ShareThis
by Paul Ballard
November 1, 2011
A Tale of Two Times
Biblical Times, Judea
A man from Judea is attacked on the road by thieves and left for dead. A good Samaritan – a non-Judean – happens by and helps the Judean who has been attacked and takes him to safety.
21st. Century, Israel or Palestine
A man from Judea is attacked on the road by thieves and left for dead. No Samaritan, good or bad, happens by. Some years earlier, all Samaritans were forced to flee their homes by the Israel Defense Forces. So there are no Samaritans close by. The Judean man who was attacked dies on the roadside, with no help from anybody.
This tale is also known as the Parable of Getting What You Want. It’s very sad. It says something about Man’s inhumanity to Man!
Please let us pray to Yahwe, Allah, God that we, as humans, can find the humility to change!
Eyeless Outside Gaza – Let’s Open Ours to Change
As I sat watching on TV earlier this week the tragic violence in Gaza and Israel, I was reminded of a time many years ago. In August 1968 I had shared drinks one evening in Tangiers, Morocco, with two business partners, co-owners of OR-Tour, a successful travel agency there. They were Mohammed Osman, a Moslem, and Baruch Rachman, a Jew.
In my under-graduate days, I worked as a tour organizer for the Connecticut-based American Institute for Foreign Study (AIFS). I had taken a large group of American high school students and their teachers on a visit to Tangiers – a side trip from a longer tour of southern Spain.
Only a year before, Israel had fought the 1967 war against Egypt and other Arab countries that redrew the map of the Middle East. I had asked the two men how they had managed to sustain their partnership in that time. Their joint reply surprised me and still impresses me to this day. They told me they had a strong business relationship based upon trust and friendship. For them, that transcended any political conflict.
Over the years, OR-Tour has become for me a metaphor of what it will really take to bring peace to Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East. For here we had a Moslem-Jewish co-owned business contracted by a large and prestigious private American cultural exchange organization to help young American students learn about the world through the Middle East.
OR-Tour speaks always very powerfully to me. It says true lasting peace will only come when Palestinians and Israelis create a common space where they can live and work together – like Mohammed and Baruch – in trust and friendship.
This, I firmly believe, is the yardstick by which we should measure Israel and Palestine’s progress, and also the impact of our country’s foreign policy in this regard.
Do they pass the OR-Tour Test ?
Very sadly, to date, by this standard both have been largely an abject failure. All the bombs, rockets, destruction, deaths and mutilated bodies and lives the past few days are surely ample testimony to this.
How has this come about even to this day? And what has been U.S. foreign policy’s contribution to it? Is the long-sought-after, never-yet-realized two-state solution still really achievable? And is it really a solution that will automatically bring peace?
To give some perspective, it’s first worthwhile quickly recalling highlights of recent history that have gotten things to where they are today.
On the Israeli side, since the failure of the Oslo Accords with the assassination of Israeli prime-minister Yitzak Rabin by an Israeli extremist in 1995, the reversal of key Oslo commitments on land-for-peace by the Netanyahu government of 1996-99, and Israeli Likud Party’s unwillingness to even contemplate the existence of a Palestinian State in 2000-2002, politics has been dominated by an essentially militaristic approach to relations with the Palestinians.
After the stalemate of Camp David II talks hosted by U.S. President Clinton in July 2000, a mutually agreed long-term peace deal was almost reached in early 2001 in Jerusalem between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s team led by Shlomo Ben-Ami and Yassir Arafat’s team led by Saeb Erekat. However, weeks later Barak lost re-election to Likud’s Ariel Sharon, who had earlier made a provocative visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem inciting a Palestinian demonstration in which over two hundred Palestinians were killed. This sparked the so-called Al-Aqsa Intifada in which Palestinians rose up against Israeli occupation through riots and suicide bombings. Swayed by all this, the Israeli public voted for security over peace, even though a majority has always indicated a preference for the latter.
Since 2001, despite repeated efforts at peace talks, successive Israeli governments led by the right-wing Kadima and Likud parties have consistently placed security concerns, “Israel’s right to defend itself” and expansion of Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank and in Jerusalem over peace. The number of settlers has doubled to half a million since 2001.
Under a heavily fortified regime – Israel has the tenth largest army in the world for a population of 6 million, supplied entirely by U.S. financed weapons – the Israeli economy has grown rapidly especially through exports to Western economies. Meanwhile, beset by Israeli military controls, checkpoints and, since 2006, the blockade of Gaza, the Palestinian territories’ economies have all but collapsed. Gazan exports fell to zero since 2007, while unemployment soared to 40%. In both the West Bank and Gaza, large majorities of Palestinians live mainly on foreign aid assistance.
On the Palestinian side, in politics, fair elections were held in 2006 that brought to power a Fatah president – Mahmoud Abbas; and a Hamas-led legislature under Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh. Infighting led to creation of two governments in 2007 – Fatah leading in the West Bank, and Hamas in much smaller Gaza. Efforts at peace talks have failed, as Israeli settlement activity on the West Bank has expanded.
This has undermined the authority of Abbas, whose attempt to gain U.N. recognition for a Palestinian state also failed at the U.N. Security Council in 2011. Meanwhile, Hamas has since 2006 repeatedly indicated willingness to negotiate a long-term peace treaty with Israel, only to be totally rebuffed as a “terrorist” organization. Repeated lack of progress in peace talks has strengthened the hand of extremist groups – supported by Iran – advocating a military solution, even as their primitive weapons largely leave Israel unscathed. Fewer than thirty Israelis have been killed by rocket fire in the past decade – compared with tens of thousands of Palestinians killed in repeated Israeli military incursions into the West Bank and Gaza.
With a fragile ceasefire holding now in Gaza, and a weakened Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and an overwhelmingly military Israeli focus on them, where do we stand today in terms of my OR-Tour Test?
Clearly, in the past decade, Israel and the Palestinians have moved away from any kind of peace. The two peoples are more separated – segregated – than ever in the lives they lead. Business and economic ties, cultural and educational ties are far far less than during the Oslo Accords period of the 1990s.
The insistence on a two-state solution, requiring as it does permanent establishment of borders, has escalated the stakes and tensions between the two sides in terms of land, Jerusalem and the right-of-return, not reduced them.
Both sides are, it seems to me, caught increasingly in a growing dependency that is most unhealthy and potentially disastrous for both in the long term. Palestinians are for now utterly dependent upon outside economic and military assistance. But Israelis are equally dependent upon the United States to maintain overwhelming military superiority to survive and upon the West economically for markets. This in turn means that Israel’s survival – in an increasingly hostile neighborhood where it has made little effort to make friends or alliances – depends long-term ultimately on American public opinion.
But, as the recent re-election win of Pres. Obama has shown, the demographics underlying U.S. politics are shifting – away from an older, white male dominated electorate and towards a non-white, minority, youth and women dominated one. Looking into the future, it is far from clear that America’s new majority will be as favorably disposed towards the Israelis or as willing to sign off on a uniquely military approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It concerns me deeply that U.S. foreign policy – by insisting upon a two-state solution without focusing upon the necessary building of trust and friendship between the parties based upon a common space for shared activities and shared interests – is in effect contributing to deepening the conflict rather than resolving it. By always emphasizing first “Israel’s right to defend itself” over all other considerations, U.S. foreign policy is underwriting the mainly militaristic approach of successive Israeli governments over the past decade. Massive U.S. military and financial assistance to Israel – of upwards of $6 billion a year for 6 million Israelis, or over $1000 per capita – has supported growth of powerful vested interests in Israeli politics – the Israeli Defense Forces and the Settler Movement – that are blocking peace not trying to achieve it.
A true tragedy is that almost as many Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza attend college as do Israelis – well over 50% in both cases. Yet, because of the collapse of their economy, the average Palestinian earns only five per cent of what the average Israeli earns in annual income. So, the average Israeli earns a European income, while the average Palestinian only gets an African income. It is profoundly sad Israelis have yet to understand that, working together with the Palestinians and Lebanese, they have the skills and entrepreneurship quickly to form a Singapore-style economic hub that could turbo-charge the development of the entire Middle East. This would also create a win-win partnership between Israel and its neighbors, anchoring its future more securely in the region.
As one who wishes Israel well and wants to see it prosper long-term as a truly pluralistic, modern democratic state, I would wish that the U.S.A. look to my OR-Tour test and what it says is needed for a real and lasting peace. Let us hope and pray that the children of Mohammed and Baruch will together establish and run a Moslem-Jewish co-owned travel agency in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Ramallah in the not too-distant future.
But for this to happen, I believe the USA needs today a fundamental reshaping of its foreign policy. This must be consistent with our core values – equality of opportunity, free markets, freedom of religion, equality before the law – that have made the USA a highly admired nation – even in the Arab and Moslem worlds. Israel needs to realize that its militaristic approach aimed at controlling land and occupying Palestinian territories forever is long-term literally a dead-end. Palestinians need to show patience, fortitude and a willingness to compromise and to eschew violence, in order to win a just and prosperous birthright owed to their children.