Enough is Enough!
Dr Harry Hagopian, KSL – KOG
Call from the Heads of Churches in Jerusalem to
Palestinians and Israelis, 10 March 2002
§
Prologue?
When defining
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today, what are the immediate images that
spring to mind? Surely, they are the harrowing pictures of ordinary lives being
snuffed out and rent apart by a vicious cycle of violence and revenge that is
fuelled as much internally by the fight for control of land as it is externally
by international strategic interests. How many times have we watched such
footage with furious inadequacy, and how many times have we witnessed human
beings becoming cannon fodder to malignant designs? At one time or another, we
have all squirmed with the prophets as the land where God chose to reveal His
divine will has turned into one blazing killing field!
Just consider
the overall figures! Last week, the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem
put the number of deaths during the two Palestinian uprisings of December 1987
[prior to the Oslo accords] and September 2000 [following their failure] at 443
Israeli civilian killings (including 50 children) and 2137 Palestinian
civilians (including 432 children). Since last week, the grim toll has mounted
on both sides every single day with new outrages and fresh fatalities.
§
Genesis?
Let me first
create a context by turning back the dusty pages of history for a cursory
refresher course on the origins of this conflict! As some people might still
recall, the British government had declared with the Balfour Declaration of
1917 its support for the formation of a Jewish national home in Palestine. It
was in 1947, however, that the UN General Assembly voted to partition
British-mandated Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state - along with
international trusteeship for Jerusalem. The neighbouring Arab states rejected
this decision in 1948 with a full-scale war. By 1949, Israel had won the war
and seized territories beyond the delimitation area agreed upon, resulting in a
human mass of Palestinian refugees that fled their ancestral homes. Two more
wars - the Six-Day War in 1967 and the War of Atonement in 1973 - led rather
tortuously to the Madrid conference and later to the 1993 DOP accords.
However, the
famous handshake between PM Yitzhak Rabin and Chairman Yasser Arafat in
Washington did not lead to a honeymoon!
Rather, what many people considered a marriage of convenience became a
divorce of necessity. And as with many splits leading to divorces, the process
was deeply painful and involved both parties giving up many dreams, as well as
making many compromises, so that they could get on with their own lives in
peace. The process became messier after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, and
it is now clear - from independent sources - that the last-minute ‘take it or
leave it’ verbal offer made by former PM Ehud Barak was untenable. It will have
resulted in a newly-emerging Palestinian ‘caricature state’ which will have
been non-sovereign, non-contiguous, non-functional and vulnerable to Israeli
political whims and military dictates! Moreover, Israeli settlements increased
in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem - expanding the number of
illegal settlers on Arab occupied land to about 400,000 and shrinking the
Palestinian territories to an even smaller area that resembled isolated cantons
in a larger Israeli landmass.
§
Peaks & Troughs?
In the current
climate, the prospects for peace and reconciliation appear quite bleak. Many
analysts believe that the region will continue to spin in its vortex of
bloodletting a while longer before the conflict attains another peak and a new
line is drawn. But even that outcome is not an absolute either! PM Ariel
Sharon’s ‘vision’ seems to consist of pounding the Palestinians into submission
before sitting down to negotiate with them. In the name of national security,
his relentless tactics of targeted assassinations, sidelining Arafat, strafing
Palestinian towns and villages with helicopter gunships and bombarding key
Palestinian Authority installations, play directly - and some would say quite
deliberately - into the hands of extremists. Allowing them to move into the
power vacuum, it exacerbates further the violence, and in turn ‘justifies’ an
even stronger crackdown by the Israeli military behemoth.
But why are the
Palestinians responding with violence?
Simply put, they see it as resisting the occupation of their land.
People who have lost all hope and hold no power over their own lives resort to
freedom fighting or terrorism - and the label shifts depending on which side of
the political fence one sits on. Although such acts are clearly wrong and
horrific in themselves, history has shown time and again that violence becomes
the last resort of a people starved of justice.
But Palestinians
are also fighting with violence because the so-called Oslo process turned into
a failure that did not deliver any concrete solutions. One just needs to look
at the many Israeli settlements that have been built in strategically crucial
locations - and with a system of roads or security highways - which splinter
the Palestinian lands into smaller disconnected pockets with limited supplies
of electricity and water. Engaged in a battle over demographics, Palestinians
are not even allowed to build their own houses and a ‘matrix of control’ is
gradually being imposed upon the occupied territories through Israeli
settlements and house demolitions. (An estimated 17,000 houses have been
demolished by Israel in the Palestinian territories since 1967, and this trend
has accelerated in the past year.) Furthermore, a system of closure - through a
network of checkpoints, curfews and unmanned roadblocks or trenches - now holds
three million Palestinians in a stranglehold. This has resulted in a sharp rise
in unemployment, hunger and hardship among Palestinians and has created a
pressure cooker of resentment, rage, despair and thirst for retaliation.
However, I still
believe the conflict is indeed attaining a peak that will compel both sides to
stand down and enter into meaningful negotiations. I posit that once the pain
threshold Israel suffers for not having peace far exceeds the threshold of
having peace, then peace will become possible in the Holy Land. In the
meantime, it is most unfortunate that many more Israeli and Palestinian
children, women and men might lose well their lives before leaders with true
statesmanship rise to the occasion. But visionary leaders who can achieve a
breakthrough are scarce today. The Labour party in Israel - once an official
opposition - is snuggling up to the government when it is not busy chasing its
own tail. The Bush administration is engaged in tepid peace semantics (and
despatching General Anthony Zinni to the region might be more an indication of
an imminent attack on Iraq than any credible hands-on involvement with the
conflict). The European Union is still away on indefinite sick leave! And the
increasing disarray and hopelessness experienced by most Palestinians renders
them even more dangerously self-sacrificial. In all, we are eyeing a recipe for
disaster!
§
Signs of Hope?
Yet, in the
midst of this rubble we define as human behaviour, and despite the
blood-curdling vengefulness and political posturing that have become the trends
in the conflict, one can still detect some bleary signs of hope!
Two hundred
Israeli families belonging to an organisation called the Parents’ Circle, and
one hundred forty Palestinian families affiliated to the National Movement for
Change, are one desperate illustration of this faint hope. They are men and
women who have lost relatives during the past eighteen months but have still
managed to come together to organise joint educational campaigns or talks as
well as lobby politicians to get back to the negotiating table. Their members
have been derided as traitors or have received regular death threats from
extremists who abhor any contact between ‘enemy’ groups. But even when the
situation has deteriorated, those men and women have continued speaking out
publicly and organising poster campaigns or discussion groups. They have even
staged displays of hundreds of coffins in public spaces to make people pause
and reflect on the human cost of the conflict. Theirs is a brave voice of
reason and justice, of tolerance and reconciliation, which is being lost in the
wilderness of growing political extremism.
In the meantime, other non-governmental agencies and
ad hoc groups are equally trying to monitor the situation. A group of around
seventy Israeli women formed an organisation called Machsomwatch that monitors
the action of soldiers and police at checkpoints. The report of one of the
founders, Judith Keshet, suggests that Palestinian women are strip-searched at
those checkpoints and that Palestinians are forced to sit in cars or buses for
hours with their windows open in the pouring rain or shut in extreme heat. They
are forced to stand for long periods with their hands in the air after having
their Identity Cards confiscated. Another Israeli pressure group, Physicians
for Human Rights, has recorded 221 instances of ambulances bearing patients in
need of kidney dialysis and cancer treatment being turned back at checkpoints
in the past eighteen months - resulting in twenty nine futile deaths.
Indignities do not breed trust!
§ Political
Theology?
These men and
women are the hardy and admirable few who challenge our collective
preconceptions about this asymmetric struggle! After all, this conflict can no
longer be circumscribed exclusively to images of suicide bombers, vigilante
settlers claiming divine right or ambulances hurtling from one hospital to
another. It cannot be centred solely round occupation, hatred and anger. It
should not be focused only on issues of peace versus security in a non-peaceful
and insecure region! This conflict is as much about past dreams becoming
present nightmares, and about forlorn hopes transmuting into actual fears.
Breaking this cycle of mutual suspicion requires sacrifices that are based on a
greater understanding by both sides of each other’s history and agonies.
Palestinians should appreciate how deeply the horrendous crimes of the
Holocaust are still embedded in the psyche of the Jewish people today.
Conversely, Israelis should understand how great a disaster the founding of
Israel in 1948 was for Palestinians, and how they have been expected to endure
long-term oppression, humiliation, discrimination, subjugation and injustice
for thirty-five years.
Indeed, what is happening today in Israel and
Palestine touches the very core of every human being and blurs the sharp-edged
distinction between predator and prey. The intensity of this conflict has
become so self-defeating that it even led Israel to ban the renowned pianist
Daniel Barenboim from travelling to Ramallah to play at a school for girls! As
an Armenian Christian from Jerusalem, I have over the years forged precious
friendships with Israeli Jewish men and women who have told me they were raised
to believe that the birth of the state of Israel as a Jewish national homeland
was an act of self-preservation. Many have grandparents who survived Auschwitz,
whilst others perished in the infernal pain of the Holocaust. A lot of those
outward-looking friends now portray some of their countrymen - particularly
those racing ahead to build settlements - as the manifestation of a cancer at
the heart of the state of Israel. The domination of another people has
diminished them morally and corrupted the very lofty and inclusive fabric of
the Jewish faith.
In an editorial entitled ‘The War’s Seventh Day’ in
the Hebrew daily Ha’aretz on 3 March 2002, former Israeli Attorney-General
Michael Ben-Yair (1993-96) writes about the creation of Israel. He states that
‘Israel was born because the Zionist movement realised it must find a solution
to the persecution of Jews and because the enlightened world recognised the
need for that solution’. However, he adds, Israel chose after 1967 ‘to become a
colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands,
transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in
theft and finding justification for all those activities’. He believes that
Israel ‘established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately
following their capture’, and that Israel is ‘prepared to expand its control
atop another nation’s ruins’ and thereby rob itself ‘of its moral
justification’. Describing the Palestinian Intifadah as a war of national
liberation, he writes that Israeli ‘security cannot be based only on the sword;
it must rather be based on [our] principles of moral justice and on peace with
[our] neighbours’. Referring to the security measures adopted by Israel to
quell Palestinian national aspirations, Ben-Yair adds that ‘the non-existence
of the occupation would render them unnecessary. A black flag hovers over these actions’. In short, Ben-Yair calls Israel to do
away with the occupation.
§ Historical
Perspective?
History teaches us that no nation is prepared to live
forever under the domination of another. Indeed, Israeli policies today are
reminiscent of those of France in early 1958 as the Algerian war approached its
climax and brought about the collapse of the IV Republic. Then as now, an
increasingly demoralised army confronted an elusive enemy that would stop at
nothing. Then as now, terrorism provoked counter-terror, torture and attacks on
civilians that merely cemented the bond between the rebels and the occupied
Arab population. In the end, France tired of fighting a squalid war on behalf
of a million French colonists in Algeria. Today, some Israelis are despairing
of a conflict that the Leader of the Opposition in the Knesset [Parliament],
Yossi Sarid, calls with some justification a ‘war for the settlements’.
I still think that the ferocity of the latest violence
may be a last-ditch effort by some ‘extremists’ on both sides to block any
compromise such as that envisioned a fortnight ago by the Saudi plan or even
earlier by the Tenet and Mitchell plans. Their actions resemble the politique de pire of the French OAS
terrorists who tried to prevent decolonisation in Algeria. It was precisely the
threat to democracy posed by such terror tactics that led the broad mainstream
of French opinion to conclude - if only for its own political health - that
France must disengage from Algeria. It is also what Professor Martin van
Crefeld, a Jerusalem-based military strategist, meant earlier this week by
stressing that the Israeli political establishment safeguard democracy by
reining in the army before it wreaks total havoc with its operations.
Epilogue?
So what happens next? Can this paroxysm of violence
become a psychological turning point in the conflict? I do not wish to assume
the schoolmasterly profile of a Dr Pangloss who indulges in ‘perfect solutions’
that come straight out of a Voltaire satire! I am not such an immutable
optimist, but I do strongly believe that Israel stands at a crossroads today.
It alone holds all the cards. It faces a choice between
retrenchment behind the 1967 borders or descent into further chaos. Like France
during the Algerian debacle, Israel needs a leader whose strategy for peace and
diplomatic vision transcends bullying tactics. As the only true regional
democracy, Israel needs an avant-garde leader who takes the bold and
unpalatable decision to pull back its army of occupation. Otherwise, the
bloodbath will continue since the injustices will also be perpetuated, and the
pain of both peoples will only be exacerbated further! Enemies must turn into
allies.
Peace requires a
leader with the self-confident courage to say ‘Enough is Enough!’ But where is that leader?
Repel
a bad deed with one that is better and see: the one with whom you had enmity
will turn to be a close ally
Holy Koran, 41:34
©
harry-bvH @ 10 March 2002