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Arabs and Israelis held hostage by a common enemy

Khaled Diab

Salom Now! And METalks are two experimental initiatives which sought to rewrite the script of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and give ordinary people a starring role in the quest for peace. Those involved experienced profound changes to their outlook and took the first steps towards forging a new, more inclusive narrative for the Middle East. However, such popular, grassroots action is held hostage by some common enemies: despair, hatred, antipathy and distrust.

 

February 2007

Part I – War and elusive peace

Part II – Talking under fire

Part III – Dangerous liaisons

Part IV – Constructive ideas

Part V – Let’s talk about you and ME

Part VI – Terrorised by a common enemy

Part VII – Existential angst

Part VIII – Moving forward

 

 

Dangerous liaisons

The reactions I received to the idea were mixed. Most people were doubtful and sceptical. Mouin Rabbani, senior Middle East analyst at the International Crisis Group, an independent Brussels-based think-tank, believed that the chances of joint Arab-Israeli activism, particularly on the Lebanese front, were slim. “I can’t see the prospect of co-operation between Israeli and Lebanese activists. The dynamic between Lebanon and Israel is completely different to that between the Israelis and the Palestinians. In many ways, Lebanese civil society is more hostile towards the Israelis.”

 

Sherman Rosenfeld, director of Israel’s National Centre for Project-based Learning at the Weizmann Institute of Science, who has been working for years to bridge the gap between Israelis and Palestinians through education, believed the idea of Salom Now! was “overly ambitious, at this stage”.

 

Some were passionately unsympathetic. An Egyptian journalist friend who works for a leading newspaper told me that she was “against any form of Arab-Israeli peacemaking whatever, on any level and for any reason. As an Arab and as a Muslim I know who my enemy is. I also know who’s on my side.”

 

Other reactions were hostile and hurtful. “May I first commend you on your articles,” one poster on an online forum called ‘Mrjingles’ began mockingly. “If you penned them without falling off your chair that is... Even the most biased, rabid Islamofascist can see you’re a simplistic Hezbollah (sic) apologist. Utter drivel unworthy of a rebuttal. The only shalom you want to hear is from Israelis leaving the country.”

 

“You are obviously a weirdo,” a 19-year-old Palestinian contributor to an online forum calling himself ‘Martyrology’ helpfully informed me. “As a friendly reminder, I would say that your approach will not be met with applause in this political hotspot of the world.”

 

The Amman-based youth continued: “You are an Egyptian and you have a homeland, it’s easy for you to advocate peace. I am a Palestinian and I am living in a land that isn’t mine and holding a passport that doesn’t belong to me. We can’t visit our relatives and property in the West Bank without the approval of the Israeli authorities; we can’t visit what once used to belong to us without waiting three weeks for a visa that might be rejected anyway, to find out that your grandfather’s house has been demolished and turned into a playground for Israeli kids.”

 

However, no Palestinians living in Palestine expressed an opinion about my idea. One barrier was a practical one, given the poverty and isolation in which too many of them live. Another was emotional and psychological. The level of despondency and despair among ordinary Palestinians is enormous.

 

“The atmosphere on the ground is rather non-conducive to peace right now,” observed Tom Kenis, who works for a Palestinian NGO in Ramallah. “The boycott against the Hamas government has a really heavy effect on people. Then there was the Lebanon crisis which radicalised both sides tremendously.” The burning issue in the West Bank, he explained, was the status of the tens of thousands of Palestinians with foreign passports facing expulsion from there.

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Further reading

Read the Salom Now! draft manifesto

 

Madrid II: towards a civil peace in the Middle East

November 2006 – Prompted by the dire situation in Gaza, Spain, France and Italy have floated an unexpected Middle East peace drive. This initiative will almost certainly join other similar aborted road maps and peace plans slowly decaying in the graveyard of international diplomacy. What the EU needs to do is to abandon the deadlocked political level and organise a high-profile Madrid II conference targeted at civil society to set in motion a ‘people’s peace process’. Read on

 

How I learned to start worrying and hate the bomb

November 2006 – With North Korea’s recent nuclear test and Iran’s suspected nuclear designs, Khaled Diab explains why he learned to start worrying and hate the bomb and suggests how the proliferation of nuclear weapons can best be arrested – and reversed. Read on

Give ‘salom’ a chance

September 2006 – The best lessons to draw from Lebanon and Gaza are that all sides lost the battle and the only way for everyone to win the war is through peaceful means. Politicians have shown a lack of imagination and willpower and so it is up to ordinary Arabs and Israelis to lead them down the path to salam/shalom (peace). It is high time to demand Salom Now! Read on

 

Salom now!

Reaching out for a people’s peace in the Middle East

Peace is so important to Arabs and Israelis that they use it to greet friends and strangers a like – ‘salam’/’shalom’, they say. Despite this, the Middle East appears to be increasingly falling prey to new conflicts. Perhaps the oldest and most intractable of these is the Arab-Israeli conflict, particularly its Israeli-Palestinian component. Read on

 

Using a carrot and stick for peace

September 2006 – Given the fragile situation in Lebanon, the pledge by EU member states to provide troops to police the UN-backed ceasefire was well-timed. However, to avoid a fresh crisis from erupting, Europe will have to aid efforts to forge lasting peace in the Middle East. Read on

 

Salom now!

Mobilising the untapped power of Arab and Israeli peaceniks

August 2006 – Arabs and Israelis have a common way of greeting people and it is to wish them ‘peace’. As advocates of violent solutions chalk up another victory in the Middle East and the international community fails the test again in Lebanon and Gaza, the time has come for Arab and Israeli citizens to join forces in a broad-based regional coalition to work towards salam/shalom… now.

Part I – Silent world

Part II – Peace begins at home

 

Crisis in Lebanon and Gaza –

From complete failure to comprehensive solutions

July 2006 – Israel’s massive onslaught against Lebanon – and before that Gaza – reveals a monumental failure on the part of the international community to prevent an avoidable tragedy. Now it is up to the European Union to avoid a replay of 1982 and revive the idea of a comprehensive solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Read on

 
The EU’s new Palestine dilemma

February 2006 – It may be better for the EU to provide more carrots and fewer sticks for Hamas, writes Khaled Diab. Read on

 

Dressed to kill –

Under the cloak of Bush’s foreign policy

December 2005 – Jeff Sommers, Khaled Diab and Charles Woolfson expose what lies beneath the cloak of US President George W Bush’s foreign policy. Read on

 

Time to rethink the EU’s role in the Middle East

January 2005 – If Yasser Arafat’s death is to signify anything more than the symbolic start of a new era, the European Union must radically rethink its role as a mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to persuade the two peoples to work towards a new dawn. Read on

 

Commission wants closer EU-Israeli ties

January 2005 – The European Commission and the EU’s former envoy to the Middle East have both come out in favour of enhancing economic and political ties with Israel. But critics question the wisdom of extending a policy of good neighbourhood to a country that has done little to make the neighbourhood a safer place to live. Read on

 

ã2007 K. Diab. Unless otherwise stated, all the content on this website is the copyright of Khaled Diab.