Trust is the greatest casualty in Mideast rift

By Charles Radin, Globe Staff, 12/25/2002
Sixth and final installment in a series of occasional articles on obstacles to peace in the Middle East.

JERUSALEM - Throughout Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories - in schools, nurseries, and community centers - young children see the same image of their nation, an outline map of one country, full of history and holiness, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. On some maps, its name is Israel. On others it is Palestine. Never is it both.

On these maps, the cease-fire line that has demarcated Israel and the territories for more than half a century - since Israel's war of independence in 1948 - does not exist. Neither, on many Israeli maps for youngsters, does Ramallah, the Palestinians' West Bank political center. On parallel Palestinian maps, there is no Tel Aviv, though the city is Israel's largest metropolis.

This is but one example of the absolute rejection by large numbers of people in each nation of the very existence of the other nation. It is an obstacle to peace in the Holy Land that may be even more difficult to resolve than the struggles over water, settlements, access to holy sites, and other physical issues.

Israelis and Palestinians have been demonizing each other for decades. The process slowed briefly in the early years of the Oslo peace process, but the modest accomplishments of those years have largely been swept away by the steady disintegration of the peace process. Attempts to foster reconciliation have not been wiped out, but never has the alienation, the hatred, the belief in the innate evil of the other side been more widespread than it is today.

''The biggest loss to both sides,'' in the two years since armed struggle destroyed what was left of Oslo, ''is the loss of trust and the huge growth of hatred,'' says Bassem Eid, director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group.

''I am not so concerned how we will rebuild [physically] when we have a Palestinian state. The Europeans will throw in so much money that we can easily build anew,'' Eid said. ''No amount of money will rebuild the trust that has been lost. It will take decades.''

The invective coming from many on the Palestinian side is particularly raw, and explicitly anti-Semitic. Members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Muslim groups dedicated to the destruction of Israel and listed as terrorist organizations by the US State Department, have always accused ''the Jews'' - it is never ''the Israelis'' - of murder, betrayal, and warmongering.

But these days, hate speech pours from the official Palestinian media, despite Palestinian Authority commitments under the Oslo and Wye River accords to end incitement against the Jewish State and despite statements by Palestinian leaders that it is the Israelis who are inflaming the situation.

''Jews' behavior has always been evil,'' declared Sheikh Mahmoud Mustafah Najem, a fiery and well-known Muslim preacher, in a sermon broadcast on the Palestinian Authority's television station on the Nov. 1 Muslim Sabbath. The Jews ''have a single common denominator - enmity of Islam and Muslim,'' Najem said. ''Be you slaves of God to punish the Jews by the worst ways of punishment, as God wants you to.'' At the conclusion of the half-hour long sermon, the camera showed close-ups of solemn Palestinians, praying in unison: ''Allah render us victorious over the Jews and those who side with them! Allah render us victorious over the Jews and the patrons of their arrogance!'' Officials of Palestinian Television and of the Palestinian Authority refused to respond to both verbal and written questions about the contents of the sermon or the propriety of its being broadcast on the official Palestinian station.

A senior official of the Palestinian Ministry of Information, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that ''if you want to keep track of similar issues on the Palestinian TV, you will get 100,000 similar examples of what you have heard.'' He said that Palestinian Authority officials do not control the station, and that no one could explain why these programs are broadcast.

Itamar Marcus, director of Palestinian Media Watch, a nongovernmental organization based in Israel, said that religious hatred has been recorded since his group began monitoring Palestinian broadcast outlets in 1995. But in the summer of 2000, before the Palestinians resumed armed struggle and terrorism against Israel, ''there was a striking change in the language of the sermons.''

Before that time, ''you rarely heard open calls for killing Jews or praise for the killers of Jews,'' Marcus said, but that summer preachers began emphasizing the theme of eternal war, and insisting that ''all agreements with the Jews are temporary ... and as soon as the violence broke out, there were open calls for killing Jews wherever you find them.''

There is no comparable, government-sanctioned denigration of Islam and Muslims on the Israeli side. But leaders of the extreme political right, especially politicians associated with the effort to build Jewish settlements throughout the West Bank, are sometimes quoted in the media asserting that Israelis cannot violate Palestinians' human rights because people who launch terror attacks are not human beings. That charge was made in the leading newspaper Ha'aretz by Benzi Lieberman, a leader of the settlement movement in the West Bank, after some recent attacks there.

Some settlers and Jewish religious leaders still believe in a restoration of a biblical promised land they say will extend from the
Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates in Iraq, and the sentiment that there already is a Palestinian state - Jordan - is widely expressed, creating deep distrust of Israeli intentions among Palestinian moderates.

For two years, the considerable public-relations machinery of the Israeli government and military has tried to eliminate the distinction that many Israelis used to draw between Palestinian terrorists who blow themselves up on buses and in nightclubs, and Palestinian militants who attack armed soldiers in the occupied territories. In most Israeli media, the effort has largely succeeded: Palestinian fighters are now all described as terrorists.

The government also has repeatedly honored the memory of Rehavam Ze'evi, who was minister of tourism at the time of his assassination in October 2001, but who was best known in Israel as a military hero who characterized the Palestinians as ''lice'' and a cancer on Israeli society, and advocated their ''transfer'' to Arab countries. On the anniversary of Ze'evi's death this year, Israel's ministry of education recommended that all schools devote part of the day to teaching about Ze'evi's contributions to the Zionist enterprise.

When some school systems and media commentators protested, the ministry said the intent was not to endorse Ze'evi's political views, but to teach the importance of the warrior heritage of men like Ze'evi to the establishment and defense of the Jewish homeland. A senior Western diplomat who closely watches the issue of incitement, speaking on condition of anonymity, said tartly that ''this is a bit like ordering up a lecture on how Hitler improved the infrastructure of Germany while ignoring his politics.''

Still, the same diplomat said, ''one of the biggest failures of the Palestinian Authority is that they did not match the Israelis' efforts'' to reduce incitement and hate speech. ''There was a lot of progress on the Israeli side'' in eliminating stereotypes and encouraging acceptance of a Palestinian state, ''while the Palestinians did nothing to prepare their own people for peace.''

Alienation and mistrust are even more critical obstacles to peace here than in other longtime trouble spots, the diplomat said. That is because of the central role in the two peoples' historical narratives of two separate events: for Israelis, it was the Nazi attempt to annihilate all Jews during World War II; for the Palestinians, it was the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the 1948 war. In that conflict, Arabs rejected United Nations plans to partition the British protectorate of Palestine and set up one state for Jews and another for Palestinians. The Jews' victory is known as Al Nakbah - The Catastrophe - by Palestinians.

''Almost every Israeli Jew has some sort of sensitivity, fear, or paranoia about what happened'' in the Holocaust, says Sippy
Shmaia-Naveh, a social psychologist at the Center for Humanistic Education, a program of the Ghetto Fighters Museum in Akko, on Israel's north coast, that tries to help Jews and Arabs understand each other's histories as a first step toward living together peacefully. ''The same is true on the Arab side'' regarding the Nakbah.

The events cannot be compared, center founder Raya Kalisman says, but understanding their centrality to Israelis and Palestinians is vital if members of the two groups ever are to be able to deal with each other. ''Each side is wrapped up in its own story,'' says David Netzer, a history teacher who works with the center. ''It really opens things up to admit your strong feelings to people you previously only knew for their hostile feelings toward your side. We live here together, and once we start back to the peace process, we have to go back to these basic traumas'' if there is to be hope for reconciliation.

At present, according to Nava Sonnenschein, director of the School for Peace at Neve Shalom, a half-Jewish, half-Palestinian community in central Israel, the two sides are competing over which has suffered greater injustice.

The first stage of encounter, in the workshops Neve Shalom arranges, is still politeness, she says, but this stage, which once lasted three or four days when a new encounter group was formed, now lasts only an hour or two.

''Then the Arab group presents powerfully regarding the Jewish state, discrimination, and what's going on in the West Bank,'' Sonnenschein said. ''They take a lot of time, do it very assertively, and it looks like the Jews are losing power ... Next, the Jewish group tries to get its power back'' through angry counter-assertions and attempts at divide-and-rule. What follows is ''deadlock, with long fights over who is more of a victim, who is more humane.''

The current situation in Israel and the territories closely parallels the encounter groups, she said, with the Jews trying to get their power back and a long deadlock looming over who can rightly claim victim status. In the final stage in Neve Shalom's groups, each side takes responsibility for its actions toward the other - something that is very far from the current reality on the ground.

A few months before the last round of Camp David talks in 2000, young participants in Seeds of Peace, a program which attempts to foster friendship and understanding between Israeli and Palestinian adolescents, finished a film about the lives of teenagers on the two sides. They were unable to get it broadcast on Israeli or Palestinian television.

''The Israelis respected the part about Israel and the Jews, the Palestinians respected the part about Palestinians,'' said Sami
al-Jundi, a longtime staffer at Seeds. ''Each wanted to show the part that was about them, but neither wanted to show the whole thing.'' Jen Marlowe, program supervisor of the Seeds center in Jerusalem, notes that both the Israeli and Palestinian education ministries have threatened to pull out of the Seeds program during the recent years of violence, and said she does not ''know that any program can counter the degree of demonization that has gone on here.''

With their leaders deeply deadlocked over the whole range of major obstacles to peace - Jewish settlements in the West Bank, Muslim exclusion of Jews from holy sites, disproportionate Israeli use of the region's water resources, and the refugee question, to name a few - it may be that people-to-people efforts are essential to bridging the vast divides.

Families who participate in programs such as Seeds of Peace have no grandiose ideas of what could come from their participation - but neither do they doubt that the effort is worthwhile. The Epsteins of the Jerusalem suburb of Mevaseret Tzion and the Mokbels of the El Arub refugee camp near Hebron are examples.

They met through their daughters' involvement in the Seeds program, and visited each other's homes. Despite Israeli travel restrictions that keep the Mokbels from visiting the Epsteins and fear of Palestinian extremists that keeps the Epsteins from visiting the Mokbels, they have maintained contact and sympathy for each other, as the conflict has gone from bad to worse.

''We know they do not have the power to help us'' with issues like curfew and travel restrictions, says Ismail Mokbel, patriarch of the Palestinian family. '' They help with our daughter, ask about our son, and this is a big thing for us. When there is a suicide bomber in Israel, we phone them and ask about their safety and their children's safety. We apologize to them for this terrible situation. They apologize to us. We relate to each other as families.

''With the Oslo agreement, there was no trust,'' he said. ''They made this deal, but each side kept trying to gain at the expense of the other and it didn't work. You have to build trust.''