I am just so appalled at what is going on in Israel/Palestine, and the reactions to it. I refuse to take sides, even though my heritage is as a Romanian Jewish New Yorker. Taking sides is to totally misunderstand what is happening. Both sides co-create the ongoing tragedy.

It isn’t a matter of who is the more evil. What is evil is not the people, it is the ideas they are all caught up in. It is the way each side reacts to the other, and this is a pattern that really is a disease of the human spirit. We are all one people: the humans. My view of the only real solution is true peace, where both sides learn to forgive each other, probably in a “truth and reconciliation” process, and become a single, powerful, prosperous nation. Seems impossible, but it’s is necessary!!!

Below is an extract from my book eGaia, Growing a peaceful, sustainable Earth through communications“ p. 170.

The following includes extracts from a book by two people who have been involved at close quarters (Bassam Abu-Sharif and Uzi Mahnaimi, Tried by Fire, The searing true story of two men at the heart of the struggle between the arabs and the jews, Little, Brown and Co., 1995.)

Bassam Abu-Sharif is a Palestinian who changed from being an active terrorist/freedom fighter (depending upon your perspective) to leading the internal Palestinian struggle to start the peace process. Uzi Mahnaimi is an Israeli who was an intelligence officer and became a journalist working for a peaceful settlement.

The Palestinian perspective: From the Palestinian point of view, the Israelis have expelled most of them from their land, and through their settlements are continuing to do so. The Palestinian’s violence is a reaction of despair, which, although arguably self-destructive, they see as desperately defensive.

Bassam: “Until the Zionists came, the Abu-Sharif family had lived in Jerusalem for the better part of 500 years.”

The Israeli perspective: From the Israeli point of view, the Arabs are living in land which was historically Jewish. This is the only place where they can be safe from the persecutions they suffered in the past. If the Arabs would only let them be, there would be no problems. But if not, they will show that they cannot just be slaughtered as in the Holocaust. The Israelis retaliate strongly to any attack on them. They see this as entirely defensive.

Uzi: “Gideon [Uzi’s father] reached manhood with one very strong conviction: that to survive as a Jew meant learning how to defend yourself – to the death.”

The two sides have entirely different world views, in which the other side is demonised. Many, perhaps most, members of each community have almost no contact with the other.

A Palestinian explains: “I grew up in Gaza hating all Jews, believing that they were bloodsuckers, that they had robbed me of my land, my rights and my freedom and that they killed my fellow men. That was before I met my first Jew.”

Uzi: “I knew nothing of the Arabs except that they were all demons. … Like all Israelis, I had been brought up in the Arab-entirely-wrong/ Israeli-entirely-right school of history. …The dislike and distrust imparted by this teaching was compounded by the almost total lack of contact between the two communities. …Most people in Israel know nothing about Arab people, and care less. They have no Arab friends. …They think themselves superior in every way to the Arabs.”

In the January, 2001 election, “The despair and anxiety that possessed the Israeli public – and the total lack of awareness of Palestinian pain and suffering – are what has put Sharon in power”. Neither side has any sense of the other as ‘ordinary people just trying to get on with their lives’, the way they see themselves.

From the point of view of someone sympathetic to both sides, they seem like cousins who have much in common, but have fallen out. There is an ongoing cycle whereby violence on one side creates a violent reaction on the other side that creates another violent reaction, and so on. They react with shock at each new ‘outrage’ from the other side as more evidence to confirm that the others are truly demons. Yet neither side sees what they are doing as connected to what the other is doing to them. Both sides believe that the other side will respond only to force.

Both sides are traumatised and drained of resources by the war effort and the destruction. The chairman of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme says that ‘martyrs’ (‘suicide bombers’ to the Israelis) almost without exception had suffered severe trauma as children, watched their parents killed or humiliated or their homes destroyed – and felt they had to combat their sense of helplessness and victimisation on behalf of their nation. (Note that this is the answer to the question “What kind of person could commit such atrocities?”)

Very few on either side can really envisage the prospects of true peace. Yet a unified Middle East, with its oil wealth added to Israeli technical and industrial ability could be a world power to reckon with.

Bassam: “Peace should not mean only the end of war. At the same time it must mean the development of joint economic, social and political programmes. Israel could never fully become a part of the Middle East unless and until it made peace with the Palestinians. …It is through a self-governing Palestinian state… that Israelis will eventually drive to shop in the Souq al-Hamadiyyeh, the magical ancient central market in Damascus.”

There is a lot to be learned from this example, which applies to very many other human conflicts. First, there are two communities which are at the same time intimately connected and yet with very limited understanding of each other. Thus each can build up a view of the other’s motivations which the other would totally reject. Each community, within itself, is continually regenerating that false view of the other community. Strong emotions stop both sides from even considering the View of the other side.

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