“The most poignant moment for me, however, was when a Palestinian teenager near the end of the program asked an Israeli teenager if he would still join the army and serve in the occupied territories, to which the answer was “yes”. To me, this said it all.”

The explanation for this line is that the Israeli sees the conflict and his role in it differently than the writer might expect. It seems meeting Israelis did not help the write see them for who they truly are.

To restore some balance into the equation, I ask:

If your cousin was arrested for violent activity against Israel or if your neighbor’s house got demolished for taking part in criminal activity, would you tell them to stop their actions and keep their friends from taking similar actions against Israel?

If your answer is that you acknowledge their “rights to resist the occupation”, then you are no better than the Israeli teen who accept the role of sharing the responsibility of defending Israel against your cousins and neighbors.

To end this cycle, the two sides should at least meet more often and try to see the conflict through the eyes of the other. If you can’t see the conflict from the Israeli perspective, don’t be surprised that Israelis can’t sympathize with violent actions against themselves.

For us to reach this level of understanding, some normalization would be required, so let’s keep meeting and talking in relaxed settings until we learn to deal with each other in a nicer fashion.

Paul Frosh discusses what these joint projects have achieved here: http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/article.php?id=731

The novelist Samir El Youssef asked, was Edward Said, the author of Orientalism, providing a cover-up for Israel when he collaborated with Daniel Barenboim?

Who “profited” from these programmes? The members of the Parents Circle certainly didn’t and neither did those Israeli academics who are vilified by the government and media for talking to Palestinians.

The problem is, this conflict is not “winnable”, it is only solvable. As long as Isralies or Palestinians think they can win and guarantee those rights with coercion, the conflict continues. Only when people start wanting to live with eachother, regardless in how many states, can this seemingly endless struggle end. Yes, true reconclilliation can only come ones there is a “cold peace”, but to get there some minimum level of trust and co-operation is required.

Consequently, the illusions about the possibility to win is right now propelling this conflict towards a major confrontation, with completely unacceptable additional human suffering.

And some of us simply belive that we can and should convince ourselves and eachtoher to live together without causing more destruction and bloodshed. And all those programs and institutions that try to combine co-existance efforts with political activism are working towards this end. Real change cannot come about from any kind of coercion and that is also something that the history of this conflict proves.

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First, you said that, “I view the Palestinian struggle as a civil rights movement, which is what it is. Every single civil rights movement in history has featured anti-normalization as a central tactic, from the Non-Cooperation Movement of India to bus boycotts of Montogomery to the anti-Apartheid Movement of South Africa. For some reason, Palestine is supposed to be different?”
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While I very much agree with you that the Palestinian struggle is a civil rights struggle, the Palestinian struggle has ALSO been tied to other dimensions. The involvement of other Arab countries, the US and the Brittish have created several other dimensions that gives the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation ALSO components of an international conflict, which has been asymmetrical in relation to Palestinians and less asymmetrical in relation to neighbouring Arab countries. And it is through this paradigm of international armed conflict – not the civil rights paradigm – that wars and violent resistance against Israel have been justified.

With that said, I very much appreciate the efforts made by everyone to redefine the Palestinian struggle in terms of a non-violent civil rights struggle. And I think this is definitively the way foreword, as can bee seen today from the increased activism around the world. Democracy and civil/liberal rights are the “lingua franca” of today and these shared values definitively have the potential to unite people from around the world, including Israelis in a struggle for Palestinian rights. But that requires the civil-rights struggle to indeed be committed to those democratic values and civic rights, in which the internal intimidation and aggressiveness towards other approaches has no place. That will alienate, not only Israelis, but internationals from countries with long democratic traditions, such as Finland (where I’m from).

Now, you also said that, “At the end of the day, I don’t view alienation as a bad thing. I’m happy that Israelis are alienated and that they’re offended by the anti-normalization movement. They need to be alienated and offended because that’s the first step towards change.”

And again, I think this would be true, if the Palestinian struggle was only a civil rights struggle. However, because of the earlier mentioned history and the fact that the international armed asymmetric conflict paradigm is still upheld between Israel and Palestinian groups engaged in armed resistance, I don’t think “alienation and offence” will work as the first step towards change as it has in the other civil rights movements you mentioned. Instead, it will strengthen those, both in Israel and in the international community, who say that Israel really has legitimate security concerns and (unjustifiably) use that to legitimize the occupation or to prevent international pressure against Israel.

I think that only when/if the international armed conflict dimension is removed and Israel continues with the oppressive policies can the kind of international consensus and pressure that lead to the fall of Apartheid South Africa be gathered. Then the Palestinians would probably win the right to define concepts of justice and fairness quite widely in the ensuing new reality.

However, it does not take many Israeli and Palestinian spoilers to keep the armed conflict going (as the cycle of retaliations continue) and thus prevent the above development. It is not enough that either Palestinians or Israelis alone manage to keep these violent spoilers in place, because sooner or later the persistent efforts of terrorist on either side will provoke a retaliation from the other, pushing the situation away from the civil rights paradigm towards the (continued) armed conflict paradigm.

This is why I think the realization of Palestinian rights requires that Israel has sufficient incentive to keep its own spoilers in place and that requires both international and Israeli support. And that is also why change in this conflict can not begin with alienation of Israelis and internationals, who support the civil rights of Palestinians, but who ALSO are aware of the armed conflict dimension.

In other words, the destructive interaction potentially caused by a too strict anti-normalization movement is not limited to alienated Israelis and internationals with hurt feelings; it can escalate to violent armed conflict, which pulls both the Israelis’ desire to live in safety and the Palestinian struggle further away from a rights and values based solution and towards a power struggle instead. And in this scenario there are only loosers.

Israelis and Palestinians need each other to realize their goals. Not only because they (or we, as I consider Israel a second home) live on the same land, but because the reciprocal relationship between our two societies is much stronger than either party would like to admit. When I write for the Jewish community newspaper in Helsinki about the discriminatory policies of Israel and why they should be changed, my strongest argument is Aziz Abu Sarah and Sari Nusseibeh. Without Palestinians who want to live in peace with Israel DESPITE what Israel has done to them is my most convincing argument, when I try to persuade them to see Israel as an occupier that deprive civil rights from Palestinians.

In fact, according to some studies (http://www.polisci.umn.edu/~freeman/BCF20070718.pdf), the reciprocal relationship between public opinions of societies in asymmetric conflicts are even stronger in determining their leader’s policy towards the other than the other side’s leaders reactions. And that’s another reason why these perceptions matter so much.

But it’s getting late. Good night for now.