Jerusalem and Peacemaking in Palestinian Arab and Israeli Jewish Relations

Jerusalem — a sacred city for Jews, Christians, and Muslims — is witnessing another episode in its cycles of violence, which have characterized its history over the millennia. Resolving the Jerusalem question is essential for resolving the conflict between Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews. Peace talks designed to determine the city’s future, among other issues, during the last 25 years have failed. Negotiators are reluctant to take risks and compromise over stakes considered too high by their respective national communities. At the 1978 Camp David summit, Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat delayed deciding the city’s fate, as did the contending Palestinian and Israeli leaderships in Oslo in 1993. It was with great reluctance that Israel’s Ehud Barak agreed to East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital toward the end of the Camp David 2000 negotiations. While Jews feel more secure in an Israeli-controlled city, Muslims argue for placing it under Palestinian control, and some Christians believe that an international or Vatican-like rule would be most appropriate.

Various political leaders have actually used religious symbols to support their own ends. Statements made after Camp David 2000 illustrate the zero-sum game played by both contending parties. Barak declared: “No Israeli Prime Minister could agree to let the Palestinians have sovereignty over the Temple Mount, which is the holy site for the Jewish people for generations.” (“Upbeat on Peace Deal Prospects, U.S. Reaches Out to ICO J’lem Committee,” Mideast Mirror, August 23, 2000) Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak stated: “No one is entitled to say that Jerusalem, or al-Aksa Mosque, is under Israeli sovereignty…. It is up to the Palestinians to make the decision compatible with their interest and which is simultaneously acceptable to the Arab and Islamic world.” (“Giving Up Jerusalem Would Invite ‘Endless Violence’” Mideast Mirror, August 24, 2000)

While the cultural, economic, religious, national, political, and territorial aspects of life converge in Jerusalem, it is more the national, political, and territorial elements that have brought both communities into enmity. As a Greek-Russian Christian born and raised in Jerusalem between Palestinian Muslims and Christians on one side and Israeli Jews on the other, I regularly witnessed deep devotion and piety at religious sites located within prayer distance from each other. While I understand what has divided citizen-believers from each other (for example, psychological barriers, territorial claims, and ideological extremism), I also felt sometimes ill at ease as supplications turned into national anthems and songs of heroism

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or vengeance, with flags and force waving in the air. “Love thy neighbor as thyself” only goes so far when a struggle for national survival is underway. Translating prayers for peace into peacemaking is difficult, both psychologically and practically.

Both Palestinian Arab and Israeli Jewish communities live in one city, but separately and unequally, and their interactions, usually socioeconomic, end at the gate of casual acquaintance and profit. Each community has generally built its collective identity by defining the “other” in negative, stereotypic terms. As Palestinian educator Sami Adwan writes: “Groups in conflict maintain a clear distance from each other; they try to shield themselves from being exposed. Their self-awareness becomes completely centralized on their own ideology, rationale, and claims.” Furthermore, “each side develops its own identity and self-image by excluding the human face of the other with positive self-images and negative stereotypical images of the enemy” and “each side tends to dehumanize the other and to see it as faceless or one-dimensional, thereby justifying the use of all means of force to destroy or oppress it.” (Adwan, “A Moment of Peace,” Sami Adwan and Dan Bar-On, eds., Victimhood and Beyond: The Bethlehem Encounter October 1999, 2001, p. 7)

It is either the Israeli Jewish or the Palestinian Arab narrative that one hears. Serious conversations and activities for dialogue and peaceful coexistence are rare. The tense situation has eliminated the presence of a real “third way” in each community in the mind of the “other.” People are pigeonholed to be in either camp. In the eyes of most Palestinians, an Israeli Jew is an Israeli Jew regardless of color and ideological predilections. The result is the same no matter who is the Israeli Prime Minister. For most Israeli Jews, Palestinian Arabs have a long way to go before they can be trusted or treated as equals and peace partners.

My Jerusalem experience has been partially replicated in the United States, as a co-founder and member of a Jewish-Arab dialogue group. In the summer of 1993, three months before the famous handshake between the PLO’s Yasser Arafat and Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn, a few Jewish Americans and Arab Americans in central New Jersey committed ourselves to peaceful coexistence and created “Project Understanding.” Our mission statement reads, “We believe that the differences our two groups have experienced during the past century have obscured our humanity and common heritage and have blocked understanding of each other for the other.” Furthermore, “Our goal is to create an opening … for the enhancement of such understanding and for the promotion of human dignity.”

The safe environment we created empowered us then to become educated about the other, and to openly explore our cultural and religious traditions through common readings and activities, which we found to be more similar than different. Our private and public interactions led to close friendships that deepened our listening and our compassion for each other.

Yet, today, the ongoing violence and suffering of our families and friends in Jerusalem and other cities and towns have widened the psychological distance between us, causing the shadows of yesteryear to reappear and our collective dialogue to degenerate into individual monologues. It is difficult for some of us to bridge the gap, especially when it comes to things ideological or political. The burden of memory and the loss of hope for a bright future in Israeli Jewish-Palestinian Arab relations have immobilized several of us, who feel reluctant to spend the requisite time for compassionate listening and dialoguing.

Like in Jerusalem, moving away from the moderate center serves neither dialogue nor peace. If fear is to be overcome, the present and the future must be discussed within the context of the past and its accumulation of pain and injustice. As Israeli Jewish psychologist Dan Bar-On states:

there are ways to discuss the past without losing control over the process of reconciliation and making peace. I assume that future negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis will also have to relate to the past and to acknowledge that there is justice on both sides. (Dan Bar-On, “October 1999-August 2001: What has Changed?”, Adwan, Victimhood and Beyond, p. 3)

However, I do not believe that acknowledging their rights automatically destroys our rights. In his view, the present situation should be redefined in order to examine “what has not been talked about until now.”

If dialogue is to be meaningful, it must be inclusive and from the heart, involving deep listening and balancing memory with positive peace. If dialogue is to be a sustainable, ongoing process, it must include an inward look into one’s own culture

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and society and an outward look into the “other’s” culture and society. Both constitute two sides of the same coin.

If true peace is to take root, the light of cultural, religious, and spiritual closeness must be properly directed to illuminate the way toward truth and justice. As Gershon Baskin and Zakaria al Qaq, the co-directors of the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information in Jerusalem, argue: “Real peace can only be made and consolidated by a transformation on the cultural-ideological level, through people-to-people change of heart: from trauma, fear, and anger to healing, forgiveness and reciprocal acceptance.” (Baskin and al Qaq, eds., Creating a Culture of Peace, 1999, p. 3) If understanding and learning are to occur in such a culture, they must be anchored in compassion and moderation, virtues shared by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

All concerned have important roles to play. Steps must be taken to protect children’s rights to survive and actualize themselves, as is enshrined in the UNICEF Convention on the Rights of the Child and in other children’s agendas for peace and security. More opportunities like Seeds of Peace (a program that annually brings Arab and Israeli teenagers together in Maine for a three-and-one-half week conflict resolution camp for reconciliation and coexistence work) must be found for children “from both sides of the divide” to meet. Focus should be placed on education for peace, mainly eliminating indoctrination and demonizing of “the enemy” from textbooks and curricula.

At the adult and group levels, creative problem-solving and compromise are a must. Those who buy into the peace process cannot expect peace to flourish unless they respond to offers of friendship and coexistence. Those who reject the peace process cannot have it both ways: independence and security on the one hand, and violence on the other. For what is won in negotiations can readily be lost in renewed conflict.

At the state level, negotiations in good faith and implementation of international agreements and United Nations resolutions are essential for resolving the tough issues separating Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs: Jerusalem, Jewish settlements on Palestinian lands, Israeli security, right of return and statehood for the Palestinians, and water shortage. Considerable international diplomatic pressure and financial assistance in support of educational and socioeconomic renewal, environmental protection, and sustainable development are important mechanisms for enhancing negotiations and rewarding compliance.

Irrespective of differing perspectives and challenges, our message must be one: violence must never be justified no matter who commits it. The answer is found in negotiations and a just compromise.

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