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| Mac Deford: A (Sporadic) Half-Century (Nearly) View of the "Holy Land" | | 11/5/2009 9:30:00 AM | Email this article • Print this article | | Publisher's note: | Mac Deford has been in the Middle East for the past three weeks, initially in Lebanon and Jordan for a week, but primarily traveling around Israel and the occupied West Bank. Today's column is the first of several reporting his conclusions on the Palestinian-Israeli problem.
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by Thomas McAdams Deford
"A total freeze, in all the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and including natural growth. No exceptions."
- Secretary of State Clinton, last spring, in response to a question seeking clarification on President Obama's demand for an Israeli settlement freeze
Prime Minister Netanyahu's offer of "restraint" on settlement construction is "unprecedented."
- Clinton, Saturday October 31st
Prime Minister Netanyahu's offer "falls far short." It's "not enough."
- Clinton, Monday, November 2nd
The first time I saw Jerusalem - in 1963, that long-ago era of "Europe on $5 a Day" (and the Middle East on half that) - it was part of Jordan.
Then, as now, it was loaded with biblical history; then, unlike now, it actually looked biblical: the walled Old City fell away on two sides to slopes of olive trees flowing into a valley of scattered small villages, and the narrow main road to Jericho was filled with as many donkeys as cars.
The next Jerusalem I saw, two years later, was the western suburbs, the Israeli half. The 1967 war was still in the future. What I remember most about that trip to Israel, my first, was the bed and breakfast I found in Tel Aviv, run by a nice middle-aged European immigrant, who spoke excellent English, had been in Israel since before it even was Israel, and who, when she learned I had just spent a year teaching in Beirut, reminisced fondly, pre-1948, about the occasional weekend drive up the coast for lunch in Beirut.
The night I arrived that year in Israel, from Beirut via Cyprus, I went to the concert hall where the local opera, or perhaps a touring company, was playing to a sell-out audience. Somehow, at the last minute, I got a single seat in the second row of the balcony. Just as I arrived, everyone in the orchestra seats stood up and looked my way. Levi Eshkol, the prime minister at the time, was arriving with his wife and entourage and sitting in the "presidential" box, about two rows of ten roped-off seats immediately adjacent to mine. There had been absolutely no security; I found myself, having spent the previous night in Beirut, now sitting three seats away from Israel's prime minister.
Five years passed. 1970, I was in Israel again, post-'67. Three of us were on vacation from studying Arabic at the American Embassy in Beirut. Driving through the now-Israeli-controlled West Bank, we picked up an Israeli soldier thumbing a ride from his post in the occupied territories on a weekend pass. Not kosher, he admitted - hitchhiking through occupied Palestinian territory - but he didn't think it dangerous despite the army regulations. The West Bank Palestinians were quiet, still in a state of shock. Not surprisingly - not only had they been taken over by the Israelis, but Arafat's PLO had just initiated an unsuccessful military action against Jordan's King Hussein, who was shortly to announce Jordan had no more claim on the West Bank.
In 1977, when next I was in Jerusalem, things were more complicated. Israel was building settlements - "facts on the ground," in Moshe Dayan's memorable description - but mostly so in the Jerusalem suburbs. Palestinian land was being confiscated but not yet in the wholesale manner of the future. West Bank Palestinians were working en masse inside Israel - despite the airplane hijackings and the Munich Olympic massacres carried out by radical Palestinian groups - with a resulting per capita income considerably higher than it had been 10 years earlier. Which is not to say the Palestinians were a happy lot, but one sensed they were in a holding pattern: while we wait for things to sort themselves out, all in all, life isn't so bad.
Of course, the most momentous event in Jerusalem that year was Sadat's surprise visit. At the time, I was stationed in our embassy in Jordan. Quite coincidentally, I had scheduled a lunch with the Egyptian charge the day Sadat dropped his bombshell proposal to travel to Jerusalem, meet with Prime Minister Begin, and address the Knesset as the first step towards a full peace with Israel.
Arriving at lunch, I asked the Egyptian his reaction to Sadat's announcement.
"What announcement?" he asked. The Egyptian foreign ministry, it appeared, was somewhat lax in its communications.
"His offer to visit Jerusalem and make peace with Israel."
When I finally persuaded him I wasn't joking, his response: "Well, if that's true, that's the end of any hope for an independent Palestine."
His point, that with Egypt neutralized, the Palestinians would never have the military or political muscle to free themselves from Israeli control, remains spot on, after more than three decades.
So here I am back again, 32 years later. I've been traveling all over the West Bank and Israel, under the auspices of Interfaith Peace Builders, a Washington-based promoter of Israeli-Palestinian peace. Over the past week, I've met with Israelis from Sderot, the town under daily fire from Hamas after the Israeli pull-out from Gaza; with a Palestinian family on the outskirts of Bethlehem who have fought an 18-year, $100,000 battle with Israeli courts trying to confiscate their 100-acre farm even though, almost uniquely, they have Ottoman documents proving ownership; with another Palestinian family who has seen their home demolished and their farmland cut off by the wall; with two Israeli human rights groups, the internationally respected B'Tselem and the more trench-struggling Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions; with a Palestinian group that raises funds to rebuild Palestinian homes demolished by Israeli bulldozers even as they teach non-violence; with a self-described "fringe" Israeli group that works to change Israel "from a militarized to a civil society"; with students from both Bir Zeit University on one side of the divide and Hebrew University on the other; with a joint Israeli-Palestinian group of ex-soldiers, Combatants for Peace; and with another joint Israeli-Palestinian organization, Bereaved Families Circle, who have had family members killed by the other side but who work together for peace in an incredible example of what reconciliation actually means.
These are Israelis and Palestinians, leftists for the most part and activists certainly, of all ages, who want to see it all end; they are the opposite of the strident ideologues on both sides who shout out their history while denying the other's. These are groups among whom, if there is hope to be found, here it would be.
And certainly their often passionate testimony gives one moments of optimism and even exhilaration. But the background against which they are struggling is dark indeed. An Israeli woman in a leadership role in an urban kibbutz in Sderot - she gained Israeli notoriety and worldwide praise when she denounced her government's actions, during its recent attack on Gaza, in a website article entitled "Not in My Name, Not for My Security" - summed it all up when she said, "Hatred breeds hatred, and the hatred on our two sides grows worse each day."
She mentioned an old friend - a friend no longer - who 25 years earlier had been jailed for refusing to do his military service after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon; he was a total supporter of the Gaza war. Or the local radio announcer, she recalled, who had exulted that the nonstop, weeklong Israeli aerial attack, during which hundreds of civilians were being killed, "is music to my ears."
"We're like two children," she said, "fighting each other. We need an adult to step in and stop it."
Instead, as another Israeli, a 60-year-old member of the Bereaved Families Circle who had lost his only daugther to a Palestinian suicide bomber, said, the recent flip-flopping in US policy brings further discouragement, more hopelessness. The appearance of Hillary Clinton at a press conference in Jerusalem a day earlier, praising Netanyahu's offer for "restraint" on settlement construction as "unprecedented," was the opposite, he said, of what we needed. "We all know what a peace will look like - call it the Geneva Accords or the Saudi Initiative or what came out of Camp David or Ehud Olmert's remarks last fall - but only the US can make it happen."
His young Palestinian colleague, whose 62-year-old father had been killed by Israeli soldiers driving the old biblical route from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, nodded in agreement. "What can I add to what my Israeli friend has said." The two then embraced, warmly and naturally, father and son, and the Palestinian hurried from the room to make it through the Israeli checkpoints before the curfew on Palestinian travel would make it impossible for him to get home that night.
Next week- The View on the Ground: Settlements, Roadblocks, Demolitions
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Reader Comments
Posted: Friday, November 13, 2009
Article comment by:
Claudia Crawford
Dear Mac,
This is beautifully written, presents such an excellent frame within which to consider the present, and could be more timely. If you have not met with Ury Avnery, I would urge you to do so. And if you send me your email, I'll send his latest article on the failure of the Obama administration to stand strong in front of Netanyahu. I have wondered where you are, and hope to hear from you!
I look forward to the next article.
Claudia Crawford
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