I saw it happen 15 years ago. In September, 1995 Rabin was Prime Minister. The Oslo Accords had been approved. Our family went to spend a year in Israel, elated to be in Israel, but also elated that progress was being made, after decades, to move toward real peaceful relations between the Zionist Jews/Israelis and Palestinian Arabs in the Middle East.
Then the extremists pushed their buttons. In November, Yigal Amir assassinated Prime Minister Rabin. In February, around Purim (anniversary of the monstrous crime of another button-pusher, Baruch Goldstein), Hamas suicide-operatives began blowing up buses in the cities of Israel. Among the first victims were my JTS classmate Matt Eisenfeld and his fiancée Sara Duker. Although our son David and our daughter Rachel—then in 8th grade and 4th grade, respectively, in the Israeli public schools—handed out hamantaschen to the soldiers guarding the bus-stops and brandished posters supporting the election of the Labor candidate Shimon Peres, it did not help. Netanyahu won.
The extremists logic was: They didn’t want peace. They knew if they pushed the buttons of the moderates by dastardly acts inciting fear, enough moderates would drift from the center to throw the center of gravity to the anti-peace forces in both the Jewish and Arab constituencies. Peace would be defeated. The extremists’ agenda would prevail.
The same pattern is repeating itself. Last week, Al Qaida attacked targets in 13 cities in Iraq, on the eve of the American turnover of military control to the Iraqis. Yesterday, Hamas killed four Jewish settlers in the Hebron area, on the eve of the start of peace talks between Israel and the PA.
Hamas has consistently opposed peace. They have consistently refused to recognize the legitimacy of Israel. They have consistently maintained that the only just solution in Israel/Palestine is the dismantlement of the state of Israel and the establishment of an Arab-Palestinian dominated state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.
Whenever Jews and Arab moderates get together to try to work out a fair peace settlement that gives a legitimate place to Jewish and Palestinian-Arab national aspirations, the minority party Hamas claims veto power. They think that if they wreak enough havoc, proving that nobody can control them and that they can kill Israelis/Zionists with impunity, they will alienate enough moderates from the idea of peace to kill the peace process. So far, they have managed to achieve this—following the example set by Arab extremists since the massacres of 1929.
We must not let them. We must not let a small violent minority veto the peace aspirations of the majority.
The only way we can stop them is to oppose their call to violence with an equally strong call to peace. We must not let them push our buttons. We must not let them trigger our own vengeful instincts, generalizing from the violent few to tar with the same brush the entire group that shares their religious or national identity.
Over 2800 years ago, when the Middle East was already embroiled in the inter-group wars and rivalries that have persisted there (and in most of the human-populated world) ever since, a Jewish prophet named Isaiah had a dream, that the nations would flock to Jerusalem and learn there of God’s Torah, and that when they did so, they would beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning-hooks, that nation would not lift up sword against nation, and they would not learn war any more.
The conventional wisdom was against Isaiah then. His dream has still not been realized. The same forces that conspired to defer the fulfillment of the dream then are still at work. But the dream still lives. The dream must prevail.
No comments:
Post a Comment