By Cecilie Surasky
“We should talk about the Jewish grandmother who protests against the occupation because, as she says, ‘I feel Palestinian children are my children too.’”
How to Tell the Truth—and When Not to Hide It

The million-dollar question for those of us in the Middle East peace movement is how do we convince people who don’t agree with us? How can we talk to people in our families and communities when their perceptions seem miles apart from what we know to be the truth on the ground? Unfortunately, our instinct to just barrage people with tales of violence and destruction is often the wrong one.

University of California Berkeley political linguist George Lakoff believes that facts alone don’t have the power to overcome people’s longstanding beliefs. In other words, the narratives that help people create meaning out of events, trump actual facts. When it comes to this conflict, one of the most enduring American narratives or beliefs is that of ‘age-old hatreds’. This is the demonstrably untrue idea that Arabs and Jews fight because we have hated each other for thousands of years, so there is nothing that can be done. By focusing only on conflict and horror, we end up reinforcing, not challenging, this idea that we are essentially enemies.

On another level, by speaking only of awful facts, we may promote the idea that we live in an essentially unjust world, a worldview that is in direct contradiction to our work as activists. Like the six o’clock news editor says, when selecting stories for the program: “If it bleeds, it leads.” Our images of death and destruction may induce anxiety, fear, and hopelessness in the very people we’re trying to reach.

Activists must never soft-pedal unpleasant truths or our passion, nor should we downplay our searing political analysis of the power imbalances that drive the conflict. Only intelligent analysis can point to a real solution. “Why can’t we just get along?” is not a solution. But neither should we be afraid to reveal the universal love that fuels our desire to get up every day and end the occupation. We should celebrate the genuine love and respect between Jews and Arabs that can be found everywhere: amid the Palestinian and Israeli peace activists who work side by side every day challenging checkpoints, rebuilding homes, and protesting the wall.

We should tell the stories of compassion and mutual respect—how Jewish doctors bring medical care to Palestinians who desperately need it; how Palestinian families in Gaza and the West Bank, though they have nothing, insist on feeding and welcoming visiting Jewish solidarity activists. We should talk about the Jewish grandmother who protests against the occupation because, as she says, “I feel Palestinian children are my children.” And the person who once wanted to join the Israeli secret service “for my love of Israelis,” and who a few years later became a passionate fighter for justice because “my circle of love simply grew to include Palestinians too.” We should celebrate and support the Jewish-Arab families that have formed despite the war and the laws that make them almost impossible.

So when you speak about this work and the awful reality of the occupation…make it clear that the occupation will end one day. The bloodshed will stop. Palestinian and Israeli children will grow up together and be friends. Arabs and Jews will cry and laugh and break bread together, and dance and sing and fall in love.
—Jewish Voice for Peace

Learning How to Become a Pro-Israel Activist
“This initiative has the potential for turning the tide in favor of Israel
on American college campuses.”

The first group of students participating in Robert Stearns’ “Israel Experience College Scholarship Program” attended the Knesset Christian Allies Caucus meeting a week ago. The scholarship program sends outstanding Christian college students to Israel for an intensive three and a half week course designed to teach them to organize pro-Israel activist organizations on American college campuses. The Members of the Knesset were delighted with the students’ remarks to the Caucus and pledged their enthusiastic support for the program.

Speaking about the Israel Experience Scholarship Program, another MK said, “This initiative has the potential for turning the tide in favor of Israel on American college campuses. American Christians have become our indispensable allies in positive advocacy for Israel in America.”

MK Binyamin Elon, who was Israel’s Minister of Tourism until the recent Cabinet purge, joined the Caucus and addressed the members on the importance of Christian tourism to Israel. Elon said he was honored by the invitation to serve on the Christian Allies Caucus and pleased that he could accept the invitation now that Knesset rules permitted his membership.

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By Aviv Lavie
“No one returns from the territories without it leaving a deep imprint,
messing up his head.”
Breaking the Silence on Hebron
“If he saw a group of people standing and talking, he would fire the teargas just to see them run and cough.
He got a big kick out of it.”

During 14 months of service in Hebron, Yehuda Shaul could not bear the moral erosion he saw in himself and his comrades. Now the ultra-Orthodox 21-year-old has organized an exhibit of soldiers’ photographs entitled Breaking the Silence, to bring the reality of the territories home. “I had a friend who had a weapon with a launcher and everyone with a launcher was given riot-dispersal equipment. He was given a lot of tear gas canisters and he loved to shoot all this gas, so he would also steal it from other people who had tear gas launchers, and fire it every time he climbed up to his post and came back from it. If he saw a group of people standing and talking, he would fire the teargas just to see them run and cough. He got a big kick out of it,” said the testimony of a fighter who served in Hebron until demobilized three months ago.

Yehuda Shaul still can’t put his finger on the exact moment in which “it all clicked” for him. Maybe it was the day when some settler girls were sitting and playing a few meters away from his post, in Gross Square in the heart of Hebron. An elderly Palestinian woman passed by, loaded down with baskets, and the girls “picked up rocks and started stoning her. When I asked them, ‘What are you doing?’ they said, ‘How do you know what she did in 1929?’” Or maybe it was after Operation Defensive Shield ended, when he returned from Ramallah to Hebron and to the corner post known as ‘the pharmacy’ because of the nearby store. He went up to the second floor of the building where there was a clinic that soldiers had taken over during the operation. He found a nauseating sight. “Everything was turned upside down. The windows were broken, syringes were scattered on the floor and excrement was smeared over everything,” he said.

And there was also the morning when he brought food to the position set up by the Israeli soldiers inside a Palestinian home overlooking the Al-Sheikh neighborhood. “I left a few bags of garbage on the sidewalk and when I came back down I saw Palestinian children rummaging through the bags and taking out the remains of our food. I took the bags from them, because our orders say that you have to make sure there are no confidential documents in the garbage. I had to do this, but only afterward did it hit me that all that interested me at the time was the papers, and not the fact that these kids were searching for food in the trash.”

The more Shaul sifts through his memories, the plainer it seems that there was no particular single moment in which his view of the world changed. A year and two months of serving in Hebron, first as a soldier and then as a commander, became a nightmarish collage of sights, sounds and feelings, which gradually led him to conclude that “It’s a situation that screws up everyone. Everyone goes through the same process there of the erosion of red lines and a sinking into numbness. People start out at different points and end up at different points, but everyone goes through this process. No one returns from the territories without it leaving a deep imprint, messing up his head.”

Shortly before he was discharged three months ago, Shaul decided that he had to do something with this—to bring it out, to tell the world, his parents, the citizens of Israel, what the soldiers do who are sent in their name to maintain the occupation, and what this mission does to them. “I realized that I could not go on unless I did something. I felt that I had to stand before society and tell my story and my friends’ story.” As soon as he started to work toward this vision, Shaul found that many soldiers who served with him were just waiting for the moment when someone would ask them to tell what was in their hearts. Psychological baggage that had accumulated over three years was unloaded either on paper or in front of the camera. “A lot of the guys used to take pictures in Hebron.” It’s a little surprising that the soldiers agreed to cooperate.

This kind of thing has not happened before. “Not only did they cooperate, they did it gladly. There was only one who refused, arguing that ‘it would give Israel a bad name in the world.’”
—Ha’aretz

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By Rami Khoury, Daily Star, Beirut Lebanon
The Dynamics of Distrust
The common Arab association of modern-day Israeli-American actions with historical subjugation of the Middle East via western colonialism and imperialism is even stronger now.

The issue of “why it is so hard for outsiders to understand the Middle East?” should be stated more accurately as “why do Americans and Israelis” find it so hard to grasp Arab perspectives—because most of the world other than the United States and Israel does understand Arab sentiments, and generally empathizes with them. This is a crucial issue because of the military power and political clout that Israel and the US exercise in the Middle East. Bridging Arab-American-Israeli misperceptions is critical to conflict resolution, stability, and prosperity in the Middle East.

Three principal reasons might explain why Americans, Israelis, and random other outsiders have difficulty understanding the Arabs: culture, politics, and history. The cultural gap is probably the most significant and least appreciated. Arabs and Americans share virtually identical values on core personal and political issues like community, family, justice, accountability, participation, and human rights, but these values are expressed very differently as a result of the distinct cultural habits of each society. A key difference is that North Americans value personal liberty, while Arabs sacrifice individual freedoms in favor of the collective identity of their religious, family, tribal, ethnic, or national groupings.

Americans tend to separate religion from public life, while Arabs organize and measure their public lives, very much on the basis of explicit religious values and dictates. Whereas Americans emphasize the codified legal rights of individuals within a formal democracy, Arabs usually measure life’s rights and wrongs more with unspoken criteria of an individual or a group’s sense of being treated with dignity, honor, and justice. Americans like to behave according to clear rules and explicit public statements, while Arabs tend to engage others through relationships that are constantly negotiated and renegotiated, with implicit rules of fair reciprocal treatment.

These generalizations do reflect profound cultural realities that make it very difficult for Arabs and Americans to understand one another. They are complicated by factors of politics and history, with the political dimension reflecting events going back two generations. One of these issues is Washington’s bias towards Israel in the Arab-Israel conflict. This enormously powerful, pervasive issue for most Arabs is not understood by Americans and Israelis, who in turn fail to grasp how this core grievance defines most other dimensions of Arab interaction with the US.

The second political issue now is that of the US in Iraq, the first example of an American invasion, occupation, and reconfiguration of a sovereign Arab country. The third is the legacy of US support for autocratic and dictatorial Arab regimes when they served US interests—and the sudden American desire for reform of Arab regimes when this is seen as the way to stop terror from the Middle East. Most Arabs see Washington’s treatment of Arab regimes as transparently expedient and hypocritically self-serving, while Americans may see their foreign policy in the Middle East as conducive to US national interests.

The combination of these three political issues alone creates a perception and communication gap between Arabs and Americans so wide that it distorts rational discussion of almost every other legitimate issue that is raised, such as political reform, women’s rights, education, or economic liberalization.

Many Arabs tend to see current American and Israeli policies as continuations of divisive episodes from the past—largely within the context of foreign imperial or colonial assaults against Arab lands and rights. Arabs see the US in Iraq and Israel in Palestine as two sides of the same ugly coin of foreign military and political assaults on Arabs, while Israelis and Americans think of themselves as purveyors of security, prosperity, democracy, and peace in the Middle East.

The common Arab association of modern-day Israeli-American actions with historical subjugation of the Middle East via western colonialism and imperialism is even stronger now. Many Arabs and Muslims fear that their fundamental values and culture are a target of US and Israeli policies. The level of Arab distrust and fear of the US and Israel is still rising.

These three primary factors—culture, politics, and history—are not only major deterrents to foreign understanding of Arab perspectives; they are also cumulatively becoming more intense, thus pushing the dynamic of mere disagreement among Arabs, Americans, and Israelis to one of active warfare, invasion, occupation, regime change, resistance, and terror against civilians.
—Rami Khouri is the executive editor of the Beirut-based Daily Star

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Now both sides can go fly a kite!
High Court Tells Israelis to Shift Part of Barrier/Wall
“We looked at the wall as a catastrophe for our village because we have high unemployment and rely on farming,” the mayor said in an interview.

Israel’s Supreme Court ordered the army to remove a small portion of the barrier it is building along the West Bank and to reroute other sections to reduce the harm imposed on Palestinians cut off from lands they need. The unanimous decision by the three-judge panel asserted that Israel has a genuine security reason for building the barrier and can expropriate land in the West Bank for it. But it said the army “has a legal duty to balance properly between security considerations and humanitarian ones.” The barrier’s planned path along a 20-mile section, the court ruled, could not be justified because of the suffering it would cause.

A court summary of the ruling said, in part: “The fence’s current path would separate landowners from tens of thousands of dunams [quarter-acres] of land, and the planned regime of authorizations to access that land would not substantially reduce the harm. The fence’s current path would burden the entire way of life in petitioners’ villages.” It added that while the ruling might reduce security for Israelis, “this reduction in security must be endured for the sake of humanitarian considerations.” The decision, affecting eight Palestinian villages with 35,000 residents near Jerusalem, sets a precedent for how Israel can complete the fence, partially built.

When complete, the barrier is to run 437 miles from the northern West Bank, wrap around some settlements deep in the West Bank, and stretch to the area’s southern rim. The barrier consists mostly of an electronic fence with coils of razor wire, adjoining trenches and guard towers, but about five percent consists of concrete walls rising 20 feet. The ruling did not address whether the fence can extend deep into Palestinian territory to Israeli settlements.

The decision brought some satisfaction in Beit Sourik, the hardscrabble Palestinian village whose village council was the chief petitioner in the case. Its farmers protested that they would be cut off from most of the terraced land on which they grow olives, grapes, and figs. “We looked at the wall as a catastrophe for our village because we have high unemployment and rely on farming,” the mayor, Muhammad Kandil, said in an interview. “They want to confiscate and steal the land. Security is a pretext.”

There was also glee in an adjoining town, Mevasseret Zion, whose Israeli residents had joined the Palestinians in arguing that a barrier between them would increase animosity and thus lessen safety. Just last week, children from the two towns joined together to fly kites as a sign of the friendly relationship that could be damaged.

The Ministry of Defense said it will destroy or move two miles already built.
—New York Times

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"Your insistence to go on supplying the Israeli army with bulldozers… helps it to destroy Palestinian lands and houses."
Arab Boycott Warns Caterpillar Not to Sell to IDF

The Damascus-based Arab office for the boycott of Israel warned the US company Caterpillar Inc. recently that Arab states will blacklist it if it keeps selling bulldozers to the Israel Defense Forces. The boycott office accused Caterpillar of selling Israel equipment used to destroy Palestinian property in the ‘Israeli-occupied territories.’ “Your insistence to go on supplying the Israeli army with bulldozers and other equipment that helps it to destroy Palestinian lands and houses...would eventually lead to halting any dealing with your company by all Arab countries,” according to the letter, the contents of which were made available to The Associated Press.

Caterpillar has come under fire for its sale of equipment that Israel uses to destroy Palestinian homes. The company has repeatedly disputed protesters’ arguments, saying it has “neither the legal right nor the means to police individual use of that equipment… We have compassion for all those impacted by political strife around the world, but the facts remain that we don’t have the legal right to police the use of our equipment,” Caterpillar spokesman Ben Cordani told AP. Cordani said his company has sales agents throughout the Arab world, including the Gaza Strip, but he refused to provide information on machinery sold to Arab buyers.

American peace activist Rachel Corrie was crushed to death in March 2003 while trying to block an Israeli army bulldozer destroying a row of Palestinian homes in a refugee camp near the Gaza-Egypt border. In April, Corrie’s parents, along with hundreds of Americans, demonstrated outside Caterpillar’s offices, demanding that it stop selling equipment to the Israeli army to destroy Palestinians’ houses. The Arab boycott office said that since 1967, Israel has used Caterpillar bulldozers to destroy 9,000 Palestinian houses, leaving 50,000 Palestinians homeless. It said the Israeli army also used the company’s bulldozers to uproot around 200,000 olive trees since the start of the Palestinian uprising in September 2000.
—The Associated Press

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By Nathan Guttman
Brother Against Brother
“I saw first-hand the devastating effect of the wall… The ability of religious institutions to function normally throughout the Holy Land is severely impeded.”

The television advertisement opens with candles burning brightly beneath the figure of the Virgin Mary. Afterward, against a backdrop of pictures of Christian clergy marching side by side toward an Israeli military Jeep, the narrator explains that it is hard for Palestinian Christians to attend Sunday morning prayer services in their respective churches. “They suffer under the occupation just as Muslims suffer under the occupation,” continues the narrator, as scenes are shown of a clergyman arguing with an Israeli soldier and of Christians walking along a highway, passing by the barrel of an Israeli tank. Viewers then see a father hugging his tearful daughter in front of a small Christmas tree. These pictures, broadcast by stations in the Washington DC area are part of a publicity campaign launched by a new organization that goes by the name of Imagine Life and whose declared goal is to humanize the suffering caused by the Israeli occupation.

This is not the first time that the situation of Palestinian Christians has received publicity in the United States. Considerable attention was generated by the harshly critical letter written by Congressman Henry Hyde (Republican, Illinois), who chairs the House International Relations Committee. Hyde’s letter, addressed to Secretary of State Colin Powell, referred to the suffering the separation fence is causing Christians who live adjacent to it or in the territories.

A similar letter, no less acerbic, was sent in April by Bishop Wilton D. Gregory, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. It reached President George Bush’s desk the day before his scheduled meeting with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in the White House. The letter claims that “Christian leaders in the Holy Land are especially concerned about the security wall, which they have called ‘a grave obstacle’ to peace.” Bishop Gregory also informs President Bush: “In my visit in January, I saw first-hand the devastating effect of the wall, which is dividing families, land, and neighborhoods. The ability of religious institutions to function normally throughout the Holy Land is severely impeded.” Protestant and Catholic church organizations alike have declared their opposition to the building of the fence.

The ever-increasing clout of Evangelical Christians in the US and their unqualified support for Israel—and for its continued control of the territories—has in recent years drowned out the voices of other Christians in America who support the Palestinian side. The letters and the recent TV ads are creating the impression that someone is trying to change this picture. “There is no organized attempt to emphasize the Christian issue,” says Hussein Ibish of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. According to Ibish, since ‘Evangelical’ Christians have decided to present the Middle East conflict as a religious dispute, a need has arisen for showing the other side, and for explaining that there are also Christians in the Palestinian community. Says Ibish: “It is simple and it makes sense that the supporters of Palestinian rights and of peace will point out to the American public that this conflict affects Christians as well.”
—Ha’aretz

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PLEASE NOTE: MennoLetter will not be published next month. I will be spending five weeks in Jerusalem at Bat Kol Institute with church workers and teachers from around the world. They are studying Scripture with Rabbis and Christians, and we will be traveling for on-site lectures throughout the country—from Dan to Be'ersheba—for my course, Biblical Geography and Archaeology of the Land.

The next issue will be published in September 2004.

Glenn Edward Witmer