"Don't Give Up On Us"
Featuring Israeli and Palestinian bridge builders. Plus an exclusive, perspective-changing, peace-making exercise from master mediator William Ury of "Getting To Yes"
When it’s difficult to find reasons for optimism in the present, sometimes we can find them in the past.
Here’s one from a conversation I had this week with Ori Nir, who spent many years covering the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip for the newspaper Haaretz.
In 1994, when Israel’s army gradually withdrew from the West Bank and transferred the authority for West Bank towns … to the PLO, I covered each and every town that was handed over…. And one of the last towns to be handed over was the town of Bethlehem. And in Bethlehem, I remember seeing, and I remember being in tears when I saw it, young Palestinian women standing and instead of throwing rocks at the [Israeli] soldiers … they threw flowers. And there was definitely a feeling that Palestinians were gaining … a sense of independence, and that they were on their way to sovereignty, to statehood…. there was a sense of euphoria.… I think what it symbolized, that act of throwing flowers was, yes, we can make peace and our hand is extended in peace.
I called Nir a few days ago, before the cease fire between Israel and Hamas, as I have often done ever since I first met him in Israel in the 1980s, when I worked at ABC News. Given the scale of destruction and the suffering of civilians this past week, I was at a loss for how to begin our conversation.
He suggested we begin with the question he usually asks his guests on his PeaceCast podcast: What gives you hope?
He pointed to the roughly one hundred demonstrations and vigils this past week — Arabs and Jews together, calling for an end to violence.
And he pointed to a small but growing network of integrated elementary schools in Israel that bring together Arab and Jewish families, called Hand in Hand.
The students are Jews and Arabs, citizens of Israel…. It’s based on complete equality between the staff, the students, and maybe most importantly, the parents. Those schools bring together … a really large community of thousands of families that interact around the school, do things together, learn about each other, obviously learn each other's languages….there is huge demand.… that's something that is beautiful, that is incredibly constructive, and that I know, for many families, has really become a game changer in the way they view the relations between Jews and Arabs inside Israel.
Nir then returned to recent history.
On November 4, 1995, the night Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by an extremist, right-wing Israeli Jew, during a rally for peace that was 100,000 strong, Nir got a call from his editor asking for reactions from Palestinians.
For context, Nir had reported on Rabin’s approach to suppressing the first Palestinian intifada - uprising - “by force, by might, by beating.” But Rabin had changed. And, as Nir has documented, Rabin “came to appreciate the Palestinians’ dogged pursuit of national liberation.”
For many ordinary Palestinians, Rabin was a symbol of transformation. A transformation among their Israeli neighbors from enmity and conflict to peace, on the road to reconciliation. Many [Palestinians] told me that Rabin’s transformation had given them hope – just as it had given hope to so many Israelis.
And so, when Rabin was shot …
I pick up the phone and I call my Palestinian sources. And the first one I called was Saeb Erekat, who was the chief Palestinian negotiator, and a great friend of mine. I've known him for years. And I called him and told him what happened. And he was shaken and we started talking.
As they were talking, Rabin’s spokesperson came out to announce that Rabin had died of his wounds. Nir found himself simultaneously translating, from Hebrew to Arabic, for Saeb Erekat on the phone.
And both Saeb Erekat and I were crying as we heard that. We were crying and I remember that what Saed said to me was, through the tears, he said something like “Everything's going to change. Nothing's going to be the same. But one thing that you and I know now is that we, the supporters of peace on both sides have more in common together than what each one of us has [with] the common denominator of each society….” In other words, there was a constituency for peace that transcended the national divide.
After 24 years in journalism, Ori Nir now devotes his life to identifying and strengthening the constituencies for peace. He is on the leadership team of Americans for Peace Now.
Introducing Huda Abu Arqoub
I discovered another bridge builder last week.
Huda Abu Arqoub is a Palestinian grass-roots leader from Jerusalem — the regional director of the Alliance for Middle East Peace, which describes itself as “a coalition of over 150 organizations—and tens of thousands of Palestinians and Israelis—building people-to-people cooperation, coexistence, equality, shared society, mutual understanding, and peace among their communities.”
Here is a moving excerpt from her conversation with the New Israel Fund’s Libby Lenkinski.
Nir’s Peace Now colleague, Hagit Ofran, was also part of that conversation. She made her own poignant plea that echoed Huda Abu Arqoub’s. Pointing to the persistence of a relatively small, but determined, cadre of Israelis and Palestinians who are working together for peaceful coexistence, Ofran made this appeal:
“Don’t give up on us.”
Writing The Victory Speech of Your Adversary
In the search for peace in one part of the world, it can help to identify insights in other parts of the world.
In September 2016, in the hours before the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas signed a peace treaty, ending their half-century civil war, I spoke with William Ury, co-author of the seminal book on negotiation, Getting To Yes.
Ury was part of the Colombian President’s “kitchen cabinet” of peace advisers. In the following short excerpt, Ury, on the phone in Cartagena, shares the inside story of an exercise his team led with government negotiators. They were asked to put themselves in the shoes of the FARC leaders by doing the following:
…just start off by imagining we’d reached an agreement. And imagine that the FARC leaders had to describe this agreement, give a talk to all their people … in which they described this agreement as a kind of victory for them. Not that it couldn’t be a victory for the government as well, but it’s like, it had to be something that they could sell to their own troops and explain “Look, we’ve been fighting for 52 years, we’re laying down our weapons.” They can’t say it was all in vain. And so we worked backwards from that speech. We even simulated that speech, I asked the president’s brother to give that speech to us as if he was the leader, the guerilla commander. Then we said “Okay, so how can we make it easier for them to give that speech? What are the key interests, what are the key needs that they have.” One was they couldn’t surrender, this needed to be an ending of the war with respect, with dignity. And we needed to find some way in which they could feel a sense of honor.
How might that exercise — writing the victory speech of your adversary — play out in an Israeli-Palestinian context? What speeches could lead Israelis and Palestinians in the direction of a just and peaceful coexistence? Ori Nir tries to tackle that question in our Wavemaker Conversation.
You can listen on the Soundcloud link below, or read along with the transcript here.
Our conversation does not tackle the myriad obstacles to peace between Palestinians and Israelis.
Our goal is simply to identify, in Nir’s words, “any kind of positivity now, when things are so dark.”
The work of the bridge builders is daunting.
Let’s not give up on them.
To sample Ori Nir’s PeaceCast, in which he interviews bridge builders in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, click here.
To watch the full webinar produced by the New Israel Fund about the ongoing crisis in Jerusalem, including detailed analysis and maps, click here.
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