Vision of Nonviolence for Israel-Palestine
Our world is torn by conflict, and the conflict over Israel-Palestine may well be not only the most dangerous — because it’s the eye of the storm in the Middle East — but the most intractable. Each side dehumanizes the other, rendering dialogue all but impossible. Extremists on both sides now seem bent on destruction, not just conquest, of the other — and over all hangs the heavy weight of a superpower, fueling one side with virtually unlimited weaponry and shielding it from the international censure that might have provided some restraint.
So where do we begin? We might begin by pointing out to whomever will listen that Israel-Palestine may be the world’s most glaring example of the futility of violence. Sixty years of the most overwhelming military power have not only not brought Israel security, they have pushed the Gazans, in particular, to a state of such desperation that they would rather die fighting than be starved — starved of the necessities of any decent life, including dignity and meaning, by an illegal blockade. More tragically still, and more ominously for any hope of peace, the conflict has steadily eroded the Jewish values that held Judaism together in its diaspora for two thousand years. The Jews have survived two thousand years of persecution; I doubt they will survive many more as the persecutors. If there was ever a situation that cried out for a radical change of vision, it is this one.
The beginnings of such a vision are, fortunately, not absent in either Israel or Palestine. Take the long-standing village of Neve Shalom/ Wahat as-Salam, “Oasis of Peace,” where sixty families, half of them Jewish and half Palestinian-Arab, Christian or Muslim, live out the founder’s vision to “live in peace, each one faithful to his own faith and traditions, while respecting those of others.” 300 families are on the waiting list to join this experiment. While in Jerusalem, recently, I spoke with Rabbis for Human Rights, one of the hundreds of peace groups in the country, and met with a young couple who practice dialogue and reconciliation groups; a few days later I was in Bethlehem, giving two long seminars on nonviolence and meditation to an international and Palestinian audience at Holy Land Trust; and a day later, I had the pleasure of meeting Hafez Jawal, sometimes dubbed the “Palestinian Gandhi” for his nonviolent resistance in the village of At-Tuwani.
What individuals can do, groups can do, and what groups can do, societies and even nations can do. Right now (it’s the ceasefire of early August) people are trying to push for a political solution instead of a military “solution.” But as my friend Sami Awad of Holy Land Trust points out, nothing permanent is going to change without a human solution. Something needs to reassure the Israelis that they will have a safe place to live, and reassure the Palestinians that the world has not abandoned them and they will not be squeezed until the entity of Palestine is wiped off the face of the earth.
That something is nonviolence. Nonviolence can take many forms, and there is an appropriate way to apply it on all these levels: human, societal and, of course, in providing non-military interventions for intrastate conflict, which is now going on in South Sudan, Mindañao, the Caucasus, Latin and North America — all over the world.
But they still are taking place in a kind of cognitive vacuum: even when spectacular episodes of nonviolence occur and succeed they do not resonate with any familiar model in the minds of ordinary people so as to become a real alternative. Supporting the nonviolent work going on in the region and promoting general literacy about the power of nonviolence and what it can do — that would go far toward building the human solution.
Each side has created a monster, it is true: on one side the settlers, half a million of them, who think they’re living out some kind of apocalyptic narrative, and on the other, the terrorist fringes of Hamas, including the Qawasameh clan of Hebron whose murder of the three Israeli boys precipitated the present conflict. I cannot see anything short of nonviolence, applied wherever and however needed, that can counter all this violence, that can strengthen the reasonable people on each side and eventually win back extremists, too. It’s possible, and we have no choice.
Enough cultivation of nonviolence, enough demonstrating that it can be applied in even such a refractory setting as Israel-Palestine, would allow some sanity to emerge on the part of the International community and the United States. That would resolve not only this conflict but, as Meir Margalit, a founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, so eloquently said recently, it could go far to “save the human condition.”
