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The Risk of Peacemaking Among the many ways of being a peacemaker, one path is to seek to mediate between those at loggerheads—or at war—with one another. It’s not an easy path to take. I’m feeling its difficulty right now. Part of the reason the mediator’s role is so hard is the expectation that in order to carry out this role you need to avoid judgment of either party, avoid even commenting critically about either party—or make a commitment that, whenever you do want to critique it, you will make it in private. So it immediately made the international media when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey stormed off the stage at a panel at Davos’s World Economic Forum in late January, where he and Israel’s President Shimon Peres were featured, telling Peres, “You’re very good at killing!” It was a shock because Turkey has played what the world took to be a useful role in mediating between Israel and several of its opponents. Israel could well use an honest broker to help it begin talking with Syria, Hamas, and others. There aren’t many candidates for the role! Egypt plays it occasionally, but Egypt lacks credibility with radical Islamists like those who lead Hamas because of Egypt’s punitive treatment of its Islamist party, the Muslim Brotherhood, and how it has been treating Hamas. And Jordan has had a long history of difficulty in relating to Palestinians. Plus these countries’ own issues: neither can afford to antagonize the viable, strong internal opposition they face. Oh, yes! I didn’t mention the U.S.! The United States is so identified with Israel in everyone’s mind that unless it totally reverses what it has been doing, it has little credibility as a mediator. But Turkey—being a non-Arab, but majority Muslim nation—has for six years been governed by the Party of Justice and Development—a Muslim party. It has been able to sit down both with Israel and with its opponents. But Erdogan has had to remember how his leadership of Turkey does not go unchallenged. He has had trouble with the generals, who have a number of times in the past deposed civilian governments. And Turkey has a growing array of citizens who want to see their country identified more with Arab Muslims and actively challenging Israel. So when Israel attacked, then invaded Gaza, it was hard for the Prime Minister to remain silent. The whole world found Israel’s conduct of the war totally out of proportion. (and when we use that term, we use it advisedly—one of the requirements of a “just war” is proportionality.) We all stood in horror as we watched hundreds of noncombatants—especially women and children—killed in bombings, artillery attacks, and seemingly endless gunfights, along with the purported use of white phosphorus. The number of Israel’s dead in the meantime remained in the teens. The Palestinians had hardly any weapons with which to respond; their rockets aimed at Israel scarcely ever hit a target. Perhaps because of the vastly unequal terms on which the war was being fought, Israel kept the press out of Gaza. And Israel was determined to resist having anyone challenge what they were doing—they even banned anti-war demonstrations by Jews in Israel itself. Erdogan’s outburst in Davos was therefore a terrible shock. To do what he did in a prime location, where world leaders would see and hear it, while at the same time being surrounded by the press, constituted a major affront to Israel. Erdogan is reputed to sometimes be a bit of a hothead. But that a mediator should embarrass one of the conflicted parties violates a mediator’s guidelines. So what was the result? Erdogan returned to Turkey to an enthusiastic reception. He wasn’t used to such crowds. Turks who were looking for their country to speak truth to Israel’s power were there waiting to cheer him on. But this has a cost, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it remove a vital player from the scene? Didn’t Turkey in this way forfeit its role as a mediating party? It’s early yet, and it’s not possible to see how this will all shake out in the end, but the initial readings are surprising. Within 48 hours Israel’s Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, spoke of Israel’s expectation that Erdogan and Turkey will continue to play the role they have been playing. And it turns out that many in Israel are anxious to maintain relations with Turkey. There are no other candidates for the role that Turkey had begun to play, and it’s been playing it fairly well. To continue to accept Turkey in that role is a price Israel—at leapt under the government still in place—will play. But of what consequence is that for us, for us non-Turks who have found ourselves in the position of wanting to help foster a dialogue in the Middle East? I belong to a group of Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others from the Delaware Valley—many of us clergy—who were part of a Compassionate Listening delegation that visited Israel and the West Bank in late March. We met Israeli citizens—secular and religious Jews, Muslims, Christians—and Palestinians of all sorts. They were people in government, people living in refugee camps, people in education, in religion. Some had been combatants in armed struggle who now call themselves Combatants for Peace; some were Jewish settlers on the West Bank; some participate in regular interfaith dialogues across the lines that divide people in the Holy Land; some were members of families who mourn the loss of their family members to violence in the conflict; some were finding new ways to bring others—such as teenage girls—into encounters with those on the other side; some were human rights workers. As participants in this delegation we made two commitments. One was to listen to whomever we met, and to listen compassionately—to hear their stories, and to find ways, when we returned to the Delaware Valley, to share what we had heard non-judgmentally. We didn’t go to the Holy Land seeking ammunition to strengthen whatever advocacy we had previously been involved in. The other commitment we made was a commitment the Palestinians we visited asked us to make. At the end of each visit, when it was appropriate for those we had visited to ask what we would do with what they had shared with us, we were generally given the same urging: “When you return home tell the people what you have seen here.” Whether it would be: ► the conditions in which people on the West Bank live—with roadblocks and checkpoints and the Wall of Separation and the resulting near-impossibility of travel, ► the difficulties of carrying out economic activities or farming, with the ► (to our eyes and ears) often arbitrary actions of Israeli Defense Force soldiers and how they inhibit life, health, and family relationships. “We will tell people what we have witnessed,” we said. And among ourselves we would say that included telling the story from both sides—we would tell people in our churches and mosques and synagogues, in libraries and service clubs and colleges, how things seemed from the settlers’ point of view as well, and—when we would speak of the Jews whom we had visited in Jerusalem—how it felt to live in constant fear of acts of violence, and what it is like to be a Holocaust survivor. For seven months I participated with great gusto in the storytelling in Southeastern Pennsylvania. I have feelers out for additional engagements. But after seven months passed, something happened—Israel attacked and then invaded Gaza. Organizations to which I relate, or—in some cases—of which I am a member asked me, and thousands of others, if we had a hammer. Amnesty International wanted me to speak out. Faithful Security wanted me to make my voice heard. Could I hammer out words of justice, words of ending the Occupation, words of horror of the kind of war which Israel almost with impunity has fought in Gaza? Would I not send appeals to my congressman, to my senators, to our outgoing and incoming presidents and secretaries of state? As the United States stood uncritically by, they pleaded with me: Speak, for dreadful things are happening! I’m one of those people who forward e-mails I receive to others when I think they would want to read them, people who might respond just as I was doing. But I discovered that the e-mails upset some of our group’s members. Essentially what they maintained was, “Are we going to be just another advocacy group like all the others?” If we did that, we would be forgetting what our mission was. Our group is one which would hear things from both sides. Our group would gain credibility with both sides because of our demonstrated even-handedness, because of our having a non-political agenda, a goal miles apart from that of groups with a clearly political agenda. If we were to maintain our hope for a peace that transcends the usual left/right or Jewish/Arab divides, they told me, then—when such appeals were issued—we would have to defer. But when I read an appeal like the one I received yesterday from the radical women’s action group Code Pink, I had to respond. Here is what I read: [It was written by Col. (Ret.) Ann Wright (the career diplomat who resigned from her job with the State Department when the U.S. attacked Iraq)]
I’m asking myself two questions. The first is: in order to—perhaps—someday play a role in helping Israelis and Palestinians establish a dialogue, do we cease to be who we are? Do we give up our role and responsibility as U.S. and world citizens? Is silence not too high a price to pay for what is at this point only a dream? As Israel moves farther and farther away from reconciliation and the possibility of peace with its opponents, as the Occupation grows more and more onerous, are we not just dreamers if we imagine anything else happening than what we’re seeing in the news? Second, to whom do we imagine our role as would-be promoters of dialogue will seem credible? Is it Israel and American Zionists whom we’re seeking to convince? Are we trying to avoid their accusation that we’re against the Jewish state, (usually spoken in shorthand as saying we’re “anti-Semites” or “self-hating Jews”) in order to gain credibility with them? If that’s what we’re thinking, a second question goes right along with it: what credibility do we have with Palestinians if, in their hour of incredible loss, we said absolutely nothing? Prime Minister Erdogan violated the normal guidelines. I’m sensing that those of us who want to play a role in working toward peace may need to take a similar risk. Jimmy Carter appeared to have lost a lot of his credibility when he wrote Palestine Peace Not Apartheid—several members of the board of The Carter Center turned in their resignations when they read it. Others wrote Carter off as “no longer helpful.” But Carter has now come out with another book, We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land. He keeps at it. Let’s remember: he is the only U.S. president to have actually moved Israel and the Arabs closer toward peace. If the man who succeeded in getting Begin and Sadat to work out a way to recognize each other says you have to speak openly and fearlessly, then maybe we need to listen. Does that mean that we say “Damn the torpedoes—full steam ahead!” and voice our critique of Israeli militarism, and of the Occupation, regardless of whether it offends? Does it mean we abandon any hope of seeing movement toward peace and the reconciliation? “Be the change you wish to see happen,” Gandhi counseled his disciples. If we look forward to a time when Israelis and Palestinians will be able to speak honestly with one another, then we have to model the openness and frankness we are looking for. If we despise the demonization of the enemy that war always brings, then we have to refuse to engage in name-calling. But it also means that we have to reject the names others may use to demonize us. If we rejoice in seeing Israelis and Palestinians who have found ways of transcending the barriers hate has erected, then we have to lend support to their efforts. They have found the way of the future. There is no other way forward than the way they have begun to model. Let us model it ourselves by being open and unafraid. Let us convince those who see everything in black-and-white terms that life—and the path to it—are filled with grays. There’s enough blame to go around. But there’s more: there are, on all sides, people who need to be heard, people who have contributions to make to the peace God is building. Attention must be paid. Al Krass
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