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  • Readers Respond
  • David Kronfeld, Peter Lawson, Susan Singh, and Howard Cort

A Note on Letters to the Editor

We welcome your responses to our articles. Send letters to the editor to letters@tikkun.org. Please remember, however, not to attribute to Tikkun views other than those expressed in our editorials. We email, post, and print many articles with which we have strong disagreements because that is what makes Tikkun a location for a true diversity of ideas. Tikkun reserves the right to edit your letters to fi t available space in the magazine.

Aipac and Iran

I was very disappointed in M. J. Rosenberg’s post “The Israel Lobby Is Killing Iran Negotiations in Favor of War” on Tikkun Daily. [Editor’s note: sign up for a free Tikkun Daily digest at tikkun.org/dailydigest].

Rosenberg makes the completely false assertion that the “Israel lobby” wants war with Iran, simply because Netanyahu, AIPAC, and many in the U.S. Congress do not want to remove the military option in dealing with Iran’s nuclear proliferation—a proliferation that is in total violation of international treaties and threatens to spark a dangerous arms race throughout the region.

Rosenberg bases his whole premise (that Israel and AIPAC are seeking war) on his statement that “it is obvious that Netanyahu and the lobby understand that no country would accept a deal in which it gives up everything in exchange for maybe something later.” I find this particularly funny, since although Rosenberg finds it so patently absurd that anyone would ask a country to “give up everything” in exchange for “maybe something later,” isn’t that exactly what so many people—on the left, particularly, as well as people of all stripes in the Arab world and in Europe—want Israel to do? Isn’t that what “land for peace” was all about? Isn’t that what Abbas et al. want Israel to do in order to enter into peace negotiations—to agree to all their demands, make concessions, and accept major preconditions (like going back to the pre- 1967 borders) even before talks begin? Isn’t that what Israel in fact did when it returned the Sinai in exchange for a piece of paper? It is amazing that what is so transparently ridiculous for others to accept is precisely what Israel is expected to rush into with open arms.

—David Kronfeld, New York, NY

Revolutionary Suicide

Lynice Pinkard’s article in the Fall 2013 print issue, “Revolutionary Suicide,” is one of the most profound and provocative articles I’ve read in many, many months. She’s absolutely right. We have to commit suicide, or work on our own dying to the death-dealing capitalist society we’ve inherited and with which we’ve been complicit.

I spent about fifty years as an Episcopal priest trying to undo the domination system in the church. The church as a social phenomenon is designed to give divine sanction to the domination system that is destroying our planet and us.

I am now working on a new book with the tentative title The Apocalypse and Beyond: A Manifesto for Creating a New Humanity. There are three things we have to do to create a new postcivilized way of being human. The first is to repent: a radical turning around and dying to the old civilized ways in which we have been thinking, acting, and behaving, much like Lynice Pinkard’s revolutionary suicide. The second is to work like crazy at nonviolently undermining all the capitalist strategies of domination while simultaneously recognizing that they cannot be defeated. Then we have to begin to create new underground structures and systems that can enable our heirs to survive the coming global apocalypse.

Thanks to all of you at Tikkun for supporting and encouraging the real humanity that is based on love and distributive justice.

—Peter Lawson, Valley Ford, CA

Lynice Pinkard’s “Revolutionary Suicide” piece in the Fall 2013 print issue is a very powerful article. I was put off by the title—Suicide (!)—when we are threatened with death, the sixth great extinction. But then she makes clear that she is talking about living more fully, not compromising with...

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