In recent months, I have read several of
the lively Comment is Free contributions from Seth Freedman and Alex Stein. While planning my own personal peace
mission to Israel and Palestine, I thought to myself: why not meet up, it
should make for interesting conversation? And we arranged to meet "next
week in Jerusalem".
What I called my Without a Road Map tour was my own modest attempt to
become a self-appointed people's peace ambassador and do my bit humanise both
sides of the conflict - to show the human face of Israel and Palestine. This
involved a fair amount of legwork and, on a couple of occasions, it even verged
on the legless.
Boozing for a good cause is a wonderful
cocktail of sin and virtue. Doing so in Jerusalem, that unholiest of holy
cities, has a wonderful irony to it.
Our encounter left such an impression on
Seth that he wrote a CiF post about it which elicited an impressive
381 responses. "This was, to all intents and purposes, a Comment is free
thread brought to life," he wrote of a political pub brawl between me and
his mate, Max, who fought in last year's war in Lebanon.
Max Terminator, as I was soon to start
calling him, describes himself as "hardly a pacifist". As a strident
pacifist myself, I found his Rambo approach to life guaranteed to provoke me.
After a couple of hours of heated debate, with Alex acting as my cavalry and
Seth assessing the collateral damage like an international observer, Max and I
called a truce on Lebanon only to discover that we shared some surprising
common ground about the future: we both viewed positively the possible
emergence of a federal Israeli-Palestinian state.
Encounters, both virtual and in the flesh,
are crucial to bridging gaps and breaking down misunderstandings and
misconceptions. In fact, the virtual world played a crucial role in the success
of my journey to build understanding and empathy between Israelis, Palestinians
and Arabs. I met, on an online discussion forum, the eccentric Israeli family I stayed with for a while - and it was
non-stop debate for breakfast, lunch and dinner. In fact, during my trip, I
subsisted almost solely on a high-energy diet of political discourse.
For
me, as an Arab, my journey provided fascinating insights into Israeli society
and culture whose energy, loudness, friendliness, religiosity and chaos belie
its location in the Middle East, despite some obvious differences in terms of
social freedom. It put me in mind of a Lebanon or a Tunisia. Being there at a
time of national grief and celebration, I realised that the Israeli obsession
with security was based as much on a deep and painful national trauma as it was
on the manoeuvrings of cynical politicians.
My presence also challenged the notion
that many Israelis have that they are surrounded by more than 300 million
hostile Muslim fanatics - whereas, in fact, the number of secular liberals in
Egypt, while a relative minority, could well outstrip the population of Israel,
Lebanon and Jordan combined.
One does not hear much about Israel's
Palestinian minority (the so-called Israeli Arabs), so meeting so many of them
during my trip - stuck as they are between two warring nations - was
enlightening. Talking to people in the West Bank and seeing how they lived gave
me a greater awareness of their aspirations and plight.
Engaging with so many people on both
sides was both depressing and inspiring. I detected a clear will and desire for
peace in almost everyone I met - and most accepted a solution along the lines
of the Arab peace plan, although the binational federal state idea is winning
more converts. But everyone had no idea how to get to this desired end and
distrusted the other side's intentions. It is almost like peace is elusively
close on the horizon but the extremists on both sides have mined the road to
it. Perhaps this means that attitudes and approaches need to be rethought, and
we ought to take a more gradual, incremental path to peace.
First, build trust. This level of
distrust is hardly surprising, since the two peoples hardly ever meet any more:
Israelis are banned from going to the West Bank and Gaza, and Palestinians need
hard-to-get permits to enter Israel. Both sides need to challenge this. Pitch
coffee tents near checkpoints so that the two sides can meet for informal chats
and smoke a peace water pipe together.
Second, Israelis need to realise on, the
40th anniversary of the occupation next month, that their best insurance policy
is a prosperous Palestinian people living in justice and equality - so they can
start by removing the restrictions on Palestinians. They also need to learn
that their heavy-handed militaristic approach wins them no friends, just more
enemies.
In my view, violence and lack of unity
are only hurting the Palestinian struggle, so a complete laying down of arms
will help the situation. Palestinian leaders also need to get their priorities
straight. With the potent mix of Israeli political paralysis, insecurity and
lack of leadership, as well as the completely intertwined nature of the two
peoples, they will probably not be getting their own state any time soon.
However, to my mind, human dignity comes
before national pride. And, so, the Palestinian cause should be turned into a
struggle for civil rights for the time being. Palestinians should campaign and
lobby the occupation to fulfil its commitments. They could demand freedom of
mobility, the full right to work and education, the right to live where they
choose, even full citizenship of Israel.
Whatever the two sides choose to do, I
have come away rather more optimistic for the future than before I arrived. Uri Avnery, perhaps Israel's most famous peacenik, told me:
"I am confident that we will see peace in my lifetime." And the man
is 83, so it can't be too long now.
This column appeared in The Guardian Unlimited’s Comment
is Free section on 7 May 2007.
ã2007
K. Diab. Unless otherwise stated, all the content on this website is the
copyright of Khaled Diab.
