Studies in the psychology of perception have shown that two people can observe the same phenomenon and nevertheless come to very different conclusions about what they have just experienced.
That seems to be the case for nine Oak Park and River Forest residents who are active in the movement to bring peace to what Christians call the Holy Land and are well read on the subject. Some agreed with former president Jimmy Carter’s argument in his latest book, Palestine Peace, Not Apartheid. Others criticized him. All responded with emotional intensity.
Blame
Carter writes, “Israel’s continued control and colonization of Palestinian land have been the primary obstacles to a comprehensive peace agreement in the Holy Land. In order to perpetuate the occupation, Israeli forces have deprived their unwilling subjects of basic human rights.” (pp. 208-209)
Some agree wholeheartedly with the 39th president. Rima Kapitan is an Oak Park resident and a lawyer. One of his parents is Palestinian. He says, “I blame the party [Israel] that is occupying Palestinian land and subjugating the Palestinian people. Even Hamas has proven far more willing to compromise and maintain ceasefires than have the Israeli settlers and the army.”
Robert Worely, a retired McCormick Seminary professor who taught at the Near East School of Theology in Beirut, got more specific. He blamed the “radical right-wing Zionists,” the Likud Party and right-wing Christian Fundamentalists for creating the present situation.
In contrast, Victor Mirelman, the rabbi at West Suburban Temple Har Zion in River Forest, said it is the leaders of the Arab world who are to blame. “It’s not Muslim culture but the leaders. Most Muslims in the Middle East want peace, good jobs, to put food on the table, progress, to make a living and get a good educations. It’s the leadership. It’s the fanatics who incite.”
Caren Van Slyke, who describes herself as an American Jew, is on the steering committee of the Committee for a Just Peace in Israel and Palestine (www.cjpip.org). She resisted assigning blame. “The blame game itself becomes an unending cycle,” she said. “Let’s not go there.”
Gary Gerson, rabbi at Oak Park Temple B’Nai Abraham Zion, agreed with Van Slyke but pleaded for an end to blaming Israel. He said, “[Carter] doesn’t mention the rockets that were launched from Gaza … or … from Lebanese territory by Hezbollah. He just sees that Israel is the cause of all the problems vis-a-vis the Palestinians. Carter lumps together targeted rocket attacks by Israel with Palestinian rocket attacks on innocent civilians.”
The facts
Gerson’s main critique of Carter is that the former president’s description of reality is simplistic and at times just plain wrong. For example, Gerson referred to Carter’s claim that Israel refused to accept any of the proposals Bill Clinton presented at Camp David, then quoted Dennis Ross, Clinton’s chief Middle East negotiator, as saying on CNN that Carter was wrong, that Israeli diplomats accepted the proposals while still at Camp David and that the Israeli cabinet voted in favor of them on Dec. 27, 2000. Carter apparently didn’t read Ross’ book, The Missing Peace. Gerson cited several other errors discovered by CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.
Not only is Carter disseminating misinformation, Gerson contended, but he is also simplistic in his analysis. Gerson used the term “Manichean,” i.e. seeing the world in terms of black and white with no shades of gray, to describe how Carter interprets the conflict. He quoted James Besser, a news analyst in Washington, who wrote, “Carter sees a much simpler Middle East. He ignores the reality that the occupation is the product of a complex stew of factors, depicting it instead as a core goal of Israeli leaders across the spectrum, a matter of malevolent policy.”
“You know what I think is the bottom line?” asked Gerson. “I think it’s a world that doesn’t do well with complexity, looking for some simple answer.”
Pauline Coffman, a member of First United Church of Oak Park who works with the Middle East Task Force of Chicago Presbytery, however disagrees. “The Carter book is accurate,” she said. “It is a quick and easy summary for those who want to review the situation and the issues. President Carter shows his in-depth grasp of the situation. …”
Van Slyke worried that Carter’s critics are trying to undermine his argument with irrelevant distractions. “I see that various interests are now ‘swiftboating’ President Carter-trying to muddy the waters and get us off topic. Hopefully that won’t work, and people will begin to really get into the issues as reported by many, many human rights and social justice organizations internationally.”
Tone
Mirelman used the words “daring” and “provocative” to describe Carter’s tone. Gerson put it another way: “The thing with Jimmy Carter is, would he like peace in the Middle East? Certainly. What he wants is pretty much what I want. The way he describes it is such a distortion that it hampers [the realization of his goal].”
Gerson was also critical of the media, saying that newspapers, for example, tend to polarize “because it makes good press.” He contends that when the media shows a Jew, for example, it’s not a mainstream Jew but a Hasid, and when they show a Muslim it’s often a radical with an AK47.
Worely contends that it is the Israeli Lobby with the support of the Christian Right that promotes “legends and myths created to support their political and religious goals.”
Rebekah Levin, executive director of the Center of Impact Research and a teacher at the Secular Jewish Community and School of Oak Park, likes Carter’s tone. She said, “President Carter has the stature, background and experience needed to be able to raise the critical issues related to the Middle East conflict and, in particular, the role that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory plays in maintaining and furthering the inhumane conditions that fuel the conflict.”
Apartheid and refugees
Carter argues the “security barrier” walls that Israel began constructing in 2002 has resulted in, as the title of his book suggests, a situation of “apartheid.”
Worely agrees. “Carter has described what is being implemented: an undemocratic Jewish state that has in every conceivable way, legal and illegal, used every means to remove non-Jews, Christian and Muslim, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River.”
Likewise, Kapitan said, “No serious historian disputes … the statement that the wall and system of checkpoints in the Occupied Territories resemble apartheid.”
Van Slyke pointed out that Bishop Desmond Tutu used the term to describe Israeli policy in 2002, years before Carter wrote his book.
Mirelman bristled at the use of the term “apartheid” to describe Israel. “Israel is not an apartheid state,” he declared. “Far from it. Most of the Arabs who live in Israel live in very good conditions.” He added that Arabs are now serving in the Knesset and that even gays and lesbians have been allowed to demonstrate, much to the chagrin of Orthodox Jews.
Gerson added that no one uses the term apartheid to describe the fence between Saudi Arabia and Yemen or the one along the U.S. Mexico border. He said that critics of Israel ignore the fact that over 90 percent of the barrier is not a wall at all but a fence and that the barrier was only constructed after 850 Israelis had been killed in the intifadas.
Regarding the issue of refugees fleeing their homes and living in camps, deprived of their citizenship, Kapitan accused Israel of expelling Palestinians and preventing them from returning in order to “maintain an exclusive Jewish state at the expense of the Palestinians.”
David Gilbert, an American Jew, said it has been Israeli policy to “make Palestine life unbearable, so that the Arabs remaining between the river and the sea would surrender their ever-decreasing land and resources and go live somewhere-anywhere-else.”
Mirelman countered that argument by saying no one remembers there were 850,000 Jews living Morocco, Egypt, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan in the late 1940s, and they were expelled, that Israel had to absorb a million refugees within the first two or three years of its existence. He said the 25 percent of the Israeli population that is non-Jewish are, for the most part, happy to be living there.
Land grab
Carter says the building of settlements on the West Bank amounts to a “land grab” by Israel.
Gilbert is even blunter: “Israeli policy is, and has always been, quite simple: maximum control of land and resources between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River, with minimum Arab presence and participation.”
Levin put it more moderately: “Israel’s creation and expansion of its extensive network of Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories is undermining any possibilities of peace and security for Palestinians as well as Jews.”
Mirelman responded by saying that Israel was, from the beginning of its existence, content with the borders drawn by the UN in 1947, and that it was the Arabs who started the conflict in 1967 by threatening to destroy Israel. Even when Israel made a peremptory attack on Egypt, it warned Jordan not to enter the war. Jordan ignored the warning, was defeated and lost the West Bank. Mirelman added that even though Israel was willing to exchange land for peace after the war, the Arab nations gathered at the Khartoum Conference in October of that year refused to accept the reality of Israel or negotiate.
Gerson took a little different stance. He agreed with Levin, saying, “I think the settlements are an abomination, that there is no rationale for them. Personally, I am on the steering committee of Peace Now which is a group working for a two-state solution and exiting the settlements in the West Bank as they have been in Gaza.”
What frightens him and makes him feel ambivalent about simplistic “magic bullet” solutions is that every time Israel makes what he perceives as a move to comply with Carter’s demand to leave the occupied territories, Hamas or Hezbollah seems to take advantage of the power vacuum by launching rockets into civilian populations in Israel. “Do I care about Palestinians?” he said. “Yes, I do. Do I think Israel was right in doing everything? No, I don’t. Am I concerned for the safety and security of the Jewish community in Israel? You’re darn tootin! I think that’s a fair way of putting it for many, many, many Jews.”
Israel’s right to exist
Carter writes, “The security of Israel must be guaranteed. The Arabs must acknowledge openly and specifically that Israel is a reality and has a right to exist in peace, behind secure and recognized borders.”
Kapitan doesn’t buy the idea that Israel has a right to exist, at least not as a “Jewish” state. “This insistence that Arabs recognize Israel’s ‘right to exist’ does not make sense to me and is very abstract. Israel does not have a right to exist as a state that favors one religious group over others.”
However, Worely, Gilbert, Van Slyke, Levin and Coffman all seem to accept Israel’s right to have a homeland for the Jewish people.
Gerson defended Israel’s right to the land with the following points:
It’s been an eons-old hope. Jews pray for it constantly.
Christian supercessionist theology has aided and abetted the expulsion of Jews from every country in Europe and from many countries in the Middle East.
The Holocaust
Anti-Semitism still exists. Look at the recent statements of Ahmadinejad in Iran. Hezbollah and Hamas call for the death of every Jew.
Israel is a fact on the ground.
Jews purchased the land. They didn’t steal it. “No one talks about the right of the United States to exist. The U.S. didn’t buy the land. They dispossessed the land from the Native Americans.”
Israelis’ right to the land was ratified by both the League of Nations and the United Nations.
I’ve been there. I know
Many people on both sides of the argument have been to Israel. Some have lived there. And they come up with very different conclusions.
The solution?
Remarkably, almost everyone involved in the debate agrees with Carter’s goals:
1) The right of Israel to exist must be guaranteed.
2) Israel must withdraw from occupied lands.
3) The sovereignty of all nations must be respected.
The rub comes not in the goal but in how to get there. Who is going to take the first step, take the first big risk for peace? Almost everyone in the debate criticized President Bush for not being more involved in the quest for peace.
Where do we go from here?
There does seem to be a consensus regarding two of the steps Wednesday Journal readers can take to move the peace process along.
1) Acknowledge the complexity
Rabbi Gerson lamented, “It’s very infuriating and very saddening. It’s so complex. There are so many people who recognize the complexity, but those are not the people who are getting interviewed.”
2) Learn more
Worely exhorted, “Read the new, Jewish historians. … Go to the West Bank and Israel, and see for yourself. … Talk with Jews, Christians, and Muslims. … Hear their stories. Search for the truth. Do not be content with the idea that State truth is the truth.”
Reading list
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Ali Abuminah, One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse
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Alan Dershowitz,
The Case for Israel -
Dennis Ross, The Missing Peace
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Shlomo Ben-Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy
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Gershom Gorenberg, The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977
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Danny Seidemann, The Jerusalem Separation Barrier and The Abuse of Security
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Mark Rosenblum and Gidon Remba, Myths and Facts About the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Guide to the Perplexed
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Clayton Swisher, The Truth About Camp David
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Charles Enderlin, The Failure of the Peace Process in the Middle East
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Yossi Beilin, The Path to Geneva: The Quest for a Permanent Agreement, 1996-2004
- Menachem Klein, The Jerusalem Problem: The Struggle for Permanent Status
Other authors
- Avi Shlaim, Benny Morris,
- Tom Segev, Alan Pappe
Websites
- www. camera.org,
CAMERA, Committee for Accuracy in Middle East
Reporting in America -
www.cjpip.org, Committee for a Just Peace in Israel and Palestine
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www.peacenow.org,
Peace Now
