In Pursuit of Peace in Israel and Palestine

Vanderbilt University Press

Contents

Is Israel-Arab Peace Even Possible?

Is Israeli-Arab peace even possible? There are many, perhaps even a majority of people, not only in Israel, but throughout the Middle East, and perhaps all around the world who contend that it is not. The Jews and the Arabs will never be able to live in peace, they claim. For some, they say it is a clash of civilizations — two opposing worldviews colliding endlessly, periodically erupting in acute violence and bloodshed, deepening the hatred and the fear — this is the eternal cycle they describe and foresee. For them, there is never a chance for reconciliation and understanding. Many of those who hold this belief couple it with the contention that the Israeli-Arab conflict is a conflict of religions — fundamental beliefs regarding God, the divine will, and the intentions of the Lord regarding the land of Israel/Palestine, the people living on it, and the ultimate truth. If one feels he is in possession of an absolute truth — such as, "God gave this Land to us," there is little that can be said, which is convincing and rational, that has the power to persuade someone that there is even the slightest bit of room for a different possibility or that they may be wrong. If the Israeli-Arab conflict is in fact a conflict between Judaism and Islam, then it cannot be resolved. But, it is not.

Some take the position that Islam and Muslims will never accommodate Western liberal values and will always be in constant conflict with the West until the entire planet becomes part of the Dar al-Islam — the domain of Islam. Those who hold fast to this belief play up the threat of Islam to Europe, whose open-door policies on immigration have enabled large Muslim minorities to populate urban centers and inner cities, often becoming the newest lower classes of the rich European societies, and thereby giving rise to social unrest, high unemployment, and vast alienation. The underclass status of many Muslims in Europe pivots them into positions of revolt, unrest, and sometimes violence and terrorism — especially amongst the second generation, who were born into that status. There are Americans who hold on to this belief, and they are often the same ones who claim that President Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim, which is evidence, they claim, of his deeply rooted hatred of Israel and of Jews. He is not, and this is not true.

On the other side of the fence, there are those who say it is the Jews that have colonized a land that may have once been theirs, but for two thousand years, was not. They came with Western support, money, and sophistication, which enabled them to maneuver the conquest of an entire land where they just recently made up only a small portion of the population. With their massive enlistment of world Jewry, mainly in the United States, they legitimized their struggle and delegitimized the indigenous Arab Palestinian people's claim to their own land, forcing them to become a stateless people. The success of the Zionist movement was so enormous that it pushed the Palestinian people into not only a stateless status but also into a status of nonexistence as a people.

But Zionism was not the same as the classic colonialist enterprises of European states in Africa and Asia. There are many differences — mainly that Zionism really is the story of a people returning to their historic land. Those who call Zionism Western colonialization refuse to recognize the legitimacy of Zionism and reject the notion that Jews are a people, asserting that Judaism is solely a status of religion. Ironically, while they demand the right of self-determination for the Palestinian people, they reject the idea that Jews too have that very same right — to determine their identity and to fulfill a territorial expression of their identity in their ancient homeland.

Likewise, on the other side, there are many who believe that peace is not possible because they are opponents of Palestinian national rights and refuse to recognize that something called a Palestinian people exists — even until today. These people argue that the Palestinians are a constructed myth and that no such separate identity exists. They claim that Palestinian nationalism was devised and created only to fight the Jews and to prevent the Jews from having a homeland in the Middle East. They claim the right of self-determination for the Jewish people and, as previously mentioned, deny the same right to millions of people who have determined that they are Palestinians and who also have a right to a territorial expression of their identity in the land in which that identity came into being.

There are those who put the burden of there being no chance for peace on Israel and claim that Israel will never agree to integrate into the Arab and Muslim Middle East. It will always be the stranger in the neighborhood and will never drop its paternalistic and patronizing attitudes toward the Arabs. Israel will always be the front line of the United States with its aggressive tendencies and policies that seek to dominate rather than to integrate and be a part of the region.

One can naturally find some truth in all of these arguments, as well as many untruths. This is a complex conflict, as most of them are, and the unraveling of the issues is complicated by the urge to delve into the narratives of each side. Working and rationalizing narratives is one part of resolving any conflict, but there are many other aspects to conflict resolution that must also be confronted. The task of making peace between Israel and its neighbors is rather daunting. Even the existing two peace treaties between Israel and Egypt, and Israel and Jordan can hardly be called a state of peace. They are at best a state of nonwar with open borders, in one direction mostly (from Israel to them), although used with less and less frequency. There is no state of peace between the people of Israel and those of Egypt and Jordan. Israelis are largely unwelcome in Egypt and Jordan, and even business relationships need to be well hidden in order to protect those involved and their desire to make money together. The only real aspect of peace that seems lasting is the cooperation between the intelligence services facing the same threats from Islamic extremists, state and nonstate actors who have brought so much instability to the entire region since the beginning of the "Arab Spring."

Even after all of these years of living side by side in the region, very few Israelis speak Arabic, and even fewer Arabs speak Hebrew (except for Israel's Palestinian citizens, Palestinians who spent years in Israeli prisons, and Palestinians who worked in Israel or continue to work in Israel). Very few on both sides view the other's media, read their literature, watch their movies, or even know very much about their internal politics. There are two areas that have broken barriers at least in one direction (from the Arab world to Israel): food and music. Beyond the stomach and the ears, enormous barriers exist between the Israeli and the Arab worlds. Despite the closeness of the Arabic and Hebrew languages, which would make them so much easier for each to learn the language of the other, the psychological barrier of learning the language of the enemy has left this potentially very powerful tool for building bridges to understanding almost entirely in the hands of security services who learn the languages for very different purposes.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been centered on mutual nonrecognition and denial of the rights of each side to have a territorial expression of their identity — a piece of land they can call their own, on which they are the masters of their destiny. So much effort has gone into developing the "factual" evidence that the other side does not really exist, and therefore, does not have the same rights in making territorial claims. Often the mutual nonrecognition takes on additional weighty claims, and arguments that focus on the horrific things each side has done to the other have enhanced hatred and fear and have ultimately prevented any chance of recognizing the possibilities for mutual recognition.

The Jews, riding on the moral imperative to provide for themselves a safe haven after the horrors of the Holocaust, for many years held the higher moral ground. The countries of the world felt pity for the Jewish people over the extermination of one third of their people — six million innocent victims — and for their own failures to prevent the Holocaust. Their guilt was a powerful driving force behind global support for Zionism after World War II. The Jewish people and the Zionist movement held onto a commanding mobilization of resources, moral support, and solidarity both within world Jewry, the Jewish community in Palestine before 1948, and the international community, which was undeniably more powerful than the voice of the fractured community of Palestinian Arabs whose nascent national movement lacked a unified voice of common identity, purpose, and vision. Although backed by the Arab world, the competing interests within the Arab world and the lack of centralized, dedicated Palestinian national leadership willing to even engage in the thought of accommodation with the Jews led to the nakba and the dispersion of most of the Palestinian population from Palestine. The Arab and Palestinian rejection of partition in 1947, which would have occurred on far better terms than those that are suggested today, left the Palestinians dispossessed, dispersed, and broken. It would take years before some Palestinian leaders could even recognize the possibility of mutual recognition as the key to salvation for the Palestinian people on part of the land of Palestine. That happened in 1988, but before then, clinging to the dream of all or nothing, Palestinians ended up with nothing.

From 1948 until 1988, the Palestinian national movement clung to the all or nothing dream, even though there were voices of change rising in the mid-1970s. In the mid-1960s when the Palestinian national movement finally organized itself on the international stage, it engaged in terrorism, not only against the State of Israel but against Israel's supporters, as well. Led by Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian national movement had great difficulty in capturing the hearts and minds of most people in the West. In those years, Israel was seen as the David that took on the mighty and powerful Goliath — struggling for its own survival, it emerged victorious against great odds. Israel's egalitarian values and socialist structures, such as the kibbutz, inspired admiration and support throughout the world. At least until 1973, Israel captured the imagination of much of the world and saw its struggle for existence as just. The June 1967 war, in which Israel emerged as a regional superpower, created a sense of awe about the small and struggling nation that amazed the world with its unsurpassed military victory against armies threatening to annihilate the nation of the Jews. Even after occupying the West Bank and Gaza, the 1967 war passed relatively quietly, both locally and internationally, mainly because the Israeli government continued its policies of at least speaking of the offer of an outstretched hand and a willingness to exchange territories for peace. The Arabs, on the other hand, continued to capture the position of no recognition, no negotiations, and no peace. The rejectionists will almost always be denied legitimacy.

Israel's position in the world regarding Palestine began to change mainly with the election of the Likud government of Menachem Begin in 1977. Although surprised and pleased with Begin's drive to find peace with Egypt, much of the world was dismayed by Begin's refusal to deal genuinely with the Palestinian issue and the insistence of his government to construct settlements in the heart of the West Bank, which was clearly seen as a move to block any possible accommodations with the Palestinians on the basis of two states for two peoples. As a result of that very settlement policy, most of the world today puzzles over the incongruence between Israel's occupation of Palestine and its insistence on calling itself a democracy.

It took many years, but today most of the world has begun to perceive Israel as the Goliath against the Palestinian David. For most of the past century, it was Israel that represented the underdog against the massive anti-Israel fervor throughout the Middle East. Today, it is clear that the game is over — without making serious and genuine moves in the direction of peace, Israel has become the pariah nation, and Palestine is a country under occupation. With the turmoil in the Middle East following the failed Arab Spring and the emergence of radical political Islamic terrorism such the Islamic State, some Middle East states no longer really exist (Syria, Lebanon, Libya, and Yemen). The convergence of common threats face Israel and its enemies, and those threats create new opportunities for engagement between them. The immediate impact of the chaos in the Middle East has led to a decreased interest in Palestine and Palestinians, but this situation will not go away. The potential alliances between Israel and some of its neighbors in confronting the Iran-Hezbollah axis and the common threat of the Islamic State can only be fully operationalized within the framework of also addressing the Palestinian issue and by Israel stating that it is prepared to see the Arab Peace Initiative of March 2002 as the basis for future negotiations.

The eruption of another round of violence in October 2015, with young Palestinians stabbing Israeli soldiers and civilians all over Israel and the occupied territories, led to another drop in the chances that any accommodation was possible. However, even with half of the Palestinian house controlled by Hamas, which rejects Israel's right to exist, I still believe that peace is possible. I believe that there are more commonalities between human beings, regardless of their place of origin, than differences. I believe that people can be taught to live in peace — I have seen it with my own eyes and have experienced it firsthand. The opposite is also true — people can be taught to hate and real-life circumstances can be the most powerful ammunition for despair, fear, and hatred. But it seems clear to me that everyone wants to be understood. Everyone wants to be respected. Everyone seeks to have their own narrative told and understood. The problems emerge when each side holds onto its own national collective narrative as the sole truth, 6 ] In Pursuit of Peace in Israel and Palestine denying the legitimacy of the other side's narrative and at times even denying the very existence of the other side.

It is almost impossible to imagine a time when Israelis and Palestinians will be willing to accept the legitimacy of the each other's narrative without denying the truth of their own — at least this is the claim that is often made. Perhaps the most that one can seek to achieve at this time, in the midst of conflict, is the willingness to listen to and perhaps understand, even a little, the opposing narrative — even without agreeing to it. I call this opening the window to view the other side. There are conflicts where historical narratives have been rewritten after years of peaceful coexistence. The possibility for this in the Israeli-Palestinian case is quite remote.

I myself came to the challenge when confronted with a recurring nightmare, one in which I found myself given the task by the Palestinian government of designing the Palestinian National History Museum. Naturally almost all of the exhibits that I had to design consisted of all of the terrible things the Zionist movement had done to the Palestinians or the results of Zionist successes in the dismemberment of the Palestinian national movement and its people. Almost all of the photos and texts in the museum were graphic depictions of the tragedies that befell the Palestinian people throughout their history because of their clash with the Jewish people and their national movement — Zionism. (The construction of the Palestinian National History Museum began in Ramallah in May 2016; its content has not yet been determined.)

One of my challenges in the nightmare, the one that usually caused me to wake up, was an argument I had with the Palestinian leadership in which I demanded that the museum also include some self-reflection and soul-searching introspection into some of the bad decisions the Palestinians made throughout their history that contributed greatly to the plight of the Palestinians. I wanted, in my dream, to bring to them the Palestinian version of "The Sermon" by the Zionist thinker Haim Hazaz, who in 1942 wrote a brilliant play in which he put Jewish history on trial. His poignant message was that the time had come for the Jews to cease being victims and to take their fate into their own hands. This, in my mind, is one of the fundamentals of Zionism. With that thought, I would wake up to the reality that both sides, it seems, have become competitors in the Olympic Competitions of Victimization — each seeking the ultimate gold medal for having suffered more at the hands of the other.