Terrorism and Peace in the Middle East
by Steve Goldstein (2/17/2002)

I tried to absorb the quality of the presenters for your Forum and the keen interest it witnesses to for discussions of contemporary issues confronting our society and the world community and, I am humbled to have been recruited to address what for me has become an avocation, that is the cause of justice for Palestinians and the establishment of a viable state on 22% of the real estate that was pre-1967 Palestine. It feels more difficult to advocate for this cause, after September 11, submerged under the rhetoric of U.S. patriotism and the garbled "war," we as a nation have declared against "some" terrorism, through the voice of a dubiously chosen president and his cabinet. It seems to be a difficult proposition on what has become a beautiful day on Staten Island. But here I am. And here you are. I am honored to have been asked.

Whenever I have advocated for the Palestine narrative in a public forum, I have been accused either of being one-sided or unbalanced (or worse), in my presentations. I make no apology for this. Ninety-five percent of public reportage in the United States of what is happening in Israel-Palestine is one-sided. The media primarily colors and weighs the Israeli perspective sympathetically, at the very least, and systematically ignores, for the most part, the facts for the lives of Palestinians in the occupied territories. As a Christian I have committed myself, in my small way, to the Palestinian refugees whose hospitality I have enjoyed, and with whom I have broken bread over the years in the Dahaisha the Jabaliya and the Jalazone refugee camps. These Palestinians who are daily living in fear, under duress, and who are suffering the terrorism caused by a military occupation. Many of the armaments fired at them have "U.S.A." etched on their casings.

I want to quote a few Palestinians who are surviving under the apparently still-escalating violence of this second Intifada-which translates "uprising" or "shaking off." It is called the el-Aqsa Intifada because of Ariel Sharon's heavily armed and government-approved visit to the Al-haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem, the Temple Mount for Israelis, on September 28, 2000. This provoked the cycle of terror now in its seventeenth month, with no apparent cessation in view, nor any resumption of serious "conversations" for a change in the status quo.

The quotations are from the recent The New York Times Magazine article, by Deborah Sontag, which I highly recommend and which represents the "5%" of public reportage that is sympathetic and even fair in its telling of the Palestinian story.

Abed al-Raouf Barbakh a resident of Rafah refugee camp in the southern tip of the Gaza strip, is the speaker. "We are tired and fed up with all the fighting," he said. We want all the blood that has been shed to be enough. Give us our small, little country, our West Bank and Gaza, and then it will all end. Israel can keep Israel and leave us the hell alone."1

Saeda al Ghandar, the wife of a street vendor, a fish monger in the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza, living on less than $2.00 per day said, "All the time, we have to leave our house," a cement cube with a missing top. "When I hear the planes, I leave. When I hear about a suicide bombing in Israel, I leave. It's not good these attacks the Palestinians are doing. It only brings Israeli retaliation . . . " And yet Ghandar says that she aspires to a Palestinian state but she said it as if it were as likely as getting wall-to-wall carpeting. Asked about Arafat "What more could he do than he is already doing?" And then, "All my days are beautiful . . . If we let ourselves be depressed, we would die. God won't forget us. God doesn't forget anything he creates, even in Gaza."2

Or a farmer Ahmed Yousef who still has hope that Abu Amar, President Arafat will bring peace. He lost many of his olive trees, bull-dozed by the IDF the Israeli Defense Forces, yet he says,

"If they are talking, the Israeli's will loosen up on us . . . Maybe there won't be a (Palestinian) state in eight weeks, or eight years. But if the two sides are talking, we will get back to our olive trees.3"

This is what Palestinians have been about since the first Intifada which began in Gaza in 1987. It was transferred to a risk of hope for many when the Oslo accords were signed. Namely the acceptance of the Jewish State and the universal Palestinian desire to have the occupation end.

It is the longest occupation in modern times. Israel has violated every international resolution and law including the Fourth Geneva Convention on which most of it is based. The Israeli army ignores Palestinian human rights and Israeli settlers live illegally on occupied Palestinian land. These are war crimes. Or to quote Francis A. Boyle in the recent AMEU publication, The Link, "Put another way, the Palestinian people are defending themselves and their land and their homes against Israeli war crimes and Israeli war criminals, both military and civilian."4

However, for the Sharon administration it is terrorism. And reaction to it is shaping American Foreign Policy. It was Sharon who was in Washington just over a week ago, not Arafat. Self defense or terrorism? Does it even matter anymore?

The daily reports of Israeli assassinations, Palestinian home demolitions and their humiliation at Israeli checkpoints denying them access to work or to hospitals or to the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa Mosque for worship, seem unending. In December and January there were multiple deaths of pregnant mothers or unborn infants as young Israeli soldiers following their superior's orders, denied them transit for medical attention. Am I too sympathetic? It is easy for me to be. My children were not killed or injured when a suicide bomber blew him or herself self up in a pizzeria killing two and wounding 27 others near Nablus on Saturday. But then I ask myself why there was no photograph and only barely a mention of the Israeli airplane attacks in Ramallah for which the suicide was retaliation?

My personal agenda is aimed at the Jewish settlers. When I last visited Palestine, now two years ago, I was hoping to write an article about the settler movement--and get some statistics indicating that the majority of the settlers were United States born and were holding dual citizenship, Israeli and U.S. What I determined after meeting with folks from Peace Now and B'eit Salem, was that though many were indeed U.S. born and did hold citizenship in both Israel and the United States, they were not a majority of the settlers.

I had been deeply affected by the massacre of twenty-nine Palestinians at prayer by Baruch Goldstein, a physician, and an officer in the IDF and a Brooklyn native in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron in February 1994, during the Jewish holiday of Purim. They built a shrine to him in Kiryat Arba, an illegal settlement adjacent to Hebron, the second most populous Palestinian city. I visited the shrine, which I understand the government dismantled last year, and was horrified that Israelis could light candles and say prayers honoring a man, who out of religious conviction saw nothing amiss in refusing to offer medical assistance to "Arabs" when he served in the army, that such a position is supported by the rabbinate in Israel, that he out of the same "mainstream" religious conviction killed Arab worshipers on a Jewish religious holiday.

Michael Prior an acquaintance whom I traveled to Hebron with on an earlier trip, in his recent book, filled in some of the detail quoting the Jerusalem Post,

"Admirers kiss his tomb, and pray over the grave of what the inscription describes as an upright martyr--a mourner explained to me [that is Michael Prior] that all those killed simply because they were Jews they were martyrs. On the occasion of the bar mitzvah of Goldstein's son, Kiryat Arba's Chief Rabbi Dov Lior addressed him, 'Ya'akov Yair, follow in your father's footsteps. He was righteous and a great hero' (Jerusalem Report 12 December 1996, p.10). 5"

When I last visited the now partitioned Jewish section of the Ibrahimi Mosque, after barely convincing the IDF officer regulating visitors' entry, that I was a Jew, even though I was traveling with a Palestinian friend and a couple of our missionaries who were working in Palestine at the time. I watched with dread a yeshiva class going on, with the teacher pointing to a photo of Baruch Goldstein on a newsprint chart, and no doubt praising his martyrdom.

This is the same mentality that condoned and probably encouraged Yigal Amir, a student at the Institute for Advanced Torah Studies in Bar-Ilan University, and son of an Orthodox Rabbi who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. In fact authorities found a book lauding Baruch Goldstein in Amir's room.6

I had hoped to see how large a number and how widespread were these Ultra-Orthodox religious settlers. Dr. Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, an Israeli friend and professor in Haifa, mentions in an article that he sent me, that they represent only 10 percent of the Israeli Jewish population. Isn't it odd how infrequently the press talks about the settlers, about their unrestrained violence inflicted on Palestinians--even school children. In Hebron I have watched fully armed young men, 16-17 year-olds, march through a Palestinian olive grove, while the owners of the land watch from the roof of their home. Has there been a day in these seventeen months that we haven't heard about Hamas or the Islamic Jihad and their radical violent religious activity? One of the things I learned on my first trip to Gaza in 1991, was that the Mosad, the Israeli CIA, was responsible for arming Hamas in its early days, hoping they would be a threat to Arafat's Fatah party.

I just read an article from The Observer about the first female suicide bomber. Do you know who she was? Wafa Idrees, 28, "had told her family she had been haunted by what she had seen working as a Red Crescent volunteer in Ramallah- the deaths and injuries to which she had attended."7 Her best friend Ahlam Nassar another Red Crescent ambulance driver has been apprehensive since her death that killed an 81-year-old bystander and injuring more than 100. With good reason, "The Israeli army says it does not deliberately target the ambulance crews of the Palestinian Red Crescent. The drivers, paramedics and volunteers who go out each day, have reason to think otherwise. In 16 months of the INTIFADA, 122 of them have been injured by Israeli fire . . . "8 And with Wafa's action they anticipate it getting worse.

What could drive a young woman to such and act? I can barely imagine the frustration and hopelessness that could breed such a despairing act. Can you? Because of the Israeli story dominating our news one has to work a little harder to hear the other side. Is there a difference between Wafa Idrees and Baruch Goldstein? Or are they both merely victims of a barely describable reality. Can anything be done to stop the fear, distrust, violence and hate?

One hopeful sign, which hasn't been fully reported in our media, was the peace rally in Tel Aviv last week. There were estimates of 10, 000 Jews and Arabs in attendance.9 The demonstration was called to support the fifty-two Israeli combat officers and soldiers who have taken a stand against serving as occupiers in the Israeli Army.

Part of their statement reads,

"We combat officers and soldiers and who have served the State of Israel for long weeks every year, in spite of the dear cost to our personal lives, have been on reserve duty all over the Occupied Territories, and were issued commands and directives that had nothing to do with the security of our country, and that had the sole purpose of perpetuating our control over the Palestinian people . . . who sensed the commands . . . destroy all the values we had absorbed while growing up in this country . . . who understand that the price of Occupation is the loss of IDF's human character . . . who know the Territories are not Israel, and that all the settlements are bound to be evacuated in the end . . . We hereby declare we shall not continue to fight this War of the settlements.....beyond the 1967 borders in order to dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an entire people . . . "

There are now 99 signers to the declaration. You can give your support to them at their website (www.servu.org).

So in spite of tacit U.S. approval of Sharon's policies described by some of his soldiers, as policies of domination, expulsion, starvation and humiliation, perhaps there is a growing glimmer of hope to stir, once again, toward a resolution of this conflict. It will I believe, have to be led by Israelis Palestinian citizens, Israeli Jews, and Palestinians living in the territories and refugee camps, themselves. Maybe we can offer our individual support beyond our governments to some of those involved.

Some things we can do:

1. Find alternate sources for your information. The Israeli press is far more "free" in reporting about the conflict, then that of the United States. Read Ha'Aretz an Israeli daily or the British Manchester Guardian or The Observer, all available on line.

2. Offer support to organizations that are trying to have the story told. Churches for Middle East Peace in Washington D.C. is one. Gush Shalom in Israel is another. Beit' S'elem is another. AMEU, Americans for Middle East Understanding is another. Their mission includes not only their magazine The Link, but making available to the public some of the most relevant books and videos at their cost. They have a program to send their magazine to libraries. I am delighted to say that this month they have gone on line at AMEU.org.

3. Let your representatives in congress know of your criticism of Israel. One of the dilemmas is that the Jewish Lobby in Washington, under the benign rubric The American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, holds many of our representatives hostage with financial and electoral coercion. It is one, if not the most, effective lobby in our nation's capital. And they play serious hard-ball.

4. Christians and people of other religious faiths must lay down their fear of being identified as anti-Semites because of criticism of Israel. Zionism is not our religion or even a religion although it is treated as such by many. The Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust, yet have been made the scapegoats for Western guilt for more than fifty years now. I sometimes wonder what would have happened had not Harry Truman been fighting for the presidency in the election of 1948, when his advisors in the state department told him it wasn't just or prudent to recognize the Jewish State. His comment was there weren't any Arab votes at stake. Perhaps had there been, the two state solution might have been celebrating a jubilee recently.

I would be glad for any dialogue you care to have, but first I want to read a portion of a prayer written by one of our missionaries serving with his wife in Bethlehem and the Occupied Territories. Alex Awad, a good friend and colleague, a Palestinian who fled as a child to the United States with his family in 1948 after his father was killed with a stray bullet. He is a United States citizen. He has just written a book which addresses the immediate realities in Israel-Palestine, Through the Eyes of the Victims, which I can obtain for anyone interested.

1 The New York Times Magazine, "The Palestinian Conversation," by Deborah Sontag, February 3, 2002, pp. 37, 38.
2 Op.cit. P. 39.
3 Op.cit. P. 41.
4 The Link Volume 35, Issue 1, January-March 2002, "Law and Disorder in The Middle East," Francis A. Boyle, p. 8.
5 Michael Prior, Zionism And The State of Israel: A Moral Inquiry, Routledge, London and New York, 1999, p. 67.
6 Ibid. P. 69.
7 The Observer, Peter Beaumont, Sunday February 3, 2002.
8 Ibid.
9 Gila Svirsky, 10 February 2002.

(Steve is a United Methodist Minister from the New York Conference.)