Helena Cobban
Writer, Researcher, and Senior Global Affairs Fellow,
Institute for Practical Ethics, U.Va.
"Israel and Palestine: The Continuing Crisis"
October 16, 2002

Helena Cobban: I am eager to share with you some of the things that I learned when I was in the Middle East this summer. And I made two trips. Well three, actually. But the two that count were…the first was an academic conference at Birzeit University in the West Bank that I went to in a short period when Birzeit University and the nearby city of Ramallah were actually accessible to the outside world. Not easily but I had to walk through several checkpoints and had a lot of adventures. But, I was able to get in to the academic conference. And the international participants there actually got to go and visit with Yassir Arafat in his besieged compound. So we are probably some of the last sort of international people who have actually spent time with Yassir Arafat. That was back in May.

It was kind of disturbing actually. I have known the guy for a long time and he seemed not to be in tiptop shape mentally or physically. I actually did put an account of that meeting into an article that I wrote in Boston Review. It came out in the summer issue of Boston Review. So I won’t dwell on that because mainly what I want to talk about is the second trip that I made when was part of this International Quaker Working Party on the Israel-Palestine conflict. There were fourteen of us. All of us except two actually Quakers. People…Quakers from South Africa, Britain, Canada, Palestine and then a couple of people who have worked with the American Friends Service Committee for a long time and who have good links with Quakers who happen to be of Jewish and Muslim belief.

And it was a wonderful group to go with. We started out in Jordan. We were looking mainly at the Israel-Palestine conflict not at issues connected with Arab states. But of course there are a lot of Palestinian refugees in Jordan. A lot of Palestinian refugees in Syria which was my second stop because we kind of found out to talk to Palestinian refugees in their various areas of concentration. And then we all gathered back together and went across the Allen B. Bridge into Israel and Palestine. And spent two weeks in Israel and Palestine talking intensively with people. I got these two notebooks just full of notes. And I got so many notes and I am trying to wrestle them all into a coherent narrative at this point. And it is a really challenging and inspiring and often really, really depressing experience.

But it was a pleasure and an honor for me to be part of this Quaker venture. The Quakers have been involved with the Israel-Palestine issue since 1948 when in parallel with the efforts that the Quakers were making to help resettle Jews from the DP camps in Europe. We also…not me personally you understand, but we as Quakers were also involved in helping provide basic relief services to Palestinian refugees in Gaza. And indeed for the first eighteen months after the dispersal of the Palestinians from their original homes, all relief services in Gaza were provide by the Quakers. And it was only after eighteen months that the United Nations got off it’s rear end and took over from us.

So we have a long-standing concern with Palestinians in general including with Palestinian refugees. And we wanted to see in the current situation what the hopes are…you know, where their hope is for peacemaking and given that at the official level the diplomacy is in such a terrible state.

I came out of the trip with a kind of view of what is happening there between Israelis and Palestinians in what for a short hand purposes I will call the Holy Land…that is all of Israel, Palestine, and west of the Jordan River. And it is hard to say which is Israel and which is Palestine, that is why I find it easier in my writing to call it the Holy Land and everybody kind of knows what you are talking about. Although in a sense the holiness is the land. And the fact that the people have this deep, deep attachment for it is one of the problems.

You would like to think that if people consider a space to be particularly holy, then they might behave particularly well in that space. It seems not to be the case, which is why I have a lot of problems with the concept of holy land. I mean I like to think that all land is sort of holy. But anyway, that is sort of a Quaker thing that I do.

So what I came out thinking is that really there are two cycles of violence going on there. There is the visible one that we all see and know about from major media. And underneath it, behind it, there is a hidden cycle of violence that is very important to understand. And they are connected. So I will talk a little bit about that. I will talk a little bit about the role of the US government and perhaps some ideas of tasks for concerned citizens.

So moving right along to the visible cycle of violence. That is what we see on our TV screens. It is the suicide bombings and their outcome versus the anti-personnel actions that the Israel Defense Forces…the IDF takes against Palestinians that every so often you will see the aftermath of that on your TV screens in terms of houses destroyed, or large scale funerals that the Palestinians hold for the victims or distraught women or whatever. I think we are all familiar with all of those scenes. So the body count in crude terms in that visible cycle of violence since the second Infitada started at the end of September 2000…that is just over a two year period at this point, is roughly 600 Israelis have died and roughly 1600 Palestinians have died.

Each side in this cycle of violence portrays itself as responding to the violence of others. Well what else is new? Though you have to note that quite frequently the Israeli side now unabashedly describes many of it’s own actions as pre-emptive. And you know, this is something that happens not only in Israel.

It does seem very hard to escape from this cycle of violence…the visible cycle of violence. Even in August and September of this year, when there was a six week period without any Palestinian suicide bombings, without any Israeli casualties there were some thirty or so Palestinians…most of them civilians who were killed in various IDF operations including on one single weekend there, there were thirteen people killed. And nothing stopped that violence and of course, almost inevitably the Palestinians then in their terms responded to that with another suicide bombing in late September.

Even during that six week period without any Israeli casualties, you didn’t see any pull back of Israeli forces from the Palestinian cities. That was what was called Area A under the Oslo Accords. Even though back in April, on April the 4^th, our President called for the Israelis to pull back out of the Palestinian cities immediately. And it is worth recalling some of what Bush has asked the Israelis to do that they haven’t done.

I don’t need to bring home to you that this cycle of violence has caused a huge amount of pain and suffering on both sides beyond just the immediate families of the bereaved, there are of course other people who are injured…people whose lives have been totally disrupted, a general sense of fear and tension. The idea that death can come at any moment as you go about your daily life is pervasive on both sides. And we certainly heard a lot about that from people on both sides that we talked with.

Now behind that visible cycle of violence there is what I call the hidden cycle of violence, which you don’t see on the TV screens although it is also causing huge damage possibly even much greater damage than the open cycle of violence. This hidden cycle of violence is constituted by the large-scale attempt by the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon and his allies inside and outside the Israeli government to further the cementing of the West Bank and to a lesser extent, Gaza to Israel. And when I say cementing, I use that term both literally and figuratively. And the attempt to cut the ability of the territories indigenous Palestinian residents to conduct a normal life on their ancestral land. This is part of this thing with attachment to the land being a problem.

Although I call this a hidden cycle of violence, it is highly asymmetrical. There are many attempts by Palestinians to resist their uprooting from their own land. But the whole power of the Israeli Army is a weight against them. The world’s third most powerful army. The Israeli Army’s operations in the West Bank actually constitute a classical direct and very brutal form of what people in the peace studies movement call structural violence imposed on the Palestinians. Last April the IDF moved back into the Palestinian cities as I mentioned earlier. And it has since then surrounded each city with a ring of steel. You can see those fences around the cities. They are not…the represent a huge investment. The kind of investment that the government doesn’t wantonly make with the idea that two weeks later, oh shucks, you know we will just take those fences down. No, this is a long-term investment around each of those…that is eight or nine major cities. In addition to that, there are a lot of Palestinian villages in the West Bank. Each one has been cut off from access to high ways by the little access roads that they have from the village onto the highway have been either blocked with huge earth barricades or cut off with trenches deep, trenches. So there is no way to get a vehicle from the village onto the high way system. People who want to go have to either climb over…scramble over these earth barricades or around the trenches. Goods cannot be taken to market at anything like an affordable price. Goods…I mean that is agricultural goods coming from the villages and the distributions of relief and food and just basic necessities of human life is extremely difficult and always at the whim of basically nineteen year old Israeli conscripts who have the power of life and death over the Palestinians at all these road blocks.

I have to tell you that the control situation on the ground in the West Bank has completely changed since I first went there in 1985. It used to be back then that the Israeli settlements were tiny pin pricks on isolated hilltops, while most of the landscape of the West Bank remained recognizably Palestinian. There were the eight or nine large cities. There were the hundreds of villages. They were all connected by a decent road system the Jordanians had left there. And Jerusalem was the hub and the organic center of the whole of the West Bank. Well now, many of those Israeli settlements have become large sprawling towns. They are all well connected by the new roads that go between them which are reserved only for settlers and other Israelis, as I mentioned only. So the Palestinians can’t use those roads.

These roads cut right through the old Palestinian road system. They connect all the settlements, large and small to each other and to Israel’s own cities. And to the very thick ring of settlements that now cuts east Jerusalem off entirely from the Palestinian hinterland.

In fact, what I saw very graphically is that say you had…like, if you could imagine that you would have settlements and villages more or less interspersed between themselves but historically the settlements would be a pin prick and the Palestinian controlled land would you know, be the surrounding passage…the surrounding landscape. What has happened since April, since you have had this very tight closure on the Palestinian communities is that the settlements have just expanded their boundary fences up to where they meet the nearest Palestinian town or city or village. And taken all that intervening land inside their own boundary fence. And the villages are now…the Palestinian villages are now cut off. So we actually…we went with an Israeli peace activist in a bus tour around a large part of the West Bank. And he showed us how this was happening. He said it is like the Japanese game of Go. You know, where your aim is to encircle and cut off and surround the counters of the other person on the board. But it is like in April, you know the Israeli player just reached into his back pocket and instead of you know, each player putting one piece on the board, the Israeli player just reached into his back pocket and put out 300 new pieces. And suddenly, you know, wins the game in terms of territorial control.

We were with a South African Quaker, as I mentioned earlier, and people were talking about the fact that it looked as though the Palestinian communities were being reduced to Banty Stands. She said, no, you know, the banty stands were bad in South Africa but you could get into a car in a banty stand and drive for a couple of hours, you know. And there were town and villages all around. And they had some degree of some kind of social and geographic integrity and cohesion.

What is happening in the West Bank is considerably worse than that. We had discussions with Jewish Israeli peace activists who were talking about the fact that this is like the concentration of population that happened in the early years, in the 1930s in Germany. Not obviously the extermination period of what happened to the Jews in Europe in the 1940s. But it is the concentration period familiar to me when I was growing up in Britain from what the Brits had done to the Afrikaners in South Africa in the early 1900s and during the Boer War.

Basically the aim is to uproot the enemy, the population that is perceived as an enemy population from any ability to conduct productive, economic life. And you encircle them and concentrate them and then they become very vulnerable to your whim. And who knows what the outcome of this will be. But one possible outcome, one thing that was discussed very widely amongst people in the Israeli peace movement and Palestinians in the Palestinian peace movement was that in the event of a big, regional upheaval such as, for example, a US war against Iraq, that these very vulnerable Palestinian communities could just all be loaded on trucks and sent out over the Jordan River into the Jordan Desert. And this would constitute for the Palestinians a repeat of what happened to most of their people inside the territory that became Israel proper in 1948. That the Palestinians referred to as a catastrophe. And that is something that is definitely very broadly discussed as a real possibility for the Palestinians in the event of a large, regional war.

This confrontation is extracting, like I said, huge costs on the Palestinians. It is extracting huge costs on the Israelis as well. Economically they talk about the fear of an Argentina syndrome in Israel right now. I traveled on a train from Haifa to Tel Aviv and in the train car, more than seventy percent of the people in my train car were young people in uniform. I mean if you think of the kind of burden that places on society to have to pay you know, all those young people to maintain this structure of control. And of course there are enormous mental health costs like I said, the pervasive fear and mass traumatization.

I think when communities are so deeply traumatized as this, that it attacks the ability of humans to exercise two vital capabilities. And those are the capabilities of human empathy and rationality. I mean if you look at the Israelis, a majority of them…roughly two thirds know that the answer is, and express their support for an outcome that would be essentially ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and pulling back the forces back home, having a Palestinian state there and dismantling most of the Israeli settlements that are there. Two thirds of them support that. But a similar proportion of Israelis also support Sharon and the hard line and perhaps even a harder line than what Sharon is implementing.

So you add that up. It adds up to more than a hundred percent. What is going on here? Are people crazy? Yes, essentially they are. I mean, they are so deeply traumatized and you know for many Jewish Israelis there is also the legacy of traumatization from the Holocaust which they sort of transfer in some way onto the Palestinians and the Arabs in general. Although they didn’t commit it. But there are these just existential fears out there that are interfering with people’s capacity to exercise logic. How do we get from here…from our current situation of fear and traumatization to there, which is a situation of withdrawal, ending the occupation, forming the Palestinian state? They need help. That is all I can say. I mean I don’t want to say it in a patronizing, paternalistic, maternalistic whatever way. But you are talking about two deeply traumatized populations with deeply dysfunctional leaders who are incapable of taking that Nelson Mandela step of saying, our people have been very badly hurt but notwithstanding that, I want to reach out a hand and make peace. You know it would be great if Ariel Sharon were Nelson Mandela. It would be great if Yassir Arafat were a Nelson Mandela. But neither of them is.

So what about external help for these people all of whom I care about deeply. All of whom have the essential spark of humanity in them: Jewish Israelis, Palestinians, Palestinian refugees whose claims have been totally ignored for fifty four years now while they have languished in their situation of exile and being refugees. How can we somehow as people who are concerned outsiders help these people out of their current situation? Well our government is majorly involved as you all know. Our government gives more than 3 billion dollars a year of aid to the Israeli government. It provides F-16s and Apache helicopters which are used in these attacks. The bulldozers are Caterpillar bulldozers made in the USA. Probably provided, in fact, this entire…I never mentioned that this entire new Israeli road building project…this entirely discriminatorily road building project that only allows Israelis to settle on…to travel on, was funded by the US under the Oslo accords.

So you know we are deeply implicated especially because we are a democracy. So what our government does, it does apparently in our name. And it is remarkable to me that there is not more anti-American anger out there in the Palestinian communities than what there is because they see this thing going ahead. They see this…let’s call it a bulldozer of Sharonism…just trampling their dreams, their ability to live a decent human life. And George W. Bush is no where to be seen. Maybe he is cheering in the back row somewhere. Every so often he mentions something like, oh that was a little bit of an excessive use of force when you drop a one ton bomb on a you know, crowded neighborhood. But are their consequences? No there are never consequences. Not a single consequence. I would love to think that we could reform this administration. It seems a little difficult. It seems even a little up hill to us. Can we reform Congress? Ditto an uphill task. I mean we have to recognize that this whole highly polarized, pro-Israeli policy is something that most members of Congress are happy to go along with. If we can’t reform US policy perhaps we ought to urge that the US hand…this important task on the global peace building agenda back to the UN, which is essentially where the US stole it from back in the 1970s. And that we have as fundamentally a twenty-five year period of US monopoly of the peace making process. I would call this stewardship of the peace making that has been exercised by the US on behalf of the international community which has it’s own very strong interests in Israeli-Palestinian peace. And this stewardship has not been well conducted for most of the past twenty-five years. And it should be ended.

Now I don’t know whether the UN actually wants to take this on. The UN and the EU and Russia are all joined in this thing called the Quartet, which is supposedly a sort of acting as an adjunct to US policy making. Koffi has made some wonderful statements, calming and reassuring and holding out the vision of a two state solution and a peaceable outcome. The vision that a majority of Israelis and a majority…a huge majority of Palestinians would all accept. So it is just a question of how we get from this present imbroglio out of this to the situation where we have a two state solution. And if Koffi can help us to do it, that is great. But I am very, very pessimistic that this President of the United States will do it.