Jews and Christians from Leeds discuss the Israel/Palestine issue and visit Israel and Palestine together

Discussions concerning Israel/Palestine (Mike Fligg)

The Israeli–Palestinian impasse is something that has engaged much of my time, energy and thought. An active member of the Leeds Jewish community, I fervently believe that Israel is an amazing place, a thriving liberal democracy, a real ethnic and cultural hotchpotch and one that enjoys multi-billion-pound trade links with the UK, Europe and beyond; I believe she has an absolute right to live in freedom from terror and the threat of terror; I believe she has an equal right to defend herself – robustly, when necessary – from those who, since long before 1948, have wished the Jewish people harm.

Zionist though I am, I also harbour a genuine sorrow for all those countless Palestinians, Muslim and Christian alike, trapped in a political situation beyond their control. I feel a similar sadness for the millions of Israelis and Palestinians who, for their respective reasons, see no partner at the moment for reconciliation and peace.

The so-called Peace Process hitherto has clearly not worked: the summits, the signings of pieces of paper, the spotlight handshakes for the media … I should therefore like to share an alternative approach to peace in the form of ideas and suggestions offered in a book that our study group has looked at in depth. I must state at the outset that I do not agree with everything in this book; nor was it the only text we examined. It was, however, the one that really made us think, the one that strove to be scrupulously fair, as well as sympathetic, to both sides; that debunked the notion that being pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian were somehow zero-sum political games. The book I refer to is Embracing Israel/Palestine, by Rabbi Michael Lerner. ²

The first sections of Lerner’s text are an attempt at a very even-handed history of the Jewish people, of that tiny area often referred to The Holy Land, and of the founding and continuation of the State of Israel. ³ He does not shy away from the long centuries of Christian anti-Semitism, from the continual Arab rejection of the very idea of a Jewish state or from the many opportunities the Arab world has missed for peace. Nor, on the other hand, does he spare any criticism of what he sees as Israel’s overlong stay and mismanagement in the West Bank, the mess he thinks it made of disengaging from Gaza, the inherent dangers posed by the Settler Movement and the rise of the Israeli ‘messianic right’.

It was the second part of Lerner’s book that really quite transfixed me – for three reasons: firstly, because it proposed to me, in an explicit, obvious form, a diagnosis which hitherto I had merely intuited; secondly, because it next made the leap that this same condition applied also to another people, not just to my own; and, thirdly, because it then closed the syllogism, so to speak, by deducing where the solution to the problem lay.

The Jewish people, says Lerner, have suffered such a protracted and miserable time through centuries of anti-Semitism that not only do Israelis have a national fear of being taken advantage of, they are now actually suffering from a kind of national post-traumatic stress-disorder. Some – though not this author – might feel inclined to question the premise that a condition normally applied to individuals might affect a national psyche; furthermore, they might disagree with Lerner’s further assertion that Palestinians, for whom tribal honour and fear of losing face are real issues, are suffering from a similar malaise. Suffice it to say that Lerner’s hypothesis is well evidenced as well as plausible.

I am not sure, on religious or on historical grounds, that I can accept Lerner’s proposition that Palestinian suffering compares to Jewish suffering, though I do accept that Palestinians have suffered and that they still do. For Israelis – and for me – Yom Ha’Atzma’ut, Israel Independence Day, is a day of celebration, the symbolic end to a nightmare and the realization of a dream; for Palestinians, it is Naqba Day, the Day of Catastrophe.

Lerner, then, attempts to tackle at root the malaise affecting both Israelis and Palestinians, and Chapter 7 onwards in his book is devoted to suggestions for ‘healing the traumas of both peoples’. The end-game is ‘to humanise the Other’; ⁴ but the challenge is that one cannot do this when one is still traumatized – hence the need for healing to take place first.

There has, says Rabbi Lerner, to be a two-pronged approach: a massive public campaign to combat negative worldviews of otherness; and, at the same time, traumatized individuals to be helped by sympathetic, one-to-one intervention from other individuals sufficiently generous and understanding to see which factors in people’s background are making them the people they are.

As part of combating negative views of ‘the other’ in Israel and Palestine, the study group supported the idea that Israelis and Palestinians should be taught in their schools about one another; they should be enabled to put themselves into one another’s shoes and to understand each other’s historical narrative. Our group in Leeds unanimously agreed that all expressions from either side of hate or of demonization, spoken or written, in textbooks or in the media, should stop.

Michael Lerner advocates a hands-on, bottom-up, people-based approach to dialogue, where healing and learning about the other are of the essence. He is equally insistent, however, that understanding someone’s mentality is never an excuse for condoning their involvement in violent or unethical behaviour such as terrorism.

Rabbi Lerner presents a nine-point proposal for true peace between Israelis and Palestinians. For the record, I must also tell you that, as things stand, some of these appear to me premature, some a little pie-in-the-sky and others, from Israel’s point of view, downright dangerous:

Israel and Palestine to be mutually recognized, with borders more or less based on the pre-1967 Green Line. Concurrently, peace treaties to be made between Israel and all the other Arab states;

Education about ‘the other’ in Israel and Palestine (David Kibble)

If education about ‘the other’ is seen to be an important vehicle for generating peace we need, first, to look at current practice in schools on both sides of the Green Line. In 2013 a study was published which had looked closely at portrayals of ‘the other’ in both Israeli and Palestinian school textbooks. ⁵

What conclusions did this biggest study ever undertaken come to? It suggested that, although demonization of ‘the other’ in textbooks was rare, books in both Palestine and Israel presented ‘unilateral national narratives that present the other as enemy [and] chronicle negative actions of the other’. Historical events, it continued, are selected so that each community’s national narrative is reinforced. Overall, the report concluded, the presentations given to children in both communities are typical of those in societies in conflict and ‘can be obstacles to peace as they engender fear, mistrust, misunderstanding and dehumanization of the other’.

Earlier studies of Israeli and Palestinian school textbooks offer examples of how negative images of ‘the other’ are given. In Palestinian textbooks, for example, there are maps which show Palestine as covering both the West Bank and Israel. ⁶ Students are taught that Israel was founded in 1948 simply because ‘the Zionist gangs stole Palestine and expelled its people from their cities, their villages, their lands and their houses and established the state of Israel’. ⁷ Pictures tell their own story: in Palestinian textbooks students see bulldozers knocking down Palestinian homes and uprooting trees, refugee camps, Israeli settlements surrounded by barbed wire and Israeli soldiers questioning Palestinians and pointing guns towards them.

In 2012 Nurit Peled-Elhanan wrote a study which examined Israeli school textbooks: she found a correspondingly negative portrayal of Palestinians. She found that in a range of geography, history and civics textbooks there were no positive verbal or visual images of Palestinians; instead they were represented as terrorists, refugees or primitive farmers. As in Palestinian textbooks, there were inaccurate maps: maps of Israel often include the West Bank. Peled-Elhanan concluded that Israeli students are presented with a picture of a Palestinian people who ‘cannot be viewed but as an obstacle or a threat to be overcome or eliminated’. ⁸

It is not my purpose to offer an in-depth study of the issue of the content of school textbooks in Israel and Palestine, but it should be clear that there is a problem which has been identified by many concerning textbooks on both sides of the divide. ⁹ A recent documentary film evidencing how this translates into actual teaching in schools reinforces the point. ¹⁰ What is clear is that few Palestinian or Israeli children are taught to see things as their neighbour on the other side of the fence sees them. Until Israeli children begin to see things as their Palestinian neighbours see them, and until Palestinian children begin to see things as their Israeli neighbours see them, little progress will be made in developing peace between the two. Peace is not something that happens when political leaders sign a piece of paper but something that takes place when two communities begin to understand something about the other and when they begin to understand things from their point of view.

Some educators have tried to begin the process. Palestinian professor Sami Adwan and Israeli professor Daniel Bar-On produced a textbook that would help to develop mutual understanding. ¹¹ It was designed to be used by both Israeli and Palestinian children and students and enabled each to understand something of each other’s historical narrative. Despite being trialled in one school on each side of the divide, both governments have now banned the use of the book.

In 2015 when members of our Engagement Group asked Saeb Erekat, minister in the Palestinian Authority and its chief peace negotiator, whether he would support education about ‘the other’ in schools, with Israeli children learning about the Nakba and Palestinian children learning about the holocaust, he angrily retorted that he did not see why Palestinian children should learn about ‘their oppressors’. The implementation of education about ‘the other’ in Israel and Palestine is essential if peace is to be developed but there is clearly a long struggle ahead.

Jews and Christians visit Israel and Palestine together (David Kibble)

Just before Easter and Passover, 2014, two members of Saint George’s and two members of the local Jewish community visited Israel and Palestine together. The main aim of our visit was to talk to Israelis and Palestinians, to ask them how they saw the political situation and what thoughts they had on developing a peace process.

We gave ourselves some time to undertake what might be termed a number of tourist activities. We began the visit, for example, by walking down the Mount of Olives and following the Via Dolorosa; this enabled our Jewish colleagues to gain something of a Christian perspective. We also visited the Herzl Museum where we were treated to a multimedia presentation on the life of Theodor Herzl, one of the founders of modern Zionism.

No visit to Jerusalem would be complete without a visit to the Holocaust Museum. We had all visited it before, but it seemed particularly appropriate to visit it as Christians and Jews together. Some years previously a number from Saint George’s had been invited to join a trip to Auschwitz and other holocaust sites in Poland with their Jewish cousins. It was here in Poland that members of the church came to realize for the first time that the Church had a history of anti-Semitism.

Our final tourist activity was a visit to Hebron, site of the tombs of the patriarchs. We were all shocked to see a street in the city’s centre where netting had had to be erected over a market area because the nearby Jewish settler community would throw rubbish down from their settlement building which towered above it. We passed through the settlement saddened to see the large poster which read ‘Palestine Never Existed (and never will)’.

Our Jewish tour guide had arranged for us to meet a Palestinian lawyer with a practice in West Jerusalem on the second day of our visit. In the hour he spent talking with us he said things to us which we were to hear repeatedly from Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line. He told us, first, that Israel’s Declaration of Independence promised equal rights for all Israeli citizens but that Palestinian citizens suffered from discrimination and were seen as second class citizens. Secondly, and without any prompting from us, he said that education about ‘the other’ is needed in schools in both Israel and Palestine – and that more was probably needed on the Palestinian side. Thirdly, he said that Palestinians tended to operate on family and tribal bases: they needed, he said, to work more cooperatively as a people and to develop the skills of leadership.

One of the highlights for us was to meet with Professor Sami Adwan at Bethlehem University. While at the university we were told that there were some in Palestine who were against any peace process and that such people labelled peacemakers as ‘collaborators’.

We did see education about ‘the other’ being put into practice in a very practical way. The Hand in Hand school in Jerusalem is one of about seven schools in Israel that educate Jewish and Arab children together, five of which are run by the Hand in Hand organization. We visited an infant classroom where two teachers, one Arab and one Jewish, taught children from both communities in one classroom. As we toured the school, we saw a display of posters which indicated that some of the older children had been learning about one another’s historical narratives. Some of the posters depicted the Holocaust and the Nakba side by side. A while after we had left, conflict erupted in Gaza. The parents of the children and students refused to take sides and offer the violent response that sometimes took place in Jerusalem. Instead, they marched silently together with Arab parents carrying placards that read jiraan as-salaam (neighbours for peace) and Jewish parents carrying placards with its Hebrew equivalent.

As we toured around and talked to a range of people, we asked about peace negotiations and about politics. Among those we talked to there was universal support for the concept of a ‘bottom-up’ approach to peace that we in our study group had discussed. There was also universal support for the idea that children on both sides of the divide should be taught about ‘the other’. Among the Palestinians we met, there was universal acceptance of our Arab lawyer’s belief that Palestinians needed to take more responsibility.

Our study group’s reading of Michael Lerner suggested that Israelis and Palestinians need to be healed from post-traumatic stress. This was a theme taken up when we visited a Palestinian non-governmental organization in Bethlehem, the Holy Land Trust. The Trust is involved in running leadership programmes for Palestinians, including one especially for Palestinian women, training in the use of non–violence and in running music workshops for children. Each year it organizes a big Bait Lahm (Bethlehem) festival in the city. Significantly for us, however, it has now started to run a programme which aims to allow communities on both sides of the Green Line to come together and share their frustrations and hurts. The aim is to promote healing from post-traumatic stress. Their leaders told us that in the past they had focused on political-type activities but had come to realize, like Michael Lerner, that peace would only come when both communities had experienced healing.

Our visit together had been an enormous success. We had all learnt something new and some of the thinking we had developed in our Engagement Group discussions together had been echoed among the Israelis and Palestinians we met.

Conclusions (David Kibble and Mike Fligg)

What, then, of our study group? We have come to believe that a ‘bottom-up’ approach, where grassroots participants rather than official leaders and politicians set the agenda, is a necessity for the development of peace. We have also come to believe that an education about ‘the other’ which seeks to enable each side to understand how the other sees things will help not simply to educate but also to generate the ‘bottom-up’ approach to peacemaking that we have come to espouse as a group. Interestingly, support for such a ‘bottom-up’ approach and for education about ‘the other’ found universal support by those who visited Israel and the West Bank on their fact-finding visit.

What have we achieved as a group? We have visited Israel and the West Bank together and have spoken to those who live there. Here in Leeds we have studied and discussed in depth several topics, papers and textbooks. Our views have shifted; they have developed; they have become more nuanced; they are more informed. We have done exactly what we would wish more Israelis and Palestinians to do: we have come to understand more about ‘the other’.

Do Israeli–Palestinian dialogue and cooperation for peace and reconciliation exist at the moment? If you trust the media, with their own agenda and their black-and-white presentation of Israelis and Palestinians as one of unrelieved fighting, bitterness, hopelessness and mistrust, you might think not – though obviously all these elements are there. But is there another story? Is there evidence in Israel and the West Bank of the grassroots, bottom-up approach to peace and reconciliation that our group takes? A quick Google search of ‘Arab-Israeli peace-projects’ will produce a list of almost 40 such organizations. ¹² Such groups in Israel and the West Bank are, we truly believe, a tribute to the victory of the human spirit over adversity. They implicitly and explicitly recognize, as analysts such as Rabbi Lerner insist, that when the rifts are raw and deep and both parties continue to be traumatized, healing, which best begins with listening and genuine dialogue, has to be a priority if peace is to be achieved.