Tag Archives: peace

Please, God

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Israel, I always say, is like a Chi Wawa. A very small dog that, thanks to its mighty bark, always draws more than its share of attention. The reason why it barks so loudly is because it is surrounded by so many hostile Arabs who keep firing at it. And the other way around, of course. Normally that is all one hears. But there is another side to the matter, and that is what it pleases me to write about today.

I live in Mevasseret Zion, about four or five miles west of Jerusalem. Another mile or so to the west is an Arab village, Abu Ghosh. Some identify it with the Biblical Kiryat Yearim, the place where David took the Ark of the Covenant after it has been recovered from the Philistines. It is also where Mary was resurrected, an event commemorated by a large Benedictine Monastery where concerts are held. During the last decades of Ottoman rule it was a den of highwaymen who preyed on travelers between Jaffa and Jerusalem. During Israel’s 1948 War of Independence its inhabitants sided with Israel, which is why they did not suffer expulsion but were able to stay on their ancestral land. Today it is an Arab, mostly Moslem, village with a population of about 7,600. Economically it is doing extremely well; the reason being that, come Saturday and almost all Jerusalem restaurants are closed, Jews flood the village in their tens of thousands.

Some years ago I had an Arab student who lived with her family in Abu Ghosh. Since our two places are so close to each other, I offered her a ride and after class. She gladly accepted but said she wanted to sit in the rear seat. Feeling slightly offended, I asked her if she really distrusted me. No, she said, I do not. However, she added, it is our custom. Try it and you’ll see I am right. We did try it, many times, and it turned out that she was right. A worry less for her, a worry less for me.

On the way we used to talk. I asked her how she came to be called Osnat, which is a name Jewish, but not Arab, Israeli families sometimes give their daughters (the original Osnat, mentioned in Genesis, was an Egyptian lady whom Pharaoh gave Joseph in recognition of his services to the crown). It turned out that her father was a heavy earth-moving machinery operator. At one point in his life he had worked for a kibbutz woman who treated him very well. By way of saying thanks, he named his daughter after her.

Osnat herself was in her mid-twenties. All her cousins had married at about seventeen and were already the mothers of several children. That, she decided, was not the life she wanted. Instead she went to study and was reading for an M.A in the humanities. More typical of Jewish women than of Arab ones. Her reward was to work as a teacher in east Jerusalem; being an Israeli citizen, she made ten times as much as her Palestinian colleagues. Later she and I lost touch, so I do not know where she is or whether she is still single. Possibly she did not stay in her village but found an Israeli-Arab husband living abroad—educated Israeli Arab women often do.

Nor is this the only way in which Jewish and Arab-Israeli approaches to life often change places and merge. Some years ago CNN did a series on wedding customs around the world. One of the episodes described an Arab wedding. But which Arabs were they? Israeli ones, of course. To distinguish it from a Jewish Israeli wedding one had to be a real expert.

Or visit an Ikea shop, where you will see Jews and Arabs quietly queueing together or else sharing a table while taking a meal. Or Dabach, a supermarket and general purpose store not far from the town of Carmiel in the north that has been doing sufficiently well to spread into central Israel. Same story.

Or visit Karim, a native of Abu Gosh who owns the grocery shop where my wife regularly does her shopping. Over the years we learnt that he is actually a university graduate with a degree in agriculture. Unable to find work in his field, though, he opened a shop and did well enough to take over the one next door as well. Right opposite his place is an Israeli-Jewish plant-nursery several of whose employees are Arabs. This is where the whole of Mevasseret Zion goes to obtain its grass, shrubbery, potted plants, gardening equipment, and so on. Arab or no Arab, I love going there. So much so, in fact, that I sometimes do so with no intention to buy anything, simply for a breath of fresh air.

The recent construction of a new children’s amusement park will no doubt bring in additional hordes of visiting Jerusalemites. Nor is Abu Ghosh the only place where many of us Israeli Jews go in order to get Arab (or “Oriental”) food. My late mother, who was born and raised in the Netherlands before, aged 30, moving to Israel with her husband and three small children used to refer to Arab music as “Arab caterwauling.” Not so many younger Israelis who like to listen to it, as I myself also do; somehow it fits into the landscape in a way Western classical music never can.

Briefly, the impression of eternally squabbling ethnic groups is often misleading. It gets even better than that. Many Western countries have a problem with Muslim women’s clothes. Seeing them as religious symbols, they try to ban them from schools, the civil services, the streets, and even the beaches. Here in Israel we never had any of these problems. True, few Arab Israeli women wear the niqab or face-cover. Go to any beach, and you can see it for yourself. But a great many wear headcover without drawing attention. In any case some Jewish women have also taken to wearing a niqab.

So far, and in spite of events in Gaza, northern Israel and southern Lebanon, the peace in Abu Gosh has held. Whatever may be going on in people’s minds, Never in the four decades my wife and I have been going there did we hear one bad word said about Arab this or Jewish that. Please God, may it stay that way.

Next to the Bear

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The other day a Ukrainian TV station contacted me and asked me whether we could do an interview about what spending one’s life in the shadow of a large and aggressive neighbor is like. As, for example, the citizens of the German Federal German Republic (until 1989), South Korea, Taiwan, and of course my very own Israel all have done. As so often happens, I found the question intriguing. So having spent some time mulling over it—I do not claim to have done much research—I jotted down some answers.

Ere we start, though, it is important to note that much will depend on who you are. Including: age, gender, marital status, education, profession, whether or not you have children to look after, how close to (or far from) the security apparatus you are, any advance training you may have received, etc. Visiting the FGR for the first time back in 1976, I was impressed by the fact that every single bridge and tunnel was marked with data, complete with pictures of tanks, about the weight and dimensions of the vehicles that could pass through. On another, more recent, visit I witnessed some firemen and their families having their picnic suddenly interrupted as sirens called on them to present themselves for duty. It was merely an exercise and everyone was sure of it. Still I was impressed by the calm, orderly way in which the men went about their business (the women, burdened as they were with children, stayed behind).

That said, based on my experience in three out of the four abovementioned countries as well as some of the literature, here are some of the ways people react to such a situation.

First, the ostrich syndrome. People ignore the problem as much as they can; and rightly so, or else they could not exist.  This, my hosts during a short visit to Seoul (which is only some 50 kilometers south of the border with North Korea) is how the inhabitants of that city react. Having got used to it for seven decades, they simply refuse to take the announcements of their own security apparatus seriously but continue with their lives as usual. It has worked countless times in the past; so why not this one? Seoul at 1500 o’clock when young female office workers start flooding the streets—what a treat for the eyes!

Second, they share their worries with others in the hope of gaining relief. This is the Israeli method par excellence. For many years one of the most important words in the language was hamatsav (the situation). Humor, including black humor, helps. For example, German women during the last months of World War II used to tell each other that a Russian lying on one’s belly was better than an American flying high over one’s head. There were plenty of similar jokes floating about; by one story Hitler himself guffawed at them.

Third, they do, or at any rate pretend to do, something about it. As by laying down plans; cleaning up their air-raid shelters (those of them who have them); acquiring all kinds of emergency supplies such as water, canned food, batteries, first aid equipment, tools, and perhaps weapons; joining a civil defense organization; participating in all kinds of exercises; moving to a district or settlement less likely to be affected; and so on. In fact almost any kind of activity, by releasing dopamine or serotonin or devil knows what, can relieve the mind, redirect it and refresh it.

Fourth, they pray. That even goes for self-proclaimed atheists. I do not know how many times, I’ve heard Israelis say: I’ve just got a new baby. Pray that, eighteen years from now, he (much less often, she) will not have to join the military. Having three children and eight grandchildren, I should know.

Finally –

People, societies and circumstances vary enormously. However much thought governments, armed forces, social services and ordinary people invest in the matter, and however thorough the preparations they make, surprises are inevitable. Very often there is no knowing how the situation will unfold and how people will react when confronted with der Ernstfall, the real thing, as the Germans say. One moment the country is at peace. The next one the sirens come to life, bombs and missiles hit (or miss!) their targets, one finds oneself fighting for survival, and the chief of staff, having undergone a mental breakdown, resigns (this actually happened to the Norwegians when the Germans invaded them in 1940). Heroes become cowards and cowards, heroes. This may be carried to the point where heaven and earth literally change places.

His name was Szymon Perskiy

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His name was Szymon Perskiy, and he was born on 2 August 1923 in Wiszniew, Poland (today, Vishnyeva, Belarus) to a well to do Jewish family. When he was nine his farther left for what was then Mandatory Palestine; the rest of the family followed two years later. Young Simon Peres, as he came to be known, started his political career in 1941 when he was elected to various youth movement and kibbutz posts associated with the largest Jewish Party, Mapai (Labor) Party. Always more of an administrator and politician than a soldier, he attracted the attention of Israel’s leader, David Ben Gurion. Sufficiently so for the latter to appoint him Secretary of the Navy in 1948. Never mind that the entire navy consisted of a handful of rickety boats bought second hand in order to smuggle in Holocaust refugee and later perhaps equipped with a gun or two. Never mind that, at the time, the nascent State of Israel was engaged in its life-and death struggle for independence. And never mind that Peres himself was just twenty-five years old.

This is hardly the place to describe his subsequent career in any detail. From 1952 to 1965 he ran the ministry of defense, first as its director-general and then as deputy minister of defense. In this capacity he was deeply involved both in the 1956 Suez Campaign and in the construction if Israel’s nuclear reactor. In 1974 he became minister of defense under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, a post he held until 1977. From 1984 to 1986 he was prime minister. Later he served as foreign minister, deputy prime minister, and minister of finance. Later still he went on to become prime minister again (1995-96) as well as President of Israel (2007-14); but that is not part of the story I want to tell you today.

What I do want to do is focus on the year 1993 when he was serving as foreign minister. In September he and Rabin, who in 1991 had been elected prime minister for the second time, signed the Oslo Agreements with PLO leader Yasser Arafat. They promised, or seemed to promise, peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Whatever may have happened later, rarely did any treaty give rise to such high hopes all over the world. His reward, which he shared with Rabin and President Clinton, was a Nobel Peace prize

generic levitra online Kamagra is made of Sildenafil citrate. Traditional Chinese medicine could relieve the pain http://www.icks.org/data/ijks/1482457576_add_file_5.pdf cialis prescriptions of prostate by comprehensive nursing and symptomatic treatment. Kamagra Oral Jelly is responsible for sexual viagra prescription uk stimulation. Just make sure that you scramble your address uk cialis before you allow it to be published online. In the same year he published The New Middle East. In it he set forth his vision of the future of the region. The way he saw it, the Oslo Agreements were a natural continuation of Israel’s peace with Egypt which had been signed back in 1978. Step by step, they would be followed, first by a relaxation of tension and then by the normalization of Israel’s relations with its remaining Arab enemies. Peace, always the ultimate objective, was, if not exactly at hand, at any rate no longer impossible. All it required were goodwill and hard work. As well as, here and there, a nudge by the international community, specifically the US as the world’s sole Superpower with a strong interest in the peace of the region. It was, after all, the place from which the world got its oil, the commodity of which everyone wanted to get as much as possible at the lowest possible price. Enough said.

Peace, Peres went on to argue, would be followed by prosperity. An entire region would move from underdevelopment towards freedom, health, education and plenty. Throughout his career, Peres had come under attack for being visionary. Time after time he had advocated and undertaken grandiose projects that seemed way beyond tiny Israel’s capabilities. Time after time he left his critics confounded.

He died in 2016 after more than seventy years spent mainly in politics. By that time he had almost every honor a human being can receive bestowed on him. True, not everyone liked him. Especially within Israel, where too many people saw him as dove always ready to make one concession after another. Not every part of his vision came true; in particular, the Oslo Agreements have not yet fulfilled the promise he and many others saw in them. But now, with one Arab country after another either signing a peace agreement with Israel or preparing to do so, it is time to remember him.

May his visionary ideas, including some kind of just peace with the Palestinians, prevail.

Just as in 1948

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Some years ago I spent some days at Churchill College, Cambridge. One morning, having a few hours to spare, I went to the great man’s archive which is housed there. Among other things, I was shown a small part of a collection of letters which he, as Secretary of the Colonies, received in connection of his visit to Palestine in the winter of 1921. Some of the letters were written by local Jews, others by Arabs.  One that has stuck in my memory, written in good English by an Arab resident, argued that there would never be peace in the Holy Land until and unless the Balfour Declaration—with its promise of establishing a Jewish National Home in the country—were cancelled.

A century has passed. Some of the smallest and weakest trees in the forest have been reaching for the sky, some of the largest and mightiest have been cut down or else fell of their own accord. Amidst all this turmoil, attempts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict there have been by the hundred. Nevertheless it persists and has lost none of its underlying hatred and bitterness. Just as the letter predicted.  With President Trump promising to publish his “peace plan” in the near future, today it pleases me to reflect on some of the outcomes to which it may still lead.

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* Separation. This is the solution much of the world, as well as I personally, would prefer. The idea of solving the conflict by establishing two states, one Jewish, the other Palestinian, has been in the air at least since the British came up with it, as the map shows, back in 1920-21. In 1947 the idea of applying it to the territory west of the Jordan was adopted by the United Nations which voted in its favor, thereby enabling the State of Israel to be established. In 1994, twenty-seven years after the 1967 Six Days’ War in which Israel occupied the Palestinian-inhabited part of the country, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Liberation Organization Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo Agreements which seemed to represent a small step in that direction. Since then, however, no further progress has been made. The main obstacles are, first, the fate of the Jewish settlements in West Jordan, as it is sometimes known. Second, control over East Jerusalem, which each side claims for itself. And third, the Palestinian Right of Return. It is as a Palestinian diplomat once told me to my face. We have our rights; why should we give them up?

* A single State with a Palestinian majority. This is the Zionist-Israeli nightmare. The very purpose of setting up the State of Israel was to make sure that Jews would never again have to live in a country where they are a minority and, as such, exposed to discrimination and persecution of every kind. Yet already today, counting Israel’s own Arab citizens, about as many Palestinians as Jews live in the land west of the Jordan. In every way that matters, all of them come under the same government, i.e. that of Israel in Jerusalem. Had it not been for Israel, Abu Mazen’s Palestinian Authority, such as it is, would have been toppled by its own people in a very short time. In this sense the single Palestinian State, reaching from the Mediterranean in the west to the Jordan River in the ease, already exists or will do so quite soon. As in the former unlamented South Africa, all that is needed is a change of government. And of the flag, of course.

* A single Jewish State. In view of the demographics, which are working against it, clearly such a state could only come about as a result of war. And clearly the most likely cause of such a war would be a double one. A desperate Israeli attempt to avert a single Palestinian State on one hand; and an opportunity provided by the collapse of the Hashemite regime in Jordan on the other. A collapse followed by the kind of chaos that will enable organizations similar to Hamas, Hezbollah and ISIS to use it as a base for terrorism against Israel, dragging the latter into an unwinnable war like the American one in Afghanistan and spreading west across the Jordan River. Here the fact that a great many—no one knows, just how many—citizens of Jordan are themselves Palestinian or of Palestinian origin could play a critical role.

Both many Israeli Arabs and many right-wing Israelis see the problem the way the French saw that of Alsace Lorraine in 1871-1914. To quote Prime Minister Léon Gambetta (1881-82): Never speak of it, always keep it in mind. And just as the conflict over Alsace-Lorraine played a large role in turning what started as a relatively minor conflict in the Balkans into World War I, so the collapse of the Jordanian State, the outbreak of terrorism from across the Jordan, and an Israeli attempt to throw at least a considerable number of the Palestinians currently under its rule across the river is almost certain to lead to a much larger war in the Middle East.

Just as in 1948, let me add.

The Things that did Not Happen

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v0_masterSeventy years ago, World War II in Europe came to an end. No sooner had it done so—in fact, for a couple of years before it had done so—people everywhere had been wondering what the post war world would look like. Here it pleases me to outline a few of their expectations that did not become reality.

* In 1945, much of Europe—and not just Europe—was devastated. Tens of millions had been killed or crippled. Millions more had been uprooted from hearth and home. Scurrying about the continent, they were desperately seeking to rebuild their lives either in their original countries or elsewhere. Entire cities had been turned into moonscapes. This was true not only in Germany (and Japan), where British and American bombers had left hardly a stone standing on top of another, but in Britain (Bristol, Coventry), France (Caen, Brest), Belgium (the Port of Antwerp), the Netherlands (Rotterdam and Eindhoven), Hungary (Budapest), and Yugoslavia (Belgrade). Transportation and industry were in chaos. With unemployment, cold—the nineteen forties witnessed some of the harshest winters of the century—and even hunger rife, many expected large parts of the continent to go Communist.

In fact, it was only Eastern Europe that became Communist. And then not because its inhabitants, war-ravaged as they were, liked Communism, but because Stalin and the Red Army forced it on them. Many west-European countries, especially France and Italy, also witnessed the rise of powerful left-wing parties. So did Greece, which went through a civil war as vicious as any. None, however, succumbed to the red pest. By 1950 production was back to pre-1939 levels. By the late 1950s, though eastern countries continued to lag behind western ones as they had begun to do as early as 1600, most of the continent was more prosperous than it had ever been.

* During the first years after 1945 many people worried about a possible revival of Prussian-German militarism and aggression. It was that fear which, in September 1944, led US Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau to propose the plan named after him. Had it been adopted, it would have deprived Germany of many of its territories which would have gone to its various neighbors not only in the east, as actually happened, but in the west as well. The rest would have been divided into several separate states. That accomplished, “all industrial plants and equipment not destroyed by military action” was to be dismantled. That even included the mines, which were to be “thoroughly wrecked.” Since both Roosevelt and Churchill at some points supported various versions of the plan, the chances of its being turned into reality looked pretty good.

In the event, Germany was dismembered and lost large tracts of land that had been part of it for centuries past. It was also partitioned, though not along the lines Morgenthau had proposed. Both the Soviets and the West, but the former in particular, dismantled parts of the German industrial plant that fell into their hands. However, Germany never came close to being a “primarily agricultural and pastoral country.” For example, by the end of 1945 Volkswagen, thanks to a British order for 20,000 vehicles, was back in business. In 1950 the firm celebrated the production of the 100,000th Beetle; the rest is history.

Furthermore, the reconstruction of German industry did not lead to the much-feared revival of Prussian-German militarism. Let alone of National Socialism and “revanchism.” Instead, Germany was turned into a federal democracy with human-rights guarantees as strong as those of any other democratic country. With the slogan “nie wieder krieg” (no more war) on almost everyone’s lips, by the time of the 1976 election-campaign, which I happened to witness, the country was being touted as “the most successful society in Europe.”

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The Wiedervereinigung (re-unification) of 1989-90 gave rise to some renewed fears among Germany’s neighbors. It was to counter those fears that Prof. Michael Wolfson, a German-Israeli teaching at the Bundeswehr University in Munich, penned his best-seller, Keine Angst vor Deutschland (No Fear of Germany). He turned out to be right. Not only has there been no revival of National Socialism and militarism, but at no time since 1945 has Germany posed the slightest danger to any of its neighbors. By now, with Putin doing what he is doing in the Ukraine, some people would argue that its unwillingness and inability to do so are precisely the problem.

* Above all, there has been no World War III. The objective of World War I, at least according to President Wilson, had been to put an end to war. In 1945, its miserable failure to do so had long become a matter of record. Everybody and his neighbor expected another world war—this time, one waged between the US and the Soviet Union and fought, if that is the word, with the aid of nuclear weapons. As a friend of mine, a retired Bundeswehr colonel whose grandfather and father were killed in 1914-18 and 1939-45 respectively, put it to me: “When I joined the Bundeswehr I did not expect to live.”

Only during the 1960s did fear of another “total” war, as the phrase went, slowly begin to wane away. As late as 1968, American planners claimed to be preparing for “two and a half wars;” a major one in Europe, another major one in the Pacific, and a smaller one somewhere else. Since then they have gradually lowered their sights. So much so that, by now, the most they can hope for is the ability to wage two small wars, such as the ones in Afghanistan and Iraq, simultaneously. Even that is becoming a little doubtful. Rather than go through world wars III and IV, as all historical precedents seemed to suggest would happen, humanity has entered into the so-called “long peace.” As a result, and in spite of the terrible things that are going on in quite some places, the chances of the average person of dying in war are now the lowest they have ever been.

The factors that have brought along the long peace have been hotly debated. Personally I believe that ninety percent or more or the credit belongs to nuclear weapons and the fear they inspire. To be sure, the weapons in question could not prevent all forms of war. There have been plenty of those, and quite a few are ongoing even at this moment. They did, however, prevent its most important and most deadly forms, namely those waged by important states against each other.

Other factors that contributed to the largely peaceful, and by all previous standards unbelievably prosperous, nature of the post-1945 decades have been the relatively benign nature of the American Empire; the rise, side by side with that empire, of numerous international institutions that are daily entwining more states in their coils; and the restraint and sagacity shown by at least some governments—as, for example, when Mikhail Gorbachev ensured that the USSR would the only empire in history to fall apart without major bloodshed. Most important still, success was grounded the hard work of billions of ordinary people who tried to do the best for themselves and their families; and who often succeeded in doing just that.

Have a happy anniversary, Europe. Have a happy anniversary, world.