When I got accepted into this scholarship program, I knew from the beginning that I faced a unique personal hazard. I would be studying Conflict Resolution with a special focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and I would be doing it in the very heart of the region. The problem is that I would be studying it from only one side. I live in Jordan, a country that has fought multiple wars with Israel and where 1.9 million of its 6 million people are registered as Palestinian refugees. I knew there would be a subtle process of adopting the views of the Jordanian people. I tried to mitigate this by deliberately seeking out Israeli viewpoints. Before I left for Jordan I bought a large stack of books by Jewish and Israeli authors and am planning to visit Israel as much as possible while in the region. I want to understand the region and its conflicts from all sides.
Looking back, I think I may have overestimated the danger. I've discovered that living in a foreign culture is like living with a family. Spend enough time in a culture, and all your illusions get stripped away; you become intimately familiar with the full humanity of the people you're living with. You get to know their strengths and their unique cultural charms, but you also get to know their weaknesses and their maddening idiosyncrasies. There is a lot I love about the Jordanian people and their culture, but there is one nasty trait in my new adopted culture that keeps rearing its ugly head: rampant antisemitism.
I came to the region as a pragmatist and realist who cares deeply about the moral dimension of peace and war. I am sympathetic to many Palestinian and Arab grievances and believe the US needs to adopt a more balanced policy in the region. I also believe the US has traditionally had a deficit of experience and wisdom in the Arab world, which is why I competed so hard to get into this scholarship program, learn Arabic, and move to the Middle East. I have dedicated my life to standing in the gap between civilizations and doing the slow, gritty, painful work of building peace. I am trying to be a true friend of the Arabs by listening to their stories, learning their culture, and bringing that knowledge back to the US government. It is in the United States' national interests to hear and understand these perspectives, and enact fair policy that addresses some of these root grievances. Many American policymakers have come to understand this, which is why the US has begun challenging the Israeli settlement enterprise.
This is why I'm so angry and disappointed by every new example of antisemitism I encounter here. I want to promote understanding between Arabs and the West, but each instance of antisemitism reinforces all the stereotypes of the Arabs' harshest critics. It's sad and pathetic. It is also self-defeating, because it undermines legitimate Palestinian pleas for sympathy and a just resolution to the conflict.
The existence of antisemitism here does not surprise me; what does surprise me is how thoroughly it permeates the culture, including among highly educated and pro-Western Arabs. Back at DLI, my wife and I became dear friends with an Arab couple who taught at the school. They have lived in the US for over twenty years teaching Arabic to US military. Their kids grew up in the US. They are American through and through. So I choked on my coffee one day when we were talking politics and my friend said, "Who knows if the holocaust even happened?" I had a similar experience here with an older, highly educated friend. A mutual friend warned me not to bring up politics and especially the Holocaust with him, because I wouldn't like what I heard. One time I had dinner with a well-educated Jordanian lawyer, who lectured me at length about the Zionist conspiracy that led the United States to secretly collaborate with Iran and support the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006. And let's not talk about all those Jews who knew about September 11th beforehand.
Perhaps the most disappointing of all is my best friend here, a Palestinian who studied conflict resolution and wants to work on peacebuilding in the future. He is a close friend and I love him like a brother, and he strives to be objective and moderate, but he still carries prejudice against Israelis that he is mostly blind to. He won't use toothpicks at restaurants, because someone told him Israelis with HIV cross the border and infect toothpicks. Yesterday he told me he doesn't like vacationing at the legendary Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt because so many Jews vacation there. When my wife and I challenged him on this, he got defensive. You don't understand, he said. The Israelis are still our enemies. You don't know what it's like suffering as much as we have. Every Israeli man serves in the IDF; maybe that Israeli tourist at Sharm El-Sheikh killed one of my relatives. If you were me, you wouldn't want to spend time with Israelis either.
So what does all this mean?
If you're thinking, "I knew it; those Palestinians are all antisemites", then you're taking away the wrong lesson. I suspect this rampant antisemitism has less to do with the intrinsic character of Palestinian and Arab culture than it does with conflict dynamics. In war, both sides spin elaborate narratives that dehumanize their enemy (see my post Dehumanization and Racism in War). Today I wrote about antisemtism, but I could also write about Israelis I've met who have about as much regard for Palestinians as they do for stray dogs. When I was at the Air Force Academy I knew a couple exchange cadets from the Balkans. Their temperament completely changed if you got them talking about Serbs. Wars radicalize people; I think Arab antisemitism has to be understood in that context. Two features of antisemitism make it unique, however. First is its severity, which is unique throughout history. Nations and peoples have reserved an unparalleled level of contempt for Jews. Second, the Palestinian narrative has taken the process of dehumanization and racism to a legendary height. Antisemitism is a central feature of much anti-Israeli rhetoric. Witness the way some Arab governments distributed the racist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and taught it in schools, or the references to this document in the Hamas charter.
What do we do about antisemitism? Or about racism and dehumanization in any conflict environment? Education is vital... both the kind you get in a classroom or from books, and the kind you get from spending time face-to-face with your enemy. The biggest tragedy with my friend isn't that he carries deep prejudice against Jews; it's that he spent two years studying Conflict Resolution at university, but his prejudice went unchallenged. He wants to help solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but he doesn't want to sit in a lawn chair next to a Jew. I have to wonder how many students in this program meet a single Israeli during their studies. How many Jewish students in Israeli universities have the same experience in reverse? If we can't even get dedicated, pro-peace students to talk to each other in the safe environment of a classroom, our rhetoric about conflict resolution is just self-deceit. We have a long, long road ahead of us.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
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3 comments:
I think it's great the energy you're putting into that region and I agree, from my limited perspective, it appears to be a long road. While reading your post I couldn't help thinking about the divides in our own country and our own lack of education and the mainstreaming of propaganda. I remember our election six short months ago and the not insignificant number of educated Air Force officers who sincerely told me they thought Senator Obama was a Muslim. Certainly these are two completely different issues but the common threads of ignorance and hatred in our own country concern me greatly. For what it's worth.
I could probably benefit from cultivating more sympathy toward the Palestinian people and their perspectives. I must say, though, that I don't exactly see the Palestinians as one of the two main sides in the "Arab-Israeli" conflict. While Palestinians are certainly Arab, they are used as pawns by more powerful Arab nations to foment hatred and violence toward Israel. At the same time, these powerful Arab nations hardly lift a finger to combat poverty in the "occupied territories." There is a reason why no one ever talks about the state of the Palestinians between 1948 and 1967: Gaza was under Egyptian control then, and the West Bank under Jordanian control, yet the situation of the people was little better than today. I am not trying to advance the sort of conspiracy theory for which the region is so famous, but I am tempted to believe that powerful Arab forces actually wish to perpetuate the misery of the Palestinians - it gives them their most potent public-relations weapon. If a Palestinian state is established, that will limit the pretext for wiping Israel off the map. Did not Netanyahu basically offer an Israel with 1967 boundaries to Arafat in 1998, only to have Arafat walk away from the negotiating table? I believe in the necessity of a Palestinian state, but I don't believe that the core issue for many Arabs is the existence of Israel itself.
It's easy to talk about "sitting in a lawn chair next to a Jewish Israeli" when you have comfortable life in which you have never experienced the day to day suffering and humiliation that characterizes the current lifestyle of the occupied peoples of Palestine. Your family has not been uprooted from their home and land...your people haven't had to stand by and watch the slaughter of 600 of their own innocent women and children in the recent Israeli offensive into Gaza. I do not think anti-Semitism is warranted; rather I think there is a characteristic difference between the inner struggle with resentment and hatred each person involved in a conflict must face and overcome, and the rampant anti-Semitism that history has been fraught with. Palestinian people are struggling with feelings that characterize an oppressed people and are searching for a narrative to explain their suffering and stake their hopes for a better future. Their feelings must be viewed as distinct from, or should we say more complex, than mere anti-Semitism; in this case, the Palestinians are oppressed and have experienced violence to their souls, and at times their physical bodies. Your role as a resolver of conflict is to help them overcome their limit situations (in the spirit of Freire), embrace the other (in the spirit of Miroslav Volf), and create solutions. In doing so, you must acknowledge the ongoing violence against their people and the inevitable human feelings that will accompany this. From there, you can help them to overcome. But labeling it as "anti-Semitism" oversimplifies the feelings they are experiencing both to them as well as to observers who can potentially help change the circumstances (i.e. continued U.S. funding of blank checks to Israel) that perpetuate the conflict.
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