Will there ever be Peace between Israel and Palestine?

by Tom Kando

My book club just discussed Susan Abulhawa’s book Mornings in Jenin (2006). I found it  gripping and convincing.

Jenin is a Palestinian city in the West Bank. It is also the site of a major refugee camp, and it suffered a brutal war in 2002.

It is important for people like me to read such a book: I have much sympathy for Israel and I am therefore not sufficiently attuned to the plight of the Palestinians. This book is a reminder of that people’s tragic circumstance over the past seventy years.

History:
The narrative begins in 1947, when the UN approved the partition of Palestine. This led immediately to conflict between Jews and Palestinians. The conflict escalated the following year, when Israel declared its independence, was attacked by, and waged war against the surrounding Arab states.


During this two-year period, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were either expelled or fled from their homelands, which became part of the new Jewish state. Most of these refugees expected to return home after the war. However, Israel won and the refugees did not return. 70 years later, they continue to fester in refugee camps outside Israel, their numbers having swelled by now to millions. The mass exodus of Palestinians in 1947-48 is referred to as the “Nakba,” or “catastrophe.”

Between 1948 and 1972 there was a roughly equal number (nearly a million) of Jewish refugees from Arab countries to Israel. While these people also lost everything, their outcome was far more positive.

List of wars and Intifadas in which Israel has been embroiled: (Intifada = uprising):
1. 1947-8: War of Israeli independence.
2. 1956: Suez Crisis.
3. 1967, June: Six-Day War. Against Arab coalition. This war led to Israel’s annexation of the West Bank, which to this day remains under Israeli control. Israel also conquered the Sinai, but it returned it to Egypt.
4. 1967-70: War of Attrition: primarily against Egypt, in the Sinai.
5. 1973, October: Yom Kippur War. Against Arab coalition (primarily Egypt and Syria).
6. 1982: Lebanon War: This was started by Israel in 1978, in order to expel the PLO from Lebanon, from where that group was staging cross-border attacks on Israel. This war led to the expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon and its relocation in Tunis. This conflict also resulted in the massacre of many hundreds of Palestinians, including many civilians, in Lebanon’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps (Sept. 16-18, 1982). Israel’s defense minister Ariel Sharon was complicit in these massacres.
7. 1987-1991: First Intifada: West Bank and Gaza. 160 Israelis killed (including 100 civilians); 2044 Palestinians killed.
8. 2000-2005: Second Intifada: 1010 Israelis killed (including 773 civilians); 3300 Palestinians killed (half of them civilians?). This episode includes the Battle of Jenin in 2002. Like most other battles between the two protagonists, the Battle of Jenin was in response to dozens of suicide bombers emanating from that camp.
9. 2006, Summer: Lebanon War.
10. 2008-9, December-January: Gaza war (against Hamas).
11-12: 2012, 2014: Repeated Gaza wars against Hamas, the more militant Palestinian faction.
Etc.

Some Generalizations:
1. By and large, most of these conflagrations have resulted in further set-backs for the Palestinians. For example, as a result of the 1967 war, the West Bank ended up under Israeli jurisdiction.

2. Throughout these conflicts, the Arabs have treated the PLO and its leader Yasser Arafat (1929-2004) like a hot potato. The organization was expelled from one Middle-Eastern country after another. Wherever it settled, it tended to become a state within a state, and therefore a threat. The PLO was founded in Jordan in1964, from where it was expelled in 1970. It moved (via Syria) to South Lebanon until 1982. It was then forced to relocate in Tunis, where it stayed until 1991.

3. The arguments on the two sides include the following:

Supporting the Palestinian cause is essentially the substance of much of this article and of the book it reviews - Mornings in Jenin: The Palestinians were robbed of their homeland, and their aggressions against Israel ever since are justified on those grounds.

Israel’s chief argument is that the threat against it is existential. That is, the country’s very right to exist is being questioned by its enemies. Furthermore, whenever it kills numerous Palestinians, it does so in reaction to Palestinian provocation. To Israel, Intifada is synonymous with terrorism.

4. I will not attempt to weigh the scale. I will only note one fact: It is difficult to see most of the conflagrations I have listed as “tits for tats.” In most cases, the Israeli response has been disproportionate. For every Jew killed, 5 or 10 Palestinians die. In general, the Palestinian people have suffered immensely during the past 70 years. That is what Susan Abulhawa’s book is about.

Mornings in Jenin:
Abulhawa traces the multi-generational saga of one Palestinian family whose members were displaced and sometimes killed. The book is partly auto-biographical and partly fictitious. The main character is Amal, a Palestinian woman born in Jenin in 1955.
The author herself was born to refugees in 1967. She eventually became an American and she now lives in Pennsylvania. Her central character, Amal, follows a similar trajectory. Interestingly, the author switches back and forth between first and third person. Amal receives a scholarship to study at Temple University and she eventually becomes American. She also marries an Oxford educated Palestinian physician who later dies at the hands of Israelis. The book traces the history of Amal’s family, including her parents, her grand-parents and her brother Youssef who joins the PLO. There is also an intrigue: Youssef’s twin brother - Amal’s brother - is kidnaped as a toddler by an Israeli soldier and raised Jewish. He becomes “David” and a soldier in the Israeli Defense Forces.
The book describes the six-day war of 1967, during which Amal is shot and scared for life by an Israeli soldier. It also offers a gripping account of the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982, and of the battle of Jenin in 2002. Amal is killed during that battle while protecting her daughter. Before that, there occurs a day of reckoning when Amal finally meets her estranged brother David, who is forced to learn who he truly is.
While he book is a blend of historical fact and fiction, it impresses me as honest and fair. It portrays individual Jewish characters sympathetically. It is not a recipe for Palestinian revenge.

About me: Am I Jewish?
I have grappled with this question all my life. I don’t know whether I am Jewish or not - and whether it even matters. My Hungarian Jewish grand-parents converted to Christianity, thinking that this was prudent. Also, my father was a gentile.

However, to Hitler and Eichmann, once a Jew always a Jew. Therefore, during the Holocaust my grandparents were evicted from their home and corralled in the Budapest ghetto, ready for the cattle cars to Auschwitz (see: Letters from the House of the Yellow Star). The rest of us spent part of the war underground at Lake Balaton.

My parents are both featured among “The Righteous” at the Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem, a monument in honor of non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the war. They made false identification papers for Jews and my father risked his life snatching a Jewish family from a cattle car parked at the Vac railroad station. The fact that the Israeli government includes my parents among the “non-Jewish Righteous” suggests that it no  longer considers my mother to be Jewish.

One key reason why I don’t feel very Jewish is probably the fact that I didn’t KNOW that I was Jewish until I was 16, when my mother finally revealed this to me. She had hidden that fact from me until then because she felt that it was safer to do so. This is uncannily similar to what happened to David in the Jenin book, who only discovers his true identity as an adult.

Regarding one’s feelings about the Israel-Palestine issue, whether one is Jewish or not should probably not matter, anyway. There are many Jews - both in and outside of Israel - who have an open mind about the problem and who would be accommodating. However, to “accommodate” cannot mean “deleting” the state of Israel.

At times, my ambivalence has complicated my relationships with my Jewish and Arab friends. Sad to say, a few such friends and I are no longer on speaking terms, after arguments we had during some of the flare-ups in Israeli-Palestinian fighting.

Israel and Palestine are two competing nationalisms. A two-state solution is inevitable. Of course, the devil is in the details, and anyone who comes up with a practicable plan deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.

Keep in mind that bloody enmities of the past have often dissipated and been forgotten with amazing speed. For example, the Tutsi-Hutu genocide of 1994 seems practically forgotten by those who survived and participated in it. Think also of the reconciliation of Japan and Germany with the Western allies, their arch enemies only a few years earlier. Humans have an uncanny ability to forget things quickly - both for worse and sometimes for the better...
© Tom Kando 2016;All Rights Reserved
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