THE PAIN OF PEACE, THE PAIN OF WAR

An Israeli and A Palestinian: Two Conversations, One Solution

In 2001, I traveled to Europe on a research trip for a book I was writing about an underground community of resistance to Nazi rule in wartime Amsterdam that my father, Guido Teunissen, belonged to. My base was the home of a former member of that community, a Dutchman who had settled postwar in the highlands of Provence and who had invited me to stay in his villa while working on the story.

What follows is an excerpt from my memoir of that sojourn in Europe. It’s about two conversations: one with an Israeli peace activist; the other with a Palestinian. Both conversations took place over twenty years ago but are so resonant of the current situation, they could have happened this week. The two encounters revealed a remarkable coherence between my interlocutors, one that still gives me room for hope that a just peace can be achieved.

“The peace movement in Israel is dead,” my other father, Martin, said in a tone of dismissal. He had legally adopted me when he married my mother in 1956, although Guido was neither consulted about, nor even informed, that another man had assumed fatherhood of his own daughter. Although my mother and Martin were long divorced, I visited him on occasion. A retired rabbi, he had returned from a trip to Israel the week before; now I sat with him and his wife Shirley around their dining room table in their expensively remodeled home overlooking Gardiner's Bay in Amagansett, New York. Halfway around the world, Ariel Sharon had recently been elected prime minister and another Intifada was on the verge of heating up. It was early September, 2001, a few days before the fateful 11th.

My hopes for an Israeli peace movement with some real chance at political power had been largely dashed several years before with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. But I posed the burning question to Martin: could peace ever emerge in the maelstrom of conflict between Palestine and Israel? He had no answer.

Over the ensuing months, I observed both sides convulse into escalating levels of violence, with Israeli tanks and Palestinian bombs; more homes destroyed; lives and livelihoods lost. And more children dying. Always, the children bear the brunt, whether it be the young Palestinian boy cowering in the crook of his father’s arm, then blown away the next moment by an Israeli gun, or Israeli teenagers torn apart by a Palestinian suicide bomber in a disco.

In France, I was put on the spot more than once, challenged on U.S. support of Israel as an American and on Israeli policy as a Jew. It wasn’t easy; I struggled with ambivalence. As a Jew, I am ashamed of Israeli injustice against the Palestinians: occupying their territory, destroying their economy, humiliating their leadership, demolishing homes and entire neighborhoods, and inflicting civilian casualties that have far exceeded those inflicted on Israelis by Palestinians. I squirm when Jews utter epithets about Arabs that echo those leveled against Jews for centuries. I take pride in the Jewish tradition of fighting for social justice and consider its betrayal by Israeli policy a personal affront. 

Yet as a Jew, also, I worry for Israel. More than merely defending Israel’s right to exist, I believe in the need for a place of refuge for Jews against persecution, past, present, and potential. And I fear the threat posed to women’s rights posed by Islamic fundamentalism. (Ultra-Orthodox Jewish fundamentalism, which is on the ascendant in Israel, poses a similar threat.) I straddle a wrenching divide. In exasperation, I used to throw up my hands at the violence perpetrated by both camps. “A pox on both their houses!,” I would exclaim. But by the Spring of 2002, seven months after my conversation with Martin, the situation had passed the point where I could continue to feign indifference.  

The Israeli

The issue surfaced on March 8, International Women’s Day, 2002. A young woman from the neighboring village, whose name I no longer remember—let's call her Selva—had invited me to a commemorative event being held in Digne, a nearby French city. She handed me the flier. “It’s a conference about problems facing women in the Middle East, especially Palestinian women,” she said. “Maybe you would like to come?” 

Pro-Palestinian feeling, always strong in France, had been increasing since the beginning of the third Intifada. Despite my revulsion toward Sharon’s policies, I hesitated. I was afraid of running into sentiments that blurred the line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. “There’s going to be a Jewish Israeli peace activist there, too,” Selva hastened to reassure me. That clinched it. I was eager to meet this representative of a movement that my stepfather had declared dead. As I drove the hundred kilometers up the Durance Valley, despair, hope and curiosity vied within me. 

Aviva (not her true name, at her request) turned out to be a young woman with close-cropped hair and a husky build. With her dark skin and almond eyes, I assumed at first that she was an Arab Israeli. But her family had emigrated to Palestine from the Polish Lithuanian border region in the early years of the twentieth century. We were practically compatriots, ancestrally speaking, since our forebears had hailed from the Pale, the area of Jewish settlement in Eastern Europe that was “ethnically cleansed” by marauding Cossacks in the service of the Russian Czar during the latter decades of the nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth centuries. Her family had gone to Palestine; mine (on my mother's side) to New York. One family reversed the Diaspora’s trajectory; the other extended it.

Aviva’s cool, appraising eyes were rimmed with dark circles. By the time I caught up with her on the last day of the conference, she had had enough of the endless hours of sitting in the conference hall. “We can talk,” she said in answer to my request for an interview, “but we have to walk at the same time.”  

“I thought the peace movement in Israel was dead,” I began, as we pushed through the double doors of the conference center into the bright sunshine. She laughed. “That’s what the government wants you to believe. Until last month, our group, Women in Black, never got in the news, although we have been holding a vigil in Tel Aviv each Friday for fourteen years. And recently, our numbers have been growing. In June, we had three thousand women marching in the streets, but the mainstream press ignored us. Terrorists, on the other hand, always get on the news.”

“Are there peace activists on both sides and are they in contact with each other?”  

“Yes. One of the most moving developments was the creation of the Parents’ Circle. It’s an organization of bereaved parents who have lost their children to the conflict. Two hundred Jewish families and one hundred fifty Palestinian families from the occupied territory got together to buy billboard space and full-page newspaper ads. The ads say only, “The pain of peace is better than the pain of war.” She paused to let the simple power of those words sink in. 

As we strolled to the center of town, I asked Aviva the question that has bedeviled me for years: “Why did Israel decide in the first place to close off the possibility of a multicultural state, to expel the Arabs with whom they had already been living for generations?”

“What you have to realize is that it wasn’t really a stated, or even consciously chosen, policy. It was a civil war, what the Israelis call the ‘Independence War” and the Palestinians call ‘The Disaster.’ It could easily have been the other way around, by the way. And not many around this conference will say it, but the Arabs started it. The Jews accepted the UN Resolution to divide the country into Israel and Palestine. But the Arabs didn’t. Encouraged by Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Egypt, who had promised them that the Jews would be defeated, the Arabs initiated a civil war, and, like all civil wars, it was very cruel.” 

“What about Arab claims of Jewish terrorism during the civil war?”  

“You mean the Haganah,” Aviva answered. “Yes. And the Arabs had their own paramilitary groups. During the two years that it lasted, one percent of all Israeli Jews died, six thousand out of a population of six hundred thousand. The Arab governments themselves told the Palestinians to leave their homes—temporarily—and they were promised that they could return.”

Aviva hesitated, then continued. “But, in fact, there was also an Israeli policy to expel the Arabs, at least a selective one. This stayed hidden for a long time, because the orders were never written down. But Ben Gurion decided it would be best to intimidate the Palestinians into leaving certain places. It happened in different ways in different communities: in Galilee and Beer Sheva, strong Arab cities, the residents were put on buses at gunpoint and expelled. In other places, psychological warfare was used.”

“How could Jews, who have been driven out of their homes so many times, expel others from theirs?” It was a question that has bedeviled me for decades. 

“The issue for the Jews was ‘Can we live here in peace?’ It was only three years after the Holocaust, you remember; the Jewish leadership was not in the best frame of mind. And they made terrible decisions. You have to realize that people who have been oppressed are afraid of losing the little they have.”  

The intensity of our conversation had brought us to a standstill in the middle of a pedestrian thoroughfare. Merchants were pulling up storefront grates as the afternoon siesta ended. The street filled with shoppers. They wove around the two foreigners speaking in urgent English toe-to-toe as if we were invisible. 

“Do you believe in a multicultural state? What do you think is the solution?”

Aviva addressed my second question first. “I think it is a long process: the most important thing is to build hope and trust between Jews and Arabs. Take the Oslo Accords. They were useless, because the Israelis still felt that they had the power, they were in a privileged position, and so the Arabs got nothing. The number of settlements in Palestinian territory doubled during the Oslo Accords. Building trust has to start by ending the division of Palestinian territory into little Bantustans—which makes a viable state impossible—and stop terrorizing the Palestinian population. And remove the settlements.”

“What about creating a multicultural state? Is that possible, considering all that has happened? And do you think the Arabs should have the ‘right of return’ to the homes and property they left behind?”  

Aviva’s answer was ambivalent. “That’s a delicate question. I believe in this right.” She sighed. “But it will change Israel completely. I think Arabs and Jews need to talk about that openly. There are three and a half million Palestinians living in the occupied territory and another two and a half million living elsewhere. Jews living in Arab countries often prospered, but they were always second class citizens. I don’t mind living in a state that’s not Jewish, but they have to be willing to live in peace with me. I want to live in a place where my identity and my life are not threatened.”  

At first I thought she was referring to her identity as a Jew. But Aviva meant something else, as well, something even more problematic in the clash between Arab and Israeli culture. She explained, “I am a lesbian. I know how lesbians are treated in Muslim countries. I don’t want to be a refugee again.” 

“Again?” I was struck by the word. Aviva was a native Israeli. She had never, in her own life, been a refugee. Yet instinctively I understood what she meant. I told her, “I, too, feel like a refugee, as if my nationality is always provisional and can be snatched away by any new pogrom.” Perhaps the potential necessity of flight is encoded in my genes, but more likely it is written there by the lifelong repetition of memories—not my own, but those of my forebears. 

“This is seared into the consciousness of every Jew,” Aviva agreed. She went on, “Someone said to me here that Israel was a ‘European place stuck in the Middle East where it doesn’t belong.’ You know, Jews are always accused of that. The woman was right that Israel has Western values and we do like to think that we are a European country. But all you have to do is look at me, to look at my dark skin, to know that I belong in the Middle East, too. I told her, ‘I don’t have anywhere to go back to.’”  

Aviva pointed out another bond that reaches across the Arab-Israeli divide, aside from a shared genetic heritage: the bond between women that Aviva and the conference participants had come together to celebrate. “I support my Palestinian sisters. As always in liberation struggles, women play an important role. And how can Israeli women say that we’re liberated when our government drives Palestinian women to blow themselves up?”

“Can the long legacy of hatred be resolved? Wouldn’t it be better to support the creation of a Palestinian state that works, without the right of return?”  

“Where would you put it?” Aviva countered. Israel and Palestine occupy the same land. Whatever you do to divide Palestine is a tragedy. A Palestinian state is the first step, but not the final one. That will have to be a state that is neither Palestinian nor Jewish. And only that will resolve the issue of hatred; you can’t hate someone who’s so close to you.” 

I suppressed a flutter of doubt at these words; fratricide is as old as Cain and Abel.

But to Aviva, the Israeli policy of exclusion and separation is destroying relations that have endured between Palestinians and Israelis despite the decades of conflict. “There were always so many human contacts between us. The older Palestinians still remember, but now, for the past two years, the only Israelis the younger ones meet are soldiers. They have a different view than their elders: they are willing to blow themselves up.”

I recalled a note my friend Hélène, who came with me to the conference, had scribbled and passed to me as we sat together in the auditorium: “the Palestinians have the future and the Israelis have the present. If the Israelis would give a little bit of the present to the Palestinians, they would give themselves a little bit of future.” 

“It’s not only Palestinians who are being suicidal,” I told Aviva, “Israel’s policy is suicidal, too, especially given her precarious position surrounded by hostile Arab states. In destroying the other, we destroy ourselves.” 

“We voted for Ariel Sharon out of despair,” Aviva explained. “People said, ‘at least, if we’re going to die, we can kill the Palestinians, too.” She added, “We swallowed the lie that ‘we offered them peace and they didn’t want it.’ When the Palestinians said they wanted the right of return, the Israelis heard only that they wanted all or nothing. Peace must be a process of reconciliation that includes Israel’s support—with the world’s help—for rebuilding Palestinian society. Israel must take responsibility for the destruction it has caused; only then can people go on with their lives.” 

The Palestinian

A remarkable sequel to my conversation with Aviva happened a month later. I was in Germany to continue my research on the book about the wartime Amsterdam community I had come to Europe to write. My research led me to Germany, where, one dreary day, I caught the train for Stuttgart after a visit to a small town on Lake Constance to interview a source.

Rain pelted the windows as the train lurched slowly away from the station platform. I pulled out my laptop to type my interview notes. A young man with a broad brow and striking large, liquid eyes sat down opposite me. He was perhaps of Middle Eastern or North African origin. Regarding me with great interest as I tapped away on the laptop, his gaze suggested an enthusiasm that was only held in check by the demands of propriety between strangers.  

Finished with my notes, I turned to pack my computer away in my valise, struggling for a moment with the ever-recalcitrant zipper. My observer leaped out of his seat to help me. “I can do it,” I protested in German, slightly taken aback by his eagerness. “I’m used to the problem.” He settled back, but then leaned forward a few moments later.

“Where are you from?” he queried.  

“America. Where are you from?”  

He hesitated, then said almost apologetically, “Palestine.” Evidently he feared an unfriendly response. I assured him that I had nothing against the Palestinian people. This relaxed him, and his initial caution receded as the conversation continued, now in English.  

After a few minutes of the usual pleasantries that traveling strangers exchange, he cast me a speculative smile, and, with another apologetic shrug, inquired if he could ask me a question. But, he hastened to add, he hoped I wouldn’t take offense. 

“Of course not. Ask me what you will,” I responded. 

“What do you think of September 11th?” 

“Well, of course, it was terrible.” 

“Yes, yes, of course, I agree,” he said impatiently. “But who do you think is responsible for it: Bin Laden” (he mumbled the name so softly that it was only by deduction that I deciphered it,) “the Mossad, or the CIA?”  

“Well, I don’t know for sure, nobody does, but most likely it was the act of terrorists,” by which we both understood “Islamic terrorists.” 

He gave me a doubtful look. 

“Who do you think did it?” I asked.  

“It could have been Mossad or probably the CIA. I think Bush used 9/11 to carry out his plans for America to rule the world.”

I am leery of conspiracy theories; they substitute simplistic speculation for the untidy nuances of reality. And in uncertain times, it’s human nature to seek rationales that confirm our biases in the face of uncomfortable events.  

“You don’t have to have a conspiracy to have people in power take advantage of a situation,” I responded. “In this case, Bin Laden handed George Bush a carte blanche to beef up American military might and, by the way, enhance his own political fortunes while he was at it.”

He still did not look convinced. “But starting this ‘war on terrorism’ has worked out so perfectly for Bush to take control of the oil pipeline through Afghanistan, to attack Iraq, (a prescient remark, as this conversation took place a year before the invasion) and many other things! You know, this whole thing is about oil, about making sure that America controls the world oil supply.”  

“Well, even if that’s true, that doesn’t mean that 9/11 was the work of the CIA,” I countered. “You don’t need a conspiracy, anyway, when you hold most of the cards.”

By this time, our talk was attracting the attention of others. I was suddenly aware of a marked hush from our fellow passengers as they strained to catch our words. Even the young boy sitting several seats down kept craning his neck around at us in curiosity. Across the aisle, a slightly built, sandy-haired man with freckles cocked an avid ear. He spoke up.  

“Do you know who Lyndon La Rouche is?” he called over to me in English.  

I groaned inwardly. Lyndon La Rouche had been around since my college days; at that time, the perennial presidential candidate was spouting ultra-leftwing rhetoric. In 2002 he was riding the coattails of the extreme right. Later, he became a full-throated supporter of Trump. I had long ago concluded that La Rouche was either a nut or an opportunist. Or both. I said as much to the man across the aisle. 

He was taken aback, but recovered. He fervently informed me that La Rouche had information that 9/11 was the work of the CIA. I bit back the comment that this didn't enhance the claim’s credibility and said politely, “Well, it could be the CIA, but I doubt it.”

By this time the train had taken on new passengers. The sturdy young German with ash-blond hair and blue eyes who had sat down catty corner from me a few minutes before stopped pretending to read his science fiction novel. He laid it on the empty seat between himself and the Palestinian, and interjected mildly, “Probably nobody will ever know exactly who did it, but the important point is that those who have power will use any situation to their own ends.”

At this the sandy-haired man picked up his attaché case and jumped across the aisle to take the seat next to the German, excusing himself perfunctorily for the intrusion. We all took a moment to introduce ourselves. Josef, the La Rouche partisan, was a businessman from Switzerland. Berndt was a computer scientist from Germany. The young Palestinian, whose name was Nimmer, was a student. He veered the conversation onto another tack. Leaning forward in his seat, elbows planted on his knees, he pronounced: 

“Well, you know it’s not just Bush. He’s being pushed by the American Jews. They are the biggest influence on U.S. policy. Did you know there are over two hundred Jews in the U.S. Congress?”

Uh-oh. All of a sudden, the rift between Nimmer and myself yawned measurably wider. I sighed inwardly at this all too common conflation of Jews and Israel, as if  “International Jewry” were anything like a monolithic, indivisible entity.

“I have a hard time believing that figure, but even if there were that many Jews in the U.S. Congress, that doesn’t mean that they would all support current Israeli policy.” (My assertion was probably over-optimistic.) “After all, I’m Jewish, and I don’t support it,” I argued.

Nimmer’s eyes bugged open and he fairly jumped out of his seat, thunderstruck. “You’re Jewish?” he cried in astonishment.  

“Yes, I am,” I replied smugly.

He subsided speechless, but I could tell by his smile that the revelation had intrigued him.

Now Josef took up the tired refrain. “Well, maybe Jews don’t formally control U.S. politics, but I’m a businessman and I know about the power of networks. Jews have a lot of control over the world economy because they form a network. It’s just a fact that they control ninety five percent of international banking and trade.” 

Nimmer nodded in agreement, but at this Berndt sprang out of his seat between the two to take the one next to me. Now he was facing the others. “First of all,” he began, “that is a completely discredited idea that’s been spread ever since the Russian Czar published the Protocols of Zion. He wanted to divide Russian Christians and Jews so he could suppress political unrest. It was a case of divide and conquer.”  

I sank back in my seat to watch Nimmer and the Swiss take this in. They were rapt, held by force of the German’s eloquence.  

“Second of all, that Jews were historically concentrated in banking was due to almost two thousand years of anti-Semitism in Europe, because they were denied the right to work in other trades. Since the Church condemned usury, it was left to the Jews to provide the necessary service of loaning money. And conveniently play the scapegoat for all the resentments of the poor and middle classes.”  

Now I was rapt, not because any of this was new to me—it wasn’t—but because I was struck by the irony of this young German, who physically fit the “Aryan” stereotype, delivering an erudite lecture on the history and role of anti-Semitism in Europe. Germany had come a long way. 

Josef was pensive; perhaps Berndt’s cogency was forcing the Swiss to reconsider his prejudices. But Nimmer appeared unmoved.  

It was incumbent on me to back Berndt up. “You know,” I inserted, “The access of Jews to positions of power is largely a myth. Hollywood may be the one exception, and that isn’t exactly an industry that can control world politics, like oil. But there is one ethnic group that, given the historical record, could be seen as conspiring to control the world.” 

They looked at me quizzically. 

“That’s the conspiracy of whites of European origin to control peoples of color.” Which included our entire little group, except Nimmer. While the two Europeans digested this statement, Nimmer burst out in startled laughter. Perspectives shifted with an almost audible creak. 

Josef turned to Nimmer. “What do you think about Arafat? Is he the best person to lead Palestine during this crisis? He’s not much of a democrat. Why don’t the Palestinians ask for more of a voice?”

Nimmer agreed that Arafat was no democrat. “But if you held an election right now, Hamas would win. (Hamas did win in 2006.) In this environment, people have been driven to the extremes. Radical fundamentalism will only go away when there is peace.”

“How is peace ever going to come about?” I asked skeptically.

“The only solution is one state for both Israelis and Palestinians. Only when we live as neighbors, when my children grow up playing with Jewish children, will there be peace.”

Now it was my turn to be astonished. This was a remarkable statement from someone who had been venting anti-Semitic propaganda moments before. And I was struck by how it echoed Aviva’s words to me on the same question. 

“Well, Jews and Arabs are, after all, brothers,” I observed. But this was going too far for Nimmer.

“No, we’re not,” he rejoined testily. “We’re cousins.”  

I laughed, “In any case, we’re family.” 

Nimmer acknowledged this with a nod. 

My stepfather and his wife Shirley had made bigoted statements about Arabs in my presence—literally using the term, “dirty Arabs.” (They failed to register the unintended irony, given how often “dirty” has been applied to Jews.) They would no doubt recoil at the idea of Palestinians living on an equal basis with Israelis. Ironically, they would never consider themselves racists. “What about discrimination against Arabs? Wouldn’t that be a problem in a unified state?” I asked. 

“Not really,” Nimmer answered. “I have a friend, a fellow student here in Germany, who is an Israeli Arab. When I asked him what it was like to live together with the Jews, he said, ‘ganz normal.’ He had no problems; he likes being an Israeli. But he still calls himself a ‘Palestinian.’ On the other hand, maybe a unified state would not be so good for the Jews. ” 

“Why is that?” I asked.

“It’s a problem of demographics. Palestinian families tend to have twelve, thirteen children. It wouldn’t be long before Palestinians were the majority. We would benefit from a democratic political system.”

A disquieting thought. Would democracy be used to destroy democracy? What if fundamentalist Islam took control of the political process in a unified Israeli-Palestinian state, following the demographic ascendance of an embittered Palestinian majority? Israeli democracy is increasingly threatened by Jewish fundamentalism; Islamic fundamentalism could deliver the coup de grâce. And in a battle between two competing theocratic ideologies, what would happen to reason, science and due process? Suddenly the field of ideals was strewn with mines. I expressed my qualms to Nimmer.  

“You know,” he mused. “Before this Intifada and Sharon, I couldn’t care less about religion. I never even read the Koran. But now I have begun to study it, and Islam has become very important to me.” 

Islam and radical Islam is not the same thing, just like Judaism and Orthodox fundamentalism are not to be confused with each other. Or Christianity and rightwing evangelicalism. I hoped Nimmer wasn't conflating them.

“Do you know what “jihad” means?” Nimmer asked the three of us. 

No one was sure how to reply. 

“Holy War?” Josef finally hazarded a guess.

“The fight against injustice,” Nimmer declared. “That’s what it means.” 

I needed to get better clarity on Nimmer’s definition of “Jihad.” “OK. I can understand fighting against injustice, but what about the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Was that jihad?”

“Of course!” Nimmer answered. “Rushdie blasphemed. That was an injustice. It had to be fought against.” 

Oh, dear. How could such a nice, intelligent young man justify the call to kill a writer because of his views? I leaned back at a loss for words. Josef, bless his soul, jumped in here to defend free speech (it almost made up for his anti-Semitic nonsense earlier in the conversation.) I no longer remember exactly what he said. Berndt tried to see it Nimmer’s way. “Well, here in Germany, if you say something like ‘the Holocaust never happened’, you can be thrown into jail. Certain things should not be said.”  

Would I, a Jew, be called upon to defend the right to free speech of Holocaust deniers? I didn’t want to get tangled in that thicket of thorns. “Yes, but even if someone would be thrown into jail for saying that here, he wouldn’t be killed! Salman Rushdie was under a death sentence decreed by the Ayatollah Khomeni. Just imagine if we lived in a society where we would fear being killed if we said what we believed! For one thing, we could never have had the conversation we have had here today.”

That punctuated the moment. We smiled at each other. Just then, the train pulled into the Stuttgart station and we each grabbed our luggage, preparing to disembark. Then we stood in a circle, blocking the aisle, as the train slowed to a stop. We grasped each other's hands as if reluctant to break our connection.  

Josef, Berndt and Nimmer disappeared into the crowd across the vast, echoing hall, each going a different way. It had been exhilarating, this conversation between strangers. We were foreigners to each other, sometimes on opposite sides of a divide, yet we had much in common. The little universe of the train, suspended between the defining bonds of place, had given us the opportunity to meet on the fragile and precious ground of a shared humanity. We were part of the family of ordinary people of all nations, genders, religions and philosophies who, in spite of our differences, want peace and understanding to reign in our world. 

The four of us had taken a step toward that goal, by listening to each other and speaking sincerely, even when confronted with ideas that we found repugnant. Mutual respect had carried us forward onto a field where we could, at least temporarily, suspend our preconceived notions about The Other. It’s the only place where minds can open and hearts be won.