peace – Page 8

AJD on Road to Peace

Road to Peace: left to right, Josh Morry of the Arab Jewish Dialogue on Campus, and AJD’s Howard Morry and Ab Freig. (photo by Rebeca Kuropatwa)

Founded in 2006, the Arab Jewish Dialogue (AJD) is a national organization based in Winnipeg with the goal of improving relations and respect between Arabs and Jews through dialogue and education. On Feb. 23, AJD co-founder and co-chair Ab Freig, co-chair Howard Morry and AJD on Campus founder Josh Morry spoke at the University of Manitoba on The Road to Peace in the Arab Israeli Conflict – A Conversation with the Arab Jewish Dialogue.

Of AJD on Campus compared to AJD, Josh Morry said, “We, too, discuss issues that are difficult and that often make us feel uncomfortable. The only difference is some policy statements that make our group more conducive to operating on campus.

“One of the things we added to our constitution, and I believe you can find it on the website, is that we abhor the use of name calling. Not only does this undermine policies, but it stops people from being able to engage in positive dialogue.”

The core campus group consists of six Arab members and six Jewish members. Plans are in the works for the organization to host a Middle East feast at the U of M.

Since AJD on Campus formed, Morry said, “I’ve seen firsthand a reduction in the hateful speech that undermines the policies. Jewish students feel much safer on campus now.”

About Arab and Jewish relations, Freig said, “We talk about what is the best case scenario: living in peace and harmony, prosperity, cooperation. We talk about that and understand it. Then we talk about the obstacles and how we can overcome them. We both need to identify what’s best for us.

“That’s the basics of what we do. In order for us to do that, we needed to dig deeper. No one seems to dig deeper to understand. So, I’ll meet with people and start with a discussion on how to take it from here.”

Freig has witnessed how what starts in the dialogue group passes onto children, cousins, and further.

Howard Morry provided an example of how, simply by acting from a humanistic level, he was able to restore trust within the group after one of the times Israel sent its military into Gaza. He told those gathered that the Jewish members were sorry for any loss of life during the operation. “Once I said that, it was as if the oxygen was put back in the room,” he explained. “The people that were sitting cross-armed changed their posture to a more open one. And then, continuing with this … we actually had a very productive talk – politically, strategically, and at every level. But, until that moment, we had lost all the trust in that room and we couldn’t move any further.”

Recently, AJD has been talking a lot about ISIS, working to understand who is supporting them, how they are getting the money and what is driving them. And, because of the violence that happened in France with Charlie Hebdo, they also took some time to discuss the Prophet Mohammed.

“There was a Muslim Arab in the group who explained [the concerns] to the other members,” said Freig. “We issued a statement. We condemn violence and we support freedom of expression and [the] press. We put together a press release, signed by the Jewish and Arab members.”

While AJD has been going strong for nine years, creating the same kind of openness and trust within a university setting will be a challenge. “Unless you’re a really bad student, you’re not going to be part of this group for nine years, because you graduate,” said Josh Morry. “I think before we expand across Canada, we have to expand across Winnipeg. So, it would be nice to a get a student here to set up a group at the University of Winnipeg (U of W).”

He noted that it may be easier for AJD on Campus to expand to schools on the East Coast. “People are much more eager to join student groups and get involved there,” he said. “Our model is easy to replicate. The constitution is easy to duplicate, using very general terms.”

Freig stressed that, within both groups, members do not “agree on everything, [but] we don’t really need to, to have a dialogue. We discuss difficult topics and keep talking about it, and hash over the issues until we get to an understanding. That’s what we try to achieve.

“It’s not necessarily an agreement, but an understanding – understanding each other’s narratives. There are some issues we are in too deep with, so we have one meeting after another, trying to get the other person to understand. If you don’t understand where the other person’s coming from, you won’t ever get over being at odds with one another. We still have work to do.”

Howard Morry added, “One of the great gifts of this group is that it gives you a chance to explain things more than once. In this group, we approach issues in different ways. Over time, listening to each other, there’s an understanding with some members, but not with others.

“I’ll tell you that the happiest moment I think I’ve had is when I’ve said something the 16th time over a two-year period, and I had one of the members come up to me and say, ‘Howard, you just changed my life.’”

Both groups hope to inspire the broader Canadian population with how well people – not only Arabs and Jews – can get along by speaking to each other respectfully, not jumping the gun, and not just trying to be right. They see their groups as a learning tool for life, teaching how to get along with others and to build trust.

“Our intention is to extend throughout Canada and then maybe we will inspire people in the Middle East,” said Freig.

Co-chair Morry added, “While we want there to be peace, our group is focused on Canadian Jews and Arabs.… We were concerned when we first started, not wanting to become like Europe. There was a lot more violence and disagreement and no dialogue at all.

“The idea is that when you get dialogue amongst the people who’ve chosen to live in Canada, over time, it will hopefully influence the rest [of the world].”

Rebeca Kuropatwa is a Winnipeg freelance writer.

An accord for the ages

Here’s a scenario to consider: What if Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu came to the Knesset with a peace accord, approved by all its neighbors, that provided for the cessation of war, the recognition of the state of Israel, land swaps to create coherent borders and the dismantling of settlements?

What if Netanyahu said the final decision on the agreement would be up to the Knesset and he would remain on the sidelines, campaigning neither for nor against the agreement? Would the Knesset endorse the deal?

At first blush, such a scenario sounds farfetched, it could never happen. But, 35 years ago, that is exactly what occurred.

Former prime minister Menachem Begin came to the Knesset with a peace agreement with Egypt. He was reluctant to abandon settlements in the Sinai, but he let members of the Knesset vote on the agreement and did not campaign against it. They endorsed the deal.

The 1979 Camp David Accords proved to be more durable than many expected, surviving the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, the Lebanon war, the Gaza conflicts and the Arab Spring. Also, the accord laid the foundation for an agreement with Jordan that is now marking its 20th anniversary.

In Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin and Sadat at Camp David (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), New Yorker staff writer and Pulitzer Prize-winner Lawrence Wright goes back to the difficult negotiations in September 1978 that led to the reluctant handshake between Sadat and Begin, and the signing of the accord on the White House lawn in March 1979.

U.S. president Jimmy Carter brought the Egyptian president and the Israeli prime minister together after Sadat took the first courageous step toward peace – a visit to Jerusalem in 1977. The three leaders and some of their most senior aides met at Camp David, a secluded country retreat about 100 kilometres outside Washington, D.C. They stayed for almost two weeks, stepping away from the whirlwind of day-to-day events to focus exclusively on a framework for peace.

A playwright and screenwriter, Wright effectively recreates the moments of high drama during the talks, weaving personal histories, sacred mythologies and past events into a detailed account of the bare-knuckle bargaining session. He also fleshes out the secondary characters, the members of the Israeli, Egyptian and U.S. bargaining teams who played a role in reaching an agreement. In the acknowledgements, Wright says he initially wrote a play about the negotiation, but he could not squeeze all the interesting characters into a 90-minute play.

The evocative portrayal of Moshe Dayan – the Israeli-born warrior who came to personify the country’s most spectacular military accomplishment in 1967 as well as its most significant loss in 1973 – is especially memorable. Dayan is described alternately as a cold-blooded, calculating fighter and the government’s most creative thinker in pursuit of peace.

The book offers a rare glimpse inside the world of high-pressure international negotiations and sheds light on the difficult relationship that Carter continues to have with Israel. That alone would make the book worthwhile. Yet Thirteen Days is more than just an historical account. Delving into how the Camp David Accords were reached inevitably fires up the imagination to think about what is possible.

Could these achievements ever be repeated again?

Wright shines a spotlight on some extraordinary aspects of the negotiations. The U.S. president, who was prepared to dedicate an inordinate amount of time to grappling with the competing interests in the Middle East, had come to the table with little more than a biblical understanding of the issues and virtually no experience in foreign policy. Yet, he shared with the Egyptian president a similar upbringing, religious devotion and commitment to service in the military. An easy rapport evolved between the two men.

Carter had a more difficult time finding a personal connection with Begin, who was scarred by the Holocaust and hardened by his experiences fighting British authorities in Palestine before the establishment of the state.

The isolation of Camp David allowed negotiators to work creatively and take risks that might not have been ventured in the public eye, Wright writes. But being forced together also had negative consequences. The intimacy at times fed hostility, rather than creating trust, and almost torpedoed the talks.

The process of negotiating, ridded with cultural misunderstandings and political miscalculations, was particularly challenging. Sadat and Begin had significantly different approaches to the talks. Sadat came with an agenda of unrealistic demands, but was willing to compromise. Begin came to listen and react. For several days, he adamantly refused to concede anything.

In his naïveté, Carter expected the two warring sides to reach an accord on their own. His opening gambit was to just bring the two sides together and step back. He assumed they would resolve their historic differences once they met and shared their history, their suffering and their dreams. How wrong he was.

Their response at critical moments was a study in contrasts. Where Sadat, a visionary, would become emotional when his idealism was challenged, Begin would become colder and more analytical. Begin kept his eye on details, meticulously dissecting every nuance in anticipation of what could be lurking around the corner. “Both desired peace,” recalled Ezer Weizman, who was Israel’s defence minister at the time. “But Sadat wanted to take it by storm and Begin preferred to creep forward inch by inch.”

Carter eventually realized he had to take the lead. But it was not until the sixth day of negotiations that he introduced a framework for peace that was to be the springboard for negotiated compromises and a final deal.

Despite the hurdles, somewhere there was magic. They reached an agreement.

Wright suggests that domestic political considerations played a significant role. The political cost for all three leaders increased as the negotiations stretched on. Carter, who staked his reputation on bringing the conflict to an end, threatened to break relations with Sadat or Begin if either leader walked away. The threats kept the two wily politicians at the table, despite their personal animosities.

Another pivotal issue was how the three leaders responded to matters related to the Palestinians. Sadat was their self-appointed representative at the talks. But, at a crucial moment, he pushed their interests aside. It was a decision that cost him his life. At the time, however, the prospect of regaining full sovereignty over the Sinai Peninsula was just too tantalizing; leaving the Palestinians on the sidelines enabled the accords to be signed.

Wright observes that there has not been a single violation of the terms of agreement, but he leaves the impression that the Camp David Accords offer little to guide those now searching for more peace. The accords have saved lives and defused tensions in a volatile neighborhood, but the agreement appears to be a unique set of circumstances in history at a time of powerful personalities that probably will not be replicated in our times.

Media consultant Robert Matas, a former Globe and Mail journalist, still reads books. Thirteen Days in September is available at the Isaac Waldman Jewish Public Library. To reserve it, or any other book, call 604-257-5181 or email [email protected]. To view the catalogue, visit jccgv.com and click on Isaac Waldman Library.

The word “Palestine”

Does Palestine exist? A blogger on the often-provocative website JewsNews doesn’t think so. A package of dates marked “Palestine” must be “magic,” he says, since there’s no such country. And this echoes Moshe Arens’ trotting out of the old canard that Palestine doesn’t exist, but Jordan – the real Palestinian state – already does.

There are at least two issues at stake for Israelis: legitimacy and security. Yet a closer look reveals that neither concern is quite what it seems.

Part of the reason that many Jews have been allergic to the word Palestine is that it has long been used to negate the legitimacy of Israel. In this view, the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River (or west of that, to the Green Line, depending on one’s view) is like a blue and white transparent film revealing a red, white and green film, containing a different narrative beneath. Since time is linear and space is finite, there seems to be room for only one people and one narrative on that tiny slice of Middle East territory. One cannot reverse the flow of the sands of time. Israel exists, so Palestine, the logic goes, cannot.

But, surprise! Those who would wish to roll back history and replace Israel with Palestine, as the Palestinian national movement claimed to want to do for decades, have now indicated – at least via their official leaders – that they will be satisfied with a mere 22 percent of the land they originally claimed as theirs. A state of Palestine, in other words, need no longer negate the symbolic right of Israel to exist.

Complicating all of this, though, is the one little word one often hears from Israeli officials, and which every state and all people deserve: security. For example, Bibi Netanyahu, in a video posted Dec. 27 to the Prime Minister of Israel’s Facebook page, contained an address to an enthusiastically nodding U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham.

In the span of a few seconds, Bibi managed to call out Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat’s rhetorical hyperbole (Erekat’s comparison of ISIS’s Islamic state desires with Bibi’s Jewish state utterances), while associating the Palestinian negotiator’s “incitement” with the throwing of a firebomb on an Israeli girl in the West Bank. The kicker: the folly of the Palestinians seeking to bring to the United Nations Security Council a proposal – a “diktat” Bibi calls it – containing provisions that “seek to undermine our security.”

The trouble with the security discourse is that, just as stating “there is no Palestine” (or “there is, but it’s in Jordan”), it tends to serve as a rhetorical trump card. We all deserve security but we also know that full and total security is ultimately elusive. Where security threats were traditionally measured solely in terms of territory, now security experts also think in terms of environmental safety, immigration and contagious diseases. There are always new threats on the horizon. All the while, we must recall that conventional security threats never really disappear – for anyone.

On top of all this we must ask whether the little girl who was tragically burned by the act of terrorism in the West Bank was in fact more secure by Israel holding onto that territory and moving its population there. Counterfactual reasoning is never foolproof, but one could certainly make the argument that occupying a hostile population for decades on end is itself a security liability, rather than a security guarantee.

Many have indeed made this argument. More than 100 retired Israeli generals, other high-ranking officers, Mossad officers and police chiefs have even told their prime minister as much, writing a letter last November urging him to “adopt the political-regional approach and begin negotiations with moderate Arab states and with the Palestinians (in the West Bank and in Gaza, too), based on the Saudi-Arab Peace Initiative.”

Obviously Israel wants security. So do the Palestinians. When it comes to the nasty world of international politics, there are no absolute security guarantees – but there are calculable risks. For starters, peace treaties tend to hold better than wishing that an occupied people will sit on their hands for decades. With 59 internal checkpoints in the West Bank, not counting the 40 near the entry to Israel at B’Tselem’s last count, I would even suggest that hoping that your own civilian population can move freely and safely within the occupied territory where an enemy population resides is where the magical thinking really lies.

So, as for that blogger and those dates, I would advise him to take a bite out of the dried fruit. I doubt that those dates are magical, but there is indeed a sweet spot that reveals the best chance for peace between two peoples vying for security and independence. And it doesn’t involve keeping the status quo going, unhappily ever after.

Mira Sucharov is an associate professor of political science at Carleton University. She blogs at Haaretz and the Jewish Daily Forward. A version of this article was originally published on haartez.com.

Nature knows no borders

Traveled thousands of miles

Inching my way

Between mothers, children, prayer books

Vying for space, so that I may touch

Your precious stones

Stones that have heard millions of tears

Stones that hold hope and anguish

Weeping and praying surround me

And I cannot hear my own sigh as I ask

Will you negotiate?

I plead

as I fold my scrap of paper

Tiptoeing upwards

to search for

a vacant space I ask

like so many before me

Can you make a miracle?

– Jerusalem 2013

Dawn has just broken. I’m walking along the beach, inhaling whiffs of sea spray. White Rock’s lights are fading in the distance, and ocean and skies are turning blue together against the backdrop of a glowing sunrise.

The hotel manager told me that if I rose early I would catch all of nature’s beauties. I’m not disappointed. Harbor seals are out fishing, birds of all shapes and sizes have begun their morning songs and skim the ocean for breakfast. A mother porpoise and her baby are playing, and fishing boats are gliding smoothly over the waves.

The only sounds are the whistling of crickets, high-pitched cries of seagulls and the rhythmic hiss of the surf. Once in a while, my laptop informs me of a new message but, fortunately, nature wins. I have the discipline to ignore it; nature wins.

This little corner of the world spells P-E-A-C-E.

The hotel has changed hands many times in the 30 years I’ve been coming here. Every visit has been different, with a purposeful or personal story.

Nature, though, is always consistent. Out in the natural world, I receive solace and my writer’s block dissolves, at least 99 percent of the time. This year, writing about peace feels like the one percent block. And an impossible task begs a purposeful visit.

The scenery is breathtaking, except for the tall unsightly steel object placed in the middle of water, a physical manifestation of the boundary between countries. I note that the boats are sailing to either side of the eyesore.

In the natural world, the skies and seas are open for birds and other creatures. No passports or border patrols needed. I am reminded of a 2012 BBC travel article, titled “Where birds know no borders.”

“Unrestricted movement between Israel and the Palestinian territories is not always possible for those on two feet,” the article reads. “But if you shift your gaze upwards, something entirely different comes into focus.”

A migration of a billion birds belonging to more than 540 species traverses through the skies each autumn and spring. Both governments have set up centres for avid birders who come from all over the world to see this spectacular sight.

Could this be a miracle, like the one I asked for last year at the Wall?

As I move my gaze away from the metal border structure and back to reality, I wonder if nature, prayer, music and dance can help us engage and connect with the world.

Can we create more connected global communities? Can we uncover commonalities that reduce conflicts? Can we build more peaceful nations? Miracles happen daily in nature. Look no further than the dove.

– Blaine, Wash., 2014

Jenny Wright is a writer, music therapist, children’s musician and recording artist.