find that these two concepts, interconnectedness and wholeness, will be woven though the presentation today.

I was raised and nurtured within the Jewish community in the United States. I attended Jewish religious primary school, followed by public high school where I was very involved in religious youth groups and then I chose to go to Yeshiva University an orthodox institution, where I graduated with a degree in Judaic Studies. And to give you a sense of my cultural milieu at the time, I was strictly Sabbath observant, kept the dietary laws with dedication, and once married, went to the mikva , the ritual immersion bath once a month in keeping with the laws of family purity. And from a political perspective on the subject of Israel, a number of my closest friends moved to West Bank settlements after graduation. Two were members of the Jewish Defense League. Binyamin Netanyahu was the distinguished speaker at my graduation.

When I was in my twenties, I had an experience that I like to think of as a wake-up call. Some kind of conceptual alarm went off that required that I live a more examined life. I began to question everything, and relevant to this presentation, I began to look at the practices of the Israeli government toward Palestinians. Mostly these were private explorations; I was too fearful to articulate them within my conservative Jewish community.

Then in October of 2000 at the beginning of the current intifada , I received news that one of my closest friends from Yeshiva University, who had become the rabbi at the hotly contested religious site of Joseph's tomb near Nablus, was killed. He was one of the first Jewish casualties of the uprising. And I was in shock. His death became a second wake up call for me. No longer did I feel I had the luxury to have private disagreements with what was going on in Israel because lives were being lost, Jewish lives, and at a higher proportion, Palestinian lives. As Martin Luther King Jr, said when he finally spoke out against the war in Vietnam, "A time comes when silence is betrayal."

To look at this odd relationship between my friend Hillel and me, I’d like to address this idea of interconnectedness. Hillel and I each represent essential aspects of the larger community. Even though there has been a tendency for us to want to reject each other and to demonize each other, a systemic perspective suggests that we actually need each other and the community needs both of us. Part of my development has been to understand the ways in which I am intricately connected with people of radically different perspectives. I might want to change their views but really what I need to do is further understand and embrace the inherent contributions of those views.

At the risk of sounding like the idealist another member of the panel pointed to, I'll say that I am most interest in exploring the ideas of a shared democratic state as was defined by Others here. The basic notion that I am talking about is one political entity that encompasses Israel proper and the West Bank and Gaza, historic Palestine. I am not interested in determining an outcome but am interested in the process of envisioning such a solution because it gives me the opportunity to clarify some underlying assumptions that are important for any future configuration. So the focus of my presentation today will be to look at these underlying assumptions, one being the character of the Jewish state. I hear a lot of discussion about the need for two states as a necessary separation between the two people at this point in time. So even if there are two states, a discussion about the exclusively Jewish character of the state of Israel must still be addressed in terms of the Palestinians citizens of Israel. In addition, I agree that there is a tremendous value in looking at regional solutions to the problem because a confederation of Middle East states seems to offer more stability and sustainability than any of these tiny states can achieve on their own, but still, the character of the state of Israel as a member of that confederation must be addressed. And in terms of my "idealism", it seems to me that all proposed solutions are so far beyond what the current political climate will accept that I've pretty much given up on working toward a vision that will "sell". Even the most conservative solution would require such major societal transformation that instead of trying to create a vision that is acceptable to people, I am more interested in basing my vision on principles and ethics.

And I will be the first to admit that there are several serious practical limitations to the implementation of a shared democratic state. The first is that it calls for the dismantling of the current ethnic democracy that privileges Jews, which is the core vision of dominant Zionist ideology. In other words, to talk about a shared democratic state directly threatens Zionism. This is the biggest threat, as has already been mentioned by another member of this panel. The other barrier is that both Israeli Jews and Palestinians have suffered so much pain at each other's hands that a tremendous amount of healing needs to take place before the two people can peacefully co-exist within one political entity.

Maybe this is a good time to be explicit that I will specifically be focusing on Jewish responsibility when looking at some core contributions to the conflict. My personal style is to address my responsibilities for misunderstandings with other people. For instance, if I get into some conflict with a co-worker, I do not think about what they could have done better but I work on what I could have done better. I hold my community to this same standard so I bring the same approach to this conflict. Since my community is the Jewish community, I am addressing our contributions and responsibilities. This style does not negate that Palestinians have responsibility for their contributions, but I don't believe it is not my job to define that work for Palestinians or to predicate the work we Jews need to do on their actions.

In order to address the first of the barriers to a democratic state, the sensitive issue of Zionsim, I want to begin by saying that in my mind, it is no accident that the State of Israel rose out of the ashes of the Holocaust. The push to create a Jewish homeland was, I believe, our best response to the traumatic overload of that event and before that to the general European anti-Semitic sentiments that allowed the Holocaust to happen. We ran from our plight in Europe, thinking that if we could create an army and properly defend ourselves with that army, like other nations, we would no longer live in fear. That was our working hypothesis. But we deceived ourselves into believing that we could start new in a world that was already populated. That painful slogan of the early Zionist movement "a land without a people for a people without a land" is a perfect encapsulation of our self-deception.

Before going forward, I want to say that I've come to these assessments with a sense of compassion for our collective actions. We were so frightened, so traumatized that only kindness and not blame is warranted in looking at our choices.

With that said, what I want to say that might seem controversial, is that I now believe that we were unskillful in our choice of how to solve our very serious problem in Europe and Russia. We thought that we could escape persecution by returning to the ephemeral dream of Zion. We ran from the task of establishing ourselves as equals within our countries of origins, and went to another part of the world where we systematically stripped the land of Palestine from its indigenous people. We ran away from one set of problems only to create another.

So what now? The fact that millions of Jews live in the little strip of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River is a reality that I accept and embrace. We did the best we could. But for us to continue to insist on an ethnically exclusive Jewish state is not only unethical to my standards, but it prevents us from doing the necessary work to heal the wounds that we suffered under anti-Semitism.

Let me explain how this is so. First of all, we have built our system of governance and system of defense in Israel based on our perpetual fear of our "hostile neighbors" who we have decided are hostile toward us because we are Jewish. It is difficult for us to see that their hostilities are related to our colonization of their land. We have concluded that an ethnically exclusive state, what we call a Jewish homeland, is our island of safety within this "hostile sea". And here is where we have gotten ourselves into trouble. We defend our island of safety with one of the most sophisticated armies in the world, but somehow we are no safer. The fact that Jews in Israel are at substantially higher risks of harm and death than Jews in any other part of the world is a testament to our faulty logic.

Let's see how this plays out. For instance, in our brutal attempts to suppress the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, we are perpetuating the exact situation we fear most--hatred toward us. Our violence against the people in the occupied territories and the inequities that we systematically impose on the Palestinian citizens of Israel fans the flames of hatred against us. So by our own acts of injustice, we continue the cycle of hate that keeps us living in fear.

To dismantle the structures of an exclusively Jewish state is not only the only way to grant appropriate democratic freedoms to the Palestinians, but it is the only path to our own freedom as well, because it releases us from faulty thinking that our safety lies in our exclusivity. To uphold a dream of safety by shackling others has created the continuation of our greatest nightmare. In other words, we can not end our victimization until we end the victimization of others. In essence, I am not only working to dismantle the ethnic Jewish state because of my sense of basic human connection with the Palestinians but because I see it as the necessary step to ensuring our safety, which will allow for the healing that still needs to take place.

I am also incredibly interested in the fact that we Jews have become so invested in Jewish nationalism, Zionism, so much so that we forget it is a mere blip in the spectrum of Jewish historical experience. We have successfully survived the Diaspora for a couple of thousand years and we continue to be successful in the Diaspora today. I would like to suggest that perhaps Zionism is more an import from the European culture in which we lived than a deeply rooted Jewish concept.

I recognize that I have been quite vague about any specifics concerning a shared democratic state. It would be fantastic if at this point in time we could address practical concerns--what would the system of governance be? How would social and economic equality be ensured? Unfortunately we are not yet at that point. The injustices first have to stop, reconciliation has to be worked through and healing has to take place before peaceful existence is even possible. And I believe that we Jews have the responsibility to take the risky first steps in the process toward this healing and reconciliation.

So now I want conclude by moving to action. What can we do? What can I do? The first thing that I do in taking responsibility is to clearly examine and re-examine the history of my people and to honestly assess our skillful and unskillful actions. Then I continue to work to challenge our attachment to Zionism and an exclusively Jewish state as our only the means of continued survival. I also believe that there is important work to be done in uniting with others in the world community who see the current injustices, so that we can together apply world pressure to the Israeli and United States governments to end the violent suppression of the Palestinian people.

The last thing that I want to share in terms of action relates back to the concept of wholeness and the relationship between inner wholeness and outer wholeness. I act to continue to heal the divides within in myself. Although the idea of living in a shared state, in an atmosphere of peaceful coexistence is necessarily in the future, the work toward getting there starts right here, right now with me. I believe that the divisions among people that appear external are really reflections of our own internal divisions and that is the place where the work must start. How easy is it for me to demonize Sharon or a suicide bomber? How much more difficult is it for me to embrace these people and others for what they have to teach me? The extent to which I still demonize members of our collective community is the extent to which I am limited in creating peaceful co-existence in the world.

And lastly, I continue to clarify my vision and identify the values and ethics that drive it forward. We can all do that, no matter what the particulars of our vision are. We have I believe the ability and the responsibility to guide and shape our futures instead of sitting back and watching the future unfold without our approval. This is our collective work, no matter our political bent and I challenge us to continue that work from this moment forward.

Thank you.