Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding (EMEU)

CHRISTIAN LEADERS CONDUCT INTERNATIONAL DIALOG
ON MIDDLE EASTERN CHURCH CRISES

AMMAN, JORDAN – In a strategic gathering of Middle Eastern, European and American Christian leaders, westerners were given an inside view of the Middle Eastern Church’s struggle in a war-torn land.

Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding’s (EMEU) Sounds of Hope II conference was held in Amman, Jordan on Oct. 15-18. It was a time for over 70 select individuals from various ministries to hear from 11 speakers with experience in the Middle East Church.

According to Dr. Ray Bakke, EMEU chair, the conference was held out of a concern that ignorance in the West was negatively influencing the worldwide Church. “We had people who are evangelical who thought that every Arab was a terrorist or a fat oil sheik,” he said.

EMEU’s purpose is to break down those stereotypes through direct dialog and help to build relationships and understanding across different cultures. As Bakke put it, “It’s not an organization, it’s a conversation.”

Three aspects stood out for Tom Bower, an attendee from Iowa: exposition of biblical material as it relates the Middle East today, a clearer definition of the area’s political and economic issues, and “wonderful networking” between Church leaders from across the globe and across the denominational spectrum.

Speakers from Sudan, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq shared on everything from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to America’s role in the Middle East, to a loving Christian response to Islam.

Dr. Nabeel Jabbour shared his concern that, after September 11th, some Christians would quit praying for and ministering to Muslims. “If that happens it will be the biggest setback in the history of missions,” he said. “Muslims are about 1.4 billion people in the world. It’s predicted that by the year 2020 they’ll become a quarter of humanity. If we consciously or unconsciously omit them from the Great Commission it will become no more the Great Commission; it will be the Great Omission.”

Jabbour walked attendees through the different belief systems in Islam, explaining that only a small percentage of Muslims are actually radical fundamentalists, but it is the activities of this faction that make the news.

John Sagherian, regional coordinator for Youth for Christ International, said that young Muslims as well as nominal Christians in the Middle East are asking the same question when presented with the biblical truth of salvation: “So what?” He said that they need more than textbook answers.

“I believe the answer lies in our changed lives and our changed values and our love for each other,” Sagherian said. “They need to see Christians living as Christians. And it would help if there were a revival in the West and the Christian West really became Christian.”

But the underlying frustration behind many of the messages given at the conference was over the apathy of westerners toward the Arab Church. Speakers said Christian Zionists have fixated on the renewal of the Israeli state, while ignoring severe abuse of the Palestinian people’s rights.

“Our message to the Jewish people (should be) that it is in the person of Jesus the Messiah that their hopes have been fulfilled, not in their return to the land and in the creation of the state of Israel,” said author and educator Rev. Colin Chapman. “When I see how Jesus has already fulfilled so many of the hopes and dreams of Israel (prophesied of) in the Old Testament, I can see how… the followers of Jesus today can… both hunger and thirst after righteousness, justice and be genuine peacemakers in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

While this conflict is extremely complex, understanding the issues involved touches on a person’s biblical interpretation, theology, politics, interfaith relationships and method of sharing the Gospel. “What is at stake over this issue is nothing less than our understanding of God, our witness to the Gospel and the credibility of the Christian Church,” said Chapman. “The stakes are very high.”

Bakke told attendees about a conversation he had with a Jewish rabbi concerning the current existence of modern Israel. “Every people, to be a whole people, must somewhere in their history be stewards of power. We Jews have always been victims of power. The state of Israel is our first opportunity to be stewards of power,” said the rabbi. Then with a tear rolling down his cheek, he finished, saying, “If God is just, he will have to remove us one more time for what we have done to the Palestinians in this land. We are treating them the way the Nazis treated us.”

Antoine Haddad, vice president of Lebanon’s InterVarsity Fellowship, said that America has had a blind support for Israel, ignoring injustices the Palestinians have faced. He said that this “created seeds for instability in the Middle East region and led to wars and civil wars, dictatorships, poverty, oppressive regimes – all of which have been negatively reflected on the Christian presence in (the Middle East).”

And while the western Church’s response has been poor, Haddad says the Church in the midst of the conflict has also reacted incorrectly: “The response of Christians has been emigration, forsaking the cradle of Christianity and forsaking their roots.”

In Iraq, Archbishop Mar Avak Asadorian of the Armenian Orthodox Church in Baghdad., is seeing a similar exodus in persecuted Christians.

“If the present state of affairs continue in the region of the Middle East and Iraq, then the Eastern manifestation of the Christian Church – the churches that saw the birth of the Lord and worshiped him in his own tongue, giving millions of martyrs throughout 2,000 years – yes, these churches, are already at peril,” Asadorian said. “(This is) a matter not to be taken lightly, otherwise we are going to lose the Eastern manifestation of the Christian Church.”

Although troubles facing the Middle East Church are plentiful, the stories of faith and perseverance were equally abundant. “I had no idea that every time I’d sit down I’d be sitting down next to a person who had the most incredible story ever, and when I’d think I’d come to the most interesting story I’d meet somebody else that would surpass that,” said Cindi Steele, who works with Orthodox Jews in Arizona through Make A Difference Ministries. “I have enjoyed every moment of it.”

Steele attended the conference with her husband and says she is thinking of eventually bringing a club basketball team back to the Middle East to work among the Palestinian people.

Speakers asked Christians everywhere to work to understand the religions and politics of the Middle East in order to have a positive influence, to look for ways to partner or offer aid to the Middle Eastern church, and most of all, to pray for those who are hurting in the Middle East.

Lynne Hybels of Willow Creek Community Church just outside Chicago said that she knows there must be some action after this dialog. She compared the Sounds of Hope conference to her experience of going to Africa five years ago to learn about AIDS. She left Africa asking the question: “How have I ignored this situation? Why didn’t I ever let what I knew in my head travel down to the level of my heart?”

She continued, “And now I’m going home with that same question that I left Africa with: What’s happened this week is that I’ve seen the pain… I’ve heard the anger. I think Christians in the Church in the West have shown a lack of concern. By supporting global policies that have very much hurt the Middle East as a whole we have betrayed our Christian brothers and sisters here. What am I to do? That’s a prayer that I know God will answer, but not easily; but I go home with that prayer.”

The Jordan conference was the second Sounds of Hope event, the first being held at Wheaton College at the Billy Graham Center in Illinois in 2006. For Sounds of Hope II, EMEU partnered with Manara International, Jordan. To find out more, the EMEU Web site can be accessed at http://www.emeu.net.

"The Courage to Persist, the Will to Build"

Remarks by Prime Minister Salam Fayyad (Palestinian Authority) at the ATFP "Gala" in Washington D.C. October 12, 2008

Ladies and gentlemen;Your Excellencies.

It is really an honor for me to have the opportunity to address such an esteemed audience tonight.

Tonight’s event is neatly book-ended by a number of significant events in the on-going Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Last month, we marked fifteen years since the signing of the first in a series of interim agreements. Next month, of course, will mark one year since the renewal of peace negotiations at Annapolis. And, yet, regrettably, we continue to walk the bumpy road to peace that began in Madrid seventeen years ago this month.

A lot can be said, and has been said, about the ups and downs of this process. But, what we do know is that we all hoped that we would be a lot closer to peace by now. The Annapolis Conference embodied the hope that we would achieve a comprehensive peace agreement by year’s end. In the meantime, we, Palestinians, had expected an improved economic and security environment to underpin the political track.

Alas, few expectations have been met. Settlements pepper the West Bank and continue to grow. Every indicator of settlement activity – from public- and private-initiated construction, to tenders and building permits – shows that rather than stopping, settlement activity has in fact accelerated since Annapolis. … That’s right. Accelerated.

Similarly, restrictions on access and movement are tighter than they were before Annapolis. Compare 563 checkpoints and roadblocks before Annapolis to 630 today, not to mention the severe tightening of the siege on Gaza. And land confiscations, home demolitions, military incursions and raids all continued.

Needless to say, the quality of life for the average Palestinian has worsened. And if we are honest with ourselves, vague pronouncements that the current peace talks are “on-going” and “serious” mean little on the Palestinian street and, when all is told, are of little relevance to people who are living hand to mouth.

As devastating as these developments have been on Palestinians’ fabric of life, the combination of deteriorating conditions on the ground and the lack of a political horizon have had an even worse impact on the Palestinians’ state of mind, which had already been seriously deformed by the erosion in self-esteem, and self- assuredness, prompted by decades of Israeli occupation and oppression. We, Palestinians, have felt this erosion. Those old enough to remember the first Intifada felt it during the second Intifada. We felt the shame of it in June of last year. We felt it last month when twelve of our citizens, including a baby, were killed in Gaza.

I have always felt that an understanding of how this sad state of affairs came about was necessary to enable us to position ourselves on a path that could lead to freedom and independence. The truth is: the loss of self-esteem and assuredness had tended to elicit one of two seemingly diametrically opposed reactions among the Palestinian public, namely, defeatism and belligerence. The painful truth is that neither is constructive. You cannot end the occupation if you are dominated by a “can do nothing,” defeatist kind of attitude. Nor will belligerence get you there, with what may come with it by way of violence and isolationist tendencies.
When viewed this way, it becomes clear that the greatest obstacle that has prevented us, Palestinians, from achieving our national goals was not occupation per se or factionalism, not poverty or separation, but that deadly erosion of self-esteem and consequent loss of faith in our capacity to get things done.

If this analysis is correct, which I believe it is, it follows that to end the occupation, we, Palestinians, must first rid ourselves of what four decades of Israeli occupation have precipitated by way of fear, skepticism, cynicism, self-doubt, and, yes loss of self-esteem.

I believe we can – though I must confess I didn’t always. At one point, the erosion of our esteem seemed to have taken on a life of its own, propelled by its own momentum, becoming almost self-fulfilling … almost. However, I truly believe we can regain our sense of self-assuredness, once we, Palestinians, collectively embrace – consciously embrace – a paradigm that says that, along the way to freedom, defeatism must be defeated and belligerence must be set aside. To me, this is not only emancipation – it is deliverance.

Acting on this conviction, and from day one – a day of national tragedy of virtually unprecedented proportions – my government set out to put in place and set in motion mechanisms capable of getting us there. My motto was “building towards statehood despite the occupation”. This involved, in the first instance, building strong, effective institutions capable of delivering services to our people in an effective, expeditious and fair manner, all within the framework of good governance. The effort has already started to bear fruit. In the area of financial management, for example, I am proud to say that we now have a system that truly measures up to the highest international standards and practices. In addition to building up our credibility at home, this has won our government the international confidence necessary to secure much needed aid, including from the United States and the European Union.

Indeed, last March the US Administration transferred US $150 million directly to the Palestinian Authority coffers. This transfer was the largest sum of assistance to be transferred to the PA in a single tranche by any donor for any purpose since the Authority’s inception. What is more, the Administration is about to transfer another US$ 150 million to us the same way. Surely this will be another strong message of support and desire to help, which I deeply cherish. What I cherish even more is the strong message of confidence in the integrity of our public finance system which this action by the Administration implies. For, as you know, however strong the desire to help is - - and indeed it is - - Congress would not authorize a transfer directly into our coffers, of this amount or indeed any amount, were it not for the integrity and the credibility which our financial system and management have come to enjoy.

This is but one example of the progress we have been able to achieve over the past year in building towards statehood. There are other important examples, especially in the sphere of security and law and order. Together, these efforts prompted UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon to speak of “an emerging sense of self-empowerment” among Palestinians.


I share his assessment. I have had the opportunity to visit most districts in the West Bank this past year – which I hope to be able replicate in Gaza – and everywhere I have been, I was greeted by a cautious, yet distinct glimmer of the self-respect, pride and resilience that makes me, despite all the obstacles we face, so very proud to be Palestinian.


It is there in the streets of Nablus and Jenin, where law and order and, thus, a modicum of normalcy have been restored. It was there in Manger Square in Bethlehem one starry night last May, when a thousand businessmen and dignitaries from all over Palestine and abroad, including Israel, dined together in the open air. It is there every Friday – and has been for the past few years, and will continue to be there – in Bil’in, where villagers peacefully protest against the erection of a despicable wall that threatens their livelihood and, sometimes, their lives, though never their spirit. It was there one sad day when Palestinians walked up a Ramallah hill to bury Palestine’s most highly revered literary icon (Mahmoud Darwish), conjuring up memories of the day our nation mourned the loss of our late President Yasser Arafat. It was there the day when a shipment of Palestinian pharmaceutical products, destined for the first time ever to Germany, made its way through the maze of economic restrictions in the West Bank, to meet the most exacting pharmaceutical standards in the world. And, yes, it was there the day Palestinians welcomed a boat-load of visitors off the shore of Gaza … And it is there, every single day, that a Palestinian child goes to school, that a Palestinian farmer manages to work his/ her land, that a Palestinian mother remains hopeful that her son will be released from Israeli prison, that a rural community begins to benefit from the implementation of one of literally hundreds of community projects being implemented throughout the country, that a Palestinian family chooses - finds a way - to remain on their land for another day.

We are approaching a critical mass of positive change – positive facts on the ground, as I like to call them, that are indicative of a most encouraging shift in the mindset of our people, away from doom and gloom towards a distinct sense of possibility and the promise of a better future.

When and where possible, with President Abbas’s guidance and support, our government tried to help generate opportunities and create conditions to make these things possible – and, in so doing, to nurture our people’s sense of dignity in themselves. This, more than anything, is what I think our job is about – as we say here tonight, “the courage to persist, the will to build”. And I am unequivocally committed to continuing to do that – now and even after I leave office.

Still, there is no dignity in what is happening to us now. And the same is true for the Israelis. There is nothing dignified in Israeli parents having to be afraid while their children are away at school. There is no dignity for the mother of the Israeli soldier who delayed a Palestinian woman at a checkpoint near Nablus, causing her to lose her unborn child. There is also nothing dignified about the world’s fifth largest army subjugating a people with no country and no army. There is nothing dignified in a country that prides itself on being a democracy when it allows itself to be held hostage by a group of extremist settlers who forcibly put their own interests ahead of the will of the majority.
Despite this – indeed, because of this – we, Palestinians, remain hopeful – resolute – to reach a peaceful resolution to the conflict between us and Israelis based on a two-state model. Palestinians long to live in freedom like any other people. For, in freedom, there is dignity, as there is in freedom from fear.

In fact, we don’t just seek peace; we seek a meaningful and lasting peace with Israel. We seek strong ties with Israel. We seek strong economic ties between the independent states of Israel and Palestine. We seek warm relations with Israelis. We do not want to simply get to a point where we just accept each other – we want to have warm relations where we both recognize the mutual economic, intellectual, spiritual, and of course security benefits of living and working together. We do not want to erect walls; we want to build bridges. We do not want to close Israelis out of our lives; we want to live with Israelis as our neighbors.

However, let it be known that Palestinians are not interested in just any state and not at any cost. It is not just Israel who has a constituency it has to worry about and serve. Let’s not forget the reasons why the results of Palestinian parliamentary elections were what they were in 2006. As one prominent Israeli advocate of peace put it, “There is no Palestinian partner for improving the quality of the occupation – there is only a Palestinian partner for ending the occupation.” When all is said and done, the Palestinian leadership will have to take any agreement it negotiates with Israel to its people.

People have an inherent sense of fairness by which they judge any settlement. And that inherent sense of fairness tells them that a peace agreement with Israel must yield a viable, contiguous, independent, potentially prosperous, sovereign Palestinian state on 22% of their historic homeland with East Jerusalem as its capital, and a solution to the refugee issue that honors the refugees and recognizes their legitimate rights and their suffering. That same inherent sense of fairness tells them that a rump state made up of disconnected Israeli throw-aways is not what they have waited so long or sacrificed so much for. It tells them that the great compromise they made back in 1988, when they relinquished claim to 78 percent of their historic homeland, should be acknowledged and respected by the other party.

Regrettably, the two-state solution is teetering under the weight of 170 settlements and almost half a million settlers. Time is running out on the two-state solution. With every brick that is laid in a settler house, with every road that is paved for settlers, with every concrete slab that is erected for the wall that snakes in and out of the West Bank, the bond that ties Israelis and Palestinians together, which originates in the fact that we must share the same piece of land, grows just a little bit tighter. That is the great irony of Israel’s settlement enterprise. Prime Minister Olmert recognized this. He said “The day will come when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights.”

Nevertheless, I remain hopeful that, through negotiations, we can reach a lasting peace between us on the basis of a two-state solution. For this process to be successful, however, we must, again, bring to it dignity and credibility. Oslo stalled because it quickly lost credibility– there was talk of peace while actions on the ground worked against peace. Annapolis risks being the same unless Israel reconciles its behavior on the ground with its stated intentions of peace and creating a viable and independent Palestinian state.

And so, if we are to get to where we want to be, we have to treat each other with dignity – lead with dignity. This means behaving like statesmen instead of politicians – thinking of the next generation, not the next elections.

For Palestinians, what this means is remaining steadfast not just to our principles for a solution, but to our commitment to non-violence and previous agreements. And we are resolute in this. Make no mistake about it. As I mentioned earlier, I view my role as Prime Minister as one of assisting our people, to the best of my ability, to live just a little bit better than the day before, and to stay on their land for another day … and another. But we do it – and will continue to do it – through constructive, non-violent means that honor our very noble cause.

For Israel, what this means is negotiating an agreement with us as equals, no more and no less. Not bullying Palestinians at the negotiating table with facts on the ground it only erected yesterday – or five years ago, or 10 years ago, or 35 years ago. Saying “no” to the settlers. Not abusing its stature as an occupying power to coerce, for example, by withholding much-needed tax dollars when it disagrees with our legitimate means of diplomatic protest. Not shutting away 1.5 million Palestinians from the world for the unacceptable actions of a few.

For the rest of the world, this means showing strength of leadership, and getting tough with transgressors of our commonly-held values, whether friend or foe. The world has been generous with us, backing our state-building efforts with robust financial investment. And it has been tough with us when it felt we strayed onto an undesirable path. We now need it to be equally demanding of our neighbor. We need the international community to hold Israel to its word when it says it desires the establishment of a viable Palestinian state. We need the world to take practical steps to keep the establishment of such a state possible. Wagging its finger at continued settlement activity is simply not enough.

With the help and encouragement of this US Administration, we are off to a good start. However, neither we nor the Israelis can afford to wait another four or eight years. We will desperately need the immediate assistance and investment from the incoming administration if we are to make a success of the process begun at Annapolis.

This is where the Palestinian-American community can be of great service. To members of this community, let me first say that I am privileged to have lived long enough in this country to appreciate its beauty and understand why you think this nation of immigrants became so great. You are an enormous but enormously underutilized source of strength to the cause of a just and durable peace. We need to work together to create that other state which, one day, you may wish to call home. We are facing many domestic difficulties and challenges, especially those related to the current state of separation. Do not give up on us. We have proposed concrete ideas the adoption of which is capable of reuniting Gaza and the West Bank. These include the formation of a national consensus, non-factional government in the run-up to presidential and legislative elections, and the utilization of Arab security assistance for a transitional period to help with the rehabilitation of our security services and with the provision of law and order in Gaza until our services are rehabilitated. National dialogue on the key political issues can then proceed, but then against the backdrop of a reunified country, in the hope of sorting out our political differences or at least forging a national consensus on how to manage these differences in a civilized, orderly, and non-violent manner. Just as you were not indifferent to the less-than-perfect way in which the PNA managed the affairs of the Palestinian people after Oslo, you cannot, I would submit, be indifferent to the risk of our country – our state-in-the-making – sliding towards backwardness, isolation, repression of freedom, gender inequality, and cultural and religious intolerance. For those who may have crossed that bridge to nowhere, to nothingness, indeed, destructive nothingness, I respectfully ask that you to reconsider.

And so, my friends, we are at a crossroads. A lot is riding on the choices we all make. Outcomes are not ordained or inevitable. We must seek to draw the right lessons from our experiences of peace-making since Madrid. Now is not the time to ditch the solution concept which, with President Bush’s 2002 speech, became a matter of explicit international consensus, namely, the vision of two states living side by side in peace and security. For abandoning that concept would be another escape to destructive nothingness.

Instead, we should make adjustments. Since Oslo, the pendulum has swung too far away from what international law and justice prescribes, towards the diktat of practicality, towards what may be seen as acceptable to each of the parties to the conflict. This shift would not have been too problematic had it occurred in a context of parity of influence. However, with us, Palestinians, holding the shorter end of the stick, this disparity has necessarily meant an erosion in our position with each round of diplomacy that did not end with a solution. This structural defect has to be redressed. It is time for the pendulum to swing back in the direction of what international law and justice requires. Back in 1988, Palestinians made the historic and painful compromise that we felt was necessary to secure a solution to the conflict.

As our Israeli neighbors think about what they consider to be painful compromises, it is my hope that they will devote equal time to reflecting on the promise that ending the occupation of all Arab territories holds: normalization not just with Arab countries, but with the 57 member states of the Islamic Conference who all endorsed the Arab Peace Initiative. That consideration will no doubt be aided by effective international engagement, with the US leading the way in close partnership with the rest of the community of nations, especially the other members of the Quartet, as well as Arab countries. To me, this is the way forward.

Is This Another Crossroad?

Final Stages of the Palestinian Conflict?
Claude Salhani
The Middle East Times
October 14, 2008
http://www.metimes.com/International/2008/10/14/final_stages_of_the_palestinian_...

Every decade of so the dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict undergo serious transformation as the result of changing conditions on the ground. The changes, however, have not always been for the better.

Consider the following shifts in direction from the late 1940s with the creation of the State of Israel and the declaration of war by all its neighbors in 1948. Almost 10 years later, Israel goes to war against Egypt during the Suez crisis (1956). Then 11 years later Israel launches the Six-Day War, capturing large swathes of Arab lands.

It took six years for the Arabs to regroup and rearm and start the October War, in 1973. Nine years later, in June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon and evicted the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). But in doing so a new enemy was created, Hezbollah.

Five years after the invasion of Lebanon, the first intifada erupts in 1987, followed by the second intifada in 2000.

The timing is just about right – eight years since the second intifada - for another repositioning in the region.

Recent developments in the Palestinian territories and in Israel suggest that we are on the threshold of another major shift in the 60-year-old conflict.

Consider two tectonic policy shifts that have taken place in recent weeks in the Middle East conflict. The first comes from Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the second and more recent statement comes from the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, Salam Fayyad.

Speaking to the Hebrew language daily newspaper, Haaretz last week Olmert ventured where no other Israeli prime minister had gone before him, saying that the time had come for Israel to recognize the reality that its occupation of Arab land had to stop and the only resolution to the conflict with the Palestinians was to recognize the need for a two-state solution.

"If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished," Olmert was quoted as saying by the Israeli daily.

The second astonishing statement comes from Fayyad and was made Sunday night in Washington in front of about 600 prominent Palestinian Americans, journalists and diplomats attending the third annual black tie gala hosted by the American Task Force on Palestine, where Fayyad was the keynote speaker.

The Palestinian prime minister stated that the future Palestinian state wanted more than just peace: "We don't just seek peace. We seek a meaningful and lasting peace with Israel. We seek strong ties with Israel. We seek strong economic ties between the independent states of Israel and Palestine. We seek warm relations with Israel. We do not want to get to the point where we just accept each other."

Fayyad, a Texas educated economist, said the Palestinians did not want to erect walls, but build bridges.

His statement is probably the most direct outreach from the Palestinian leadership toward Israel since the PLO recognized the existence of the State of Israel.

Olmert said Israel now had a "partner" in Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Fayyad said Sunday night that Israel would have "a Palestinian partner in ending the occupation, but not "for improving the quality of occupation."

"We do not want to close Israelis out of our lives," said Fayyad. "We want to live with the Israelis as our neighbors."
Regretfully, the timing for this historic rapprochement of view on both the Israeli and Palestinian outlook to the crisis comes at a bad moment, with the United States and Israeli leadership in transition.

The U.S. presidential election is now only 21 days away, rendering the current American president incapable of pushing through any major policy issues in the final three weeks of his mandate, a la Clinton.

And Olmert, too, is something of a lame duck as he prepares to step down in the wake of an alleged financial scandal.

If one fact emerged from this 30-year debacle in the Levant it is the realization that as tectonic as individual initiatives might be, without the active participation of the White House, chances of any breakthrough in the Middle East conflict stand at nil.
"Ultimately," said the Palestinian prime minister, "the only way forward is with the United States leading the way."

And that will have to wait until the new administration is settled.
"We are at a crossroads," Fayyad said Sunday night.

Hopefully, the next administration will waste no time in trying to bring together both two sides at the crossroads and get traffic moving in a positive direction.

A "Sea Change" in Isr Politics!

Olmert's Lame-Duck Epiphany About Palestinian Peace
Scott MacLeod
Time Magazine
September 30, 2008

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1845831,00.html

He is a former leader in the rightist Likud Party who for decades staunchly believed that the West Bank and Gaza Strip belonged to the Jewish people and that the territories, along with the Golan Heights, should remain part of Greater Israel forever. Along with former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert gradually came to understand that this was a fantasy. They broke away from Likud and created the centrist Kadima ("Onward") Party three years ago. Now, as Olmert hands the reins to Tzipi Livni and leaves office amid a corruption scandal, he's made a series of stunning departure statements that form a swan song of historical importance. Peace advocates, Israeli dreamers, Arab skeptics and U.S. mediators in a future McCain or Obama Administration should read his words carefully and take note.

The political lame duck's views expressed in interviews and public comments reveal the sweeping reversals that have taken place among some of Israel's ultra-nationalists. Olmert says Israel should withdraw from "almost all" of the West Bank and Golan Heights. A former mayor of "the undivided capital of the Jewish state," he now advocates dividing Jerusalem with the Palestinians. He wants to keep some of the Jewish settlements that adjoin Israel's pre-1967 border but accepts giving the future Palestinian state Israeli territory in a land swap with a "close to 1-to-1-ratio." "The notion of a Greater Israel no longer exists," Olmert says, "and anyone who still believes in it is deluding themselves."

True, these are not radical views. Former Labour PM Ehud Barak put something like this on the table at Camp David negotiations with the Palestinians eight years ago. What Olmert is saying today broadly conforms to the thinking of Israeli Labour politicians, mainstream Palestinian and Arab leaders, and U.S. officials, as well as the international community. What is important is the source, content and context of Olmert's statements.

Olmert is no Arab-loving pacifist. As Prime Minister, he ravaged half of Lebanon in 2006 in a military offensive after Hizballah killed and kidnapped Israeli soldiers. He has unmercifully turned the screws on Hamas-controlled Gaza. Olmert's comments reflect a profound shift toward realism among Israeli rightists, akin to what Palestinian and Arab nationalists started going through three decades ago, when Israel was in the prime of its strategic strength. The shift is evident not only in Olmert's prescription for a peace settlement, but also in his severe critique of a [self]-righteous Israeli mind-set that has turned out to be self-destructive.

"Forty years after the Six-Day War ended, we keep finding excuses not to act," Olmert says. "We refuse to face reality ... The strategic threats we face have nothing to do with where we draw our borders ... For a large portion of these years, I was unwilling to look at the reality in all its depth." Saying Israel would not attack Iran unilaterally to stop Tehran's nuclear program, Olmert scoffs, "Part of our megalomania and our loss of proportions is the things that are said here about Iran. We are a country that has lost a sense of proportion about itself."

Olmert is by no means agreeing to a surrender. Yet, after Israel's failure to impose its will on Arab opponents by force over four decades, he's crying uncle. "We invested our mental resources and thoughts in 'how to build Judea and Samaria,' yet history made clear to us that the state of Israel has other realistic and viable options," he says. "The state of Israel's future won't be found in intermixing with the Palestinians, but rather, is to be found in unpopulated regions that are desperate for our entrepreneurship and innovation."

Palestinian demands, Olmert is acknowledging, won't go away. Recall, the Likud Party, with which Olmert made his career, always refused any dealings with the PLO or even to recognize its demands for Palestinian independence. Indeed, Sharon invaded Lebanon in 1982 with a grand vision of redrawing the Middle East map with no place for a Palestinian state. The expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank proceeded rapidly in the ensuing decades. With his about-face, Olmert effectively acknowledges that the Palestinian uprisings of 1987 and 2000 succeeded in forcing Israel to address Palestinian rights. Everybody, including Camp David host Bill Clinton, loved to blame Yasser Arafat for the collapse of the peace process. When Sharon succeeded Barak as Prime Minister in 2001, he began implementing a unilateral vision of a settlement by ending Israel's occupation of Gaza. Yet for the last year, at the tragically belated coaxing of the Bush Administration, Olmert, who replaced the ailing Sharon in 2006, has been quietly engaged in a revival of negotiations with Arafat's successor. Like Olmert's willingness to enter those talks, his swan song amounts to an admission that Israel never went quite far enough in accommodating the Palestinians' basic requirements for peace.

The realism behind Olmert's change of heart is of tremendous import, summed up by one sentence: "The international community is starting to view Israel as a future binational state." In other words, forget about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's threats to wipe Israel off the map. Echoing views he initially expressed in 2003, Olmert reasons that without an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, the Jewish state faces the self-inflicted, mortal danger of being destroyed by demographics, overwhelmed by Muslim and Christian Arabs demanding political representation. Olmert fears that the international community could ultimately favor a one-state solution, thus spelling the death of the two-state partition that has been at the core of an acceptable Israeli-Palestinian solution for decades. "Time is not on Israel's side," Olmert says. "I used to believe that everything from the Jordan River bank to the Mediterranean Sea was ours ... But eventually, after great internal conflict, I've realized we have to share this land with the people who dwell here ? that is, if we don't want to be a binational state."

In the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Aluf Benn disparages the Israeli Prime Minister's "epiphany," saying "Olmert is an excellent commentator, but he lacks the firmness to execute his ideas."

Sadly, that seems to be the case. Yet Olmert, on the eighth anniversary of the second Palestinian intifadeh, has done history a valuable service by puncturing some myths about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If future negotiators, as well as American mediators, abandon their fantasies as Olmert has done, a peace that truly benefits all parties is much likelier to come.

No more "Peace Process", Please!

Enough talk

By Gideon Levy
Haaretz.com

The most unstable country in the Middle East is changing its government again. Soon Israel will have a new government, with "continued peace negotiations with the Palestinians" engraved on its banner. Well, now it's time to end the farce after more than 15 years of futile negotiations that led nowhere and brought no peace. It's time to say enough already to the second most dangerous game after the war game - the "political process" game.

This mainly involves playing with ourselves, an idiom meaning masturbation in some languages, and thus a perfect metaphor for this "peace process" that must now be brought to an end. Snuff out this bonfire of vanities, this process of self-deception that pushes us ever further from any agreement. The time has come for decisions and actions - war or peace, annexation and a state of all its people, or dividing the land into two sovereign states. All this must take place during injury time; the 90th minute has long passed.

After 15 years of talking, nothing has been left unsaid or undiscussed. After endless peace plans, "drawer" and "shelf" plans, road maps and interim agreements, none of which has been carried out, we must scream to the new government: Don't start again with that futile negotiations carousel. Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas, Tzipi Livni and Ahmed Qureia, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat, Yossi Beilin and Abu Mazen, Ami Ayalon and Sari Nusseibeh, Ehud Barak and Arafat - they've all said it all. Now's the time to decide - to pull the detailed plans out of Bill Clinton's or Yossi Beilin's or Barak's or Rabin's drawer. The differences between them are minimal.
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There is only one plan on the table: the end of the occupation, the '67 borders and solving the refugee issue in exchange for peace - yes or no. All the rest is insignificant. It cannot take much more time, simply because time has long run out. Take the Clinton plan or Geneva initiative, who knows what the differences are, and start implementing it. There will be no other plans.

It's not merely a criminal waste of time, which always acts against peace. That which could have been achieved a decade ago cannot be achieved today, and that which is still attainable today will no longer be possible in a decade. This danger is real: At the end of each negotiating round lurks the next cycle of violence. Nothing is more dangerous in this region than another failed negotiation.

In addition, the very existence of peace negotiations enables Israel to pretend to be doing something about the situation, without actually doing anything. Israel can thus go through the motions with no intention of reaching a peace agreement and feel as if it were doing everything to achieve it.

But while critical time was being wasted, Israel did not stand idly by. Neither did the Palestinian Authority. While they were negotiating, Israel was building more and more homes in West Bank settlements. In fact, it never stopped. Even Barak, the bravest of them all, added 6,000 housing units to the unworthy project. From one negotiation to the next, more and more opportunities dissipated. The occupation became increasingly heartless and brutal, as did Palestinian terrorism.

The only missing ingredient in all the tedious, superfluous negotiations was sincere goodwill to reach peace. Nothing is more critical than this, which has never been on the table, not even in the great illusion era of Oslo. That is why Israel has never offered, even then, to evacuate a single potted plant in the West Bank settlements. All it did was build more and more, dunam after dunam of destroying every chance. There is no other conflict in the world, it seems, where the negotiations to solve it have lasted so many years while the solution moved ever further away, like the horizon.

If the new government is headed for peace - and this is extremely doubtful - it must start with actions, not talks. It is very easy to change the occupation's road map: Just take a few steps like a mass release of prisoners and taking down all internal roadblocks to signal that the government intends to make peace. This would advance the political process more than all the talks, as daring as they may be.

If I were a Palestinian leader, I'd tell the new government: You know what our positions are, as we know yours. Let's not start everything over again. If you are sincere, start acting, even before the first photo-op between Livni and Abbas. This is even more apt when it comes to peace with Syria - we know what the conditions are, there is nothing to talk about, only to decide. Enough talk. It's time to act.

Palestinian and Israeli Families Agree

Dear Friend of Palestinians and Israelis,
I've been trying to restrain myself from putting too much on the table to you, long-suffering friend.
And send only the most meaningful stories and information relating to the need for addressing and resolving the 60 year-old breakdown (actually longer than that of course). Parents' Circle is Israeli and Palestinian families who have lost children and want to see dialogue between "sides" and resolution, so there will be no more bloodshed. Read on, JRK

Israeli, Palestinian bereaved families meet
Anat Shalev
Ynetnews
September 21, 2008

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3599864,00.html

This weekend a series of meetings between Jewish and Palestinian families was held under the auspices of the "Parents Circle," a group connecting bereaved families from both sides.

The Palestinians listened to the accounts of families of individuals who were killed by Qassam rockets, while the Israelis heard stories from Palestinian parents who have lost their children in the West Bank village of Naalin. Both sides agreed that peace must prevail to stop the bloodshed.

"Our organization is very special," said Nir Oren, the Israeli chairman of the Parents Circle. "Everyone of us has lost a family member as a result of the conflict. Each one of us is working for peace so that neither side will gain more bereaved families."

Oren said that on Saturday a group of 20 Palestinians and 10 Israelis visited the Kibbutz Kfar Aza home of the late Jimmy Kdoshim, who was killed by a mortar round. "The encounter was exciting, and everyone sympathized with the pain Jimmy's family was going through and the fear of rockets that still looms over this kibbutz," he said.

The second encounter took place in the village of Naalin. The group visited the homes of Ahmed Musa and Yousef Amera, who were killed during demonstrations against the construction of Israel's security barrier. "They (Palestinians) told us about how the (security) fence is affecting their daily life, we toured the area where the fence will be constructed and heard their reservations," added Oren.

"We are dealing with people who are losing their livelihood. Ahmed's father told us that he is only interested in peace, his land and bringing the person who shot his son to justice. It's only been 40 days and he is speaking with a tone of appeasement," he said.

Oren added, "the residents of the village understand the security interest in putting up the fence and they are only fighting to change its route. The Israeli group even had a settler who told us stories about living with the Palestinians from the village."

After the meeting, a ceremony was held in Beit Jala where peace activists were cited for their work. One of the recipients was Ismail Hatib, who donated his son's organs to an Israeli. Hatib said, "The most important thing in the world is human life. If I lost my son and I can help another human being, Israeli or Palestinian, that is what is important."

Co-chairman Abu Awwad then spoke about his delegation's experiences while visiting Kibbutz Kfar Aza and said, "We talked to the residents about the co-existence and agricultural cooperation that occurred prior to the year 2000 and how the only contact now is through violence.

"We later visited Jimmy Kdoshim's widow. It was very difficult to hear about her experiences. She lives with the images of the event and we can sympathize with her because we have all been there. My brothers were killed by the IDF, everyone in the Palestinian delegation sympathized and opened up about their own experiences," he said.

"What makes her story more tragic," said the Palestinian chairman, "is that she and her husband worked towards peace and deliberation between the two sides.

"We continued to discuss the different factors and the situation itself and how we can promote dialogue. The important thing is that we get dialogue going between us, the ordinary people. We need to understand each other, with the main problem being the dislike for the different. As soon as we change that, we can move that change further up the ladder," said Abu Awwad.

Listen to BOTH Narratives

Dear Friend of Israelis and Palestinians,
Saliba Sarsar was a colleague of mine when I served a Presbyterian congregation in NJ (First, Red Bank). He spoke at a class I organized there. He teaches at nearby Monmouth University.
Below is his usual even-tempered comment about his friend, Dan Bar-On. Professor Sarsar was raised in the Russian monestery on the side of the Mt. of Olives (dedicated to Mary Magdalene) and is a Greek Orthodox Christian Palestinian.

Overcoming our whirlwinds
Saliba Sarsar
Haaretz
Opinion
September 12, 2008

https://www.americantaskforce.org/admin/content/node-type/daily-news/fields

Dan Bar-On had a story about how he learned to see things through Palestinian eyes. An Israeli Jew, born in Haifa to refugees who had left Nazi Germany in 1933, Dan was a psychology professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and he had long been interested in seeing his nation live in peace with its Palestinian neighbors. At a certain point back in the mid-1990s, however, he realized, as he told me in a formal interview I conducted with him last year, that "I could not live my life in this region without seeing Palestinians, without feeling their pain."

Unable to tolerate such a situation, he began to watch the interactions of Jewish and Palestinian Israeli students as they participated in dialogue workshops under the auspices of BGU's behavioral sciences department. Over a three-year period, Bar-On observed their encounters through a one-way mirror. "That was a painful study for me," he told me. But he felt compelled "to test my own stereotypes about Palestinians."

Bar-On had already made a name for himself with his studies of the intergenerational after-effects of the Holocaust on the children and grandchildren of both survivors and Nazi perpetrators. Now, by watching the Jewish-Palestinian groups, he explained, he saw how it was easier to do Holocaust-related studies, "because I come from the victim side ... the good side." When it came to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, "I was much more involved [and] under the pressure that I belong to the side that occupies the Palestinians, who prevents them from having their own state, and it was difficult morally for me to be in that role." While he had no doubt that the Jews had a right to their national home, he realized that it was essential to find a way to also "accept the Palestinian need for such a right, and it was not an easy task for me to understand."
But Dan Bar-On, who died on September 4, at age 69, did not shrink from the task. And as a consequence of combining his professional pursuits with his political convictions, he was not only a psychologist but a peace builder, someone who used his voice and his touch to help change Israeli society in support of social justice, for both his own people and the Palestinians.

I first met Dan in 1999, when I invited him to speak to a New Jersey group of Arab Americans and American Jews working for dialogue and peaceful coexistence. As a Jerusalemite raised in Palestinian culture, I was impressed by his empathy, his capacity to listen, and the depth of his knowledge, not only of history, but also of how to go beyond victimhood. He always maintained his professional composure, but, as he explained in his book "Tell Your Life Story," he sometimes felt "overpowered by unpredictable whirlwinds ... [and had] to work my own way through in spite of them." In reality, Dan sometimes felt politically estranged in Israel, "due to the growing political animosity in Israel toward the Palestinians and toward my own work with them."

Our relationship evolved into joint publications and co-teaching. In one of our articles, we suggested that, for Israeli Jews and Palestinians to conduct dialogue, "each national community must acknowledge and respect the other's painful memory, whether or not it was party to its creation." Sometimes, in their pain, both peoples have a tendency to see only their own victimization, a blindness that only serves to perpetuate the conflict. But we were convinced that "an inclusive act of communication and faith [would] prepare the way for reconciling the past and for building a better future, one to which our children and grandchildren are entitled."
To this end, Dan and Palestinian educator Sami Adwan, his co-director in the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East (PRIME), with the help of Israeli and Palestinian teachers, put together three sets of booklets in Arabic, Hebrew and English for high school students. The booklets, published between 2002 and 2007, presented the narratives of both sides, one next to the other, with a space in between the two narratives for students to write their own comments. In describing it to me, he observed that initially, students from one group, in encountering the story of the other, "usually see it as propaganda. They delegitimize it, they say that their narrative is morally superior." Being presented with both narratives at the same time, however, "they are faced with both narratives in a way where they can read both of them, can compare them, and have to learn to respect the narrative of the other side just as they respect their own."

In the current political environment, where expediency, narrow self-interest, and cynicism reign, it behooves Israelis and Palestinians to find the inner strength, as Dan did, to cross the border and find a workable solution to what is ailing them. Like it or not, they are destined to be neighbors forever. The quicker they realize it, the better their relationship will become. Bottom-up peace builders, leading without power, are urged to maintain their struggle for peace and to synchronize their plans with top-down peacemakers. Toward that end, today, hope may mean, as Dan concluded in "Tell Your Life Story," "giving up the romantic, monolithic desires of the idealized past in favor of a less perfect but more complex understanding of the world and ourselves, an understanding that can create new possibilities for dialogue within our selves, among ourselves within a collective, and with the Other."

Dr. Saliba Sarsar is professor of political science and associate vice president for academic program initiatives at Monmouth University in New Jersey.