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AUSTRALIA

Compassionate Jews weep for Gaza

  • 18 August 2014

In Australia and around the world, in recent weeks and months, places of Jewish worship have been tagged with graffiti. One tag reads, ‘Weep for Gaza’.

In the face of the tragic loss of innocent civilian lives in Gaza we express our anguish and call for an end to hostilities. We weep for Gaza. We pray that a just, lasting and durable peace can be found by the Palestinian people and Israel. 

We acknowledge that the people of Palestine experienced deprivation and expulsion from the place they called home in the wake of the founding of the modern state of Israel and we call for full recognition of the right of Palestinians to self-determination and their right to have a state of their own in which to live normal peaceful lives in freedom, living alongside the State of Israel in peace and recognition of the State of Israel. 

We also acknowledge the right of the Jewish people to a place of sanctuary and home in the place their ancestors called home and which their prophets and rabbis held out as a beacon of light in the midst of despair. We call for full recognition of the right of the State of Israel to exist and be a homeland for the Jews and for Israelis to live normal, peaceful lives within that State or anywhere they might travel.

While acknowledging the right of the Jews to have a home in Israel, we weep with anguish for the loss of men, women and children, the civilians who are victims in Gaza. Similarly we weep for the senseless loss of Israeli lives both civilian and military sacrificed in war.  We weep with Gaza and we weep with the inhabitants of Israel.

We hope that ultimately there will be an end in a negotiated peace to hostilities, mistrust and enmity between Israel and the Palestinians.

We deplore episodes of tagging in Australian cities and we say to those who weep with Gaza that we weep with them, but we also say to those who are passionate for self-determination for the people of Gaza that attacks on Jewish synagogues, much less Jewish children in school buses are not a way to open up a dialogue with the Jewish community, and they are not a way to influence change in the Middle east.

The sentiment expressed in the tag, ‘Weep for Gaza,’ is one that all of us, Christian or Jew, would agree
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