Friends,
Passover is my favorite holiday, and not just because of the matzah ball soup and gefilte fish (yes, I’m a fan!).
It’s because in reliving the Passover story, we reaffirm the values core to our identity. We celebrate our hard-won journey to liberation. We mourn the pain and loss suffered by those who were our enemies. We pass down to our children the values of liberation, empathy and justice.
These values are at the very heart of our J Street movement.
For Israel to truly thrive long into the future as a secure, democratic homeland for the Jewish people, it must embody those values, and so must US foreign policy. The injustices of the right-wing vision for endless occupation -- discriminatory evictions, arbitrary home demolitions, different sets of laws for different people -- violate our core values. They entrench a painful conflict that has taken too many innocent Israeli and Palestinian lives already.
Lasting freedom, peace and self-determination for Israelis cannot and will not come at the expense of those same rights for Palestinians.
This Passover, there can be no better expression of our Jewish, democratic values than to recommit ourselves to the struggle to uphold those values both at home and in Israel. To work for freedom, peace and the security of statehood for Israelis and Palestinians alike.
Please consider a contribution to fuel J Street's fight and push us closer to our $40,000 Passover goal >>
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Right-wing groups may urge us to cast aside our values and endanger our democracy in support of an over-simplified, black-and-white vision of what it means to be ‘pro-Israel,’ but we know that will only lead to more suffering and injustice.
In Israel, turning a blind eye to the settlement movement’s efforts to build and bulldoze their way to permanent, undemocratic control of the West Bank not only tramples Palestinian freedoms but pushes us further and further from Israel’s founding vision as a truly just, democratic homeland for the Jewish people.
And in the United States, supporting right-wing representatives who undermine democracy itself threatens everything our community stands for -- including the shared principles on which the US-Israel relationship is built.
At J Street, we know that our shared values of freedom, equality and democracy make us stronger, not weaker. That they must be core to our vision, not cast aside to defend the indefensible.
Together, we can ensure that US leadership is principled, bold and effective. We can continue our work to inject nuance, empathy and truth into a political debate too often dominated by extremism and willful ignorance.
Friends -- Please consider a Passover contribution, of any amount, to help fuel the work of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement. Every contribution gets us closer to our goal >>
Thank you for all that you do.
Chag Sameach,
Sam Berkman
National Director of Communal Leadership
