Security and Peace-Building In Israel and Palestine

Peggy Ray recently returned from a trip to Israel and Palestine with a Fellowship of Reconciliation “Interfaith Peace-Builders” delegation. In this Living Room Dialogue she reported on some of what she learned on this trip.

The Fellowship of Reconciliation sends delegations to Israel and Palestine to support human rights and peace activists and to learn about the conflict first-hand. Peggy’s was the 15th delegation to travel there since 2000, when groups such as the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and the Palestinian group Holy Land Trust invited FOR to send them.

This delegation consisted of 27 people from all parts of the country, varying in age from a recent college graduate to retirees. There were several Jews and three Arab-Americans in the group.

Peggy began by responding to questions about the origins of the conflict that were raised at the beginning of the meeting. She said that her understanding of the situation had been helped by the idea that at the root of the conflict between Israelis and Palestine are two different narratives that tell the creation story of each country.

The Jews story tells of a Zionist movement for a national homeland in Palestine and the “War of Independence” that led to the creation of the state of Israel after the Holocaust. This story is familiar to most Americans.

The Palestinians’ story is not. It tells of Al Nakba, “The Catastrophe,” when over 500 villages were wiped out and 750,000 people became refugees during the 1948 war between Jews and Palestinians. The boundary that the United Nations set between the new state of Israel and historical Palestine after Israel won the war in 1948 left the Palestinians a mere 22% of historical Palestine. In 1967, Israel took over control of that 22% after the 1967 six-day war, and Palestinians have lived under occupation since then. Israel began sending settlers into the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, in contravention of international law, in the 1970s. Those numbers have grown to 450,000 settlers today.

One of the Israelis who impressed Peggy was Gail Svirsky from the Coalition of Women for Peace. A woman who for years and years has made every effort to bring Israelis and Palestinians together, she identified herself as a Zionist. She believes there is enough Anti-Semitism in the world that a Jewish state is necessary as a place of refuge for Jews. She takes pride in Jewish culture and wants to build an egalitarian and democratic Israel.

But she acknowledged a moral dilemma: Israel was “born in sin.” After the Holocaust, when her people had no place else to go because no countries would let them in, they came to Palestine and took other people’s land. She is grateful that the Palestinians have agreed to accept the 22% of their historical land that has been left to them, and has made a commitment to do her best to help them keep that 22%.

However, that 22% continues to be chipped away bit by bit, Peggy said. While everybody’s attention is on events in the Gaza Strip where Ariel Sharon has announced that Israel will dismantle settlements, Israel continues to build the huge Separation Wall it started in 2002, and Israeli settlements continue to expand. She displayed maps from the UN and from Peace Now showing the route of the Wall. It is being built entirely on the Palestinian side of the “Green Line,” that boundary between Israel and Palestine originally set by the UN in 1948.

In places the Wall cuts well into the West Bank in order to incorporate Israeli settlements into Israel, especially large ones such as Ariel (25,000 settlers) and Ma’ale Adumin (30,000). Building it has required uprooting olive trees by the hundreds of thousands and demolishing Palestinian houses. In some places, it goes through Palestinian villages and separates farmers from their land. It also incorporates into Israel the wells villages depend on for water, adding to Israeli’s control of access to water.

The maps also showed how the combination of Israeli settlements and Jewish-only roads connecting them that have been built throughout the West Bank have divided the West Bank up into small disconnected cantons. A Palestinian state divided up in this way would not be viable. The Palestinian economy would be reduced to subsistence farming and remittances from family members working abroad.

Like Gail Svirsky, most people the group met in both Israel and Palestine still had hope that Israel could remove the settlers from Palestine and create two states with a border roughly along the Green Line. Israelis pointed out that most settlers would not object to relocation because they had gone there as a result of economic incentives and not for ideological reasons. Nevertheless, Peggy saw many Israelis wearing orange arm bands that meant they were opposed to Israel’s pulling settlers out of the Gaza Strip and signs reading “Jews do not expel Jews.”

Jeff Halper from the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, presented the most dire analysis from the Palestinian point of view. He called the division of Palestine into small cantons “apartheid,” and did not think the breakup of the West Bank could or would be undone. He pointed out that in 2004, President Bush wrote to Ariel Sharon that he does not have to withdraw to the Green Line because it is unreasonable to expect Israel to pull out of major population centers. This policy was ratified in the U.S. Congress with a vote of 407-9 in the House and 95-3 in the Senate.

On the Palestinian side, all the people the delegation talked to accepted the existence of Israel as a Jewish state and aimed for a two-state solution except Ziad Abbas. Ziad, who had spent his entire life in the Dheishe refugee camp, learned to throw stones before he could read, and went to jail for the first time at 13, said he didn’t want to settle for a small piece of the West Bank. He argued that there would never be peace if Jews insist on a Jewish state. He wanted one state for everyone.

In the discussion, Peggy was asked if youth in Israel and in Palestine learned the separate narratives in school. She said her impression was that yes, that was the case. She did learn of Palestinian and Israeli educators at Jerusalem University who spent a year developing a curriculum that presented the opposing historical versions on facing pages in a text for high school students. The educators found they had come closer to being able to tell a single narrative while on their project, however.

At the end of the evening, Peggy still had much more to tell. Although she had described aspects of the current situation as it was presented to her by the people she met, she never got to talk about the peace-building activities of the various groups. It was agreed that she would present these at a second Living Room Dialogue, probably at the end of the summer.

Some closing comments by the evenings’ participants:

• People on both sides are resisting the violence. We need to hear more about this.
• When we look at a situation like these through the media we seem to see only one side and the side that has the most voice is the more violent one.
• It is terrible what was done to the Palestinian people. Want to hear more about Hebron.
• Picture seems to be getting worse despite the resistance of some. How can we stop the tit for tat?
• Interested in Israel peace movement. How can we stop the wrong?
• We have to do something positive to change things.
• How can we get people to sit down to talk with one another and to listen? There will be no peace until this is done. It will take place at a peace table. How many more have to die?
• The maps were very helpful, and made a lot of sense.
• Again concern for the refugees
• The American narrative is a story of two Rights and this is a problem. The Palestinian people have been made to pay for the crimes of Europeans. There won’t be a settlement unless Americans acknowledge this.