Follow Me Online

Making Change Podcast

Facebook

Twitter

Gopin Associates, LLC

YouTube

Tag: conflict

  • Battles Around Nation Over Proposed Mosques – NYTimes.com

    This will be a long, hard fought battle that will leave Muslims quite weary, but it has been engaged before and successfully won. Just ask Catholics a hundred years ago, or Jews two hundred years ago. This will require persistence, coalition building, compromise, honesty, an evolution in communication skills, and patience above all. But I believe that history demonstrates that Americans of common sense generally win in the long run. I believe we are just witnessing the second wave of organized hatred that comes from political opportunists (who often wear religious garb). It will exhaust itself in embarrassment as it reaches absurd limits. Critics of Islam with legitimate gripes, such as Wafa Sultan, will begin to distance themselves from hatreds they did not intend to unleash, as everyone learns, in every generation unfortunately, that nothing good comes of hate, and the mob is not controllable.

    While a high-profile battle rages

    …

  • YES! JUST WHAT THE MIDDLE EAST NEEDS:Burg to form joint Arab-Jewish party

    Former Knesset speaker announces that new party ‘Shai’ will push for equality in Israeli society. Former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg announced this week that he plans to form a new joint Jewish-Arab party ahead of the next election, that would push for equality in Israeli society.The new leftist party will be called Shai, which means “gift” in Hebrew and is an acronym for “equality in Israel” shivyon yisrael. Burg said he would only announce the party’s candidates and platform ahead of the election, which is set for October 22, 2013, but could be held much earlier.“The most important issue in Israel now is the distortion in the values of our democracy,” Burg told The Jerusalem Post. “The divides among rich and poor, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, Jew and Arab, occupier and occupied all have in common inequality. Israel is becoming a nationalist, fundamentalist, theocratic state, which is the unholy triangle.”Asked whether

    …

  • The Lonely Man of Peace: An In-depth Interview

    Folks, many of you may have seen this, but we have friends in the world who cannot directly access the Jerusalem Post piece. So here it is. Lauren is an amazing interviewer. She interviewed me for nine hours, longest interview of my life:

    The lonely man of peace

    lonelymanofpeace

    By LAUREN GELFOND FELDINGER

    21/01/2010

    This week, Orthodox American rabbi Marc Gopin saw his coexistence work in Syria bear fruit. What turns a Soloveitchik disciple into an unofficial diplomat to the Arab…Somewhere between the shtetls of Eastern Europe and sites across the Levant, Rabbi Dr. Marc Gopin, 52, has found his calling.

    Heading the George Mason University Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution in Arlington, Virginia, he is not waiting for a peace treaty to cause change. Gopin gets on a plane and heads for trouble spots wherever he can find openings. He meets with sheikhs, heads of state …

  • Peace is Not Magic

    By Kobi Skolnick
    In the last few weeks, there have been many developments in the Middle East conflict. People around the world have been following the speeches of President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu, as well as Hosni Mubarak’s essay in the Wall Street Journal. This high-level discussion signals a shift in policy and progress toward peace. However, some skeptics wonder if this is just another phase in a cycle of false hope. After all, it is not difficult to imagine another suicide bombing in one of Israel’s cities, or an ill-timed Israeli Defense Force operation in the Palestinian Territories, both of which would immediately make peace look like a mere fantasy.

    This danger has always existed in peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. Even when top leaders sign treaties, on the ground there remains a deep enmity between Israelis, Palestinians, and the Arab world. With this in mind, …

  • MARCGOPIN.COM COMES TO BOSTON ON TUESDAY

    Marc, Aziz , and Scott will be speaking Tuesday night in Boston. See the details below. Please come, or send others who you know in New England!
    “Positive Change: Peace Steps that Can Make a Difference in the Middle East”

    Come Tuesday night and get first hand inside information on the situation both in Syria and Palestine from two leading experts on the practice of citizen diplomacy and peacebuilding in the region. The Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution, GMU, is engaged in vital work from Damascus to Jerusalem, but we need you to participate in developing a social network for positive change domestically and globally. The speakers: Aziz Abu Sarah, CRDC’s new director of Middle East Projects and a native of Jerusalem and Hebron, is one of the most important pioneers of nonviolent resistance and peacebuilding in Palestine who has received warm responses from hundreds of Jewish …

  • Jews and Palestinians as Brothers: A View From Genetics

    There has been extensive analysis in the last decade of the genetic origins of Jews and their relationship to other groups, especially in the Middle East. I am still in a state of shock from these many studies.  This research has been overshadowed by the wars of Jews and Palestinians, but the genetic research provides an opportunity for profound reflection on what actually is happening when Jews and Palestinians fight, who they really are, and where these two peoples have been for the past 10,000 years.

    In this video I react to that evidence. I explore the relationship between genetics, science, the Book of Genesis, and some basic truths of the Palestinian/Jewish relationship. Below the video please find a genetic map of the Jewish people’s y chromosomes, and where Palestinians and Syrians, and other Middle Eastern groups, fall.

    …

  • Marc on Friends: A New Video Series Coming this Summer

    Here is a short clip from the upcoming video series about Friends Across the Divide. It is a series of stories of pairs o f friends in the Middle East who have worked together for many years to build strong bridges between Jews and Arabs as they struggle together for peace and justice. The power of pairs of friends to change history, to impact deeply rooted conflict, is one of the most important themes of Marc’s new book on citizen diplomacy. See here for a full description of the book and its reviews.

    …

  • Iranian Presidential Hopeful Mahdi Karroubi: An Obama on the Persian Gulf?

    It is  very important that we blog about the Iranian elections and expose to the world the Iranian choices. Read here on Karroubi’s platform to open up the universities. There are conflicting polls on who is ahead, with state polls putting Ahmedinijad ahead, obviously. Ahmadinijad controls all the public television stations, which is what the vast majority of the country has access to. But the youth are with the reform candidates so they are trying to utilize every social media possible to reach the voters anyway. Therefore, Ahmadinijad is blocking Facebook as much as he can. Karroubi, like Obama, is focused on the internet, the youth, the disenfranchised. This is an unfair fight for the future of the people of Iran, and I believe it is the deciding factor for the future of peace and war in the Middle East. Candidate Moussavi is saying more what Westerners want to hear…

  • The Ghost of Cyrus: Iranian Potential for Reform in the Nuclear Age

    (Originally published at Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Responsibility, in a very good issue dedicated to Iran. It will give you a good overview of thinking in the American Jewish community right now on the slowly moving crisis with Iran)

    Over the past 25 years I’ve developed relationships across the Middle East; in Syria, specifically, over the past five years. While I traveled as a peacemaker, to be cautious I would emphasize my role as a professor and only reveal my role as a rabbi when it felt safe. I never experienced any negative comments because I am a rabbi; rather I heard from some a longing to meet with old Jewish friends. Experiences with Syrians have given me confidence that similar inroads can be made in Iran. What Iran shares with Syria, most importantly, is a historical tradition of religious pluralism and progressive religious thinking. There is still …

  • Friendship in a Mad World: The Art of the Possible in an Impossible Region

    This report in from Sami Moubayed in Damascus. Moubayed speaks with great authority for the official mood in Syria. This cancellation of negotiations by Syria has sent shock waves in an Israeli establishment that thought the talks with Syria were going well. My shock is at their shock:

    According to veteran British journalist and Syria expert Patrick Seale Israel’s ‘savage war’ brings home a number of truths:

    1) Syria’s fate is tied to the Palestinians. It cannot distance itself from the Palestine cause, whatever incentives Israel might in future be inclined to offer it.

    2) Only a comprehensive accord can bring peace to the Middle East – but of this there is at present no sign.

    3) Third, by its violence and its brutal indifference to human life, Israel has demonstrated yet again that it is not ready for peace. Its primal urge remains to expand and to dominate, as

    …

Categories