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Jewish World Review / July 16, 1998 / 22 Tamuz, 5758
By Neil Rubin
SAMIR, A FRIENDLY teenager en route to a Chicago
university, summed up his greatest joy about the United States with one,
simple sentence: "There's a lot less pressure."
Sunday evening, Samir, a Palestinian teen, sat quietly for
most of the time as his father and a colleague had an open dialogue with me
at the Atlanta Jewish Community Center. About 20 people showed up for the
last-minute event sponsored by the decidedly left-wing American Friends
Service Committee.
I agreed to participate for the reason that I attended the Palestinian
Olympic team's party about two years ago. American Jews, who do influence
the Mideast peace process through lobbying the U.S. government, rarely
interact with Palestinians. Nor do we want to. As I bluntly told our
guests, "I'm not particularly interested in the Palestinians or their
cause, at least not the way I care about Israelis. I am interested in
Israel, particularly its Jews, and I feel that occupying the West Bank has
damaged Jewish morale and dignity. We need to focus our energies on
spiritual matters, not military occupation. So even though I believe Jews
and Arabs should live wherever they want, most of the occupation needs to
end, which is the complex process in which the Israelis and Palestinians
are now engaged. But frankly," I added, "Palestinian nationalism scares the
hell out of me."
For this, a gentleman from Bosnia told me that he was angry and embarrassed
that we were both American citizens, adding that the Holocaust should make
me more sensitive to the Palestinians' pursuit of life, liberty and
happiness. I told him that I'm concerned about such notions for my
10-year-old Israeli niece. She shouldn't have to worry about life, liberty
and pursuit of happiness evaporating as a bus she's on explodes or a
terrorist randomly knifes her in the street. And, I responded, I don't
remember the majority of Nazis seeking a peaceful solution to the
Holocaust, which was radically different than the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict.
But such moments were not typical of the overwhelmingly positive two-hour
conversation. Recognizing that we were not U.S. State Department
negotiators, we avoided the predictable Palestinian rage at Israeli land
appropriation and Jewish anger at the Palestinians having about 20,000
additional machine-gun wielding policemen than permitted under the Oslo
Accords.
The Palestinians, veterans of such talks, presented well-reasoned
positions. As Ghassan Andoni said, "I'm no peacenik. I just don't see a
way other than a Palestinian state achieved through negotiations."
He also believed that Israeli West Bank bypass roads to settlements are
meant to dice up the territories to prevent contiguous Palestinian rule,
Netanyahu still seeks a Greater Israel, settlements are part of a
colonialist occupation and Jerusalem will be shared.
The last matter, I told him, won't happen, so forget it. Borders will be
redrawn to make everyone happy. The only question is whether this comes
before war, which is inevitable under today's conditions.
Andoni, head of The Rapprochement Center for Dialogue and Understanding, is
a former fedayeen, which Jews would call a terrorist and Palestinians
a freedom fighter. During a stint in an Israeli jail, a Jewish attorney
helped cut his sentence in half. Later, the attorney was severely wounded
when two Palestinian terrorists shot up Jerusalem's Zion Square.
Risking further imprisonment, Andoni snuck into Jerusalem to visit the
lawyer in the hospital. The Arab was relieved to hear his friend look up
and say, "I'm glad that I know you; before I would have thought the person
who shot me was just another terrorist. Now he's someone who hates peace
and I know not everyone does."
Andoni added, "It's not so easy to hate when you are friends with the
enemy."
Perhaps the most intriguing notion came from Samir. "I want," he said,
"Israelis and Palestinians to live side-by-side as neighbors, my house next
to a Jew's. And if my children want to marry a Jew, so be it."
Don't hold your breath, both Andoni and I agreed.
In closing, I told Samir to hold onto his dream because the notion is
seldom heard through the very real Hamas bulletins. Perhaps to his
surprise, I asked him to ponder the words of the great Zionist thinker
Theodor Herzl: "If you will it, it is no dream."
Peace isn't arriving any time soon to the Middle East. There's plenty of
pure hate on both sides and the complaints about one another are as deadly
as they are real. But there will be no progress without such talks, even
when it seems to get us nowhere.
Wishful thinking
JWR contributor Neil Rubin is Editor of the Atlanta Jewish Times.
