February 2005

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Moving Beyond Silence: Reconciling Palestine and Israel

Hilda Silverman was one of the few non-Quaker members of a 14-person International Quaker Working Party that traveled to Israel, Palestine, and nearby Arab countries in the summer of 2002. The book, When the Rain Returns: Toward Justice and Reconciliation in Palestine and Israel (AFSC, 326 pp, 2004, $15) originated in the group's shared experiences.

Silverman explains, "If the book were only a recounting of our trip, it would add little to the vivid email accounts that arrive daily from friends and political colleagues on the ground who describe a current reality that is, if anything, even worse than the one we confronted over two years ago. But it is far more than that. The book starts with chapters on "Voices We Heard," which capture some of the more compelling accounts among those of the 100 or so people with whom we met.

It then includes background and contemporaneous information about the occupation, settlements, Jerusalem, refugees, Palestinian-Jewish relations inside Israel, international involvement, nonviolence, and peace negotiations. There is also an extremely useful set of appendices, including a timeline, a brief history of the conflict, many relevant UN resolutions, suggested readings, and contact information for organizations dealing with the conflict.

This is a book that would be appropriate reading both for those new to the issue and to "old Middle East hands." But it was an excruciatingly difficult one to write, in part because of the need to come to agreement among 14 disparate and strong-willed people. Perhaps more importantly, however, we were describing a reality that was so devastating to each of us, yet hard to convey to potential readers who might be unwilling or unable to accept accurate but harsh descriptions, particularly of Israeli behavior. As Martin Buber wrote in 1945, though, 'Truth is rather unpalatable at times... But... who knows the truth, the truth that alone can help us, is compelled to speak out, no matter whether a whole people is listening or only a few individuals.'"

The section excerpted here is from the conclusion and appears on pp. 262-266.

The Palestinians of the occupied territories and the Jewish citizens of Israel are locked into two overlapping processes of violence, with each of these processes seeming frequently to feed off the other.

Prayers for peace and justice left in the Separation Wall near Abu Dis (East Jerusalem) by members of the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel, www.eappi.org. December, 2004. Photo © Skip Schiel, www.teeksaphoto.org

On the one hand, there was the fairly visible "cycle" of violence, a process wherein egregious and often newsworthy violence undertaken by one side would inflict pain and suffering on members of the community, and this pain and suffering would then be used to "justify" either a tit-for-tat reaction or -- quite frequently -- a highly escalatory response. (In late summer 2003, the typical nature of these acts was, on the Israeli side, extrajudicial killings of Palestinian militants, and on the Palestinian side, suicide bombings against targets inside Israel.) Often, it was quite hard to tell who had "started" any particular round of this cyclical violence. During the second intifada, a number of truces or temporary de-escalations were arranged. Sometimes the Israeli side broke these truces. Sometimes the Palestinian side did.

Though we describe this process as cyclical, we want to emphasize once again here its deeply asymmetrical nature. On the Israeli side, the vast majority of killings of Palestinians were carried out by members of organized security forces under the control of Israel's elected government, while only a relative handful were perpetrated by extra-governmental groups or individuals. Many of the killings by government forces were quite deliberate. For example, the Israeli human rights group B'tselem has compiled a list of 110 acts of deliberate, extra-judicial killing that were carried out by Israeli forces between November 2000 and June 2003. (The list also contains information on other, non-targeted individuals who were killed during these operations.)

On the Palestinian side, by contrast, very nearly all the acts that killed Israelis were carried out by nonstate actors, and very nearly all of them were denounced by the Palestinians' elected national leadership. Yasser Arafat could perhaps have done more to incapacitate the groups advocating and carrying out acts of violence -- though it is hard to see how he could have done this after his own security infrastructure had been incapacitated by the Israeli attacks against it in spring 2002. We know of no evidence, however, that he or anyone else in the P.A. leadership ever ordered any killings of Israelis.

Another aspect of the asymmetry: Israel's powerful and well-funded security forces command means of killing that are more lethal, more numerous, and much easier to deploy than anything that any Palestinians have access to. In addition, nearly every single violent action undertaken by the Israeli security forces against the Palestinians has received the explicit or tacit approval of the most powerful government in the world: the United States. These factors helped to account for the fact that around three times as many Palestinians as Israelis lost their lives in the first three years of the second intifada.

To note these asymmetries is not to diminish for one moment the pain felt by an Israeli parent whose child has been killed by a suicide bomber, or the more generalized sense of fear and abandonment that the whole phenomenon of suicide bombings engendered in most of Israeli society. We do, however, need to remember that the pain of a Palestinian parent whose child is killed as, for example, "collateral damage" in an Israeli assassination operation is no less deep, no less real, than that of her Israeli neighbor; and the Palestinians have also suffered from a generalized sense of fear and abandonment as a result of the suffering that the Israeli government has inflicted on them.

However, we also discerned that behind the more visible cycle of violence is a second, parallel process of violence in which proponents of Israel's settlement-building project have continued to expand their control over Palestinian land and resources in the occupied territories and to implant additional Jewish settlers into the settlements, while the Palestinians have done what they could to resist the process of colonial expansion. Here again, the process has been highly asymmetrical, since Israel's settlement project has enjoyed nearly full backing from Israel's powerful government and has been condoned by the US government, while the Palestinians have had pitifully few national-level means to coordinate any effective resistance against this institutionalized colonial violence.

We should note that there have often been strong interactions between the "cyclical" and colonial processes of violence. For example, in the years that followed Ariel Sharon's election as Israel's prime minister in early 2001, the people in the settler movement had strong support within the national government. This government then often exploited the security fears of Israelis living inside the green line -- including many who hold a generally pro-peace position -- in order to "justify" such actions as maintaining lengthy lockdowns and tight movement controls on the Palestinians of the occupied territories, expanding the boundaries of the settlements, or building the very harmful security "wall" that snakes through the West Bank. The effect (and sometimes, quite possibly, also the intention) of such actions has been to increase the area of the land over which the settlements have direct control, to decrease the amount of land in which Palestinians can hope to make a livelihood, and radically to undermine the Palestinians' ability to organize a defense of their ancestral lands.

Despite the many interactions between the two processes of -violence that we have identified, we nonetheless consider it important to restate that we see both these different processes underway since our attitude toward each of them is significantly different. When we consider the visible cycle of violence, our overwhelming reaction is one of grief for the quite avoidable suffering that has been inflicted, and deep sympathy for all who have had their lives blighted by all these hateful acts. We stand foursquare against all acts of killing and all acts that deliberately inflict suffering on others. We stand, as the Israeli peace-and-justice activist Jeff Halper has clearly expressed it, "on the side of humanity."

We note, moreover, that this whole maelstrom of deadly violence and suffering that has continued in Palestine/Israel since September 2000 has done nothing to change the essential fact that there are still around six million Israelis (of whom one million are of Palestinian ethnicity) and three million non-Israeli Palestinians all living in the land of Israel/Palestine, and a further four million Palestinians living outside it but maintaining their claim on it -- and it is clear to us that, basically, none of these population groups is going to melt away. One day, sooner or later, these thirteen million men and women will have to find a way to co-exist. The maelstrom of visible, deadly violence has not changed that fact. The challenge of finding a workable means of coexistence remains.

The situation was all the more tragic, since even while public support for the undertaking of acts of violence remained quite high in each community, still, as [Israeli feminist peace campaigner] Gila Svirsky and others stressed to us, a clear majority of people on each side of the line continued to voice support for an outcome based on just about the same territorial compromise.

Regarding the other, deeper process of violence, the clash between the colonial project and its resisters, we cannot, however, stand neutral. Here, we judge that we must stand firmly against the colonial project, which constitutes a large-scale process of coercive "taking" of land and resources to which the colonizers have no valid claim. We say this in full knowledge that many participants in our group are members of communities that in the past participated in or were the beneficiaries of projects of colonial land-taking (though others of us have, by contrast, been the direct victims of such projects). This knowledge humbles us and causes us to continue to explore how those past harms be repaired. It does not, however, encourage us to turn a blind eye when we see other projects of colonial taking being pursued in the present day. We stand firm with our adherence to the principle of human equality, and therefore to the idea that the rights of all peoples should be equally respected.

...The Spirit within which we try to dwell is not one which picks out any one group of people to stand above the rest, but one who urges recognition and respect for all our fellow humans. The Inner Light that illumines our lives and our being is not one that permits us to sanction anyone's use of force-backed coercion to impose their will on others, or the establishment of institutions that systematically discriminate between people on grounds of ethnicity or manner of worship. This Light is one that endows us with a radical commitment to human equality, human connectedness, and the building of compassionate reciprocity in human relationships. It challenges us to exercise empathy with our fellow humans, can call directly to that of God in each of them.

When we say, therefore, that we stand firmly against the Israeli settlement project, does this mean that we support the use of any and all means to combat it? No, it does not. What we saw during our time in Israel/Palestine convinced us more firmly than ever before not only that mass civilian nonviolent organizing continues to be the most effective route of ending the occupation and building a fair and sustainable peace but also that this is by far the most ethical and farsighted way to proceed.

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