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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

 

Moving forward

Salom Now! and METalks both ultimately lost traction because not enough people believe in them. “The bottom line may be whether or not the urge for peace can override the essential inherent social and racial inequalities now present in the two ‘nations’ at issue,” argued Steve Snedeker, an American member of the METalks forum.

 

“Bitter recriminations, if allowed, will dominate the discourse but lead nowhere. For now, all parties in the Middle East conflict need to leave history be, at least until better times, and concentrate on the most immediate task at hand: stopping the suffering on all sides,” observed Werbeloff.

“You want a movement like yours to work, give Palestinians hope, and from there they can sit and talk regarding a peaceful settlement,” suggested ‘Doc’ in a post on an online forum. But how do we give people such hope in this current climate of despondency and despair? How do we bring about a new, positive dynamic?

 

“I’m sure you expect such support for this idea will not be gathered overnight from either side. It will take years to build a much-needed trust between the two sides and have these groups lobby their governments and their people about a proposed lasting peace,” added Doc.

 

“I think [Salom Now!] could work if it had a really big base of support,” posits Debra Adler, an American Jew who recently made Israel her home. “Overcoming people’s personal inertia is very difficult unless they are swept up in a wave. If people feel that their efforts make a difference, or that they will witness an event of a lifetime, or a watershed in history (like civil-rights demonstrations in the US), they will get off their butts and participate.”

 

This year is the 40th anniversary of Israel’s 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. A newly formed coalition of Israeli and Palestinian civil society, the Israeli-Palestinian Peace NGOs Forum – which corresponds to some of my aspirations for Salom Now! – is considering wide-ranging anti-occupation protests.

 

If enough Palestinians and Israelis can come together and engage in highly symbolic joint action against the occupation, which is unpopular on both sides of the fence, this can help provide the missing momentum.

 

I believe that a potent action would be to organise a ‘hands across the divide’ event where a human chain of people linking hands would stretch either way from the various Israeli-Palestinian borders, with the first Israeli and Palestinian actually touching hands, if feasible, or reaching out to each other. The same could be done on the Lebanese, Egyptian and Syrian borders. I also think that solidarity events in every capital in the region – and the world, if possible – could offer a symbolic ‘helping hand’.

 

This may strike some readers as naďve. But a lot of today’s realities once seemed to be wishful fantasies and pipe dreams. Personally, I intend to nurture my naivety, because what passes for geo-political sophistication in our corner of the world will keep us stuck in an endless loop. In the short term, I plan a visit to Israel and Palestine. In the long term, I look forward to the day the Middle East becomes effectively a borderless union of peace and prosperity.

 

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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

 

ă2007 K. Diab. Unless otherwise stated, all the content on this website is the copyright of Khaled Diab.