Jews and Arabs in Israel-Palestine - Martin Buber
We have not settled Palestine together with the Arabs but alongside them. Settlement alongside, when two nations inhabit the same country, which fails to become settlement together with, must necessarily become a state against. This is bound to happen here -- and there will be no return to a mere alongside. But despite all the obstacles in our path, the way is still open for reaching a settlement together with. And I do not know how much time is left to us. What I do know is that if we do not attain [such a relationship with the Arabs of Palestine], we will never realize the aims of Zionism. (October 1929)
We considered it a fundamental point that in this case two vital claims are opposed to each other, two claims of a different nature and a different origin which cannot objectively be pitted against one another and between which no objective decision can be made as to which is just, which unjust. We considered and still consider it our duty to understand and to honor the claim which is opposed to us and to endeavor to reconcile both claims. We could not and cannot renounce the Jewish claim; something even higher than the life of our people is bound up with this land, namely its work, its divine mission. But we have been and are still convinced that it must be possible to find some compromise between this claim and the other, for we love this land and we believe in its future; since such love and such faith are surely present on the other side as well, a union in the common service of the land must be within the range of possibility. Where there is faith and love, a solution may be found even to what appears to be a tragic opposition. (1939)
Showing posts with label English - Israeli Palestinian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label English - Israeli Palestinian. Show all posts
Tuesday, 14 April 2009
David Grossman's speech at the Rabin memorial
David Grossman's speech at the Rabin memorial
The annual memorial ceremony for Yitzhak Rabin is the moment when we pause for a while to remember Rabin the man, the leader. And we also take a look at ourselves, at Israeli society, its leadership, the national mood, the state of the peace process, at ourselves as individuals in the face of national events. It is not easy to take a look at ourselves this year. There was a war, and Israel flexed its massive military muscle, but also exposed Israel's fragility. We discovered that our military might ultimately cannot be the only guarantee of our existence. Primarily, we have found that the crisis Israel is experiencing is far deeper than we had feared, in almost every way. I am speaking here tonight as a person whose love for the land is overwhelming and complex, and yet it is unequivocal, and as one whose continuous covenant with the land has turned his personal calamity into a covenant of blood.
I am totally secular, and yet in my eyes the establishment and the very existence of the State of Israel is a miracle of sorts that happened to us as a nation - a political, national, human miracle. I do not forget this for a single moment. Even when many things in the reality of our lives enrage and depress me, even when the miracle is broken down to routine and wretchedness, to corruption and cynicism, even when reality seems like nothing but a poor parody of this miracle, I always remember. And with these feelings, I address you tonight. "Behold land, for we hath squandered," wrote the poet Saul Tchernikovsky in Tel Aviv in 1938. He lamented the burial of our young again and again in the soil of the Land of Israel. The death of young people is a horrible, ghastly waste. But no less dreadful is the sense that for many years, the State of Israel has been squandering, not only the lives of its sons, but also its miracle; that grand and rare opportunity that history bestowed upon it, the opportunity to establish here a state that is efficient, democratic, which abides by Jewish and universal values; a state that would be a national home and haven, but not only a haven, also a place that would offer a new meaning to Jewish existence; a state that holds as an integral and essential part of its Jewish identity and its Jewish ethos, the observance of full equality and respect for its non-Jewish citizens. Look at what befell us. Look what befell the young, bold, passionate country we had here, and how, as if it had undergone a quickened ageing process, Israel lurched from infancy and youth to a perpetual state of gripe, weakness and sourness. How did this happen? When did we lose even the hope that we would eventually be able to live a different, better life? Moreover, how do we continue to watch from the side as though hypnotized by the insanity, rudeness, violence and racism that has overtaken our home? And I ask you: How could it be that a people with such powers of creativity, renewal and vivacity as ours, a people that knew how to rise from the ashes time and again, finds itself today, despite its great military might, at such a state of laxity and inanity, a state where it is the victim once more, but this time its own victim, of its anxieties, its short-sightedness. One of the most difficult outcomes of the recent war is the heightened realization that at this time there is no king in Israel, that our leadership is hollow. Our military and political leadership is hollow. I am not even talking about the obvious blunders in running the war, of the collapse of the home front, nor of the large-scale and small-time corruption. I am talking about the fact that the people leading Israel today are unable to connect Israelis to their identity. Certainly not with the healthy, vitalizing and productive areas of this identity, with those areas of identity and memory and fundamental values that would give us hope and strength, that would be the antidote to the waning of mutual trust, of the bonds to the land, that would give some meaning to the exhausting and despairing struggle for existence. The fundamental characteristics of the current Israeli leadership are primarily anxiety and intimidation, of the charade of power, the wink of the dirty deal, of selling out our most prized possessions. In this sense they are not true leaders, certainly they are not the leaders of a people in such a complicated position that has lost the way it so desperately needs. Sometimes it seems that the sound box of their self-importance, of their memories of history, of their vision, of what they really care for, exist only in the miniscule space between two headlines of a newspaper or between two investigations by the attorney general. Look at those who lead us. Not all of them, of course, but many among them. Behold their petrified, suspicious, sweaty conduct. The conduct of advocates and scoundrels. It is preposterous to expect to hear wisdom emerge from them, that some vision or even just an original, truly creative, bold and ingenuous idea would emanate from them. When was the last time a prime minister formulated or took a step that could open up a new horizon for Israelis, for a better future? When did he initiate a social or cultural or ideological move, instead of merely reacting feverishly to moves forced upon him by others? Mister Prime Minister, I am not saying these words out of feelings of rage or revenge. I have waited long enough to avoid responding on impulse. You will not be able to dismiss my words tonight by saying a grieving man cannot be judged. Certainly I am grieving, but I am more pained than angry. This country and what you and your friends are doing to it pains me. Trust me, your success is important to me, because the future of all of us depends on our ability to act. Yitzhak Rabin took the road of peace with the Palestinians, not because he possessed great affection for them or their leaders. Even then, as you recall, common belief was that we had no partner and we had nothing to discuss with them. Rabin decided to act, because he discerned very wisely that Israeli society would not be able to sustain itself endlessly in a state of an unresolved conflict. He realized long before many others that life in a climate of violence, occupation, terror, anxiety and hopelessness, extracts a price Israel cannot afford. This is all relevant today, even more so. We will soon talk about the partner that we do or do not have, but before that, let us take a look at ourselves. We have been living in this struggle for more than 100 years. We, the citizens of this conflict, have been born into war and raised in it, and in a certain sense indoctrinated by it. Maybe this is why we sometimes think that this madness in which we live for over 100 years is the only real thing, the only life for us, and that we do not have the option or even the right to aspire for a different life. By our sword we shall live and by our sword we shall die and the sword shall devour forever. Maybe this would explain the indifference with which we accept the utter failure of the peace process, a failure that has lasted for years and claims more and more victims. This could explain also the lack of reaction by most of us to the harsh blow to democracy caused by the appointment of Avigdor Lieberman as a senior minister with the support of the Labor Party - the appointment of a habitual pyromaniac as director of the nation's firefighters. And these are partly the cause of Israel's quick descent into the heartless, essentially brutal treatment of its poor and suffering. This indifference to the fate of the hungry, the elderly, the sick and the disabled, all those who are weak, this equanimity of the State of Israel in the face of human trafficking or the appalling employment conditions of our foreign workers, which border on slavery, to the deeply ingrained institutionalized racism against the Arab minority. When this takes place here so naturally, without shock, without protest, as though it were obvious, that we would never be able to get the wheel back on track, when all of this takes place, I begin to fear that even if peace were to arrive tomorrow, and even if we ever regained some normalcy, we may have lost our chance for full recovery. The calamity that struck my family and myself with the falling of our son, Uri, does not grant me any additional rights in the public discourse, but I believe that the experience of facing death and the loss brings with it a sobriety and lucidity, at least regarding the distinction between the important and the unimportant, between the attainable and the unattainable. Any reasonable person in Israel, and I will say in Palestine too, knows exactly the outline of a possible solution to the conflict between the two peoples. Any reasonable person here and over there knows deep in their heart the difference between dreams and the heart's desire, between what is possible and what is not possible by the conclusion of negotiations. Anyone who does not know, who refuses to acknowledge this, is already not a partner, be he Jew or Arab, is entrapped in his hermetic fanaticism, and is therefore not a partner. Let us take a look at those who are meant to be our partners. The Palestinians have elected Hamas to lead them, Hamas who refuses to negotiate with us, refuses even to recognize us. What can be done in such a position? Keep strangling them more and more, keep mowing down hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza, most of whom are innocent civilians like us? Kill them and get killed for all eternity? Turn to the Palestinians, Mr. Olmert, address them over the heads of Hamas, appeal to their moderates, those who like you and I oppose Hamas and its ways, turn to the Palestinian people, speak to their deep grief and wounds, acknowledge their ongoing suffering. Nothing would be taken away from you or Israel's standing in future negotiations. Our hearts will only open up to one another slightly, and this has a tremendous power, the power of a force majeur. The power of simple human compassion, particularly in this a state of deadlock and dread. Just once, look at them not through the sights of a gun, and not behind a closed roadblock. You will see there a people that is tortured no less than us. An oppressed, occupied people bereft of hope. Certainly, the Palestinians are also to blame for the impasse, certainly they played their role in the failure of the peace process. But take a look at them from a different perspective, not only at the radicals in their midst, not only at those who share interests with our own radicals. Take a look at the overwhelming majority of this miserable people, whose fate is entangled with our own, whether we like it or not. Go to the Palestinians, Mr. Olmert, do not search all the time for reasons for not to talk to them. You backed down on the unilateral convergence, and that's a good thing, but do not leave a vacuum. It will be occupied instantly with violence, destruction. Talk to them, make them an offer their moderates can accept. They argue among themselves far more than we are shown in the media. Make them an offer that will force them to choose between accepting it or prefering to remain hostage to fanatical Islam. Approach them with the bravest and most serious plan Israel can offer. With the offer than any reasonable Palestinian and Israeli knows is the boundary of their refusal and our concession. There is no time. Should you delay, in a short while we will look back with longing at the amateur Palestinian terror. We will hit our heads and yell at our failure to exercise all of our mental flexibility, all of the Israeli ingenuity to uproot our enemies from their self-entrapment. We have no choice and they have no choice. And a peace of no choice should be approached with the same determination and creativity as one approaches a war of no choice. And those who believe we do have a choice, or that time is on our side do not comprehend the deeply dangerous processes already in motion. Maybe, Mr. Prime Minister, you need to be reminded, that if an Arab leader is sending a peace signal, be it the slightest and most hesitant, you must accept it, you must test immediately its sincerity and seriousness. You do not have the moral right not to respond. You owe it to those whom you would ask to sacrifice their lives should another war break out. Therefore, if President Assad says that Syria wants peace, even if you don't believe him, and we are all suspicious of him, you must offer to meet him that same day. Don't wait a single day. When you launched the last war you did not even wait one hour. You charged with full force, with the complete arsenal, with the full power of destruction. Why, when a glimmer of peace surfaces, must you reject it immediately, dissolve it? What have you got to lose? Are you suspicious of it? Go and offer him such terms that would expose his schemes. Offer him a peace process that would last over several years, and only at its conclusion, and provided he meets all the conditions and restrictions, will he get back the Golan. Commit him to a prolonged process, act so that his people also become aware of this possibility. Help the moderates, who must exist there as well. Try to shape reality. Not only serve as its collaborator. This is what you were elected to do. Certainly, not all depends on our actions. There are major powers active in our region and in the world. Some, like Iran, like radical Islam, seek our doom and despite that, so much depends on what we do, on what we become. Disagreements today between right and left are not that significant. The vast majority of Israel's citizens understand this already, and know what the outline for the resolution of the conflict would look like. Most of us understand, therefore, that the land would be divided, that a Palestinian state would be established. Why, then, do we keep exhausting ourselves with the internal bickering that has gone on for 40 years? Why does our political leadership continue to reflect the position of the radicals and not that held by the majority of the public? It is better to reach national consensus before circumstances or God forbid another war force us to reach it. If we do it, we would save ourselves years of decline and error, years when we will cry time and again: "Behold land, for we hath squandered." From where I stand right now, I beseech, I call on all those who listen, the young who came back from the war, who know they are the ones to be called upon to pay the price of the next war, on citizens, Jew and Arab, people on the right and the left, the secular, the religious, stop for a moment, take a look into the abyss. Think of how close we are to losing all that we have created here. Ask yourselves if this is not the time to get a grip, to break free of this paralysis, to finally claim the lives we deserve to live.
The annual memorial ceremony for Yitzhak Rabin is the moment when we pause for a while to remember Rabin the man, the leader. And we also take a look at ourselves, at Israeli society, its leadership, the national mood, the state of the peace process, at ourselves as individuals in the face of national events. It is not easy to take a look at ourselves this year. There was a war, and Israel flexed its massive military muscle, but also exposed Israel's fragility. We discovered that our military might ultimately cannot be the only guarantee of our existence. Primarily, we have found that the crisis Israel is experiencing is far deeper than we had feared, in almost every way. I am speaking here tonight as a person whose love for the land is overwhelming and complex, and yet it is unequivocal, and as one whose continuous covenant with the land has turned his personal calamity into a covenant of blood.
I am totally secular, and yet in my eyes the establishment and the very existence of the State of Israel is a miracle of sorts that happened to us as a nation - a political, national, human miracle. I do not forget this for a single moment. Even when many things in the reality of our lives enrage and depress me, even when the miracle is broken down to routine and wretchedness, to corruption and cynicism, even when reality seems like nothing but a poor parody of this miracle, I always remember. And with these feelings, I address you tonight. "Behold land, for we hath squandered," wrote the poet Saul Tchernikovsky in Tel Aviv in 1938. He lamented the burial of our young again and again in the soil of the Land of Israel. The death of young people is a horrible, ghastly waste. But no less dreadful is the sense that for many years, the State of Israel has been squandering, not only the lives of its sons, but also its miracle; that grand and rare opportunity that history bestowed upon it, the opportunity to establish here a state that is efficient, democratic, which abides by Jewish and universal values; a state that would be a national home and haven, but not only a haven, also a place that would offer a new meaning to Jewish existence; a state that holds as an integral and essential part of its Jewish identity and its Jewish ethos, the observance of full equality and respect for its non-Jewish citizens. Look at what befell us. Look what befell the young, bold, passionate country we had here, and how, as if it had undergone a quickened ageing process, Israel lurched from infancy and youth to a perpetual state of gripe, weakness and sourness. How did this happen? When did we lose even the hope that we would eventually be able to live a different, better life? Moreover, how do we continue to watch from the side as though hypnotized by the insanity, rudeness, violence and racism that has overtaken our home? And I ask you: How could it be that a people with such powers of creativity, renewal and vivacity as ours, a people that knew how to rise from the ashes time and again, finds itself today, despite its great military might, at such a state of laxity and inanity, a state where it is the victim once more, but this time its own victim, of its anxieties, its short-sightedness. One of the most difficult outcomes of the recent war is the heightened realization that at this time there is no king in Israel, that our leadership is hollow. Our military and political leadership is hollow. I am not even talking about the obvious blunders in running the war, of the collapse of the home front, nor of the large-scale and small-time corruption. I am talking about the fact that the people leading Israel today are unable to connect Israelis to their identity. Certainly not with the healthy, vitalizing and productive areas of this identity, with those areas of identity and memory and fundamental values that would give us hope and strength, that would be the antidote to the waning of mutual trust, of the bonds to the land, that would give some meaning to the exhausting and despairing struggle for existence. The fundamental characteristics of the current Israeli leadership are primarily anxiety and intimidation, of the charade of power, the wink of the dirty deal, of selling out our most prized possessions. In this sense they are not true leaders, certainly they are not the leaders of a people in such a complicated position that has lost the way it so desperately needs. Sometimes it seems that the sound box of their self-importance, of their memories of history, of their vision, of what they really care for, exist only in the miniscule space between two headlines of a newspaper or between two investigations by the attorney general. Look at those who lead us. Not all of them, of course, but many among them. Behold their petrified, suspicious, sweaty conduct. The conduct of advocates and scoundrels. It is preposterous to expect to hear wisdom emerge from them, that some vision or even just an original, truly creative, bold and ingenuous idea would emanate from them. When was the last time a prime minister formulated or took a step that could open up a new horizon for Israelis, for a better future? When did he initiate a social or cultural or ideological move, instead of merely reacting feverishly to moves forced upon him by others? Mister Prime Minister, I am not saying these words out of feelings of rage or revenge. I have waited long enough to avoid responding on impulse. You will not be able to dismiss my words tonight by saying a grieving man cannot be judged. Certainly I am grieving, but I am more pained than angry. This country and what you and your friends are doing to it pains me. Trust me, your success is important to me, because the future of all of us depends on our ability to act. Yitzhak Rabin took the road of peace with the Palestinians, not because he possessed great affection for them or their leaders. Even then, as you recall, common belief was that we had no partner and we had nothing to discuss with them. Rabin decided to act, because he discerned very wisely that Israeli society would not be able to sustain itself endlessly in a state of an unresolved conflict. He realized long before many others that life in a climate of violence, occupation, terror, anxiety and hopelessness, extracts a price Israel cannot afford. This is all relevant today, even more so. We will soon talk about the partner that we do or do not have, but before that, let us take a look at ourselves. We have been living in this struggle for more than 100 years. We, the citizens of this conflict, have been born into war and raised in it, and in a certain sense indoctrinated by it. Maybe this is why we sometimes think that this madness in which we live for over 100 years is the only real thing, the only life for us, and that we do not have the option or even the right to aspire for a different life. By our sword we shall live and by our sword we shall die and the sword shall devour forever. Maybe this would explain the indifference with which we accept the utter failure of the peace process, a failure that has lasted for years and claims more and more victims. This could explain also the lack of reaction by most of us to the harsh blow to democracy caused by the appointment of Avigdor Lieberman as a senior minister with the support of the Labor Party - the appointment of a habitual pyromaniac as director of the nation's firefighters. And these are partly the cause of Israel's quick descent into the heartless, essentially brutal treatment of its poor and suffering. This indifference to the fate of the hungry, the elderly, the sick and the disabled, all those who are weak, this equanimity of the State of Israel in the face of human trafficking or the appalling employment conditions of our foreign workers, which border on slavery, to the deeply ingrained institutionalized racism against the Arab minority. When this takes place here so naturally, without shock, without protest, as though it were obvious, that we would never be able to get the wheel back on track, when all of this takes place, I begin to fear that even if peace were to arrive tomorrow, and even if we ever regained some normalcy, we may have lost our chance for full recovery. The calamity that struck my family and myself with the falling of our son, Uri, does not grant me any additional rights in the public discourse, but I believe that the experience of facing death and the loss brings with it a sobriety and lucidity, at least regarding the distinction between the important and the unimportant, between the attainable and the unattainable. Any reasonable person in Israel, and I will say in Palestine too, knows exactly the outline of a possible solution to the conflict between the two peoples. Any reasonable person here and over there knows deep in their heart the difference between dreams and the heart's desire, between what is possible and what is not possible by the conclusion of negotiations. Anyone who does not know, who refuses to acknowledge this, is already not a partner, be he Jew or Arab, is entrapped in his hermetic fanaticism, and is therefore not a partner. Let us take a look at those who are meant to be our partners. The Palestinians have elected Hamas to lead them, Hamas who refuses to negotiate with us, refuses even to recognize us. What can be done in such a position? Keep strangling them more and more, keep mowing down hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza, most of whom are innocent civilians like us? Kill them and get killed for all eternity? Turn to the Palestinians, Mr. Olmert, address them over the heads of Hamas, appeal to their moderates, those who like you and I oppose Hamas and its ways, turn to the Palestinian people, speak to their deep grief and wounds, acknowledge their ongoing suffering. Nothing would be taken away from you or Israel's standing in future negotiations. Our hearts will only open up to one another slightly, and this has a tremendous power, the power of a force majeur. The power of simple human compassion, particularly in this a state of deadlock and dread. Just once, look at them not through the sights of a gun, and not behind a closed roadblock. You will see there a people that is tortured no less than us. An oppressed, occupied people bereft of hope. Certainly, the Palestinians are also to blame for the impasse, certainly they played their role in the failure of the peace process. But take a look at them from a different perspective, not only at the radicals in their midst, not only at those who share interests with our own radicals. Take a look at the overwhelming majority of this miserable people, whose fate is entangled with our own, whether we like it or not. Go to the Palestinians, Mr. Olmert, do not search all the time for reasons for not to talk to them. You backed down on the unilateral convergence, and that's a good thing, but do not leave a vacuum. It will be occupied instantly with violence, destruction. Talk to them, make them an offer their moderates can accept. They argue among themselves far more than we are shown in the media. Make them an offer that will force them to choose between accepting it or prefering to remain hostage to fanatical Islam. Approach them with the bravest and most serious plan Israel can offer. With the offer than any reasonable Palestinian and Israeli knows is the boundary of their refusal and our concession. There is no time. Should you delay, in a short while we will look back with longing at the amateur Palestinian terror. We will hit our heads and yell at our failure to exercise all of our mental flexibility, all of the Israeli ingenuity to uproot our enemies from their self-entrapment. We have no choice and they have no choice. And a peace of no choice should be approached with the same determination and creativity as one approaches a war of no choice. And those who believe we do have a choice, or that time is on our side do not comprehend the deeply dangerous processes already in motion. Maybe, Mr. Prime Minister, you need to be reminded, that if an Arab leader is sending a peace signal, be it the slightest and most hesitant, you must accept it, you must test immediately its sincerity and seriousness. You do not have the moral right not to respond. You owe it to those whom you would ask to sacrifice their lives should another war break out. Therefore, if President Assad says that Syria wants peace, even if you don't believe him, and we are all suspicious of him, you must offer to meet him that same day. Don't wait a single day. When you launched the last war you did not even wait one hour. You charged with full force, with the complete arsenal, with the full power of destruction. Why, when a glimmer of peace surfaces, must you reject it immediately, dissolve it? What have you got to lose? Are you suspicious of it? Go and offer him such terms that would expose his schemes. Offer him a peace process that would last over several years, and only at its conclusion, and provided he meets all the conditions and restrictions, will he get back the Golan. Commit him to a prolonged process, act so that his people also become aware of this possibility. Help the moderates, who must exist there as well. Try to shape reality. Not only serve as its collaborator. This is what you were elected to do. Certainly, not all depends on our actions. There are major powers active in our region and in the world. Some, like Iran, like radical Islam, seek our doom and despite that, so much depends on what we do, on what we become. Disagreements today between right and left are not that significant. The vast majority of Israel's citizens understand this already, and know what the outline for the resolution of the conflict would look like. Most of us understand, therefore, that the land would be divided, that a Palestinian state would be established. Why, then, do we keep exhausting ourselves with the internal bickering that has gone on for 40 years? Why does our political leadership continue to reflect the position of the radicals and not that held by the majority of the public? It is better to reach national consensus before circumstances or God forbid another war force us to reach it. If we do it, we would save ourselves years of decline and error, years when we will cry time and again: "Behold land, for we hath squandered." From where I stand right now, I beseech, I call on all those who listen, the young who came back from the war, who know they are the ones to be called upon to pay the price of the next war, on citizens, Jew and Arab, people on the right and the left, the secular, the religious, stop for a moment, take a look into the abyss. Think of how close we are to losing all that we have created here. Ask yourselves if this is not the time to get a grip, to break free of this paralysis, to finally claim the lives we deserve to live.
Friday, 13 March 2009
Martin Buber's Open Letter
Martin Buber's Open Letterto Gandhi Regarding Palestine
(February 24, 1939)
The following is excerpted from an open letter the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber wrote in response to criticisms of the Jews in Palestine.
You, Mahatma Gandhi, who know of the connection between tradition and future, should not associate yourself with those who pass over our cause without understanding or sympathy.
But you say — and I consider it to be the most significant of all the things you tell us — that Palestine belongs to the Arabs and that it is therefore "wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs."
Here I must add a personal note in order to make clear to you on what premises I desire to consider your thesis.
I belong to a group of people who from the time Britain conquered Palestine have not ceased to strive for the concluding of a genuine peace between Jew and Arab.
By a genuine peace we inferred and still infer that both peoples together should develop the land without the one imposing its will on the other. In view of the international usages of our generation, this appeared to us to be very difficult but not impossible. We were and still are well aware that in this unusual — yes, unprecedented — case it is a question of seeking new ways of understanding and cordial agreement between the nations. Here again we stood and still stand under the sway of a commandment.
We considered it a fundamental point that in this case two vital claims are opposed to each other, two claims of a different nature and a different origin which cannot objectively be pitted against one another and between which no objective decision can be made as to which is just, which unjust. We considered and still consider it our duty to understand and to honor the claim which is opposed to ours and to endeavor to reconcile both claims. We could not and cannot renounce the Jewish claim; something even higher than the life of our people is bound up with this land, namely its work, its divine mission. But we have been and still are convinced that it must be possible to find some compromise between this claim and the other, for we love this land and we believe in its future; since such love and such faith are surely present on the other side as well, a union in the common service of the land must be within the range of possibility. Where there is faith and love, a solution may be found even to what appears to be a tragic opposition.
In order to carry out a task of such extreme difficulty-in the recognition of which we have had to overcome an internal resistance on the Jewish side too, as foolish as it is natural-we have been in need of the support of well-meaning persons of all nations, and have hoped to receive it. But now you come and settle the whole existential dilemma with the simple formula: "Palestine belongs to the Arabs."
What do you mean by saying a land belongs to a population? Evidently you do not intend only to describe a state of affairs by your formula, but to declare a certain right. You obviously mean to say that a people, being settled on the land, has so absolute a claim to that land that whoever settles on it without the permission of this people has committed a robbery. But by what means did the Arabs attain the right of ownership in Palestine? Surely by conquest, and in fact a conquest with intent to settle. You therefore admit that as a result their settlement gives them exclusive right of possession; whereas the subsequent conquests of the Mamelukes and the Turks, which were conquests with a view to domination, not to settlement, do not constitute such a right in your opinion, but leave the earlier conquerors in rightful ownership. Thus settlement by conquest justifies for you, a right of ownership of Palestine; whereas a settlement such as the Jewish — the methods of which, it is true, though not always doing full justice to Arab ways of life, were even in the most objectionable cases far removed from those of conquest — does not justify in your opinion any participation in this right of possession. These are the consequences which result from your axiomatic statement that a land belongs to its population. In an epoch when nations are migrating you would first support the right of ownership of the nation that is threatened with dispossession or extermination; but were this once achieved, you would be compelled, not at once, but after a suitable number of generations had elapsed, to admit that the land "belongs" to the usurper. . . .
It seems to me that God does not give any one portion of the earth away, so that the owner may say as God says in the Bible: "For all the earth is Mine" (Exodus 19:5). The conquered land is, in my opinion, only lent even to the conqueror who has settled on it-and God waits to see what he will make of it.
I am told, however, I should not respect the cultivated soil and despise the desert. I am told, the desert is willing to wait for the work of her children: she no longer recognizes us, burdened with civilization, as her children. The desert inspires me with awe; but I do not believe in her absolute resistance, for I believe in the great marriage between man (adam) and earth (adamah). This land recognizes us, for it is fruitful through us: and precisely because it bears fruit for us, it recognizes us. Our settlers do not come here as do the colonists from the Occident to have natives do their work for them; they themselves set their shoulders to the plow and they spend their strength and their blood to make the land fruitful. But it is not only for ourselves that we desire its fertility. The Jewish farmers have begun to teach their brothers, the Arab farmers, to cultivate the land more intensively; we desire to teach them further: together with them we want to cultivate the land — to "serve" it, as the Hebrew has it. The more fertile this soil becomes, the more space there will be for us and for them. We have no desire to dispossess them: we want to live with them. We do not want to dominate them: we want to serve with them. . . .
(February 24, 1939)
The following is excerpted from an open letter the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber wrote in response to criticisms of the Jews in Palestine.
You, Mahatma Gandhi, who know of the connection between tradition and future, should not associate yourself with those who pass over our cause without understanding or sympathy.
But you say — and I consider it to be the most significant of all the things you tell us — that Palestine belongs to the Arabs and that it is therefore "wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs."
Here I must add a personal note in order to make clear to you on what premises I desire to consider your thesis.
I belong to a group of people who from the time Britain conquered Palestine have not ceased to strive for the concluding of a genuine peace between Jew and Arab.
By a genuine peace we inferred and still infer that both peoples together should develop the land without the one imposing its will on the other. In view of the international usages of our generation, this appeared to us to be very difficult but not impossible. We were and still are well aware that in this unusual — yes, unprecedented — case it is a question of seeking new ways of understanding and cordial agreement between the nations. Here again we stood and still stand under the sway of a commandment.
We considered it a fundamental point that in this case two vital claims are opposed to each other, two claims of a different nature and a different origin which cannot objectively be pitted against one another and between which no objective decision can be made as to which is just, which unjust. We considered and still consider it our duty to understand and to honor the claim which is opposed to ours and to endeavor to reconcile both claims. We could not and cannot renounce the Jewish claim; something even higher than the life of our people is bound up with this land, namely its work, its divine mission. But we have been and still are convinced that it must be possible to find some compromise between this claim and the other, for we love this land and we believe in its future; since such love and such faith are surely present on the other side as well, a union in the common service of the land must be within the range of possibility. Where there is faith and love, a solution may be found even to what appears to be a tragic opposition.
In order to carry out a task of such extreme difficulty-in the recognition of which we have had to overcome an internal resistance on the Jewish side too, as foolish as it is natural-we have been in need of the support of well-meaning persons of all nations, and have hoped to receive it. But now you come and settle the whole existential dilemma with the simple formula: "Palestine belongs to the Arabs."
What do you mean by saying a land belongs to a population? Evidently you do not intend only to describe a state of affairs by your formula, but to declare a certain right. You obviously mean to say that a people, being settled on the land, has so absolute a claim to that land that whoever settles on it without the permission of this people has committed a robbery. But by what means did the Arabs attain the right of ownership in Palestine? Surely by conquest, and in fact a conquest with intent to settle. You therefore admit that as a result their settlement gives them exclusive right of possession; whereas the subsequent conquests of the Mamelukes and the Turks, which were conquests with a view to domination, not to settlement, do not constitute such a right in your opinion, but leave the earlier conquerors in rightful ownership. Thus settlement by conquest justifies for you, a right of ownership of Palestine; whereas a settlement such as the Jewish — the methods of which, it is true, though not always doing full justice to Arab ways of life, were even in the most objectionable cases far removed from those of conquest — does not justify in your opinion any participation in this right of possession. These are the consequences which result from your axiomatic statement that a land belongs to its population. In an epoch when nations are migrating you would first support the right of ownership of the nation that is threatened with dispossession or extermination; but were this once achieved, you would be compelled, not at once, but after a suitable number of generations had elapsed, to admit that the land "belongs" to the usurper. . . .
It seems to me that God does not give any one portion of the earth away, so that the owner may say as God says in the Bible: "For all the earth is Mine" (Exodus 19:5). The conquered land is, in my opinion, only lent even to the conqueror who has settled on it-and God waits to see what he will make of it.
I am told, however, I should not respect the cultivated soil and despise the desert. I am told, the desert is willing to wait for the work of her children: she no longer recognizes us, burdened with civilization, as her children. The desert inspires me with awe; but I do not believe in her absolute resistance, for I believe in the great marriage between man (adam) and earth (adamah). This land recognizes us, for it is fruitful through us: and precisely because it bears fruit for us, it recognizes us. Our settlers do not come here as do the colonists from the Occident to have natives do their work for them; they themselves set their shoulders to the plow and they spend their strength and their blood to make the land fruitful. But it is not only for ourselves that we desire its fertility. The Jewish farmers have begun to teach their brothers, the Arab farmers, to cultivate the land more intensively; we desire to teach them further: together with them we want to cultivate the land — to "serve" it, as the Hebrew has it. The more fertile this soil becomes, the more space there will be for us and for them. We have no desire to dispossess them: we want to live with them. We do not want to dominate them: we want to serve with them. . . .
MARTIN BUBER AND JEWISH-ARAB PEACE
MARTIN BUBER AND JEWISH-ARAB PEACEby Dan Leon
The road to peace between Arabs and Jews, as Buber knew, is not paved by power.
DAN LEON, who lives in Jerusalem, is co-managing editor of the Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics, and Culture, the first joint quarterly, now in its fifth year.
The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and the establishment of the state of Israel were separated by about half a year (January and May 1949). Writing in 1938, Gandhi had not been sympathetic to the Jewish national home in Palestine since he thought that "Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. Why should [the Jews] not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and earn their livelihood"?
He urged German Jews "to claim Germany as their home" and to follow the example of civil resistance. "The Jews of Germany can offer Satyagraha under infinitely better auspices than the Indians of South Africa." "The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of Jews (but) to the God-fearing, death has no terror" (1938).
Buber's Response
It is doubtful whether the great Indian exponent of nonviolence, whose life has inspired generations of disciples all over the world, ever saw a reply sent to him in February 1939 by the distinguished Jewish philosopher and theologian of dialogue, Professor Martin Buber (1878-1965). Buber, who came from Germany to live in Palestine in 1938 at the age of sixty, writes of Gandhi's voice as one "which he has long known and honored." But he asked Gandhi: "Do you know, or not know, Mahatma, what a concentration camp is like and what does on there? Do you know of the torments in the concentration camp, of its methods of slow and quick torture? I cannot assume that you know of this." Among Jews in Germany Buber had "observed many instances of genuine Satyagraha" but "a diabolic universal steam-roller cannot thus be withstood. . . . [it is] ineffective, unobserved martyrdom [and] no maxim for suitable behavior can be deduced therefrom."
But the main thrust of Buber's letter concerned Jewish rights in Palestine. He wrote that Jews and Arabs must
develop the land together without one imposing his will on the other. We considered it a fundamental point that in this case two vital claims are opposed to each other, two claims of a different origin, which cannot be pitted one against the other and between which no objective decision can be made as to which is just and which is unjust.
We considered and still consider it our duty to understand and to honor the claim which is opposed to ours and to endeavor to reconcile both claims. We have been and still are convinced that it must be possible to find some form of agreement between this claim and the other; for we love this land and believe in it future; and seeing that such love and faith are surely present also on the other side, a union in the common service of the land must be within the range of the possible.
What Sort of Peace?
Buber had been a Zionist since 1888, but as far back as 1918 (soon after in the Balfour Declaration the British recognized a Jewish National Home in Palestine) he rejected what he called the concept of "a Jewish state with cannons, flags and military decorations." He and his colleagues worked for a bi-national Palestine based not on a colonial alliance but on cooperation and parity between Jews and Arabs.
A year after official Zionist policy achieved its aim of Jewish statehood in 1949, Buber expressed his fears that after the war peace, when it comes, will not be peace, a real peace which is constructive, creative (but) a stunted peace, no more than nonbelligerence, which at any moment, when any new constellation of forces arises, is liable to turn into war.
And when this hollow peace is achieved, how then do you think you'll be able to combat "the spirit of militarism" when the leaders of the extreme nationalism will find it easy to convince the young that this kind of spirit is essential for the survival of the country? The battles will cease -- but will suspicions cease? Will there be an end to the thirst for vengeance? Won't we be compelled, and I mean really compelled, to maintain a posture of vigilance for ever, without being able to breathe? Won't this unceasing effort occupy the most talented members of our society"? (1949).
Buber died two years before the Six Day War of June 1967 -- and this article is being written twenty-five years after the Yom Kippur War of 1977, when Israel suffered 2,697 dead. Israeli survival since 1948 has cost six wars and the Intifada, with terrible casualties on both sides. Buber, it seems, understood the nature of the conflict more deeply than many of the political pragmatists who scorned him as being merely an unrealistic visionary.
Hope from Oslo
Five years ago the Oslo Accords signed in Washington by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat for the Government of the State of Israel and the PLO team agreed "to put an end to decades of confrontation and conflict" and to "recognize their mutual political and legitimate rights, and strive to live in peaceful coexistence and mutual dignity and security and achieve a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement and historic reconciliation through the agreed peace process."
Following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by an extremist religious Jewish student, we witnessed the unexpected victory in the summer of 1995 of the young rightist Benjamin Netanyahu over Shimon Peres, after a spate of monstrous terror attacks against Israel. For the last two years the rightist-religious coalition, while outwardly reluctantly accepting Oslo, set about the systematic destruction of its spirit and its content.
Netanyahu's warning at the UN in September 1998 against the establishment of a Palestinian State is a good expression of that contempt for the Arabs which he expressed in 1993 in his book, A Place among the Nation. Nevertheless, on October 23, 1998, Netanyahu joined Yasser Arafat and President Clinton in signing the Wye River Memorandum, which broke the deadlock in the peace process imposed by Netanyahu himself, and defined "steps to facilitate implementation of the (Oslo) Interim Agreement," including Israeli territorial concessions an the West Bank.
Labor leader Ehud Barak welcomed Wye as a continuation of Rabin's legacy but noted that "for no good reason Israel lost 19 months in which the spirit of the process was eradicated, trust between the sides was lost, and Israel wasted international and economic assets" (Ha'aretz, October 25, 1998). The lost trust will not easily be restored. On the other side of the political spectrum, rightist parliamentarian Ruby Rivlin said that Wye has been presented as a tremendous achievement; in fact almost half of Judea and Samaria [the West Bank -DL] will be handed over to Yasser Arafat, who is well on the way to establishing his state. How sad and ironic that this is taking place under the auspices of a Likud (rightist) -- National Religious Party government" (Jerusalem Post, November 22, 1998).
Why Wye?
In the opinion of Uri Elitzur, a West Bank settler leader who heads the prime minister's Bureau, Netanyahu faced unprecedented American pressure but his final decision was made out of pragmatic domestic considerations. Above all, the two powerful and influential forces in Israel are "the ideological left and the ideological right." "After 30 years of struggle, the contours of the outcome are emerging: we [the right] were victorious in the sphere of settlement [there are some 750,000 Jewish settlers in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 -DL] and the left won the battle for [recognizing] the existence of the Palestinian people." Netanyahu barely won the confidence of the middle third of the public, which does not want the annulment of the Oslo accords or a huge falling-out with the United States and is interested in a settlement with the Arabs (Ha'aretz, November 5, 1998).
Many political observers see Wye as expressing the final collapse of the rightist-religious "Greater Israel" ideology and a victory for realism and pragmatism,
But in a piece called "An Uncertain Future," Henry Siegman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, praises Clinton's accomplishment at Wye but expresses a view frequently heard on the Israeli left -- namely that had Netanyahu wanted to implement the Oslo Accords, he could have done so earlier to the extent that Netanyahu entertains a 'strategic objective,' that objective has been, and continues to be, the nonimplementation of the Oslo agreements in a manner that allows him to escape blame and to point an accusing finger at the Palestinians and the USA" (Jerusalem Post, October 27, 1998).
While welcoming Wye, prominent Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab in an article called "Nothing New" writes that the implementation of Wye "will certainly not solve the Palestinian problem." The Palestinians strive for a comprehensive peace which "must start with the recognition of the Palestinian right to self-determination, including their rights to live in peace and tranquility in their own state. All are therefore in agreement that Wye is an important station in the negotiating process but only events in the political life and among the populations of the three signators to Wye will show whether the road will be opened up for the benefit of peace or blocked again to its detriment.
Independence and Nakba
Thus, fifty years after the birth of Israel, negotiations are at least under way, even if the genuine "historic reconciliation" foreseen at Oslo has not yet been guaranteed.
The real problem lies even deeper since the establishment of Israel corresponded with the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe), in which 750,000 Palestinians became refugees from their own homeland. Only a small minority of Israelis is prepared to accept at least moral responsibility for the events of 1948; most blame the Palestinian leadership for rejecting the 1947 UN partition proposal and initiating the 1949 war, with its tragic consequences.
In terms of international legitimacy, conventional thinking and education in Israel consider the birth of Israel as vindicated both by the United Nations and by subsequent developments. Its historical justification as a shelter for Jews in distress from holocaust survivors, from Arab lands and from the former USSR, is seen in Israel's Jewish population growth from 650,000 in 1948 to some five million today, along with a million Israeli Arabs. Militarily, Israel is the strongest power in the region, and this was and is seen as the only guarantee for its future.
As for the official Zionist leadership, its moral ambiguity in the Jewish-Arab conflict is evident. Professor Chaim Weizmann, who led tho Zionist movement between the world wars and was to become Israel's first president, was considered a moderate. He declared in 1947 that "there must not be one law for the Jews and another for the Arabs. . . . the world will judge the Jewish state by what it will do for the Arabs." Yet he saw the Arab exodus of 1948 as a miracle.
Israel's 1949 Declaration of Independence promised "full and equal citizenship" to the Israeli Arabs, yet in 1962 in a protest to David Ben-Gurion, Buber noted that Israel "has committed acts which have engendered in the Arab inhabitants of the State a feeling that they are but second-class citizens." Some thirty-five years later, this is still true. Unhappily, it is equally true that most official representatives of the Jewish religion in Israel have failed to take a stand in the name of Judaism over the great moral questions of our times, including Jewish-Arab rapprochement. The present coalition government in Israel depends on religious support while for the last quarter of a century national religious circles have sanctified territory ("a Greater Israel") over other political and human values. If and how they will adapt to the option of mutual Israeli-Palestinian recognition, which involves what they see as "surrendering parts of the historical Jewish Homeland," remains to be seen. It is worth noting that ultra-orthodox Judaism, which is gaining strength in Israel, is less attracted to this nationalist-territorial form of religion.
Building and Destroying
Chaim Weizmann, for all his innumerable faults, was both a renowned scientist and a man of the world who had a deep understanding of the Jewish people. In 1951, a year before his death, he talked of "all the mistakes that are being made in this country. The Jews are a very small people quantitatively, but also a great people qualitatively. An ugly people, but also a beautiful people, a people that builds and destroys. A people of genius and at the same time a people of incredible stupidity."
In a speech in 1958 Buber, aged eighty, while affirming the factual reality of the State of Israel, referred to "the most pernicious of all false teachings, that according to which the way of history is determined by power alone. . . . while faith in the spirit is retained only as mere phraseology." Buber maintained that "he who will truly serve the spirit must seek to make good all that was once missed: he must seek to free once again the blocked path to an understanding with the Arab peoples [in] a peace of genuine cooperation." Surely, a good message for Israel in her jubilee year.
Copyright of Cross Currents is the property of Association for Religion & Intellectual Life and its content may not be copied without the copyright holder's express written permission except for the print or download capabilities of the retrieval software used for access. This content is intended solely for the use of the individual user.Source: Cross Currents, Winter 1998-99, Vol. 49 Issue 1.
The road to peace between Arabs and Jews, as Buber knew, is not paved by power.
DAN LEON, who lives in Jerusalem, is co-managing editor of the Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics, and Culture, the first joint quarterly, now in its fifth year.
The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and the establishment of the state of Israel were separated by about half a year (January and May 1949). Writing in 1938, Gandhi had not been sympathetic to the Jewish national home in Palestine since he thought that "Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. Why should [the Jews] not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and earn their livelihood"?
He urged German Jews "to claim Germany as their home" and to follow the example of civil resistance. "The Jews of Germany can offer Satyagraha under infinitely better auspices than the Indians of South Africa." "The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of Jews (but) to the God-fearing, death has no terror" (1938).
Buber's Response
It is doubtful whether the great Indian exponent of nonviolence, whose life has inspired generations of disciples all over the world, ever saw a reply sent to him in February 1939 by the distinguished Jewish philosopher and theologian of dialogue, Professor Martin Buber (1878-1965). Buber, who came from Germany to live in Palestine in 1938 at the age of sixty, writes of Gandhi's voice as one "which he has long known and honored." But he asked Gandhi: "Do you know, or not know, Mahatma, what a concentration camp is like and what does on there? Do you know of the torments in the concentration camp, of its methods of slow and quick torture? I cannot assume that you know of this." Among Jews in Germany Buber had "observed many instances of genuine Satyagraha" but "a diabolic universal steam-roller cannot thus be withstood. . . . [it is] ineffective, unobserved martyrdom [and] no maxim for suitable behavior can be deduced therefrom."
But the main thrust of Buber's letter concerned Jewish rights in Palestine. He wrote that Jews and Arabs must
develop the land together without one imposing his will on the other. We considered it a fundamental point that in this case two vital claims are opposed to each other, two claims of a different origin, which cannot be pitted one against the other and between which no objective decision can be made as to which is just and which is unjust.
We considered and still consider it our duty to understand and to honor the claim which is opposed to ours and to endeavor to reconcile both claims. We have been and still are convinced that it must be possible to find some form of agreement between this claim and the other; for we love this land and believe in it future; and seeing that such love and faith are surely present also on the other side, a union in the common service of the land must be within the range of the possible.
What Sort of Peace?
Buber had been a Zionist since 1888, but as far back as 1918 (soon after in the Balfour Declaration the British recognized a Jewish National Home in Palestine) he rejected what he called the concept of "a Jewish state with cannons, flags and military decorations." He and his colleagues worked for a bi-national Palestine based not on a colonial alliance but on cooperation and parity between Jews and Arabs.
A year after official Zionist policy achieved its aim of Jewish statehood in 1949, Buber expressed his fears that after the war peace, when it comes, will not be peace, a real peace which is constructive, creative (but) a stunted peace, no more than nonbelligerence, which at any moment, when any new constellation of forces arises, is liable to turn into war.
And when this hollow peace is achieved, how then do you think you'll be able to combat "the spirit of militarism" when the leaders of the extreme nationalism will find it easy to convince the young that this kind of spirit is essential for the survival of the country? The battles will cease -- but will suspicions cease? Will there be an end to the thirst for vengeance? Won't we be compelled, and I mean really compelled, to maintain a posture of vigilance for ever, without being able to breathe? Won't this unceasing effort occupy the most talented members of our society"? (1949).
Buber died two years before the Six Day War of June 1967 -- and this article is being written twenty-five years after the Yom Kippur War of 1977, when Israel suffered 2,697 dead. Israeli survival since 1948 has cost six wars and the Intifada, with terrible casualties on both sides. Buber, it seems, understood the nature of the conflict more deeply than many of the political pragmatists who scorned him as being merely an unrealistic visionary.
Hope from Oslo
Five years ago the Oslo Accords signed in Washington by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat for the Government of the State of Israel and the PLO team agreed "to put an end to decades of confrontation and conflict" and to "recognize their mutual political and legitimate rights, and strive to live in peaceful coexistence and mutual dignity and security and achieve a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement and historic reconciliation through the agreed peace process."
Following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by an extremist religious Jewish student, we witnessed the unexpected victory in the summer of 1995 of the young rightist Benjamin Netanyahu over Shimon Peres, after a spate of monstrous terror attacks against Israel. For the last two years the rightist-religious coalition, while outwardly reluctantly accepting Oslo, set about the systematic destruction of its spirit and its content.
Netanyahu's warning at the UN in September 1998 against the establishment of a Palestinian State is a good expression of that contempt for the Arabs which he expressed in 1993 in his book, A Place among the Nation. Nevertheless, on October 23, 1998, Netanyahu joined Yasser Arafat and President Clinton in signing the Wye River Memorandum, which broke the deadlock in the peace process imposed by Netanyahu himself, and defined "steps to facilitate implementation of the (Oslo) Interim Agreement," including Israeli territorial concessions an the West Bank.
Labor leader Ehud Barak welcomed Wye as a continuation of Rabin's legacy but noted that "for no good reason Israel lost 19 months in which the spirit of the process was eradicated, trust between the sides was lost, and Israel wasted international and economic assets" (Ha'aretz, October 25, 1998). The lost trust will not easily be restored. On the other side of the political spectrum, rightist parliamentarian Ruby Rivlin said that Wye has been presented as a tremendous achievement; in fact almost half of Judea and Samaria [the West Bank -DL] will be handed over to Yasser Arafat, who is well on the way to establishing his state. How sad and ironic that this is taking place under the auspices of a Likud (rightist) -- National Religious Party government" (Jerusalem Post, November 22, 1998).
Why Wye?
In the opinion of Uri Elitzur, a West Bank settler leader who heads the prime minister's Bureau, Netanyahu faced unprecedented American pressure but his final decision was made out of pragmatic domestic considerations. Above all, the two powerful and influential forces in Israel are "the ideological left and the ideological right." "After 30 years of struggle, the contours of the outcome are emerging: we [the right] were victorious in the sphere of settlement [there are some 750,000 Jewish settlers in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 -DL] and the left won the battle for [recognizing] the existence of the Palestinian people." Netanyahu barely won the confidence of the middle third of the public, which does not want the annulment of the Oslo accords or a huge falling-out with the United States and is interested in a settlement with the Arabs (Ha'aretz, November 5, 1998).
Many political observers see Wye as expressing the final collapse of the rightist-religious "Greater Israel" ideology and a victory for realism and pragmatism,
But in a piece called "An Uncertain Future," Henry Siegman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, praises Clinton's accomplishment at Wye but expresses a view frequently heard on the Israeli left -- namely that had Netanyahu wanted to implement the Oslo Accords, he could have done so earlier to the extent that Netanyahu entertains a 'strategic objective,' that objective has been, and continues to be, the nonimplementation of the Oslo agreements in a manner that allows him to escape blame and to point an accusing finger at the Palestinians and the USA" (Jerusalem Post, October 27, 1998).
While welcoming Wye, prominent Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab in an article called "Nothing New" writes that the implementation of Wye "will certainly not solve the Palestinian problem." The Palestinians strive for a comprehensive peace which "must start with the recognition of the Palestinian right to self-determination, including their rights to live in peace and tranquility in their own state. All are therefore in agreement that Wye is an important station in the negotiating process but only events in the political life and among the populations of the three signators to Wye will show whether the road will be opened up for the benefit of peace or blocked again to its detriment.
Independence and Nakba
Thus, fifty years after the birth of Israel, negotiations are at least under way, even if the genuine "historic reconciliation" foreseen at Oslo has not yet been guaranteed.
The real problem lies even deeper since the establishment of Israel corresponded with the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe), in which 750,000 Palestinians became refugees from their own homeland. Only a small minority of Israelis is prepared to accept at least moral responsibility for the events of 1948; most blame the Palestinian leadership for rejecting the 1947 UN partition proposal and initiating the 1949 war, with its tragic consequences.
In terms of international legitimacy, conventional thinking and education in Israel consider the birth of Israel as vindicated both by the United Nations and by subsequent developments. Its historical justification as a shelter for Jews in distress from holocaust survivors, from Arab lands and from the former USSR, is seen in Israel's Jewish population growth from 650,000 in 1948 to some five million today, along with a million Israeli Arabs. Militarily, Israel is the strongest power in the region, and this was and is seen as the only guarantee for its future.
As for the official Zionist leadership, its moral ambiguity in the Jewish-Arab conflict is evident. Professor Chaim Weizmann, who led tho Zionist movement between the world wars and was to become Israel's first president, was considered a moderate. He declared in 1947 that "there must not be one law for the Jews and another for the Arabs. . . . the world will judge the Jewish state by what it will do for the Arabs." Yet he saw the Arab exodus of 1948 as a miracle.
Israel's 1949 Declaration of Independence promised "full and equal citizenship" to the Israeli Arabs, yet in 1962 in a protest to David Ben-Gurion, Buber noted that Israel "has committed acts which have engendered in the Arab inhabitants of the State a feeling that they are but second-class citizens." Some thirty-five years later, this is still true. Unhappily, it is equally true that most official representatives of the Jewish religion in Israel have failed to take a stand in the name of Judaism over the great moral questions of our times, including Jewish-Arab rapprochement. The present coalition government in Israel depends on religious support while for the last quarter of a century national religious circles have sanctified territory ("a Greater Israel") over other political and human values. If and how they will adapt to the option of mutual Israeli-Palestinian recognition, which involves what they see as "surrendering parts of the historical Jewish Homeland," remains to be seen. It is worth noting that ultra-orthodox Judaism, which is gaining strength in Israel, is less attracted to this nationalist-territorial form of religion.
Building and Destroying
Chaim Weizmann, for all his innumerable faults, was both a renowned scientist and a man of the world who had a deep understanding of the Jewish people. In 1951, a year before his death, he talked of "all the mistakes that are being made in this country. The Jews are a very small people quantitatively, but also a great people qualitatively. An ugly people, but also a beautiful people, a people that builds and destroys. A people of genius and at the same time a people of incredible stupidity."
In a speech in 1958 Buber, aged eighty, while affirming the factual reality of the State of Israel, referred to "the most pernicious of all false teachings, that according to which the way of history is determined by power alone. . . . while faith in the spirit is retained only as mere phraseology." Buber maintained that "he who will truly serve the spirit must seek to make good all that was once missed: he must seek to free once again the blocked path to an understanding with the Arab peoples [in] a peace of genuine cooperation." Surely, a good message for Israel in her jubilee year.
Copyright of Cross Currents is the property of Association for Religion & Intellectual Life and its content may not be copied without the copyright holder's express written permission except for the print or download capabilities of the retrieval software used for access. This content is intended solely for the use of the individual user.Source: Cross Currents, Winter 1998-99, Vol. 49 Issue 1.
The March for Peace and Nonviolence” in Israel
The March for Peace and Nonviolence” in Israel
To “Adva Center”
We would like to invite you to endorse and participate in the biggest Peace event in the history of humanity (100 countries are already participating and others add themselves as we speak).
The World March will begin in New Zealand on October 2, 2009, the anniversary of Gandhi's birth, declared the "International Day of Non-Violence" by the United Nations. It will conclude in the Andes Mountains (Punta de Vacas, Aconcagua, Argentina) on January 2, 2010. These 3 months are also the last in Unesco's Decade for a Culture of Peace.
In every city the March visits, local individuals and groups will organize forums, meetings, festivals, conferences, and events (sports, cultural, social, musical, artistic, educational, etc.), depending on their own creative initiative.
At this time hundreds of projects have already been set in motion by different individuals and organizations. You may see important endorsements by the Dalai Lama, the President of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, Noam Chomsky, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Federico Mayor Zaragoza (director of UNESCO for 12 years, now Director of Culture of Peace), the singer Noa from Israel, the Holy Land Trust from Palestine, HaShomer HaTzair movement from Israel and many more on www.worldmarch.info.
The objectives are: To achieve the eradication of nuclear weapons; the progressive and proportional reduction of non-nuclear arms; the signing of non-aggression treaties among nations and the renunciation by governments of war as a way to resolve conflicts. Not only are we promoting the end of wars but also the end of poverty by highlighting that just a 10% reduction in weapons could solve all the hunger of the world... which is a cause of further violence.
Also, to expose the many other forms of violence (economic, racial, sexual, religious, all types of violations of human rights, etc…) that are currently hidden or disguised by their perpetrators; and to provide a way for all who suffer such violence to be heard.
As for activities in Palestine and Israel, we intend to have many local events and a joint simultaneous Concert/Festival for Peace is being planned to take place in October 17 between Israeli and Palestinian people, in order to promote reconciliation between the two peoples and help move forward the peace process.
Your endorsement does not commit you to any particular action, your support is important per se, but if you wish to participate actively we would be delighted to discuss with you what would be the best initiatives to promote the March and encourage many others to walk with us.
We await your response
Promotion team for “The March for Peace and Nonviolence” in Israel
We would like to invite you to endorse and participate in the biggest Peace event in the history of humanity (100 countries are already participating and others add themselves as we speak).
The World March will begin in New Zealand on October 2, 2009, the anniversary of Gandhi's birth, declared the "International Day of Non-Violence" by the United Nations. It will conclude in the Andes Mountains (Punta de Vacas, Aconcagua, Argentina) on January 2, 2010. These 3 months are also the last in Unesco's Decade for a Culture of Peace.
In every city the March visits, local individuals and groups will organize forums, meetings, festivals, conferences, and events (sports, cultural, social, musical, artistic, educational, etc.), depending on their own creative initiative.
At this time hundreds of projects have already been set in motion by different individuals and organizations. You may see important endorsements by the Dalai Lama, the President of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, Noam Chomsky, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Federico Mayor Zaragoza (director of UNESCO for 12 years, now Director of Culture of Peace), the singer Noa from Israel, the Holy Land Trust from Palestine, HaShomer HaTzair movement from Israel and many more on www.worldmarch.info.
The objectives are: To achieve the eradication of nuclear weapons; the progressive and proportional reduction of non-nuclear arms; the signing of non-aggression treaties among nations and the renunciation by governments of war as a way to resolve conflicts. Not only are we promoting the end of wars but also the end of poverty by highlighting that just a 10% reduction in weapons could solve all the hunger of the world... which is a cause of further violence.
Also, to expose the many other forms of violence (economic, racial, sexual, religious, all types of violations of human rights, etc…) that are currently hidden or disguised by their perpetrators; and to provide a way for all who suffer such violence to be heard.
As for activities in Palestine and Israel, we intend to have many local events and a joint simultaneous Concert/Festival for Peace is being planned to take place in October 17 between Israeli and Palestinian people, in order to promote reconciliation between the two peoples and help move forward the peace process.
Your endorsement does not commit you to any particular action, your support is important per se, but if you wish to participate actively we would be delighted to discuss with you what would be the best initiatives to promote the March and encourage many others to walk with us.
We await your response
Promotion team for “The March for Peace and Nonviolence” in Israel
Thursday, 12 March 2009
Concise Overview of Recent Israeli-Palestinian History
Concise Overview of Recent Israeli-Palestinian History
Nov 2, 1917
British issued the Balfour Declaration, viewed by Jews and Arabs as promising a “National Home” for the Jews in Palestine.
1936-1939
Arab Revolt led by Haj Amin Al-Husseini. Over 5,000 Arabs were killed according to some sources, mostly by British. Several hundred Jews were killed by Arabs. Husseini fled to Iraq and then to Nazi Germany.
May 15, 1948
Israel War of Independence (1948 War). Declaration of Israel as the Jewish State; British leave Palestine; Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia declared war on Israel. Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian invasion began.
April 3, 1949
Armistice - Israel and Arab states agree to armistice. Israel gained about 50% more territory than was originally allotted to it by the UN Partition Plan.
Oct. 29, 1956
Suez Campaign. In retaliation for a series of escalating border raids as well as the closure of the straits of Tiran and Suez canal to Israeli shipping, and to prevent Egyptian use of newly acquired Soviet arms in a war, Israel invades the Sinai peninsula and occupies it for several months, with French and British collaboration.
May, 1964
PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) founded with the aim of destroying Israel. The Palestinian National Charter (1968) officially called for liquidation of Israel.
May, 1967
Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser closes the straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and dismisses UN peacekeeping force. Negotiations with US to reopen the Straits of Tiran fail.
June 5-10,1967
6-day war . Israel destroys the Egyptian air force on the ground, conquers and occupies Sinai and Gaza, then conquers the West Bank from Jordan, and Golan Heights from Syria. UN resolution 242 called for Israeli withdrawal, establishment of peace.
Oct. 6, 1973
Yom Kippur War (October War). In a surprise attack on the Jewish day of atonement, Egypt retook the Suez canal and a narrow zone on the other side. Syria reconquered the Golan Heights. Following massive US and Soviet resupplying of the sides, Israel succeeded in pushing back the Syrians and threatening Damascus. In Sinai, the IDF crossed the Suez Canal and cut off the Egyptian Third Army.
March 26, 1979
Peace treaty signed between Egypt and Israel.
June 7, 1981
Israel destroys Iraqi nuclear reactor in daring raid.
Oct. 6, 1981
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat is assassinated while on the reviewing stand of a victory parade.
June 6, 1982
Massive Israeli invasion of Lebanon to fight PLO.
Sept. 13, 1993
Oslo Declaration of Principles - Israel and PLO agree to mutual recognition.
Sept 28, 1995
Oslo Interim Agreement signed. Palestinian Authority to be established.
Nov. 4, 1995
Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin assassinated by right-wing Israeli fanatic Yigal Amir. Rabin is replaced by Shimon Peres
June, 1996
Right-Wing Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu elected Prime Minister in Israel, replacing Shimon Peres.
Sept, 1996
"Al-Aksa tunnel riots - Arab sources spread the false rumor that a gate opened in an underground tunnel tourist attraction by the Israeli government, endangered the foundations of the Al-Aqsa mosque. This caused several days of rioting and numerous casualties.
Jan 18, 1997
Israel and Palestinians reach agreement on Israeli redeployment in the West-Bank city of Hebron
Oct. 1998
Wye River Plantation talks result in an agreement for Israeli redeployment and release of political prisoners and renewed Palestinian commitment to correct its violations of the Oslo accords including excess police force, illegal arms and incitement in public media and education.
May 17, 1999
Israel elects Labor party leader and Former General Ehud Barak as Prime Minister in a landslide. Barak promises rapid progress toward peace.
March, 2000
Israeli-Syrian peace negotiations fail when Hafez Assad rejects an Israeli offer relayed by US President Clinton in Geneva.
Sept. 28, 2000
Palestinians initiated riots after Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount, which is also the location of the Haram as Sharif holy to Muslims.
Sept. 11, 2001
Terror attacks on World Trade Center in NYC and the Pentagon carried out by fanatic Islamic Al-Qaida group headed by Osama Bin Laden initiate US war on terror. Israel and Palestinians agree to a cease fire, but it is not implemented.
Feb 6, 2001
Right-wing Likud leader Ariel Sharon elected Prime Minister in Israel replacing Ehud Barak and promising "peace and security."
March-April 2002
Israel conducts operation Defensive Wall in the West Bank, following a large number of Palestinian suicide attacks on civilian targets. Saudi peace initiative adopted at Beirut summit.
Jan 28, 2003
Elections in Israel give wide margin (40 seats) to right wing Likud party, returning PM Ariel Sharon for another term.
March 19,2003
US begins invasion of Iraq by a strike against a building where Saddam Hussein and other leaders are meeting. Baghdad falls, April 9.
July 9, 2004
International court of Justice (ICJ) rules that the Israeli security barrier violates international law and must be torn down.
Nov 11, 2004
Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat dies.
Jan 9, 2005
Mahmoud Abbas elected President of the Palestinian National Authority.
Jan 10, 2005
Ariel Sharon forms unity government with Labor and United Torah Judaism parties in Israel.
April 2005
Ariel Sharon visits US President George Bush at his Texas ranch. Syrian Army leaves Lebanon, officially ending Syrian occupation.
May 26, 2005
Mahmud Abbas visits US President George Bush at the White House, an important symbolic gesture signaling US backing for Abbas and Palestinian aspirations. Israel releases 400 Palestinian prisoners including some with blood on their hands. Britain confirms "low level" negotiations with Hamas.
June, 2005
Violence flares in Gaza. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visits Palestinian and Israeli leaders to ensure coordination of Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Israeli PM Ariel Sharon and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas meet in Jerusalem June 21. Sharon announces that Palestinians have promised to coordinate regarding Gaza withdrawal. PM Abbas postpones Palestinian legislative elections in order to change the election law, amidst growing concern that Hamas will trounce Abbas's Fatah party in the elections. Lebanese elections give a decisive majority to the opposition to Syria, led by Saad Hariri, son of slain leader Rafiq Hariri.
Aug. 15, 2005
Disengagement - Israeli evacuation of Gaza settlements and four West Bank settlements began on August 15 and was completed August 24.
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