In Pursuit of Peace in Israel and Palestine

Gershon Baskin

Description

Gershon Baskin's memoir of thirty-eight years of intensive pursuit of peace begins with a childhood on Long Island and a bar mitzvah trip to Israel with his family. Baskin joined Young Judaea back in the States, then later lived on a kibbutz in Israel, where he announced to his parents that he had decided to make aliya, emigrate to Israel. They persuaded him to return to study at NYU, after which he finally emigrated under the auspices of Interns for Peace. In Israel he spent a pivotal two years living with Arabs in the village of Kufr Qara.

Despite the atmosphere of fear, Baskin found he could talk with both Jews and Palestinians, and that very few others were engaged in efforts at mutual understanding. At his initiative, the Ministry of Education and the office of right-wing prime minister Menachem Begin created the Institute for Education for Jewish-Arab Coexistence with Baskin himself as director. Eight years later he founded and codirected the only joint Israeli-Palestinian public policy think-and-do tank in the world, the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information. For decades he continued to cross borders, often with a kaffiyeh (Arab headdress) on his dashboard to protect his car in Palestinian neighborhoods. Airport passport control became Kafkaesque as Israeli agents routinely identified him as a security threat.

During the many cycles of peace negotiations, Baskin has served both as an outside agitator for peace and as an advisor on the inside of secret talks—for example, during the prime ministership of Yitzhak Rabin and during the initiative led by Secretary of State John Kerry. Baskin ends the book with his own proposal, which includes establishing a peace education program and cabinet-level Ministries of Peace in both countries, in order to foster a culture of peace.

Sujets

• Middle Eastern Studies
• International Relations
• Middle Est
• Human Rights
• Histoire
• Israel
• Peace and conflict studies
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 12 décembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780826521835
• Langue: English

Extrait

In Pursuit of Peace in Israel and Palestine
In Pursuit of Peace in Israel and Palestine
GERSHON BASKIN
VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS
Nashville
© 2017 by Gershon Baskin
Published by Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee 37235
All rights reserved
First printing 2017
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file
LC control number 2017000459
LC classification number DS119.7.B2918 2017
Dewey classification number 956.9405—dc23
LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2017000459
ISBN 978-0-8265-2181-1 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-8265-2183-5 (ebook)
This book is dedicated to all the innocent victims of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is written with the hope that more innocent lives will not be lost because of the inability of leaders to return to the table to negotiate peace. It is dedicated to all those Israeli and Palestinian heroes who dedicate their lives, day in and out, to work for peace. Peace is made by the actions people take to change attitudes and behaviors and to create hope for a much brighter tomorrow.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
1. Is Israel-Arab Peace Even Possible?
2. Why Write This Book?
3. In the Beginning
4. Making Aliya to an Arab Village
5. Working for the Israeli Government
6. The Institute for Education for Jewish Arab Coexistence
7. The Israeli Army Drafts Me
8. The First Engagement—The Intifada
9. Inventing IPCRI
10. A Day in the Life of an Israeli Peace Activist
11. Becoming a Security Threat
12. The Magical Kingdom
13. From Security List to Advisor to the Prime Minister
14. Bringing Security to the Table
15. The al-Aqsa Intifada, September 2000
16. Dilemmas of a Peacemaker
17. Near Death Experiences
18. Making Peace
19. Lessons Learned
20. Why the Kerry Initiative Failed
21. A Plan to Replace the Netanyahu Government
22. Netanyahu Wins, Hands Down
23. Where to from Here?
24. What Does Peace Look Like?
25. Final Thoughts
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
Many people have influenced me and impacted my life and my work over the past six decades. Amongst those there is one constant shining light of intelligence, principle, integrity, and action—my mother, the late Rita Geller Baskin, who was killed in a car accident in Florida nine years ago. Her spirit and guidance is always with me.
My unending appreciation is also given to my family—my wife Edna, who has tolerated and suffered my too many hours away from home and the anxiety of my travels to dangerous places, and my three children, Elisha, Ben, and Amit who have grown up into extraordinary adults living the values of our home and each making their own significant impact on the world that we share.
Preface
On October 18, 2011, Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit returned home after five years and four months in captivity in Gaza, held by Hamas’s military wing, Ezzedin al-Qassam. Schalit was exchanged for 1027 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. The deal made between the government of Israel and Hamas that ended this painful saga was facilitated through the development of a secret direct back channel of negotiations between me and several Hamas leaders. My first direct contact with a Hamas leader began in April 2005 while attending a UN Conference in Cairo. A friend from Gaza, Prof. Mohammed Samhouri, an economist, was attending that conference. During the first day of meetings, Prof. Samhouri approached me with someone whom he described as a former student and now a professor of economics at the Islamic University of Gaza. Prof. Mohammed Migdad had traveled from Gaza to Cairo via Sinai because he heard that there might be some Israelis at this conference. He had never spoken with an Israeli before, and he was interested in asking some serious questions. In more than two decades of working with Palestinians, I had not yet spoken to anyone from Hamas. This was a golden opportunity for both of us.
Prof. Migdad and I spent about six hours together during the next two days in deep debate and exploration. For me the biggest challenge in our conversations was in trying to explain that my self-definition as a Jew did not solely consist of an identification with a religion. I tried very hard to explain that although very secular, I am also very Jewish. The complexities of defining “Jewish” were, not surprisingly, beyond his comprehension as a believer in the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, a refugee living in the impoverished Gaza Strip, growing up with the consciousness of placing blame on Israel and the Jews for all of his people’s problems and sufferings. Much of our conversation reminded me of similar conversations I have had with many Palestinians and other Arabs over the past decades. Nevertheless, I proposed to Prof. Migdad that our dialogue, being both interesting and important, should be continued and expanded to include other friends from both sides. Prof. Migdad agreed.
Over the next months, we attempted to organize the dialogue. I found four non-EU countries that were willing to host and sponsor our talks: Russia, Norway, Switzerland, and Turkey. Prof. Migdad organized a group of his colleagues from the Islamic University. I organized a group of senior Israeli academics and experts. In the end, the dialogue did not take place. The Palestinian participants had cold feet and would only participate if they had the explicit green light from the Hamas leadership. Despite a visit to Gaza then and a two-hour discussion between Prof. Migdad and Dr. Ahmed Yousef, a senior advisor to Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, that took place in the prime minister’s office in Gaza, during which Dr. Yousef said that he would join our dialogue, the meetings never took place. The senior leadership of Hamas vetoed the talks, stating that no direct contact would take place between Hamas members and Israelis.
In September 2005, my wife’s first cousin, Sasson Nuriel was abducted and murdered by Hamas in the West Bank. When he first disappeared, I tried to use my enormous web of contacts in the West Bank to attempt to locate him or at least gather information about his whereabouts. Shortly after, Hamas published a video of Sasson in captivity. 1 Soon after that, he was murdered. His body was found by Israeli security forces.
My wife, an Iraqi Jew, has a huge family—thirty-six first cousins—compared with me, an Ashkenazi Jew, who has only two. Sasson was my wife’s age. He had been at my wedding years before. We had met at other family celebrations and occasions. Shortly before his murder, we had met at a condolence visit for a common cousin who passed away in Netanya, north of Tel Aviv, and Sasson traveled back to Jerusalem with us. On the way home, we talked politics. He spoke about his close relationship with his Palestinian workers in his candy factory, which was located in the settlement industrial zone of Mishor Adumin, the place where he was abducted by one of those same Palestinian workers with whom he had thought he was so close. At Sasson’s funeral, standing over his body, I swore to myself that, if ever again I could prevent what happened to Sasson, I would do everything possible to save that life.
On June 25, 2006, early in the morning, eight Palestinian armed fighters exited from an attack tunnel inside the Kerem Shalom Israeli Army base next to the Gaza Strip. They launched a rocket-propelled grenade at a tank on the edge of the base. From the tank, which was engulfed by flames, emerged two Israeli soldiers, Hanan Barak and Pavel Slutzker—both were immediately shot and killed. One of the Palestinians climbed onto the tank and dropped a grenade inside. A shell-shocked and wounded soldier was pulled out of the tank and carried off to Gaza. It took the army about one hour to discover that Corporal Gilad Schalit was missing. The Israeli Army immediately began a hot pursuit into Gaza, but it was already too late. The Israeli cabinet authorized a military operation in Gaza—dubbed “Summer Rains”—to bring back the soldier and to capture the perpetrators of the attack. The Israeli Army bombed Gaza. A lot of infrastructure was damaged, including roads, bridges, water networks, and Gaza’s main electricity plant.
Six days later, Prof. Mohammed Migdad called me and said, “Gershon—we have to do something. We are being bombed. We have no water and no electricity. The situation is bad, and it is going to get worse.” I asked him, “What can we do?” Migdad suggested that we try to open a line of communication between the opposing sides. He got into his car and went to the Hamas prime minister’s office. About thirty minutes later, I received a phone call from Dr. Mohammed Madhoun, the director general of the Prime Minister’s Office. He told me that someone else would contact me shortly. A few minutes later, Dr. Ghazi Hamad, the spokesperson of the Hamas government and close advisor to Prime Minister Haniyeh, called. Later that day, based on a proposal by Ghazi Hamad, I organized a phone call between Noam Schalit, Gilad’s father, and Ghazi Hamad. That was the beginning of a five-year-and-four-month-long story of trying and eventually succeeding in getting the government of Israel to listen to me and carry on a secret direct back channel negotiation to bring Gilad Schalit home. 2 Two and a half months into my attempts, I succeeded in getting Hamas to release a handwritten letter from the soldier to his family tha