Michael Bernet

EXCERPTS FROM THE BOOK:
In September 1994, on the lawn of the White House, Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yassir Arafat shook hands. Despite foreboding on both sides, there was much rejoicing among Israelis and Palestinians: peace was within grasp. That December, Rabin, Arafat, and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres shared the Nobel Prize for Peace.

By the year 2000, fewer than 5% of Palestinians remained under direct Israeli rule. At Camp David in July 2000, under the auspices of President Clinton, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Barak, offered Arafat 90% of the “occupied territories,” with Israel offering territory near the Gaza Strip to compensate for the rest. He also offered something no other Israeli could have dared: dividing Jerusalem to create a Palestinian capital. Arafat stormed out without making a counteroffer.

On September 28, 2000, two days before the Jewish New Year, rioting Moslems on the Temple Mount pelted rocks straight down on the Jewish worshippers at the sacred Western Wall. The Second Intefaddah had been launched. That December, under pressure from President Clinton, Barak offered 95% percent of the territories plus additional areas in East Jerusalem, even ceding the sacred Temple Mount. The Palestinians turned down that offer and a final offer of a full 97%. As Israeli statesman Abba Eban once remarked: “Arafat has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

Seven years later, with growing violence and ferocity, the Second Intefaddah still rages. The newly flourishing economy in the Palestinian area is a shambles; the civilization of the Palestinian people has turned into a culture of carnage, subject to the rule of hooligans, robbers, and bandits. Israelis manage to survive with relative optimism, but every child boarding a bus for school leaves parents waiting anxiously until the return home. Every backfire arouses apprehension. Every loud boom sets off a myriad cell phones asking: “Are you OK?”

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The Jews of Israel and the Arabs of Palestine constitute an odd couple. Neither side can move out of the Holy Land, their shared home; neither can hear the other for all the curses and all the blows.

The Israelis are fighting for survival, unwilling to give up their independence, unwilling to be absorbed into an Arab nation, unwilling to be exiled again into an unfriendly world. The Palestinians, battling unacceptable humiliation, seek glory in martyrdom. The Palestinians cannot understand that to live at peace within their own sovereign state, they must abjure killing Israelis. The Israelis don’t understand that the Palestinians live in a culture that perversely glorifies humiliation and considers compromise as inherently humiliating. Both sides are shackled by fear and rage, hopes and traditions. Assigning guilt or blame offers no help.

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Helplessness is one of the basic roots for failure and conflict, both for individuals and for nations; left to fester, it turns into debilitating depression, a frightening state and major cause for sickness, death and suicide. Blaming the world or neighbors becomes a galloping cancer of the soul, fostering hatred and alienation and requiring fabrication of an endless web of fantasies that soon consumes one’s energies.

Humiliation is the ultimate blame, always viewed as a malicious assault imposed by another, never as something one has brought on oneself. Humiliation is the basis for every war that was ever fought: deadly, destructive, self-perpetuating into centuries of fear and hatred. Humiliation is part of virtually every conflict, the mortar of sibling bonding, the cement of schoolyard bullying, the ferment of firehouse friendships, the source for status in the street and prestige in the prison yard. In the social compact of almost every society, humiliation is held to be a crime against the self and society, just a little milder on the scale of wrongs than murder. Humiliation does not merely sanction retribution, it demands it. When you humiliate me, smiting you becomes my social obligation for the welfare and the honor of my family, my clan and my people. It offers me a ready hand up the ladder of honor and respect.

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On the surface, religion is the most intransigent issue dividing Israelis and Palestinians; religion is also the most tractable. This is not a war between Jews and Moslems, not about dogma nor the denial of rights nor access to sacred shrines. Moslems have no realistic trepidation that Jews seek to convert them, and Jews have no trepidations that Moslems could--or would--attempt to convert them. Jews have not fought a war of religious aggression in 3000 years; reluctant to seek converts, they are content within their own faith, an obligation that falls on their shoulders only--and by no means the only route to God or salvation.

The Jewish-Moslem conflict is a cynical ploy toward political ends, marshalling the tension and fervor of 1.3 billion Moslems world-wide, propagating perpetual fear and hatred so that there never can be peace. Religious confrontation with the non-Moslem world justifies casting blame on others for cultural and economic failings in the Moslem world, validates dictatorial repression in 50 Moslem countries, and shakes down the Western world to surrender some of its moral principles and to pay out monetary blackmail.

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Israelis who claim that there has never in history been a Palestinian state or nation, are partly right. Palestine was a mocking term applied by the Romans to the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, after they had defeated and dispersed the Judeans. Under Moslem rule--Arab, Mameluke or Ottoman--the term Palestine was never applied to the area, nor has the area been a unified--much less an autonomous--entity in 2000 years. Before the early twentieth century, only cartographers used the name. Its Arab-speaking population defined itself by towns and villages, clans and families, and religious denominations until well into the 1960s.

Arabs who deny Jewish rights in Palestine, assert that the Jews of today are descendants not of the ancient Israelites but a multinational riffraff of Assyrian captives from the Caucasus, Gothic tribesmen from Europe, Khazar herders out of central Asia. Others claim Israelis are usurpers who arrived in the Holy Land a century ago, sponsored by wealthy Jewish bankers. Others claim that Jews are the tools (or the manipulators) of United States imperialistic strivings, or that Israel was carved out of Palestine by Western nations to compensate Jews for their suffering--itself a fabrication as some Moslem polemicists claim--in Nazi Europe.

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It is terrifying to imagine a future after Israel has withdrawn behind the 1967 lines. Eventually the Palestinians and their allies, armed with everything that oil and terror can buy, will combine forces to totally annihilate the Jews; all the guarantees of the world will not avail. In 1994, 800,000 people were massacred in Rwanda within just a few weeks while Kofi Annan was head of U.N. peacekeeping. Twenty years later, Annan (now elevated to U.N. Secretary-General), expressed his remorse, admitting that most of the deaths could have been prevented if the international community had acted swiftly. ``But the political will was not there, nor were the troops.” The next year, 7000 Bosnians were massacred in Srebrenica, a “safe area” under the protection of Dutch United Nations peacekeepers--who claimed they had no authority or responsibility to intervene.

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And yet, peace is possible, a peace that offers life and dignity and prosperity to all, without compromising either side’s security.