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Roy Skinner
Israeli government leaders and many of their supporters suggest that when the Hamas rockets stop, the Israeli offensive will stop. That view is very shortsighted. The killing of innocent people by any party is not condoned or defended, but the rockets falling in Israel are to be seen as symptoms of the cause.
The counter to the official Israeli reasoning can remain that when the throttling, decades-long, siege of Gaza stops, the rockets will stop and honest, meaningful talks can be conducted for peace.
Successive generations of Gazans have experienced over 41 years of military occupation or siege without genuine movements to peace with justice being evident. There have been many talks, but without meaningful substance.
Twenty-five years before he became prime minister of Israel, Menachem Begin wrote of the time he was commanding an underground Jewish militant organisation fighting both the British Mandate forces and the Palestinian Arabs. He did not accept the label of terrorist that was given to him by the British government. He endeavoured at length to explain his philosophy of the need of his people to hate foreigners who deprived them of the means of individual defence and struggles for national independence. With a different religious ideology, he could have understood and supported the Hamas movement today. And perhaps he could have understood the value of negotiations with a foe through direct dialogue and not through the barrel of a gun.
During the period he and his senior ministers were negotiating peace with Egypt, in the late 1970s, he quietly expressed fear of his agriculture minister, the soldier turned politician, Arik Sharon. The man who was defence minister at that time, Ezer Weizman, recorded his views in 1981 of what he called the human aspect of peace. He wrote that Sharon had not observed his awareness of the difference between his own good and that of Israel. Sharon had caused his prime minister to fear that he could order tanks to isolate the prime minister’s office to force through his point of view of the day. As in Lebanon in both 1982 and 2006, the world sees today other militant leaders putting what they see as their own good before that of the future of their country.
Using the military and harsh forms of occupation, Israel’s leaders continue to ignore what their country needs most: peace with the Palestinians.
In 1999, the former chairman of civil rights in Israel, Holocaust survivor and peace activist Israel Shahak wrote (with Norton Mezvinsky) of their fear of a fundamentalist Jewish regime coming to power in Israel. If it did, they believed that those Israelis who did not accept its creeds would be subjected to worse treatment than given to the Palestinians. And recently, an Israeli peace group advertised its fear that unless the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands ended, militant Israeli settlers would occupy Israel itself (Haaretz, October 24, 2008).
By the late 1970s Israel was isolating the PLO and sponsoring an Islamic welfare organisation in Gaza to weaken local support for the PLO. Palestinians took to the streets in 1987 to rise against occupation. Even after the 1991 Madrid talks and agreements, the PLO was further weakened and the military group, Hamas, grew in influence in Gaza. Ten years later, calls for democratic elections throughout the Middle East resulted in the election of a Hamas-led government in Gaza. Israel declined to engage in dialogue with the latter, but may now realise the necessity to do so.
Thirty-two years ago, a wise Palestinian leader brought to me in my office in Gaza his group’s confidential plan for peace in the region. He and all the members of his group were first-generation refugees from British-Mandated southern Palestine. They had heeded the advice of Socrates to recognise their people’s interests in the long term and to see ahead the distant results of their deeds. With a proposed map, flag design and written text, my visitor outlined ideas for a federation of three nations in economic and political union: Israel, Jordan and Palestine. At that time, it did not seem it would attract wide support.
The peace-seeking group leader emphasised that his group had taken into account that the Middle East was home to the sources of the world’s three monotheist religions. They had stripped away consideration of cultural and geographical human-made rituals and dogmas. They emphasised that a basic foundation of each of the three religions was a common message of compassion for fellow man and belief in the dignity and worth of every human being.
Today, some of their frustrated grand and great grandchildren could be manning the launchpads of rockets aimed into Israel, into the areas of their families’ former homes from which they had been evicted in 1948.
Internationally organised peace talks have focused on a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Discussions in recent years within some Palestinian communities and an article in The Canberra Times (August 5, 1998) suggest a one-state solution, non-religious but democratic, with equality of all before the law.
The US president-elect, Barack Obama, can take advantage of the fading of the cold war psychology of balance of power in the Middle East. That had included the maintenance of the militarily friendly Israeli nation based also on quasi-held religious values. Dialogue with those who were once feared can now be considered feasible and necessary. Making friends and not enemies, and assisting regional economic development can be the new policy.
Obama and his advisers could visualize the U.S. state of New York if it were populated with the same population density as the Gaza Strip, in similar circumstances to it. The New York state would have a population of almost 500 million frustrated persons, generations of whom had been deprived for 41 years of the very things for which Begin said he had fought in an underground organization, as a freedom fighter.
There are millions of Israelis who yearn for meaningful negotiations within the Middle East. Most of those known to me have fought in the regional wars and have served in the occupied territories. Those who have done so have accepted that bombs and bullets may kill people but do not kill ideas and aspirations for freedom.
I negotiated with them almost daily for 12 years in four regions of the occupied territories for humane measures to alleviate hardship for the oppressed. They have first-hand knowledge that every death, also of so-called terrorists and insurgents, automatically recruits others to take their places and to entrench feelings of hate of occupation governments.
They understand the need for uninterrupted education, sustained means of livelihood, economic development and freedom of travel. As peace activists today, these Israelis need confidence, with international encouragement, to continue their efforts for a just peace. Desperately working for chances for peace, they recognize the difficulties caused by unfriendly relations with Iran and Syria.
The new U.S. administration could patiently and diplomatically negotiate to remove the obstacles.
*Published by THE JORDAN TIMES on Jan. 8.
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