Jerusalem Post/Yalla Peace: Palestinians need an A Street, too

Yalla Peace: Palestinians need an A Street
By RAY HANANIA
20/04/2010 Jerusalem Post Newspaper

At a recent event hosted by J Street head Jeremy Ben-Ami, I was inspired by the man’s dedication to principle and morality.

AIPAC is both praised and criticized as the powerful Israel lobby. It hasn’t done a good job of promoting peace, however. There is a new kid on the block doing just that, promoting peace. It’s called J Street and it’s headed by Jeremy Ben-Ami. I recently had a chance to hear Ben-Ami speak to a tough audience of American Jews at Am Yisrael synagogue in Glencoe, Illinois.

His words inspired me because of the clarity of his dedication to principle and morality. It made me even wish there was a Palestinian version, maybe called A Street. All we Arabs have are the extremist activists who dominate public discourse and the ineffective Arab League, which spends a fortune doing nothing. The closest equivalent of Ben-Ami in my community is probably the articulate intellectual Hussein Ibish.

But if we wait for the Palestinians to get their act together, we’ll probably wait forever. Is that a reason not to pursue peace?

J Street, founded in April 2008, is fast becoming the impetus for a revival of the peace process and reinforcement among many that peace is possible, including among many Arabs and Palestinians I know.

BEN-AMI is no Jewish quisling, nor a self-hating Jew, and not anti-Semitic. He’s not anti-Zionist and not some leftist activist looking to achieve the impossible, to turn the clock back to 1947 and achieve “one state.” He’s hard core Jewish, Zionist and very pro-Israel.

But Ben-Ami makes points I make all the time: Jews don’t have to abandon their diehard support for Israel (nor Palestinians for Palestine) to support a peace plan that brings peace and safety to both.

Ben-Ami’s grandparents were among the founders of Petah Tikva in 1882. His father served in the Irgun.

He candidly laid out Israel’s three choices: hang on to all of the land, hang on to Israel’s Jewish character and hang on to Israel’s democratic tradition. Israelis can only pick two of the three.

Ben-Ami argues convincingly that the majority of Jews, including in America, support two states and compromise. He said, “This conversation we are beginning is not about American foreign policy... but about who we are as a people... How Jews act and behave when we are not the minority. When we are not powerless, but the powerful.”

I could not have been more inspired as a Palestinian. He quickly won the support of the more than 250 Jews and others in the synagogue, with the exception of a small handful of sometimes disruptive foes of peace.

He answered the tough questions and dispelled false rumors, like the one put forth, he said, by Alan Dershowitz, that Norman Finkelstein, the extremist anti-Zionist Jew from Chicago, was a speaker at a recent J Street event. (My support of two states, attacks against extremists and condemnation of Hamas as a terrorist organization have drawn Finkelstein’s ire.)

Ben-Ami warned the audience the clock is ticking on the two-state solution, something the fanatics recognize too. They’ll stop at nothing to block peace. “Time is not on the side of peace. Time is no longer on our side,” he said.

He reflected many of the views I embrace: The wall is needed, but not in Palestinian territory. It should have been built on “recognizable borders.” Israelis and Palestinians need a time separation, especially once peace is established, to help overcome natural animosity from a century- long conflict.

Jerusalem is already a divided city, but that division can continue in a peace accord with Israel controlling the Jewish areas and Palestine the Christian and Muslim areas.

Ben-Ami said Hamas is both a terrorist organization and a political voice that represents a sizable segment of the Palestinian population. But, he added, Israelis and Jews “must recognize that every movement will use violence, and I speak from my own family experience.” Two-states can be achieved through a swap of land on a one-to-one basis. As many as 75 percent of settlers could remain in the West Bank.

He was especially outraged at the hateful campaign against the renowned jurist and international legal scholar Judge Richard Goldstone who headed the UN inquiry into allegations of war crimes committed not just by Israel, but by Hamas as well during Operation Cast Lead. Ben-Ami stressed that many Israeli leaders believe the allegations should be investigated, but said “the vilification of Judge Goldstone is ludicrous and out of bounds.”

FINALLY, BEN-AMI was asked why he isn’t as critical of the Palestinians as he is of Israel (which isn’t true).

“We do a disservice if we refuse to look at the reality of the West Bank... to call the West Bank a terrorist breeding ground does a disservice to the reality and to people like Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad who are working for support peace,” Ben-Ami said. “There will be violence from both sides” as we get closer and closer to peace.

He stressed that he is Israeli and a Jew. His responsibility is not to tell the Palestinians how to forge their own society, but to help improve, strengthen and define Israel and the Jewish people.

It’s a similar message I make when addressing Arab and Palestinian groups. As a Palestinian, it is not my place to tell Israelis what to do with their country. Is it Jewish or not Jewish is up to them.

“My focus is on what my people and my country are doing,” Ben-Ami said.

In other words, Jews and Palestinians can help the process not by blaming the other side or telling the other side how to act. As a Palestinian, my responsibility is to do more to end the campaigns of violence against Israel and to speak out more forcefully against the voices of extremism in the Palestinian community.

Palestinians can’t keep pointing to what Israel does as an excuse to ignore what Palestinians are doing to Israelis. That goes the same for Israelis.

The battle is not between Palestinians and Israelis. It is, as Jeremy Ben-Ami so eloquently argued, “between those who support compromise and those who do not.”

Named Best Ethnic Columnist in America by New America Media, the writer is a Palestinian-American columnist and peace activist. He can be reached at www.YallaPeace.com

My response to the vicious slander by Laila el-Haddad, the "Gaza Mom"

Here's my response (to Laila el-Haddad's personal attack -- the extremists NEVER address the issues, they only attack the person) and under the guise of being the "Gaza Mom", she attacked me personally in part because I am a Christian Palestinian (married to a Jewish wife) and because I espoused support for peace based on two-states, something she clearly rejected. (Click to read her blog). 

When you support the one-state "solution" you are condemning Palestinians to generations of despair and suffering, but that suffering and despair enables you to self-focused activism. Anyone who supports "one-state" is either consumed with suffering and tragedy or simply an extremist who rejects compromise, and NOT a moderate. So why waste my time talking to you?  

Gaza IS NOT the only issue. The issue is peace, something the Hamas terrorists (and the settler terrorists) do not want. When we have peace, we will have a safe Gaza and West Bank and Palestine State. But I don't think you want peace at all. You want victory over the "Jews" and the Israelis, and you won't stop fighting until you turn back the clock to 1922. It ain't going to happen. And don't wrap yourself up with the suffering of my people. It's people like you who have enabled the Israeli extremists to achieve what they have.

Your extremism is undermining the Palestinian cause. And although you use your celebrity to achieve personal gain, the Palestinians are suffering because of your extremist views and your hatred of moderates, Jews and Christian Arabs who like me dare to express their views.

You asked, I answered.  

Ray Hanania 

www.RadioChicagoland.com
www.TheArabDailyNews.com

Movement to moderate Jewish voices at J Street could reignite moderate Palestinian voices

For years, APIAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobby, has had Jewish American political thought in an extremist headlock, a new voice of Jewish American moderation is rising in strength called J Street. The organization, which is being pilloried by extremist pro-Israel conservatives, holds a major conference on Israel and Middle East next week in Washington D.C. I'll be participating in a special blogging panel of Israelis and Palestinians who support compromise and peace based on two-states organized by Richard Silverstein of Tikun Olam.

There is no doubt that Jewish American thought on peace between Palestinians and Israelis has been driven to the far, extremist right by AIPAC and its network of pro-Israel funding mechanisms. In fact, in part because of AIPACs powerful lobbying, many Jewish Americans who normally would support peace based on compromised have been pushed into a corner embracing a one-sided peace in which Israel retains all that it has taken over the years without making any sacrifices for peace while demanding that Palestinians do everything from surrendering some West Bank Lands, compromising on Jerusalem, accepting some of the illegal all-Jewish settlements and accepting a state that lacks the true power of sovereignty over its lands.

At the same time, many Palestinians are being pushed into the corner of extremism by the failure of the Palestinian leadership to achieve any real concessions from Israel. There is a growing movement of Palestinians who are now calling for a "one-state" solution which is not a solution at all but the end of the Palestinian Revolution and claim to nationhood. The one-state agenda basically abandons the occupation as the primary evil in the current relationship between Israel and Palestine, and instead naively proposes that the Arab population will grow at such a rate that eventually Israel and Palestine will become one Arab State, the original goal of the Arab World in the 1930s and 1940s that laid the groundwork for six decades of Palestinian failures.

Palestinians live in occupation and in the diaspora for the fundamental reason that they have allowed their emotions to lead them into believing the notion that nothing less than total Jewish surrender can compensate for their suffering and their failures and military losses. In other words, Palestinians have been taught that the shame of their failures can be compensated through rejection and emotion, and in many cases, unrestrained violence of vengeance that often targeted innocent civilians.

Every time that the Palestinian leadership sought to compromise with Israel and achieve a step forward towards the two-state solution, Hamas terrorists using a bastardized distortion of Islam as their standard intentionally targeted Israeli civilians in suicide bombings. This ongoing violence gave many Palestinians the only form of fulfillment, a macabre sense of justice.

This failing among the Palestinians to develop a reasoned strategy to support a compromise that would maximize their returns pushed many Israelis and American Jews into extremism themselves. They use Palestinian failure as a justification to reject true compromise and this formula has become the foundation of AIPAC's political assaults. It has held American public opinion hostage through ignorance of facts, leading them to believe that it is the Palestinians who refuse to compromise when in fact it is the dominant Israeli government that, even during the peace process, continues to expand settlements, confiscate Palestinian lands and provoke hostilities through policies of confrontation and even violence.

Next week in Washington, Jewish Americans who still believe in two-states, and peace based on compromise will meet to discuss how to strategically move the two-state solution out of the margins. Their success can also motivate Palestinian moderates to reinvigorate their own support of two-states and peace based on compromise.

What is that compromise? Most Palestinians know what it is. Palestinians know that they cannot defeat Israel, but they can continue to make the lives of Israelis miserable and painful, at a cost of making their own lives miserable and painful too. That's the Hamas option.

They also know that if Israel were to become serious in peace, and if moderate Jews and Israelis can reclaim control of their public opinion, they would reciprocate and support peace based on compromise. And that compromise entails very clearly defined concessions for both sides. Israel surrenders the majority of Palestinian lands it occupied in 1967 and end its provocative military attacks not just against Hamas but other Palestinians in the West Bank. It means that Israel stop expanding its settlements and instead begin dismantling the settlements. It also means Israel accepts that there must be a Palestinian presence in Jerusalem that would represent the capitol of a Palestinian State.

It also means that Palestinians accept the reality that the right of return may be a legal legitimate right, but that it is an unrealistic right that can never be achieved. Palestinians must accept the fact that refusing to compromise on the Right of Return is in fact a form of punishment on the Palestinian people living in the diaspora with no hope other than the empty promises made to them year after year by Palestinian fanatics who refuse to compromise. Those fanatics will fight to the very last refugee to prove their point.

But before Palestinian moderation can re-establish itself, the moderate Israeli and Jewish movement must re-assert itself. They Pace Now is dead and that the leftists in Israel no longer have a voice in Israeli policy. If Jewish and Israeli moderation is dead than the future is bleak for everyone. But if it can resurrect itself, it is very possible that might reignite the moderate Palestinian movement.

And that moderate Palestinian movement is the only hope Palestinians have for the future. We can remain interlocked in an unending conflict in which Palestinians sustain far more punishment than the Israelis, with no real hope of statehood, or we Palestinians can recognize the reality and replace emotion and hate with passion and reason. If we can, we might see a sovereign Palestinian State in our lifetime.

-- Ray Hanania

www.RadioChicagoland.com