FPI Position Paper, August 9, 2011
John R. Kleinheksel Sr.
A direct challenge to my apparent commitment to the “One-State” position has led to a fresh reassessment of what I and “Friends of Palestinians and Israelis” are all about The introduction to a post on August 6, 2011 by Sam Bahour was titled: “Two-States is Dead; Long Live One State”. One of my good friends took heated exception. This statement addresses that question. I’m sorry now I got carried away by a sudden burst of ardor for the One-State position. One State (secular and democratic); Two states (side by side in peace and security); Three states, four states: Right now, these are political games being played. I don’t want to go there.
The deeper issue (for me) is how we treat each “other”, whether with dignity, each person having the right to exist on the face of the land in freedom and equality; or with fear, distrust, and hostility, using previous offenses as ammunition to fence “the other” off. That is the underlying issue. Every essay, link, article, book review, anecdote that appears from now on in FPI will and must encourage people to treat each person with dignity instead of like dirt: Palestinians treating Israelis as persons on a valid journey to authentic existence; Israelis treating Palestinians as persons on a valid journey to self-determination. No more, no less. This is a battle for hearts and minds that is a real battle. Without winning here, there will be neither a One-State nor a Two-State solution. If all we “see” is a thief or a “terrorist”, there will be neither security nor peace.
Now I know that systemic injustice must be adjudicated. Segregated lunch counters and busses needed to be outlawed in the US and personal relationships were affected because of those systemic changes. That too, is an important battle to be waged in the struggle for “equality” (and J Street, the American Task Force on Palestine, the Obama administration and many others are still working hard to make the “Two-State” solution happen). If that is their battle, so be it. Others are working for a one-state solution with freedom and equality for all. On the surface, it is a longer reach. From before 1948, Jewish leaders have feared losing the “Jewish” character of their homeland because of demographic trends. Can this be solved? It MUST and can be solved, to the satisfaction of all parties that make up “the land”. But not without treating grievances with a listening ear and heart, reaching understanding and wisdom.
It’s been a neighborhood brawl especially since the 1920s when each tribe tried to accommodate one another and failed, again and again, building competing “narratives” that served as bludgeons against the validity of the “other’s” existence, dignity and rights.
FPI joins forces with Israeli and Palestinian persons and entities that are shifting the paradigm from competition (warfare) to cooperation (reconciliation). This is the human dimension that is concomitant with any political solution. Looking each other in the eye. Getting to know one another. Seeing each other as fellow human beings with hopes and dreams. Walking in each other’s shoes. Learning each other’s stories. Laughing and crying together. Seeing things about ourselves that are hard to admit publically, because of ridicule, misrepresentation and rejection by “extremists”. And being public about it anyway.
Perhaps you can understand why the stark egalitarian appeal of the One-State position (living together equally), swept me away the other day. Forgive me. It is of course, “impossible”; for now. Of course, the Two-State solution is impossible as well. Who is holding the high cards?
Don’t you think I know how “impossible” this is politically for those who dreamed of a “Jewish homeland” in the late 1800s: the Zionist dream (secular, by the way) of a homeland “of our own” taking historical form among other nations in the world? How do we give up that dream? How do we modify that dream to accommodate the people we find in the land? How successful has the experiment been, especially since 1967 when we occupied huge swaths of land the international community declared was meant for “the other” people living there? And in 1948, driving out the native inhabitants and forcing them into refugee status or to be second-class citizens in a country no longer their own?
I will speak for myself. I need to do a better job of getting to know more Israelis and Palestinians who are sick and tired of the adversarial stereotypes being perpetuated. I want to redouble efforts to make friends with “the other” who also have dreams, dignity, disappointments and heartache and let you know about persons who are making a difference. Be they Jewish, Muslim or Christian, Druze or whoever.
I really like Eugene Peterson’s translation of Psalm 51:8. The older translation goes something like “a sacrifice acceptable to God is a contrite heart; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise”. Peterson says it better: Heart-shattered lives ready for love/don’t for a moment escape God’s notice.
I’m always looking for those little cracks in armor-plated facades that admit to being human and vulnerable; cracks that drop tears of empathy, joy and sadness when in each other’s presence. FPI is dedicated to finding those stories of brothers and sisters in the human family who find a peace the rest of the world neither seeks nor understands. This is the heart of any religion worth practicing.
I will always lift up The Parents Circle (www.theparentscircle.com), Musalaha (Salim Munayer), SABEEL, (Naim Ateek); No More Enemies (Deb Reich); Holy Land Trust (Sami Awad); Christians for Middle East Peace (CMEP); Mark Braverman (www.markbraverman.org) and many others who are breaking new ground in personal relationships.
Friday, August 12, 2011
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Two State solution: Dead. Long Live One State!
Dear Friend,
I have long thought the so-called "Two State" solution to the Isr/Pal conflict was DEAD. Our "friend", Sam Bahour concurs (see below).
On the eve of official Palestinian leadership's decision to seek their "independence" inside Israel/Palestine, I send you businessman Sam Bahour's assessment and call for "One State, with liberty and justice for all". Well, that's not a direct quote, but it surely is the full intent of his editorial in the Guardian, (faithfully sleuthed out by our friends at ATFP, who are still, by the way, committed to the "Two State" solution. I give them credit for passing on Sam's critique and call.)
More and more of our "friends" are pressing the Israelis (and US) to widen their view of who a "citizen" of Israel is. Repeated calls to recognize Israel as a "Jewish State" are anachronistic, ethnic-centered, and saturated in religious settlement-driven orthodoxy. Surely this form of "A Jewish Republic" is equally as heinous as their constant criticism of Iran's "Islamic Republic". What's the difference? None. Competing orthodoxies, fused with religious fervor, won't lead any to the Promised Land, "living together equally" (as Sam Bahour puts it at the end of his opinion piece below).
The US model of a secular democracy is still the best model there is for Isr/Pal. We in the US must continue to insist on greater true democracy in that region, even though it means going up against "the Jewish State" of Bibi's Likud party, their sympathizers in the US political action committee AIPAC (and even J Street, still wanting to beat the Two-State Dead Horse). Every "state" has its "neighborhoods", but their must be some form of "confederation" that gives basic human equality to all citizens. Such equality does not now exist and few seem to be working at changing that condition!
BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions movement) should be aimed at Israeli companies who are profiting from the Apartheid-like policies, from confiscated land, depriving Palestinian participation in production and services from "their" land and energies. Read on and ponder, JRK
Palestinians will soon come full circle
Years have been wasted making concessions to their colonisers. Palestinians were right to call for a secular state at the outset
By Sam Bahour
The Guardian - Thursday - August 4, 2011
The Palestinian national liberation movement has reached its end. As the Palestinian leadership – if there is such a legitimate body today – prepares to bring the issue of statehood to the UN this September, the weeks and months ahead will witness the last desperate attempt to get the international community to assume their responsibilities and ensure that a Palestinian state becomes a reality in the occupied territories.
The reasons for the failure of the Palestinian national liberation movement are many. First and foremost, the shellshock that the creation of Israel caused among Palestinians in 1948 has never really gone away. Half of the Palestinian population at the time were displaced from their homes.
Those that refused to flee are today citizens of Israel – a citizenship that was not requested, but rather imposed upon them – and comprise more than 1.2 million people, Muslims and Christians.
As if the forced dispossession from 78% of their homeland was not enough, the Israeli military occupied the remaining parts of Palestine in 1967. Israel had planned for that occupation long before the war. Military occupation is, by definition, regarded as a temporary state of affairs – and one would be stretching the definition to the point of fantasy to consider Israel's presence in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem as still temporary after 44 years. Reality is much more accurately described as the crime of apartheid than that of military occupation.
Beginning in the early 1970s, the Palestinians became, as former Palestinian diplomat Afif Safieh put it, "unreasonably reasonable". Year after year the Palestinian leadership offered concession after concession, trying to reach an equitable resolution to their dispossession and military occupation.
This seemingly never-ending chain of concessions culminated in what is known as the 1993 Oslo peace accords. These accords were a seriously lopsided bilateral agreement between the PLO and Israel, which attempted to bring the parties to a "final status agreement" within five years.
The Oslo accords kept the system of military occupation in place and simply codified the unsustainable imbalance between an occupying power (Israel) and an occupied people (the Palestinians). The accords failed, miserably and multiple times. Not only did a final agreement never happen, but today we are further from a two-state solution than ever before. No amount of 11th-hour wordsmithing by Barack Obama or Binyamin Netanyahu around reviving negotiations by setting a starting point for discussing borders is acceptable. Past procrastination has only created irreparable damage on the ground invoking a dire need for an end game, not yet another starting point.
After struggling to revive the peace process for two decades, the Palestinians have lost faith in the process as well as in those tasked with overseeing it, namely the Quartet – United States, Russia, the EU and the UN. For the entire period of the peace process, Israel ploughed forward with more land confiscations, more settlement building, more death and more destruction.
Any honest observer would reach a clear conclusion that Israel has no intention of allowing the Palestinians to create a new reality on the ground towards a feasible, workable resolution of the crisis. Nor are the powers that be, namely the US and EU, serious about ending the conflict on the basis of international law. Diplomacy has utterly failed the Palestinians, leaving them with less land and less water, more fragmented, poorer, in disunity, and with fading hopes.
The drama unfolding as we head towards September revolves around a simple equation. Those who claim to be the Palestinian leadership have no more tricks up their sleeves to justify remaining in negotiations with their occupier. Thus, they are taking what is being portrayed as a strategic move to apply for membership of the state of Palestine in the UN.
The underlying political fact they are trying to re-establish is that the resolution to this seemingly insoluble conflict is two states, Israel and Palestine, based on UN general assembly resolution 181, which in 1947 partitioned Palestine (illegally, I might add).
This move gets an "A" for effort but is doomed to fail even if Palestine is admitted into the UN this year, next year, in five years or not at all. The realities on the ground have changed drastically since 1947. Israel, with blind US support, has succeeded in removing a two-state solution from the feasible options.
The new Palestinian leaders, those whom the Israeli negotiators have not yet met, see the larger picture and refuse to believe that Israel desires to live in peace when every indication for 64 years has shown the opposite. The emerging Palestinian leaders see Israel for what it is: a settler, colonial, apartheid movement clinging to a racialist, exclusivist ideology that neither wishes nor intends to allow another state to emerge between the Mediterranean sea and the Jordan river, let alone allowing Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and be compensated for their hardships, as was stipulated as a condition when the UN accepted Israel as a member state on 11 May 1949.
Once this foredoomed move toward Palestinian membership in the UN runs its course, a new paradigm will take root, one that Israel dreads because it implicitly views Palestinians and Israelis as equals, as co-citizens, as partners. This new shift will see Palestinians dropping their desire for independent statehood in a fraction of their historic homeland and instead will find them, within a genuinely representative political structure, articulating their desire for self-determination within their historic homeland, even if that homeland today is called Israel.
The Palestinians are about to come full circle. They were correct, painfully so, to call for a secular democratic state at the outset of this conflict. Sadly, they wasted precious time and lost too many lives trying to accept unjust modalities of a resolution.
Now, the sooner Palestinians and Israelis realise that our destiny is to live together as equals, the sooner we can begin to rehabilitate our communities and build a single society whose citizens are all equal under law and equal as human beings.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/04/palestinians-secular-state
I have long thought the so-called "Two State" solution to the Isr/Pal conflict was DEAD. Our "friend", Sam Bahour concurs (see below).
On the eve of official Palestinian leadership's decision to seek their "independence" inside Israel/Palestine, I send you businessman Sam Bahour's assessment and call for "One State, with liberty and justice for all". Well, that's not a direct quote, but it surely is the full intent of his editorial in the Guardian, (faithfully sleuthed out by our friends at ATFP, who are still, by the way, committed to the "Two State" solution. I give them credit for passing on Sam's critique and call.)
More and more of our "friends" are pressing the Israelis (and US) to widen their view of who a "citizen" of Israel is. Repeated calls to recognize Israel as a "Jewish State" are anachronistic, ethnic-centered, and saturated in religious settlement-driven orthodoxy. Surely this form of "A Jewish Republic" is equally as heinous as their constant criticism of Iran's "Islamic Republic". What's the difference? None. Competing orthodoxies, fused with religious fervor, won't lead any to the Promised Land, "living together equally" (as Sam Bahour puts it at the end of his opinion piece below).
The US model of a secular democracy is still the best model there is for Isr/Pal. We in the US must continue to insist on greater true democracy in that region, even though it means going up against "the Jewish State" of Bibi's Likud party, their sympathizers in the US political action committee AIPAC (and even J Street, still wanting to beat the Two-State Dead Horse). Every "state" has its "neighborhoods", but their must be some form of "confederation" that gives basic human equality to all citizens. Such equality does not now exist and few seem to be working at changing that condition!
BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions movement) should be aimed at Israeli companies who are profiting from the Apartheid-like policies, from confiscated land, depriving Palestinian participation in production and services from "their" land and energies. Read on and ponder, JRK
Palestinians will soon come full circle
Years have been wasted making concessions to their colonisers. Palestinians were right to call for a secular state at the outset
By Sam Bahour
The Guardian - Thursday - August 4, 2011
The Palestinian national liberation movement has reached its end. As the Palestinian leadership – if there is such a legitimate body today – prepares to bring the issue of statehood to the UN this September, the weeks and months ahead will witness the last desperate attempt to get the international community to assume their responsibilities and ensure that a Palestinian state becomes a reality in the occupied territories.
The reasons for the failure of the Palestinian national liberation movement are many. First and foremost, the shellshock that the creation of Israel caused among Palestinians in 1948 has never really gone away. Half of the Palestinian population at the time were displaced from their homes.
Those that refused to flee are today citizens of Israel – a citizenship that was not requested, but rather imposed upon them – and comprise more than 1.2 million people, Muslims and Christians.
As if the forced dispossession from 78% of their homeland was not enough, the Israeli military occupied the remaining parts of Palestine in 1967. Israel had planned for that occupation long before the war. Military occupation is, by definition, regarded as a temporary state of affairs – and one would be stretching the definition to the point of fantasy to consider Israel's presence in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem as still temporary after 44 years. Reality is much more accurately described as the crime of apartheid than that of military occupation.
Beginning in the early 1970s, the Palestinians became, as former Palestinian diplomat Afif Safieh put it, "unreasonably reasonable". Year after year the Palestinian leadership offered concession after concession, trying to reach an equitable resolution to their dispossession and military occupation.
This seemingly never-ending chain of concessions culminated in what is known as the 1993 Oslo peace accords. These accords were a seriously lopsided bilateral agreement between the PLO and Israel, which attempted to bring the parties to a "final status agreement" within five years.
The Oslo accords kept the system of military occupation in place and simply codified the unsustainable imbalance between an occupying power (Israel) and an occupied people (the Palestinians). The accords failed, miserably and multiple times. Not only did a final agreement never happen, but today we are further from a two-state solution than ever before. No amount of 11th-hour wordsmithing by Barack Obama or Binyamin Netanyahu around reviving negotiations by setting a starting point for discussing borders is acceptable. Past procrastination has only created irreparable damage on the ground invoking a dire need for an end game, not yet another starting point.
After struggling to revive the peace process for two decades, the Palestinians have lost faith in the process as well as in those tasked with overseeing it, namely the Quartet – United States, Russia, the EU and the UN. For the entire period of the peace process, Israel ploughed forward with more land confiscations, more settlement building, more death and more destruction.
Any honest observer would reach a clear conclusion that Israel has no intention of allowing the Palestinians to create a new reality on the ground towards a feasible, workable resolution of the crisis. Nor are the powers that be, namely the US and EU, serious about ending the conflict on the basis of international law. Diplomacy has utterly failed the Palestinians, leaving them with less land and less water, more fragmented, poorer, in disunity, and with fading hopes.
The drama unfolding as we head towards September revolves around a simple equation. Those who claim to be the Palestinian leadership have no more tricks up their sleeves to justify remaining in negotiations with their occupier. Thus, they are taking what is being portrayed as a strategic move to apply for membership of the state of Palestine in the UN.
The underlying political fact they are trying to re-establish is that the resolution to this seemingly insoluble conflict is two states, Israel and Palestine, based on UN general assembly resolution 181, which in 1947 partitioned Palestine (illegally, I might add).
This move gets an "A" for effort but is doomed to fail even if Palestine is admitted into the UN this year, next year, in five years or not at all. The realities on the ground have changed drastically since 1947. Israel, with blind US support, has succeeded in removing a two-state solution from the feasible options.
The new Palestinian leaders, those whom the Israeli negotiators have not yet met, see the larger picture and refuse to believe that Israel desires to live in peace when every indication for 64 years has shown the opposite. The emerging Palestinian leaders see Israel for what it is: a settler, colonial, apartheid movement clinging to a racialist, exclusivist ideology that neither wishes nor intends to allow another state to emerge between the Mediterranean sea and the Jordan river, let alone allowing Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and be compensated for their hardships, as was stipulated as a condition when the UN accepted Israel as a member state on 11 May 1949.
Once this foredoomed move toward Palestinian membership in the UN runs its course, a new paradigm will take root, one that Israel dreads because it implicitly views Palestinians and Israelis as equals, as co-citizens, as partners. This new shift will see Palestinians dropping their desire for independent statehood in a fraction of their historic homeland and instead will find them, within a genuinely representative political structure, articulating their desire for self-determination within their historic homeland, even if that homeland today is called Israel.
The Palestinians are about to come full circle. They were correct, painfully so, to call for a secular democratic state at the outset of this conflict. Sadly, they wasted precious time and lost too many lives trying to accept unjust modalities of a resolution.
Now, the sooner Palestinians and Israelis realise that our destiny is to live together as equals, the sooner we can begin to rehabilitate our communities and build a single society whose citizens are all equal under law and equal as human beings.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/04/palestinians-secular-state
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
NO MORE ENEMIES!
Friend,
Here is the complete review of Deb Reich's NO MORE ENEMIES, JRK
A review of Deborah Reich’s NO MORE ENEMIES, available from Amazon.com
John R. Kleinheksel (www.friendsofpalestiniansandisraelis.blogspot.com)
Our culture is more and more polarized. We accuse “others” of our woes, unable to see “the enemy” is we. One of the key issues of our time is how to build bridges to “others” instead of walls. How will be refuse to treat persons as “enemies”, turning them into partners? It's true in other cultures. It's true in Israel/Palestine.
With characteristic clarity, Martin Marty skewers the chattering class in re the Anders Breivik massacre in Norway. The world jumped to the conclusion that a Muslim extremist must have done it. O no, wait, he was a Christian extremist! “No, this is not one of us”. Left untended, we demonize Muslims or Christians, or Jews, and keep them at arm’s length, to isolate or even eliminate them. He concludes his “Sightings” column for August 1, 2011 with this illuminating paragraph:
The back-and-forth polemics continues. To what point? Each “side” finds it important and urgent to use a broad brush to paint the “other” most monstrously, in order to deflect criticism from themselves and to assure themselves of their own virtue. That obscures what should be a clear-eyed critique of “self-and-other” among all when clarity is so important. The instant and inaccurate portrayal of “the other” makes the self look good in his or her own eyes. It does not provide the accurate data about. . .the people we need to understand more than we need to fire people up, motivated by Islamophobia and Christianophobia, neither of which needs more heat in our flammable or inflammable world.
I’ve discovered a working mom in Israel, who is determined to do something about it. Somehow (perhaps through Sam Bahour), Deb Reich got on my FPI list (Friends of Palestinians and Israelis) and offered to send me a copy of her recently published book, NO MORE ENEMIES (NME). I’ve read it and recommend it to all persons seeking to advance Israeli/Palestinian reconciliation efforts. She refuses to be anybody’s “enemy”.
Born in Manhattan, educated at Barnard College, Ms Reich is a single Israeli mom, raising two children in Karkur, a small town near the Mediterranean coast. With single-minded determination, she is working to reconcile Israelis and Palestinians Arabs by building lasting friendships with “the enemy”, making them “partners” instead of adversaries. And she’s networking with scores of individuals and groups seeking to transcend literal and relational barriers.
There are four parts to her 383 page book. Part I seeks to explain NME, that “the very notion of enemies is obsolete” (p. 3). In Part II, she seeks to apply her vision to Israelis and Palestinians, giving many “stories” (Part III) of how to “live behind enemy lines”, drawn from her own experiences with friends, neighbors and colleagues between 1981 (when she moved to Israel) and 2010.
Throughout the book, she hammers home her thesis that “the enemies paradigm simply does not promote good solutions. The ‘other group’ is the partner you need in order to fix what’s broken” (p. 212). Part IV gives a smorgasbord of practical suggestions of actions to take, websites to visit, and agencies and entities that are working toward the NME paradigm. She advocates creating a literal “Toolbox” with items/objects to remind us of the many ways we can address “the other”. It is an invitation to a “transformation process” that has taken her “40 years to figure out” (p. 268).
As a fair-minded Christian I truly admire Deb Reich’s wholehearted commitment to “liberate the latent cooperation bound up in dysfunctional relationships [with] ‘enemies’” (p. 271). She knows it takes “energy”, the energy latent in each of us, to get this done (Christians would say it comes from the “one” who helps us love our enemies like he did!) She also knows it is we who are often our own worst enemies. It is we who need transformation.
Here is a typical brilliant flash of insight that sparkles throughout the book:
If you take part in systematically oppressing or disenfranchising or discounting a whole group of people over a long time, you are not merely depriving them unfairly of . . .basic human rights, you are also binding up their vital, mysterious human energy (and much of your own) in a sterile and ugly cycle of joint struggle, suffering and death (p. 270.)
I want my readers to be introduced to just a few of the websites Ms Reich has suggested, as windows into groups that are contributing to turning enemies into partners.
Women Organization for Political Prisoners: www.wofpp.org This is a group of women united in their opposition to the Israeli occupation. They wish to support (listed) women political prisoners incarcerated for opposing the occupation.
The Madaa Community Center in Silwan: www.madaasilwan.org is a Palestinians community center established in 2007. Silwan is just outside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, occupied by Israel. They are using nonviolent techniques in the struggle to avoid displacement. They are promoting dialogue and training youth for leadership.
Artsbridge Institute: www.artsbridgeinstitute.org Artsbridge creates a safe space for shared self-revelation while staying with the language of empathy, curiosity and compassion. It was used productively at Wahat al Salam – Neve Shalom, near Jerusalem in 2010.
Compassionate Listening: www.compassionatelistening.org teaches listening skills to create powerful cultures of peace. Their next delegation to Israel/Pal is March 18-28, 2012.
School for Peace: www.nswas.org Ms Reich has translated their Israeli/Palestinian Identities in Dialogue: The School for Peace Approach, available from their website.
Rabbis for Human Rights: www.rhr.org.il The lead article by Rab Yishai Ron, alone is worth a visit to this site.
Israeli Committee Against House Demolition: www.icahdusa.org Born in the USA, Jeff Halper has long sought to advance a just peace between Israel and the Palestinians based on coexistence and human rights. He patiently, persistently works for an end to the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.
When I asked her where she got this deep desire to turn enemies into partners, she referred me to a column she wrote in 2002 to explain it:
Up Xenophilia
Nearly everyone’s heard of xenophobia (fear and loathing of foreigners and their strange ways), but what about its obverse -- xenophilia? I checked an unabridged dictionary, and there it was. Xenophile: someone attracted to things and people strange and foreign… as this columnist has always been.
Well, maybe not always; is it genetic, or learned? To teach us world history, my 4th grade teacher, Miss Ladd, organized a creative multinational food fair -- way to go, Miss Ladd! Every kid in the class chose a country, and the moms pitched in to help (dads didn’t cook yet in 1957). One fine day we must all have gathered in the classroom and eaten our merry way around the globe, though uncharacteristically I have no memory of the repast, or even of my family’s contribution. Still, my xenophilous tendencies seem to have crystallized by the 4th grade.
Xenophilia isn’t an intrinsically Jewish impulse, maybe; but it’s not a sin, either. Most people are evidently happiest sticking with their own kind, without a fuss. Relatively few seem to find foreign ways either irresistibly fascinating or intolerably threatening. Alas, the Philes tend to become anthropologists and the Phobes, politicians. Pick any nation: With its xenophiles safely shipped off to some aboriginal hinterland or busy in academe, the xenophobes in government get busy rallying the masses to make war on the neighbors (and the neighbors likewise, of course). Maybe we need a Society for the Promotion of Xenophilia in Government (unless what passes for our legislature has already made it illegal).
“That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of nations, is as shocking as it is true,” wrote Thomas Paine in 1792; “but when those… in the government… make it their study to sow discord, and cultivate prejudices between nations, it becomes the more unpardonable.” Well said, old boy.
Deb Reich is a courageous Israeli mother, consistently working in her homeland for an end to seeing “the other” as an “enemy”. She is not alone. The cascade of voices, the pounding of feet, the working hands and open arms are increasing, some day to transform the lives and landscape of the present “unholy” land. Dear lady, may your anti-tribal tribe increase!
Here is the complete review of Deb Reich's NO MORE ENEMIES, JRK
A review of Deborah Reich’s NO MORE ENEMIES, available from Amazon.com
John R. Kleinheksel (www.friendsofpalestiniansandisraelis.blogspot.com)
Our culture is more and more polarized. We accuse “others” of our woes, unable to see “the enemy” is we. One of the key issues of our time is how to build bridges to “others” instead of walls. How will be refuse to treat persons as “enemies”, turning them into partners? It's true in other cultures. It's true in Israel/Palestine.
With characteristic clarity, Martin Marty skewers the chattering class in re the Anders Breivik massacre in Norway. The world jumped to the conclusion that a Muslim extremist must have done it. O no, wait, he was a Christian extremist! “No, this is not one of us”. Left untended, we demonize Muslims or Christians, or Jews, and keep them at arm’s length, to isolate or even eliminate them. He concludes his “Sightings” column for August 1, 2011 with this illuminating paragraph:
The back-and-forth polemics continues. To what point? Each “side” finds it important and urgent to use a broad brush to paint the “other” most monstrously, in order to deflect criticism from themselves and to assure themselves of their own virtue. That obscures what should be a clear-eyed critique of “self-and-other” among all when clarity is so important. The instant and inaccurate portrayal of “the other” makes the self look good in his or her own eyes. It does not provide the accurate data about. . .the people we need to understand more than we need to fire people up, motivated by Islamophobia and Christianophobia, neither of which needs more heat in our flammable or inflammable world.
I’ve discovered a working mom in Israel, who is determined to do something about it. Somehow (perhaps through Sam Bahour), Deb Reich got on my FPI list (Friends of Palestinians and Israelis) and offered to send me a copy of her recently published book, NO MORE ENEMIES (NME). I’ve read it and recommend it to all persons seeking to advance Israeli/Palestinian reconciliation efforts. She refuses to be anybody’s “enemy”.
Born in Manhattan, educated at Barnard College, Ms Reich is a single Israeli mom, raising two children in Karkur, a small town near the Mediterranean coast. With single-minded determination, she is working to reconcile Israelis and Palestinians Arabs by building lasting friendships with “the enemy”, making them “partners” instead of adversaries. And she’s networking with scores of individuals and groups seeking to transcend literal and relational barriers.
There are four parts to her 383 page book. Part I seeks to explain NME, that “the very notion of enemies is obsolete” (p. 3). In Part II, she seeks to apply her vision to Israelis and Palestinians, giving many “stories” (Part III) of how to “live behind enemy lines”, drawn from her own experiences with friends, neighbors and colleagues between 1981 (when she moved to Israel) and 2010.
Throughout the book, she hammers home her thesis that “the enemies paradigm simply does not promote good solutions. The ‘other group’ is the partner you need in order to fix what’s broken” (p. 212). Part IV gives a smorgasbord of practical suggestions of actions to take, websites to visit, and agencies and entities that are working toward the NME paradigm. She advocates creating a literal “Toolbox” with items/objects to remind us of the many ways we can address “the other”. It is an invitation to a “transformation process” that has taken her “40 years to figure out” (p. 268).
As a fair-minded Christian I truly admire Deb Reich’s wholehearted commitment to “liberate the latent cooperation bound up in dysfunctional relationships [with] ‘enemies’” (p. 271). She knows it takes “energy”, the energy latent in each of us, to get this done (Christians would say it comes from the “one” who helps us love our enemies like he did!) She also knows it is we who are often our own worst enemies. It is we who need transformation.
Here is a typical brilliant flash of insight that sparkles throughout the book:
If you take part in systematically oppressing or disenfranchising or discounting a whole group of people over a long time, you are not merely depriving them unfairly of . . .basic human rights, you are also binding up their vital, mysterious human energy (and much of your own) in a sterile and ugly cycle of joint struggle, suffering and death (p. 270.)
I want my readers to be introduced to just a few of the websites Ms Reich has suggested, as windows into groups that are contributing to turning enemies into partners.
Women Organization for Political Prisoners: www.wofpp.org This is a group of women united in their opposition to the Israeli occupation. They wish to support (listed) women political prisoners incarcerated for opposing the occupation.
The Madaa Community Center in Silwan: www.madaasilwan.org is a Palestinians community center established in 2007. Silwan is just outside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, occupied by Israel. They are using nonviolent techniques in the struggle to avoid displacement. They are promoting dialogue and training youth for leadership.
Artsbridge Institute: www.artsbridgeinstitute.org Artsbridge creates a safe space for shared self-revelation while staying with the language of empathy, curiosity and compassion. It was used productively at Wahat al Salam – Neve Shalom, near Jerusalem in 2010.
Compassionate Listening: www.compassionatelistening.org teaches listening skills to create powerful cultures of peace. Their next delegation to Israel/Pal is March 18-28, 2012.
School for Peace: www.nswas.org Ms Reich has translated their Israeli/Palestinian Identities in Dialogue: The School for Peace Approach, available from their website.
Rabbis for Human Rights: www.rhr.org.il The lead article by Rab Yishai Ron, alone is worth a visit to this site.
Israeli Committee Against House Demolition: www.icahdusa.org Born in the USA, Jeff Halper has long sought to advance a just peace between Israel and the Palestinians based on coexistence and human rights. He patiently, persistently works for an end to the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.
When I asked her where she got this deep desire to turn enemies into partners, she referred me to a column she wrote in 2002 to explain it:
Up Xenophilia
Nearly everyone’s heard of xenophobia (fear and loathing of foreigners and their strange ways), but what about its obverse -- xenophilia? I checked an unabridged dictionary, and there it was. Xenophile: someone attracted to things and people strange and foreign… as this columnist has always been.
Well, maybe not always; is it genetic, or learned? To teach us world history, my 4th grade teacher, Miss Ladd, organized a creative multinational food fair -- way to go, Miss Ladd! Every kid in the class chose a country, and the moms pitched in to help (dads didn’t cook yet in 1957). One fine day we must all have gathered in the classroom and eaten our merry way around the globe, though uncharacteristically I have no memory of the repast, or even of my family’s contribution. Still, my xenophilous tendencies seem to have crystallized by the 4th grade.
Xenophilia isn’t an intrinsically Jewish impulse, maybe; but it’s not a sin, either. Most people are evidently happiest sticking with their own kind, without a fuss. Relatively few seem to find foreign ways either irresistibly fascinating or intolerably threatening. Alas, the Philes tend to become anthropologists and the Phobes, politicians. Pick any nation: With its xenophiles safely shipped off to some aboriginal hinterland or busy in academe, the xenophobes in government get busy rallying the masses to make war on the neighbors (and the neighbors likewise, of course). Maybe we need a Society for the Promotion of Xenophilia in Government (unless what passes for our legislature has already made it illegal).
“That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of nations, is as shocking as it is true,” wrote Thomas Paine in 1792; “but when those… in the government… make it their study to sow discord, and cultivate prejudices between nations, it becomes the more unpardonable.” Well said, old boy.
Deb Reich is a courageous Israeli mother, consistently working in her homeland for an end to seeing “the other” as an “enemy”. She is not alone. The cascade of voices, the pounding of feet, the working hands and open arms are increasing, some day to transform the lives and landscape of the present “unholy” land. Dear lady, may your anti-tribal tribe increase!
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Working Toward Reconcilation, Salim Munayer
Dear Friend,
I'll be giving more details from Deb Reich's new book: NO MORE ENEMIES, but first this from the Musalaha director, Salim Munayer. Pray for peace and reconcilation; learning each other's narrative and working for rapproachment. JRK
The Urgency of Reconciliation
by Salim Munayer
As Israeli and Palestinian believers, we usually focus on our theological differences, but we are unaware of the greater political and societal differences. Recently, I was speaking with one of my colleagues from the Hebrew University, a professor who has done a lot of work on bringing Israelis and Palestinians together. We were discussing the different challenges that these sort of inter-group meetings face, and the lack of hope that people have in the prospect of reconciliation. This led us to talk about the new report by Sammy Smooha, a professor of sociology at Haifa University and one of Israel’s preeminent scholars of Israeli-Palestinian relations, especially within the State of Israel. He recently published a report through the United States Institute of Peace, called Arab-Jewish Relations in Israel, Alienation and Rapprochement[1]. It is an informed look at the shift in attitudes over the past few decades, as well as the current situation, and suggests a number of policy changes that should be made to help reconciliation as we go forward.
Smooha first points out that Israeli society is fragmented on a number of different levels. He writes, “Israel is a deeply divided society. The division between Arab and Jewish citizens is reflected in institutions; culture; national identity; socioeconomic status; and stances on the character of the state, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and other fundamental issues.”[2] Furthermore, Palestinian-Israelis,
[R]eject Zionism, the de facto state ideology of Israel. They see Zionism, the Jewish movement of national liberation, as colonialist and racist, and they denigrate the Jews’ fundamental Zionist collective identity. The Jews, meanwhile, do not see themselves as colonial settlers but rather as the genuine proprietors of the Land of Israel, from which they were historically exiled and to which they rightfully returned to find alien Arabs in possession . . . Both sides reject the most cherished values of the other.[3]
This division is important, because the Palestinians in Israel make up a very significant minority; one in six Israeli citizens are Arab, and they make up around 17 per cent of the total population (excluding the Palestinian Territories). Smooha explains that there are two different theories on the Arab-Jewish relations within Israel, mutual alienation and mutual rapprochement. The mutual alienation theory states that the two communities are on a violent collision course, while the mutual rapprochement theory claims that they are in the process of adjusting to each other. He then looks at the period from 1996 to 2010 and discusses some of the developments that took place, in light of these two theories. “By either account,” he writes, “any account in fact, this was a lost decade for Arab-Jewish coexistence. The situation has worsened and bodes badly for the future of their relations.”[4]
For example, Smooha discusses the collapse of the Oslo accords and the beginning of the Second Intifada, as well as the October Events in 2000, when Israeli police killed thirteen Palestinian-Israelis in protests that took place across the country. Smooha also looks at the steep rise in popularity of right wing political parties such as Yisrael Betenu, and the proposed measures to require loyalty oaths, and to criminalize participation in Nakba Day memorial ceremonies. Although these measures were not passed, they affected Arab-Jewish relations within Israel and indicate the level of animosity between the two communities. Among Palestinian-Israelis, the voting rate has dropped from 75 per cent in 1999 to 53 per cent in 2009, and contains an element of boycott that demonstrates a withdrawal from Israeli society. The Palestinian-Israelis that do vote have increasingly supported Arab parties that advocate a bi-national state that would no longer be Jewish.[5] Smooha also includes the results of his survey on attitudes towards reconciliation, and they do not paint a rosy picture. 43 per cent of Palestinian Israelis are not ready to have a Jewish neighbor, and 50 per cent of Jewish Israelis are not ready to have an Arab neighbor.[6] All of these trends represent a growing hostility between these two communities.
For Smooha, real progress will only be made when a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is found, and when Palestinian-Israelis are integrated into mainstream Israeli society. Unfortunately, no progress was made on either of these fronts in the past decade. In spite of this lack of progress, however, Smooha is optimistic. He sides with the mutual rapprochement theory, and believes that we can still reach coexistence and reconciliation, but only if we are willing to work for it. If nothing is done to bring about change, the only result will be further alienation, destruction and violence. We cannot afford to “postpone change until peace is concluded,” we must “take steps immediately to improve Arab-Jewish coexistence” if we are to “preclude further deterioration that might impede peace.”[7]
This is encouraging, and serves as an affirmation of those who work for reconciliation. But it is also a warning. As believers, we are by no means immune to the destructive traits that mark our respective communities, and all of the factors that have further entrenched the divisions in the past decade have also affected us. We may disagree on how to go about reaching reconciliation, but we do still have hope for an improvement of our relations, and we have our shared faith in the Messiah who calls us to dwell in unity as brothers and sisters. If nothing is done to restore the relationships that have been damaged, there are dark days ahead, and this is why it is crucial that we allow God to use us as an instrument of his peace. We are called to be peacemakers, and stand against division, hatred, and violence with love.
Salim J. Munayer, Ph.D., is director of Musalaha, a ministry of reconciliation.
I'll be giving more details from Deb Reich's new book: NO MORE ENEMIES, but first this from the Musalaha director, Salim Munayer. Pray for peace and reconcilation; learning each other's narrative and working for rapproachment. JRK
The Urgency of Reconciliation
by Salim Munayer
As Israeli and Palestinian believers, we usually focus on our theological differences, but we are unaware of the greater political and societal differences. Recently, I was speaking with one of my colleagues from the Hebrew University, a professor who has done a lot of work on bringing Israelis and Palestinians together. We were discussing the different challenges that these sort of inter-group meetings face, and the lack of hope that people have in the prospect of reconciliation. This led us to talk about the new report by Sammy Smooha, a professor of sociology at Haifa University and one of Israel’s preeminent scholars of Israeli-Palestinian relations, especially within the State of Israel. He recently published a report through the United States Institute of Peace, called Arab-Jewish Relations in Israel, Alienation and Rapprochement[1]. It is an informed look at the shift in attitudes over the past few decades, as well as the current situation, and suggests a number of policy changes that should be made to help reconciliation as we go forward.
Smooha first points out that Israeli society is fragmented on a number of different levels. He writes, “Israel is a deeply divided society. The division between Arab and Jewish citizens is reflected in institutions; culture; national identity; socioeconomic status; and stances on the character of the state, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and other fundamental issues.”[2] Furthermore, Palestinian-Israelis,
[R]eject Zionism, the de facto state ideology of Israel. They see Zionism, the Jewish movement of national liberation, as colonialist and racist, and they denigrate the Jews’ fundamental Zionist collective identity. The Jews, meanwhile, do not see themselves as colonial settlers but rather as the genuine proprietors of the Land of Israel, from which they were historically exiled and to which they rightfully returned to find alien Arabs in possession . . . Both sides reject the most cherished values of the other.[3]
This division is important, because the Palestinians in Israel make up a very significant minority; one in six Israeli citizens are Arab, and they make up around 17 per cent of the total population (excluding the Palestinian Territories). Smooha explains that there are two different theories on the Arab-Jewish relations within Israel, mutual alienation and mutual rapprochement. The mutual alienation theory states that the two communities are on a violent collision course, while the mutual rapprochement theory claims that they are in the process of adjusting to each other. He then looks at the period from 1996 to 2010 and discusses some of the developments that took place, in light of these two theories. “By either account,” he writes, “any account in fact, this was a lost decade for Arab-Jewish coexistence. The situation has worsened and bodes badly for the future of their relations.”[4]
For example, Smooha discusses the collapse of the Oslo accords and the beginning of the Second Intifada, as well as the October Events in 2000, when Israeli police killed thirteen Palestinian-Israelis in protests that took place across the country. Smooha also looks at the steep rise in popularity of right wing political parties such as Yisrael Betenu, and the proposed measures to require loyalty oaths, and to criminalize participation in Nakba Day memorial ceremonies. Although these measures were not passed, they affected Arab-Jewish relations within Israel and indicate the level of animosity between the two communities. Among Palestinian-Israelis, the voting rate has dropped from 75 per cent in 1999 to 53 per cent in 2009, and contains an element of boycott that demonstrates a withdrawal from Israeli society. The Palestinian-Israelis that do vote have increasingly supported Arab parties that advocate a bi-national state that would no longer be Jewish.[5] Smooha also includes the results of his survey on attitudes towards reconciliation, and they do not paint a rosy picture. 43 per cent of Palestinian Israelis are not ready to have a Jewish neighbor, and 50 per cent of Jewish Israelis are not ready to have an Arab neighbor.[6] All of these trends represent a growing hostility between these two communities.
For Smooha, real progress will only be made when a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is found, and when Palestinian-Israelis are integrated into mainstream Israeli society. Unfortunately, no progress was made on either of these fronts in the past decade. In spite of this lack of progress, however, Smooha is optimistic. He sides with the mutual rapprochement theory, and believes that we can still reach coexistence and reconciliation, but only if we are willing to work for it. If nothing is done to bring about change, the only result will be further alienation, destruction and violence. We cannot afford to “postpone change until peace is concluded,” we must “take steps immediately to improve Arab-Jewish coexistence” if we are to “preclude further deterioration that might impede peace.”[7]
This is encouraging, and serves as an affirmation of those who work for reconciliation. But it is also a warning. As believers, we are by no means immune to the destructive traits that mark our respective communities, and all of the factors that have further entrenched the divisions in the past decade have also affected us. We may disagree on how to go about reaching reconciliation, but we do still have hope for an improvement of our relations, and we have our shared faith in the Messiah who calls us to dwell in unity as brothers and sisters. If nothing is done to restore the relationships that have been damaged, there are dark days ahead, and this is why it is crucial that we allow God to use us as an instrument of his peace. We are called to be peacemakers, and stand against division, hatred, and violence with love.
Salim J. Munayer, Ph.D., is director of Musalaha, a ministry of reconciliation.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Palestinian Statehood Long Overdue
Dear Friend,
Saliba Sarsar and Hussein Ibish give words to be heeded. Prof. Sarsar is a former colleague of mine when I was in New Jersey, a native of East Jerusalem, a Christian Palestinian, a Vice President at the University of Monmouth.
Mr. Ibish was Communications Director for the ADC (American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee), has a PhD from U. Mass and is a Sr Research Fellow at the ATFP (American Task Force on Palestine).
It is an extraordinarily perceptive piece on the need for "progress" on the "Two-State" solution. (Disclosure: I've given up on the Two-State solution long ago, and think the "equal rights" movement is a better route to take). But for all that, these two men clearly make the case for action in a prudent, persistent way. It raises many questions but seeks to clarify the issues.
Read it, ponder it, and pass it on as it contributes significantly to the discussion. The longstanding conflict is a microcosm of US Middle East policy.
I'm planning on going back there next year. Let's go together. jrk
The Long Overdue State of Palestine
Hussein Ibish and Saliba Sarsar
The Huffington Post (Opinion)
July 18, 2011 - 12:00am
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hussein-ibish-phd/state-of-palestine_b_901442.html
With the independence of the new Republic of South Sudan, the world is again reminded that states are created on the basis of local, regional and international necessity. At least two decades of international action, as well as a long, bitter and bloody conflict produced the independence of the south, a state that has been already welcomed by the international community, the African Union, the United Nations, and has been invited to join the Arab League.
South Sudan is only the latest newly-created state in the international community. In recent decades numerous new countries have come into existence, arising out of the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, the split between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the secession of Eritrea from Ethiopia, and so forth. Yet more than 60 years after its existence was envisaged by the UN partition plan for Palestine, more than 40 years after its creation was implied in the UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, and almost 20 years since the Oslo Accords led the whole world to expect that Palestine would, soon, enjoy independence, there is still no Palestinian state.
It's hard to overestimate the strategic, political and cultural damage this failure to secure Palestinian independence is having on the Middle East as a region, and, indeed, throughout the globe. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the ongoing occupation that began in 1967 is completely disproportionate to its geographical and demographic size because of the profound emotional, ideological, religious and symbolic investment people throughout the world have made in it. Passions run high far beyond Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, and it's no exaggeration to describe the conflict and the occupation as a cancer on the body politic of the global community.
The bottom line is this: in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea -- what has been the de facto Israeli state since 1967 -- there are approximately equal numbers, about 6 million of both, of Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Muslims and Christians. One group has a state, citizenship, self-determination and independence. A small group of Palestinians, about 1 million, are citizens of Israel but subject to significant forms of discrimination. But the large majority of Palestinians live in the occupied territories without citizenship or enfranchisement of any kind, self-determination or independence, and are subject to the arbitrary and typically abusive rule of a foreign military. Moreover, they have watched as their land is steadily colonized by Israeli settlements, which are both a violation of international law and a human rights abuse against those living under occupation according to the Fourth Geneva Convention. Nowhere in the world is there any comparable level of separate and unequal as there is under Israeli rule in the occupied Palestinian territories.
David Ben-Gurion, who was Israel's prime minister twice, during 1948-1953 and 1955-1963, respectively, eloquently spoke in 1945 of the Jewish yearning for national validation and self-determination. He stated, "We are a people without a State and, therefore, a people without credentials, without recognition, without representation, without the privileges of a nation, without the means of self-defense, and without any say in our fate." These might easily be the words of a Palestinian leader in 2011.
Two years later, on November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 181, recommending the partition of Palestine into two separate states, one Jewish and one Arab, with the Jerusalem-Bethlehem area to be placed under special international protection, administered by the United Nations. However, the UN Security Council failed to implement Resolution 181, and as soon as the British Mandate was terminated, Jewish leaders declared the establishment of Israel, leading to the intervention by five Arab armies in what was already a raging communal civil war in Palestine. This conflict left Israel in de facto possession of not the 55 percent of mandatory Palestine envisaged in the partition resolution, but 78 percent, which are now generally regarded as the internationally accepted borders of Israel.
Sixty-three years later, and following seven wars, the displacement of over a million Palestinian refugees during the 1948 and 1967 wars (who now number more than four million), two Palestinian intifadas, and countless dead and wounded, Israel remains a nation at war and in fear, and Palestinian national aspirations remain totally unfulfilled. Israeli settlements continue to be built at an alarming pace, with 200 already constructed, and the half-million Jewish Israeli colonists living in them are squeezing Palestinians into ever smaller areas of the West Bank and Jerusalem, and denying them access to water and other resources.
Peace efforts such as the Oslo accords (1993); Wye River accord (1998); Camp David meeting (2000); Taba negotiations between Palestinian and Israeli delegations (2001); George Mitchell's proposal (2001); George Tenet's plan (2001); United Nations Resolution 1397, which affirmed a vision of a region where Palestine and Israel would live side by side within secure and recognized borders (2002); the Arab Peace Initiative adopted unanimously twice by the Arab League (2002); and the "roadmap" for peace adopted by the Quartet (2003); have all been creditable efforts to develop peace, but none have succeeded and thus far the agony and tragedy have simply continued.
Years of conflict and insecurity, narratives of exclusion and pain, and incompatible visions of the future, let alone understandings of the past, have created a serious disconnect between Israelis and Palestinians. Each national community is caught up in its own tendentious and exclusive narratives: Israel using the past and the present to create the future; the Palestinians using the present to recreate the past in service of the future. Both are laboring under serious illusions.
Unfortunately, while US policy has emphasized that a two-state solution is imperative for American national interests, because of the "special relationship" between the two countries, in practice it remains steadfastly in Israel's corner, vetoing 26 UN Security Council draft resolutions on Palestine since July 1973. Domestic political considerations and a powerful American popular and elite consensus in support of Israel make pressuring that country in the normal diplomatic manner very difficult for an American president. Palestinians have hoped to be able to use the "special relationship" to help mollify Israeli concerns and reassure them that because of American participation, they are not taking any inordinate risks in entering into a peace agreement with the Palestinians. So far, this strategy, while theoretically promising, has yet to demonstrate much efficacy.
According to almost all opinion polls, most Palestinians and Israelis are in favor of a negotiated two-state solution, based on the 1967 borders, with agreed upon land swaps. Unfortunately, similarly large majorities do not believe it will happen and do not trust the other side's intentions. Unless President Barack Obama is able to persuade Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu to negotiate on the aforementioned parameters, then the Palestinians will be facing many more checkpoints and a stonewall of delay while the Israelis continue to seize more Palestinian land in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Unfortunately, many Palestinians and Israelis believe that Netanyahu has no interest in pursuing a negotiated solution along the lines that Palestinians would deem acceptable. And, even more unfortunately, his unenthusiastic approach to the peace process and insistent emphasis on security above all, including peace, has proven extremely popular in Israel and he leads an unlikely but extraordinarily stable coalition government. In other words, his default position of saying "no" to everything is serving his political interests, leaving him with few incentives to be more forthcoming.
However, as numerous Israelis with impeccable national security credentials, including some very strongly rooted in the political right, have been publicly stating in recent months, it is essential to Israel's national interest to help secure the creation of a viable, democratic and peaceful State of Palestine. While the Israeli occupation resulted from conditions of the 1960s or even earlier, the time for its ending has come. An independent, contiguous, and secure Palestine (democratic, pluralistic, non-militarized, and neutral) living in peace alongside Israel is, as an apparent consensus of Israeli national security experts appear to recognize, the only way to secure Israel's long-term safety and stability. The occupation is untenable, dangerous and, ultimately, self-destructive.
The Arab states, as well as the United States and Israel, strongly require the creation of a Palestinian state for their fundamental national interests. For too long the Palestinian question has been a volatile, destabilizing variable in regional politics, the source of conflict and tension, and a powerful tool in the hands of extremists of many different varieties. This understanding was most importantly expressed through the Arab Peace Initiative, but has also been repeatedly emphasized by Arab leaders across the region. King Abdullah II of Jordan, in his memoir, Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril, expressed "a sense of urgency, a conviction that the window for peace between Israel and the Palestinians is closing." We agree with him when he states, "Both sides have a moral responsibility to strive for peace... the alternative is more conflict and violence."
Every moment that is lost only benefits the proponents of extremism on all sides. Albeit a minority, they will continue to monopolize the political narrative and dictate the facts on the ground in the absence of peace. The moderates will lose heart and fade away in the smoke of violence and hate and the fog of deception.
Enlightened leadership not only leads and serves but finds like-minded followers as well, leaders in their own right, who would be eager to sustain positive change for the common good of both Palestinians and Israelis. It not only responds to constituencies, it creates them. The need for allies for peace and statehood is equally important as the need for such a consensus locally, regionally, and internationally.
What Ben Gurion envisioned for his people in 1945, all Palestinians have sought for decades. It is high time that the United States and the rest of the international community stood by them, not just rhetorically or in terms of development aid, but with practical, effective diplomatic efforts that ensure that the occupation will end, and that a Palestinian state alongside Israel will be created, recognized by the major powers of the world, and welcomed as a member state of the United Nations. Without a doubt this will require Israeli acquiescence as well, which means that negotiations are unavoidable and indispensable.
But the international community has an important role to play in laying the groundwork for such an agreement, making it crystal clear that it will accept no other outcome, applying both negative and positive pressure on both sides to make it happen, and doing everything possible to avoid any other outcome. Simply leaving it up to the parties, which are defined by the most extreme degree of power asymmetry imaginable, is not a viable option. International engagement, led by but not exclusive to the United States, is more indispensable now than ever. Especially given the role the international community played in the creation of Israel, it has a right and a responsibility to play a similar role in the creation of Palestine.
This is a delicate process, and we are not proposing an implausible and impracticable "imposition" of a solution on the parties by an international community that is unwilling and probably unable to take such steps. Nor are we suggesting that the Palestinian demand for full UN membership in September is likely to prove successful. Clearly a failed confrontation with the United States at the UN Security Council over the issue of statehood is not in anybody's interest, let alone the Palestinians. However, a greater role for the international community in resolving this exceptionally damaging and destabilizing ongoing conflict is essential. Palestinians can and should receive a major upgrade of their observer mission status from the General Assembly, and should be recognized on a bilateral basis by every state that is serious about Israeli-Palestinian peace.
There is much the international community can do to promote a two-state solution, particularly by clarifying its unshakable commitment to this outcome and its categorical refusal to accept any alternative. There is no longer any excuse for postponing or delaying such measures. They do not undermine Israeli-Palestinian negotiations; they support them insofar as they make the only reasonable, workable outcome far more likely and demonstrate that the world expects and will help the parties arrive at a two-state solution in the near future. The international community has made its commitment to Israel very clear since 1948. It must now move quickly to make its commitment to Palestine alongside Israel equally clear, especially to the Palestinians and the Israelis.
Saliba Sarsar and Hussein Ibish give words to be heeded. Prof. Sarsar is a former colleague of mine when I was in New Jersey, a native of East Jerusalem, a Christian Palestinian, a Vice President at the University of Monmouth.
Mr. Ibish was Communications Director for the ADC (American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee), has a PhD from U. Mass and is a Sr Research Fellow at the ATFP (American Task Force on Palestine).
It is an extraordinarily perceptive piece on the need for "progress" on the "Two-State" solution. (Disclosure: I've given up on the Two-State solution long ago, and think the "equal rights" movement is a better route to take). But for all that, these two men clearly make the case for action in a prudent, persistent way. It raises many questions but seeks to clarify the issues.
Read it, ponder it, and pass it on as it contributes significantly to the discussion. The longstanding conflict is a microcosm of US Middle East policy.
I'm planning on going back there next year. Let's go together. jrk
The Long Overdue State of Palestine
Hussein Ibish and Saliba Sarsar
The Huffington Post (Opinion)
July 18, 2011 - 12:00am
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hussein-ibish-phd/state-of-palestine_b_901442.html
With the independence of the new Republic of South Sudan, the world is again reminded that states are created on the basis of local, regional and international necessity. At least two decades of international action, as well as a long, bitter and bloody conflict produced the independence of the south, a state that has been already welcomed by the international community, the African Union, the United Nations, and has been invited to join the Arab League.
South Sudan is only the latest newly-created state in the international community. In recent decades numerous new countries have come into existence, arising out of the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, the split between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the secession of Eritrea from Ethiopia, and so forth. Yet more than 60 years after its existence was envisaged by the UN partition plan for Palestine, more than 40 years after its creation was implied in the UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, and almost 20 years since the Oslo Accords led the whole world to expect that Palestine would, soon, enjoy independence, there is still no Palestinian state.
It's hard to overestimate the strategic, political and cultural damage this failure to secure Palestinian independence is having on the Middle East as a region, and, indeed, throughout the globe. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the ongoing occupation that began in 1967 is completely disproportionate to its geographical and demographic size because of the profound emotional, ideological, religious and symbolic investment people throughout the world have made in it. Passions run high far beyond Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, and it's no exaggeration to describe the conflict and the occupation as a cancer on the body politic of the global community.
The bottom line is this: in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea -- what has been the de facto Israeli state since 1967 -- there are approximately equal numbers, about 6 million of both, of Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Muslims and Christians. One group has a state, citizenship, self-determination and independence. A small group of Palestinians, about 1 million, are citizens of Israel but subject to significant forms of discrimination. But the large majority of Palestinians live in the occupied territories without citizenship or enfranchisement of any kind, self-determination or independence, and are subject to the arbitrary and typically abusive rule of a foreign military. Moreover, they have watched as their land is steadily colonized by Israeli settlements, which are both a violation of international law and a human rights abuse against those living under occupation according to the Fourth Geneva Convention. Nowhere in the world is there any comparable level of separate and unequal as there is under Israeli rule in the occupied Palestinian territories.
David Ben-Gurion, who was Israel's prime minister twice, during 1948-1953 and 1955-1963, respectively, eloquently spoke in 1945 of the Jewish yearning for national validation and self-determination. He stated, "We are a people without a State and, therefore, a people without credentials, without recognition, without representation, without the privileges of a nation, without the means of self-defense, and without any say in our fate." These might easily be the words of a Palestinian leader in 2011.
Two years later, on November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 181, recommending the partition of Palestine into two separate states, one Jewish and one Arab, with the Jerusalem-Bethlehem area to be placed under special international protection, administered by the United Nations. However, the UN Security Council failed to implement Resolution 181, and as soon as the British Mandate was terminated, Jewish leaders declared the establishment of Israel, leading to the intervention by five Arab armies in what was already a raging communal civil war in Palestine. This conflict left Israel in de facto possession of not the 55 percent of mandatory Palestine envisaged in the partition resolution, but 78 percent, which are now generally regarded as the internationally accepted borders of Israel.
Sixty-three years later, and following seven wars, the displacement of over a million Palestinian refugees during the 1948 and 1967 wars (who now number more than four million), two Palestinian intifadas, and countless dead and wounded, Israel remains a nation at war and in fear, and Palestinian national aspirations remain totally unfulfilled. Israeli settlements continue to be built at an alarming pace, with 200 already constructed, and the half-million Jewish Israeli colonists living in them are squeezing Palestinians into ever smaller areas of the West Bank and Jerusalem, and denying them access to water and other resources.
Peace efforts such as the Oslo accords (1993); Wye River accord (1998); Camp David meeting (2000); Taba negotiations between Palestinian and Israeli delegations (2001); George Mitchell's proposal (2001); George Tenet's plan (2001); United Nations Resolution 1397, which affirmed a vision of a region where Palestine and Israel would live side by side within secure and recognized borders (2002); the Arab Peace Initiative adopted unanimously twice by the Arab League (2002); and the "roadmap" for peace adopted by the Quartet (2003); have all been creditable efforts to develop peace, but none have succeeded and thus far the agony and tragedy have simply continued.
Years of conflict and insecurity, narratives of exclusion and pain, and incompatible visions of the future, let alone understandings of the past, have created a serious disconnect between Israelis and Palestinians. Each national community is caught up in its own tendentious and exclusive narratives: Israel using the past and the present to create the future; the Palestinians using the present to recreate the past in service of the future. Both are laboring under serious illusions.
Unfortunately, while US policy has emphasized that a two-state solution is imperative for American national interests, because of the "special relationship" between the two countries, in practice it remains steadfastly in Israel's corner, vetoing 26 UN Security Council draft resolutions on Palestine since July 1973. Domestic political considerations and a powerful American popular and elite consensus in support of Israel make pressuring that country in the normal diplomatic manner very difficult for an American president. Palestinians have hoped to be able to use the "special relationship" to help mollify Israeli concerns and reassure them that because of American participation, they are not taking any inordinate risks in entering into a peace agreement with the Palestinians. So far, this strategy, while theoretically promising, has yet to demonstrate much efficacy.
According to almost all opinion polls, most Palestinians and Israelis are in favor of a negotiated two-state solution, based on the 1967 borders, with agreed upon land swaps. Unfortunately, similarly large majorities do not believe it will happen and do not trust the other side's intentions. Unless President Barack Obama is able to persuade Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu to negotiate on the aforementioned parameters, then the Palestinians will be facing many more checkpoints and a stonewall of delay while the Israelis continue to seize more Palestinian land in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Unfortunately, many Palestinians and Israelis believe that Netanyahu has no interest in pursuing a negotiated solution along the lines that Palestinians would deem acceptable. And, even more unfortunately, his unenthusiastic approach to the peace process and insistent emphasis on security above all, including peace, has proven extremely popular in Israel and he leads an unlikely but extraordinarily stable coalition government. In other words, his default position of saying "no" to everything is serving his political interests, leaving him with few incentives to be more forthcoming.
However, as numerous Israelis with impeccable national security credentials, including some very strongly rooted in the political right, have been publicly stating in recent months, it is essential to Israel's national interest to help secure the creation of a viable, democratic and peaceful State of Palestine. While the Israeli occupation resulted from conditions of the 1960s or even earlier, the time for its ending has come. An independent, contiguous, and secure Palestine (democratic, pluralistic, non-militarized, and neutral) living in peace alongside Israel is, as an apparent consensus of Israeli national security experts appear to recognize, the only way to secure Israel's long-term safety and stability. The occupation is untenable, dangerous and, ultimately, self-destructive.
The Arab states, as well as the United States and Israel, strongly require the creation of a Palestinian state for their fundamental national interests. For too long the Palestinian question has been a volatile, destabilizing variable in regional politics, the source of conflict and tension, and a powerful tool in the hands of extremists of many different varieties. This understanding was most importantly expressed through the Arab Peace Initiative, but has also been repeatedly emphasized by Arab leaders across the region. King Abdullah II of Jordan, in his memoir, Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril, expressed "a sense of urgency, a conviction that the window for peace between Israel and the Palestinians is closing." We agree with him when he states, "Both sides have a moral responsibility to strive for peace... the alternative is more conflict and violence."
Every moment that is lost only benefits the proponents of extremism on all sides. Albeit a minority, they will continue to monopolize the political narrative and dictate the facts on the ground in the absence of peace. The moderates will lose heart and fade away in the smoke of violence and hate and the fog of deception.
Enlightened leadership not only leads and serves but finds like-minded followers as well, leaders in their own right, who would be eager to sustain positive change for the common good of both Palestinians and Israelis. It not only responds to constituencies, it creates them. The need for allies for peace and statehood is equally important as the need for such a consensus locally, regionally, and internationally.
What Ben Gurion envisioned for his people in 1945, all Palestinians have sought for decades. It is high time that the United States and the rest of the international community stood by them, not just rhetorically or in terms of development aid, but with practical, effective diplomatic efforts that ensure that the occupation will end, and that a Palestinian state alongside Israel will be created, recognized by the major powers of the world, and welcomed as a member state of the United Nations. Without a doubt this will require Israeli acquiescence as well, which means that negotiations are unavoidable and indispensable.
But the international community has an important role to play in laying the groundwork for such an agreement, making it crystal clear that it will accept no other outcome, applying both negative and positive pressure on both sides to make it happen, and doing everything possible to avoid any other outcome. Simply leaving it up to the parties, which are defined by the most extreme degree of power asymmetry imaginable, is not a viable option. International engagement, led by but not exclusive to the United States, is more indispensable now than ever. Especially given the role the international community played in the creation of Israel, it has a right and a responsibility to play a similar role in the creation of Palestine.
This is a delicate process, and we are not proposing an implausible and impracticable "imposition" of a solution on the parties by an international community that is unwilling and probably unable to take such steps. Nor are we suggesting that the Palestinian demand for full UN membership in September is likely to prove successful. Clearly a failed confrontation with the United States at the UN Security Council over the issue of statehood is not in anybody's interest, let alone the Palestinians. However, a greater role for the international community in resolving this exceptionally damaging and destabilizing ongoing conflict is essential. Palestinians can and should receive a major upgrade of their observer mission status from the General Assembly, and should be recognized on a bilateral basis by every state that is serious about Israeli-Palestinian peace.
There is much the international community can do to promote a two-state solution, particularly by clarifying its unshakable commitment to this outcome and its categorical refusal to accept any alternative. There is no longer any excuse for postponing or delaying such measures. They do not undermine Israeli-Palestinian negotiations; they support them insofar as they make the only reasonable, workable outcome far more likely and demonstrate that the world expects and will help the parties arrive at a two-state solution in the near future. The international community has made its commitment to Israel very clear since 1948. It must now move quickly to make its commitment to Palestine alongside Israel equally clear, especially to the Palestinians and the Israelis.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Aiming at "Equal Rights" (NOT "Statehood")
Dear Friend,
This article argues that a new generation of activists are rejecting the "old" leadership of warring factions (Fatah and HAMAS), and will be pressing (nonviolently) for "equal rights" in the land of Isr/Pal.
It looks to me like Rachel Shabi is on to the essence of this "new movement" that sees striving for Palestinian "statehood" as outdated and irrelevant to "facts on the ground". Civil rights for Palestinians in the land of Israelis and Palestinians sounds more like Martin Luther King Jr and the civil rights movement in the US.
Our "friend" Sami Awad (Holy Land Trust) is quoted at the bottom of the article. Please at least scan this piece. Your faithful servant, JRK
Palestine Lost
Rachel Shabi
Foreign Policy (Opinion)
July 13, 2011 - 12:00am
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/07/13/palestine_lost
Promises were made, and it looks like they'll be broken.
U.S. President Barack Obama said he believed a Palestinian state could be created by September 2011. Speaking to the U.N. General Assembly in September 2010, he laid down a challenge to formulate an agreement that would make it a reality.
That same deadline was set by Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad for his state-building plan, which was intended to create the institutions for a viable Palestinian state.
But U.S.-brokered negotiations have been a miserable failure, and September is now fast approaching. Palestinian leaders have declared their intention to push for recognition in the U.N. General Assembly, where they can expect overwhelming support. The United States is expected to block the move in the Security Council -- and, of course, Israel will not alter its policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip because of a U.N. resolution.
Now, with the Palestinian dream of statehood stymied at every turn, a new generation of activists are adopting fresh tactics to win their rights.
"September is a moment of truth for us," says Diana Alzeer, a 23-year-old social activist from Ramallah who cites the revolution in Egypt as inspiration. "We see that a dictatorship of over 30 years was gone in two weeks. So why not for Palestinians?"
Alzeer is part of a network of global Palestinian activists that form the "March15" movement -- named for the date when thousands took to the streets of Gaza, the West Bank and Jersualem to call for Fatah and Hamas, the two dominant Palestinian parties, to end their bitter division. But the movement also proves that the Palestinian street is growing disillusioned with its long-dominant political factions. "That's the big difference now," says Alzeer. "We are not led by parties. Most of us don't belong to any."
March15 is a loose network of young, social media-friendly activists organizing globally and injecting new life into the Palestinian popular struggle. Healing political divisions is one step on the path of creating a united, non-violent protest movement, they believe. Another goal on that same path, some activists say, is to resuscitate the PLO's legislative body, the Palestinian National Council -- and allow all Palestinians, regardless of geography, to elect representatives. And for some, the idea of pursuing a Palestinian state through asymmetric negotiation with Israel is simply outdated.
"What's the use of state if you can't have the political rights that go with it?" asks Fadi Quran, a 23-year-old coordinator of Palestinian youth groups in Ramallah. "The demands of the new movement that is slowly but surely beginning to surface are freedom, justice and dignity -- that both Palestinians and Israelis should have the same opportunities and the same rights, as equals."
This year also marks the 20-year mark of the start of the peace process between Palestinians and Israelis in Madrid in 1991 and led to the landmark Oslo Accords -- a process that, in all that time, has yielded few results. Those Palestinians who have grown up in the "Oslo years" have grown deeply cynical as the peace process faltered and failed to deliver. And Obama's spectacular climb-down last year over Israel enforcing a freeze on settlement expansion was, for many, the final nail in the coffin of a negotiated solution.
Young Palestinians now see more hope in the democracy movements sweeping the region, and draw parallels in their opposition to corrupt, unrepresentative politics and a stifling lack of opportunity. "This whole generation in the Arab world is more educated and its main goal has been to break away from the older generation and create something new for themselves," Quran says.
This sentiment is borne out in public opinion surveys. Though Palestinian national sentiment is notoriously difficult to measure, the Norwegian research firm FAFO recently found that Palestinians believed corruption had increased significantly over the past three years. What's more, FAFO discovered that support for both Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh have slumped in 2011.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian push for statehood at the United Nations may not get many cheers on the ground. Quran argued that, even if successful, a U.N. statehood seal would be no more than a moral victory. "There will be no full sovereignty, no contiguous land, no Palestinian control over large swathes of the Palestinian population -- nothing that you need to be state," he says. "If there is a huge fuss and a declaration of statehood, a lot of Palestinians will say it is a big joke and that we are sick of people playing with our destiny."
The shift among some protesters, from statehood to equal rights, has also put women center-stage. They are increasingly leading the Friday afternoon marches against the Israeli separation barrier and Jewish settlements in the West Bank. A small group of active Palestinian women focused on such protests say they take regular inquiries from new female activists, inspired by images of young Palestinian women facing down Israeli soldiers. They also explain that they earned their protest stripes during the March 15 demonstrations in Ramallah, when they formed human shields around male activists, taking the blows from security officials who at first attacked, later defended, and finally joined them
"These are guys who would usually never listen to a woman and her opinions but now they are with us, working together," says Lina, a 27-year-old woman from East Jerusalem.
For her, it's all in line with the new goals of the movement. "It is about complete, dynamic change, rather than the same people running the system," she says. "This is not about territory any more, but about rights -- and the same rights for women."
Already, this movement has altered the format of Palestinian protest movements. On May 15, March15 was involved with coordinating border protests of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Syria, linking those to simultaneous demonstrations in the West Bank and Gaza. The striking display of unified protest marked Nakba Day, the Palestinian commemoration of their displacement in the war that created Israel.
At least 14 people were killed and hundreds injured as Israeli forces opened fire on these mass protests - Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas declared a three-day mourning period for those killed. But the March15 movement had made its mark. As Nazareth-based journalist Jonathan Cook pointed out in an article for The National, "the scenes of Palestinian defiance on Israel's borders will fuel the imaginations of Palestinians everywhere."
Quran argues that the unity of the protest movement is an antidote to the current politics of division. "We thought it would take longer to convince Palestinian youth from different locations around the world to get together," he says. "But all we had to do was get in touch with them."
Activists predict more change is coming. "Non-violent protest won't be political activities or just about the [Israeli separation] wall or settlements," says Sami Awad, director of the Holy Land trust, a Bethlehem-based, non-profit organisation that works on Palestinian community building. "We want to expose the inequalities that Palestinians face -- from water distribution to education to movement and freedom of worship."
This is not about giving up on Palestinian statehood entirely, but rather a strategic decision to put it on pause. "Until the equal rights of Palestinians are recognised, we will not be able to find a political solution," says Awad. "For now, that can wait."
This article argues that a new generation of activists are rejecting the "old" leadership of warring factions (Fatah and HAMAS), and will be pressing (nonviolently) for "equal rights" in the land of Isr/Pal.
It looks to me like Rachel Shabi is on to the essence of this "new movement" that sees striving for Palestinian "statehood" as outdated and irrelevant to "facts on the ground". Civil rights for Palestinians in the land of Israelis and Palestinians sounds more like Martin Luther King Jr and the civil rights movement in the US.
Our "friend" Sami Awad (Holy Land Trust) is quoted at the bottom of the article. Please at least scan this piece. Your faithful servant, JRK
Palestine Lost
Rachel Shabi
Foreign Policy (Opinion)
July 13, 2011 - 12:00am
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/07/13/palestine_lost
Promises were made, and it looks like they'll be broken.
U.S. President Barack Obama said he believed a Palestinian state could be created by September 2011. Speaking to the U.N. General Assembly in September 2010, he laid down a challenge to formulate an agreement that would make it a reality.
That same deadline was set by Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad for his state-building plan, which was intended to create the institutions for a viable Palestinian state.
But U.S.-brokered negotiations have been a miserable failure, and September is now fast approaching. Palestinian leaders have declared their intention to push for recognition in the U.N. General Assembly, where they can expect overwhelming support. The United States is expected to block the move in the Security Council -- and, of course, Israel will not alter its policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip because of a U.N. resolution.
Now, with the Palestinian dream of statehood stymied at every turn, a new generation of activists are adopting fresh tactics to win their rights.
"September is a moment of truth for us," says Diana Alzeer, a 23-year-old social activist from Ramallah who cites the revolution in Egypt as inspiration. "We see that a dictatorship of over 30 years was gone in two weeks. So why not for Palestinians?"
Alzeer is part of a network of global Palestinian activists that form the "March15" movement -- named for the date when thousands took to the streets of Gaza, the West Bank and Jersualem to call for Fatah and Hamas, the two dominant Palestinian parties, to end their bitter division. But the movement also proves that the Palestinian street is growing disillusioned with its long-dominant political factions. "That's the big difference now," says Alzeer. "We are not led by parties. Most of us don't belong to any."
March15 is a loose network of young, social media-friendly activists organizing globally and injecting new life into the Palestinian popular struggle. Healing political divisions is one step on the path of creating a united, non-violent protest movement, they believe. Another goal on that same path, some activists say, is to resuscitate the PLO's legislative body, the Palestinian National Council -- and allow all Palestinians, regardless of geography, to elect representatives. And for some, the idea of pursuing a Palestinian state through asymmetric negotiation with Israel is simply outdated.
"What's the use of state if you can't have the political rights that go with it?" asks Fadi Quran, a 23-year-old coordinator of Palestinian youth groups in Ramallah. "The demands of the new movement that is slowly but surely beginning to surface are freedom, justice and dignity -- that both Palestinians and Israelis should have the same opportunities and the same rights, as equals."
This year also marks the 20-year mark of the start of the peace process between Palestinians and Israelis in Madrid in 1991 and led to the landmark Oslo Accords -- a process that, in all that time, has yielded few results. Those Palestinians who have grown up in the "Oslo years" have grown deeply cynical as the peace process faltered and failed to deliver. And Obama's spectacular climb-down last year over Israel enforcing a freeze on settlement expansion was, for many, the final nail in the coffin of a negotiated solution.
Young Palestinians now see more hope in the democracy movements sweeping the region, and draw parallels in their opposition to corrupt, unrepresentative politics and a stifling lack of opportunity. "This whole generation in the Arab world is more educated and its main goal has been to break away from the older generation and create something new for themselves," Quran says.
This sentiment is borne out in public opinion surveys. Though Palestinian national sentiment is notoriously difficult to measure, the Norwegian research firm FAFO recently found that Palestinians believed corruption had increased significantly over the past three years. What's more, FAFO discovered that support for both Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh have slumped in 2011.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian push for statehood at the United Nations may not get many cheers on the ground. Quran argued that, even if successful, a U.N. statehood seal would be no more than a moral victory. "There will be no full sovereignty, no contiguous land, no Palestinian control over large swathes of the Palestinian population -- nothing that you need to be state," he says. "If there is a huge fuss and a declaration of statehood, a lot of Palestinians will say it is a big joke and that we are sick of people playing with our destiny."
The shift among some protesters, from statehood to equal rights, has also put women center-stage. They are increasingly leading the Friday afternoon marches against the Israeli separation barrier and Jewish settlements in the West Bank. A small group of active Palestinian women focused on such protests say they take regular inquiries from new female activists, inspired by images of young Palestinian women facing down Israeli soldiers. They also explain that they earned their protest stripes during the March 15 demonstrations in Ramallah, when they formed human shields around male activists, taking the blows from security officials who at first attacked, later defended, and finally joined them
"These are guys who would usually never listen to a woman and her opinions but now they are with us, working together," says Lina, a 27-year-old woman from East Jerusalem.
For her, it's all in line with the new goals of the movement. "It is about complete, dynamic change, rather than the same people running the system," she says. "This is not about territory any more, but about rights -- and the same rights for women."
Already, this movement has altered the format of Palestinian protest movements. On May 15, March15 was involved with coordinating border protests of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Syria, linking those to simultaneous demonstrations in the West Bank and Gaza. The striking display of unified protest marked Nakba Day, the Palestinian commemoration of their displacement in the war that created Israel.
At least 14 people were killed and hundreds injured as Israeli forces opened fire on these mass protests - Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas declared a three-day mourning period for those killed. But the March15 movement had made its mark. As Nazareth-based journalist Jonathan Cook pointed out in an article for The National, "the scenes of Palestinian defiance on Israel's borders will fuel the imaginations of Palestinians everywhere."
Quran argues that the unity of the protest movement is an antidote to the current politics of division. "We thought it would take longer to convince Palestinian youth from different locations around the world to get together," he says. "But all we had to do was get in touch with them."
Activists predict more change is coming. "Non-violent protest won't be political activities or just about the [Israeli separation] wall or settlements," says Sami Awad, director of the Holy Land trust, a Bethlehem-based, non-profit organisation that works on Palestinian community building. "We want to expose the inequalities that Palestinians face -- from water distribution to education to movement and freedom of worship."
This is not about giving up on Palestinian statehood entirely, but rather a strategic decision to put it on pause. "Until the equal rights of Palestinians are recognised, we will not be able to find a political solution," says Awad. "For now, that can wait."
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Haaretz Editorial
Dear Friend,
The editorial speaks for "progressive" Israelis who want a change from the direction being given by the present Likud leadership.
Likud continues to demonize Palestinians, denying their legitimate aspirations for national identity.
Many of us sense the time for a "Two-State" solution has long past. But some keep beating a "Dead Horse". (As in this editorial)
Is resurrection possible after death? For people of hope, life after death is possible. But . . . it means a change; life-change. Attitude change. A new mind-set.
Perhaps the tide is changing. Add your voice to the need for meeting "The Other" at least half way. JRK
Israel should learn the lessons of Sudan
The UN proved its ability to resolve bloody conflicts with South Sudanese independence. Sudan's partition plan, which was passed by a democratic referendum and supported by the international community, proved that a peaceful solution can be found, even for the most bitter conflicts.
Haaretz Editorial
The city of Juba was joyous yesterday. Thousands of inhabitants of the world's 193rd country, the Republic of South Sudan, celebrated its independence in the presence of the United Nations secretary general and numerous other leaders - including its former enemy, the president of North Sudan, Omar al-Bashir. They cheered at the sound of the newest national anthem on Earth and the unfurling of the flag of the world's youngest nation.
South Sudan's independence was bought by great bloodshed. After 50 years of civil wars, which cost the lives of some two million Sudanese, the time came to partition the north and the south. Yesterday's celebrations could not hide the serious problems of the new country: One out of seven babies will not reach its fifth birthday, and between one and four million South Sudanese might be deported from the north. How will oil profits be divided between the north and the south? What will South Sudan, one of the poorest and most corrupt regions in the world, do with the money - will it continue to spend it on its army or devote it to solving its social problems? How will the debts of the two countries - a total of $38 billion - be divided? And how will the south find an outlet to the sea?
But yesterday was a time for worldwide celebration: The United Nations proved its ability, in a rare instance, to resolve bloody conflicts. Sudan's partition plan, which was passed by a democratic referendum and supported by the international community, proved that a peaceful solution can be found, even for the most bitter conflicts. The involvement of the United Nations was the critical factor in resolving the conflict.
Israel should learn the lessons of Sudan. Not only should it join the expected general recognition of the new country; it should realize that the division into two countries backed by the international community is the only way to solve a bloody conflict like the one between the Israelis and the Palestinians. While Israel is fighting a harsh and needless battle against UN recognition of a Palestinian state, it should look to Sudan and draw the conclusion that a diplomatic plan that wins the support of the United Nations and most of the world, could be the best plan for Israel, too. After South Sudan became the 193rd country, it may be hoped that if Palestine becomes the 194th, it will be with the support of its neighbor, Israel.
The editorial speaks for "progressive" Israelis who want a change from the direction being given by the present Likud leadership.
Likud continues to demonize Palestinians, denying their legitimate aspirations for national identity.
Many of us sense the time for a "Two-State" solution has long past. But some keep beating a "Dead Horse". (As in this editorial)
Is resurrection possible after death? For people of hope, life after death is possible. But . . . it means a change; life-change. Attitude change. A new mind-set.
Perhaps the tide is changing. Add your voice to the need for meeting "The Other" at least half way. JRK
Israel should learn the lessons of Sudan
The UN proved its ability to resolve bloody conflicts with South Sudanese independence. Sudan's partition plan, which was passed by a democratic referendum and supported by the international community, proved that a peaceful solution can be found, even for the most bitter conflicts.
Haaretz Editorial
The city of Juba was joyous yesterday. Thousands of inhabitants of the world's 193rd country, the Republic of South Sudan, celebrated its independence in the presence of the United Nations secretary general and numerous other leaders - including its former enemy, the president of North Sudan, Omar al-Bashir. They cheered at the sound of the newest national anthem on Earth and the unfurling of the flag of the world's youngest nation.
South Sudan's independence was bought by great bloodshed. After 50 years of civil wars, which cost the lives of some two million Sudanese, the time came to partition the north and the south. Yesterday's celebrations could not hide the serious problems of the new country: One out of seven babies will not reach its fifth birthday, and between one and four million South Sudanese might be deported from the north. How will oil profits be divided between the north and the south? What will South Sudan, one of the poorest and most corrupt regions in the world, do with the money - will it continue to spend it on its army or devote it to solving its social problems? How will the debts of the two countries - a total of $38 billion - be divided? And how will the south find an outlet to the sea?
But yesterday was a time for worldwide celebration: The United Nations proved its ability, in a rare instance, to resolve bloody conflicts. Sudan's partition plan, which was passed by a democratic referendum and supported by the international community, proved that a peaceful solution can be found, even for the most bitter conflicts. The involvement of the United Nations was the critical factor in resolving the conflict.
Israel should learn the lessons of Sudan. Not only should it join the expected general recognition of the new country; it should realize that the division into two countries backed by the international community is the only way to solve a bloody conflict like the one between the Israelis and the Palestinians. While Israel is fighting a harsh and needless battle against UN recognition of a Palestinian state, it should look to Sudan and draw the conclusion that a diplomatic plan that wins the support of the United Nations and most of the world, could be the best plan for Israel, too. After South Sudan became the 193rd country, it may be hoped that if Palestine becomes the 194th, it will be with the support of its neighbor, Israel.
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