A good monster is a dead monster

Most people in the world don’t know anything about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Really, anything. It’s a fact. For many, the lives and deaths of several million people are nothing more than a daily dose of fragmented TV reports and unintelligible newspaper headlines. The conflict is over a hundred years old; it’s persistent, passionate, omnipresent in the public debate and yet unfamiliar and incomprehensible for many. The most disquieting aspect of it is that most of those involved – the people living in the Middle East, directly and personally implicated by the seemingly inexhaustible violence surrounding them – don’t seem to know a lot about it, either. This is because knowledge and information is – like everywhere else – the victim of a relentless passion for self-justification, trampled by political manipulation and assisted by utterly prejudiced mass media outlets.

Since the beginning of the most televised dispute in modern history, tens of thousands of human beings have been killed. The political and social events that took place during the last several years in Israel, my country of birth, and in the territories it has occupied since 1967 are threatening to destroy the lives of many more, including people very close to me.

Most of my acquaintances in Paris, the French capital where I live, and elsewhere around the world, be they educated or not, keep clumsily confusing notions they can’t differentiate properly. How many times have I heard someone using words like “Israeli”, “Israelite”, “Jew” and “Zionist” interchangeably? How often did I listen to a person carelessly assimilating “Palestinians”, “Muslims” and “Arabs”? How frequently do I hear reference to Iran as an “Arab country” or to right-wing Jews as “Zionists extremists”? Politically, socially, constitutionally, historically, geographically and culturally, the Middle East is a melting pot of broadcast imprecision.

The fact is that, popular media being what it is, it’s very hard for lots of people to think of someone – a person, an individual human being – proclaiming to be simultaneously an agnostic Jew and a pro-Palestinian Israeli Zionist. But, in spite of preconceived ideas, many such individuals exist. I am just one of them, and I’ve had it up to here with explaining to each person I meet separately the reasons why Israelis and Palestinians have been killing each other on a daily basis for that last one hundred years. This is why I write these lines. You could say that, essentially, it’s an egoistic endeavor. It saves me a lot of time.

Actually, there is another, much more important, reason for writing this. These are urgent times. The “situation in the Middle East” – as it’s so swiftly summarized every day – is deteriorating rapidly. Israel, an overconfident political ally of the United States, has recently spoken of the “Axis of Evil” at the United Nations General Assembly, emulating a fanatical political program which has set new records of unpopularity even among Americans. The Hamas government in Palestine has, once again, talked about blood and revenge for yet another senseless Israeli killing of civilians in Gaza. Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tapped yet again into Jewish collective panic, time-tunneling his audience back to the year 1938.

At no point in history was there so little hope among Israelis and Palestinians of seeing the cyclic carnage end within their lifetime. The few groups or individuals who publicly try to stop the region from collapsing completely are ridiculed by their peers for being desperately credulous appeasers, defeatists and ultimately traitors. The complete lack of trust between the two peoples continues to be fueled by preconception and paranoia, ignited by carelessness and short-term gain, reassured by exhaustion and disrespect for human life. This is a distressed call to all those – be they people of faith, complete atheists or anywhere in between – who favor life over death.

This conflict, if it is to be resolved one day, is in a desperate need of people who can express themselves in different terms. I am thus turning to the Internet with the hope of establishing contact with other people, Israelis, Palestinians, and people of different origins and nationalities, who feel the urge to meet, act and educate others with the perspective of searching for a possible solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, based on the acceptance of the following historical facts and elementary principles:

1. Death is certain. Life is not. This is why life is precious, and death isn’t.
2. Life within a community is not about the glorification of one’s own suffering, but about acknowledging the suffering of others.
3. Very different people refer to many different religions. Essentially, God defines one’s own place within a community and an individual’s stance towards one’s own actions and moral decisions. In a political conflict involving profoundly different communities, references to God should be as few and far between as possible, because they often constitute an excuse for turning a blind eye to tangible and practical realities involving dissimilar groups of people who either believe in different Gods or have rejected faith altogether.
4. International Law and United Nations resolutions are no substitute for individual human conscience. Causing the death of another human being is an absolutely and universally reprehensible act.
5. That said, and in agreement with The United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, all peoples have the right to self-determination. This means that both Israelis and Palestinians are entitled to shape their collective lives in the manner that they decide is best.
6. The international Zionist movement, born in the late nineteenth century with the goal of promoting the creation of a nation-state for the Jewish people in Turkish and subsequently British-controlled Palestine, has succeeded in founding the State of Israel in accordance with international law. However, in doing so, it has dislodged, deported or killed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were living in Palestine during that time. More often than not, Palestinians ignore the first fact and Israelis disregard the second.
7. Children are neither responsible nor accountable for the actions of their parents. On top of that, evaluating one’s own social and political condition as being the consequence of past wrongdoings perpetrated by earlier generations or other parties – often abstractly named – is a formula for perpetual suffering. In that sense, it is unacceptable to justify Israeli violence against Palestinians on the grounds of historical Jewish suffering, most notably the Holocaust. It is also senseless to rationalize the Palestinian affliction as being the result of some worldwide Americano-Jewish colonialist conspiracy.
8. Recognizing the existence of a very powerful right-wing Jewish lobby in the United States of America, with close ties to Congress, the Senate and the White House, is not to be confused with anti-Semitism. The fact that this lobby exists doesn’t mean that it controls the world or that it has a secret agenda. On the contrary, its agenda is very much a public affair, and deals specifically with maintaining Israel’s military supremacy over its neighbors.
9. The State of Israel needs to stop relying on the unconditional political and financial support of the United States of America. The power of the American veto at the United Nations Security Council combined with the incomparable economic backing of Israel by the US Congress constitutes a de-facto endorsement of Israeli military aggression and of Israel’s opposition to a profound and necessary geopolitical transformation.
10. In practice, unless one is an advocate of mass-murder, it is unfeasible to make either millions of Palestinians or millions of Israelis disappear. It is therefore essential for the two peoples to accept a partition of historical Palestine. The often-heard Israeli right-wing position, which invites the Palestinians to leave their homeland and move to any of the many Arab countries, as well as the Palestinian call for Israelis to leave their country and go back to the various countries from which their parents and grand-parents came, are both humanly unacceptable and politically impractical.
11. It is impossible to ignore the persistent absence of freedom of expression in the majority of Arab countries, and therefore the inability of many Palestinians to advance conciliatory viewpoints. Aside from the fact that many of them are desperately unable to fight for peace, having to deal with the daily hardships imposed upon them by the Israeli military, it is essential that Palestine become a place where people can express their thoughts freely. This is not something that can be imposed, though. It has to be chosen.
12. The territorial dispute finds its origins in the early twentieth century and has therefore nothing to do with the Israeli occupation of Jordanian territories (the so-called “West Bank”) since June 1967. However, all Israeli settlements built in those territories after the war must be immediately dismantled if a viable solution is to be found. This is because it is evidently impossible for Palestinians to hope for or even imagine a better future when their everyday lives are controlled by the Israeli military.
13. There is no guarantee that ending the forty-year-long Israeli occupation of those territories would bring peace to the region. It is, however, obvious that prolonging this occupation guarantees perpetual war. Understanding the motives of those who seek to preserve the armed struggle in the region is essential if a thorough appreciation of the problem is to be gained.

I follow this declaration of principles with a story, which seems to me to be of some significance. A year ago, at work, I met a man who was born in Lebanon. The history of the country of Lebanon and its relationship to Palestine is a bit complicated to explain in a few lines, but the importance of this story is this man, an Arab, and the passions involved in the most trivial of encounters. We were in a room together with other individuals, and he knew I was an Israeli. He practically ignored my presence for several hours, until I asked him what he did during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. It was my choice of words that caught his attention. I had used the word “invasion” because that’s what I thought it had been, and this word made him feel that he could talk freely, openly. He told me stories about fighting Israeli soldiers, canon shells flying over his head, while he – together with his entire platoon – was holed up in a ditch in southern Lebanon. They were all high on alcohol and whatever else they could pick up in order to reduce their fear and increase their courage. From what he had heard, he was fighting monsters, bloodthirsty beasts, something definitely not human. He was, I think, nineteen years old at the time.

Then he told me of the day he’d first met an Israeli face to face. It was in Paris, in the eighties. It was what is commonly called a “soirée” in these parts of the world. Because of the circumstances, he had to shake hands with him. And the moment he did, he felt that he was betraying his homeland, his people, his friends and his family.

I understand this man, because I grew up not very far from where he was born. This is one of the things this region of the world does to you. You become distrustful. You dare not speak unless you know who is standing in front of you. For years, as a child growing up on the other side of the border, the only image I had of Arabs was that of senseless cold-blooded assassins. My country’s military establishment was nothing more than an “Israeli Defense Force”, ethically immaculate, protecting my family and myself from a faceless exterior menace which had no name and no purpose other than killing us. Like most Israelis I had no Palestinian friends and knew nothing of their history. I had never actually seen an Arab until I was sixteen, even though Palestinian Arabs made up one-fifth of the citizens of my country and lived in villages only ten kilometers from my home. They were the “good” Arabs, loyal, invisible, hard working and tolerable as long as they didn’t express themselves too often. But even then I kept hearing people around me, fellow Israelis, resorting to the still-popular idiom: “a good Arab is a dead Arab”.

When I came to France I was amazed to meet new people telling me stories about their summer trips to Tunisia, Syria and Iran, impossible landscapes of the perilous kind for me and for many of my childhood friends. And every time I met a person of Arab origin I could feel that immediate and bilateral suspicion: fundamentally, does this person want to hurt me only because of who I am? Does this person have friends who might have hurt friends of mine? There were always two of us, having the exact same thoughts, two victims of a century’s tutoring of hatred. Over the years I have read, traveled and talked, but that very basic childhood instinct of distrust is very difficult to suppress. This difficulty is at the heart of the Israelis’ and the Palestinians’ devastating failure to communicate. We only talk among ourselves, Israelis among Israelis, Palestinians among Palestinians. When found face-to-face with each other, we raise impenetrable walls of protection. That’s what we were brought up to do.

This is also the reason why previous peace efforts have tragically failed. Incomprehension, suspicion and self-victimization are at the heart of the miscalculated initiatives which ironically both shaped and destroyed the Oslo agreements, Wye Plantation accords and Camp David negotiations. The assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin by a right-wing religious fanatic, the incessant and organized corruption of the Palestinian authority under Chairman Yasser Arafat, the assertion of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak that there is no partner for peace – effortlessly adopted by the majority of Israelis – and the foretold emergence of Islamic Hamas as being the only viable political and social alternative for the Palestinian people, have all plunged the region into an ostensible apathy, punctuated by the only activity that both people seem to carry out efficiently: the absurd and futile killing of each other. The State of Israel has particularly excelled in this undertaking, but Palestinians will be doing better and better as time goes by and as more weapons pour into the region.

I would hate to think that we – Israelis and Palestinians who were born into this war and who were raised on detestation and fear – are a generation lost, that we are either helpless spectators or carefully operated actors. We have the right to shape our own future and, consequentially, the future of our children. We should meet and talk, as often and as freely as possible, about the most painful and the most forbidden questions. This is, I believe, the only way to stop the killing.

Ani DiFranco, an American songwriter, once wrote a beautiful alliteration about the mass media, “trying to convince me to participate in some prep school punk’s plan to perpetuate retribution, perpetuate retribution”; If I am wrong, if everyone living in Israel and Palestine was somehow fatally destined to perpetuate retribution for as long as they lived, then we wouldn’t really lose anything by speaking to each other first.