Text: Julia Ley
Photography: Renalda Ludvika
I would like to take you on my own emotional and intellectual journey from one side of the Middle East conflict to the other. There is no hidden agenda, and no firm conclusion in favour of one or the other. Indeed, I would like to argue against all too firm conclusions as such. This is an appraisal of the possibilities of our post-ideological times. It is a defence of the view that the time has come to step back from the dogmas of left and right and to allow ourselves more intellectual freedom, and less clear lines.
Rather than deciding on one ‘direction’ which becomes the lens through which we look at the world, I believe we should begin by looking at the world in all its mind-boggling complexity and with all its shades of light, dark, middle, very dark and very light grey. The point is to listen - carefully and empathetically - without needing to defend one’s own perspective all the time. For if we understand properly, as well as we understand our own opinion, only then can we enter a dialogue that can begin to change something.
One of the conclusions one could – and I believe many have - come to when following the recent political developments of Israeli-Palestinian politics, is that Israel in some ways behaves like a militarized giant. A giant, which is slowly trying to squeeze the lifeblood out of the Palestinian people, whom it torments with what Palestinians call the ‘Apartheid’-wall, evictions, checkpoints, curfews, raids, and even full-on war as the last Gaza offensive has shown.
Particularly after this recent display of military might, it has become rather difficult to believe Israeli justifications for the suffering they are inflicting on the Palestinian people. Once you cross the invisible line between West and East Jerusalem, it is quite hard not to see one’s expectations of crass economic and political imbalances between Israelis and Palestinians reconfirmed.
Israeli occupation of the west bank is a crude reality and notably one that utterly contradicts the official Israeli rhetoric of a potential two-state solution. Already Israeli settlements occupy 42% of the territory of this state-to-be and neither the Oslo peace process nor the latest ‘Roadmap for peace’, in which Israel committed itself to a freeze of the settlement process, have managed to do anything about it.
Israeli settlements have continued to grow since the annexation of the West Bank in 1967, amounting to a total of 470.000 Israeli settlers living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem by May 2009. Settlements are located strategically to occupy water and other natural resources which would constitute the vital lifelines of an independent Palestine.
Other settlements, like those that now encircle Jerusalem, are constructed in a way that handicaps the construction of a coherent Palestinian infrastructure or hinders the further growth of Arab settlements, like in East Jerusalem. In addition most Palestinians I met in the west bank, aside from having had relatives killed, appear to have at least one relative or friend who is currently held in an Israeli jail – often for very dubious reasons.
Perhaps the most depressing thing is that most of the people I met have lost the will and energy to resist the frequent violations and humiliations they are being subjected to from Israeli soldiers. Many have simply become used to it, it seems, leaving bleak prospects for a functional Palestinian state.
At some point, I couldn’t help but think that Israel’s official policy line of a potential two-state solution may be primarily a tactical endeavour to ensure the continued political and financial support of the West. This would buy them the time to create the conditions on the ground that make the integration of the West Bank into a future Israeli state an irreversible reality. If this process is to be averted, Israel would have to forcibly remove several thousand settlers from their homes, something that was done under massive protests in Gaza and Sinai before.
When I came back to Israel a few weeks later, I was yearning for a justification, yearning for some explanation that would offer me another perspective, another side to the misery I encountered. Despite having seen and heard everything with my own eyes and ears, I still felt like I had somehow misunderstood something. Simply identifying Israel as the aggressor seemed over-simplistic, and I longed to understand, how Israelis justify or even make sense of a process whereby one side becomes so blatantly superior to the other.
I started asking questions and got drawn into heated debates. What I heard seemed to be excuses, not explanations: the usual stuff about Israel’s right to defend and protect itself in the face of violent hostility in addition to numerous stories about the terrorist nature of Hamas, al-Fatah and, well, Palestinians in general. They were described to me as a bunch of dangerous and corrupt criminals who exploit the suffering of little children in order to win sympathy and support. No word of Israel’s previous financial support to Hamas in order to create a counterweight to the PLO, whereby it really created the enemy it is now claiming to destroy.
I was told that during the last Gaza offensive, Palestinian parents made their children play dead to carry them across the city in fake funerals. Afterwards, these children simply got up from their stretchers and walked away. So what, I wonder? Isn’t it rather unlikely that all the hundreds of children that were killed during the Gaza offensive simply pretended to be dead, even if one or two might have? And even if all of them did, can we make sense of it other than recognising it as an act of bare desperation?
Such stories didn’t explain what is happening but merely defend what Israel does today by portraying Palestinians as somehow innately inhumane - and thus deserving of inhumane treatment. But none satisfied my desire for a well-argued defence of Israel’s ‘right’ in doing so. None of them tackled the question of legitimacy that interests me. How one justifies a historical reality whereby a group of people, loosely connected by their belonging to the same religion, begins to settle in one stretch of land, buying land from the native population, or – if they prove unwilling to be bought off – expelling it by rather crude means and eventually establishing a state. A state which is explicitly Jewish in nature and thereby a priori defines parts of its population as alien and second-class.
As I made my way to the airport several days later, I felt angry frustrated and confused with a situation that seemed to have reached deadlock. It seemed any attempt to overcome this deadlock will have to happen at the expense of either the one or the other. Back home I pondered over these impressions time and time again. I noticed that to some extent I had jumped to premature conclusions. The crass differences that prevail between Israel and the occupied territories in standards of living but also in terms of military, political and financial power make it sometimes too easy to sympathize exclusively with the Palestinians.
I don’t want to euphemise what I believe is an often crude and uncompromising way of dealing with the Palestinians, however, what I noticed is that I had never truly listened to what Israelis had told me. Sure, I had listened – in so far as my mind had understood and processed what I was told – but I had never met their arguments with an open mind. I only really heard what I wanted to hear and saw what I expected to see.
Scientists may call this ‘partial perception’. Everything I had seen and heard in Palestine was still true, and yes, if you look at everything ‘objectively’ (if there is such a thing) and if you believe – and I don’t – that one can compare pain or suffering, then you may say that Palestinians seem to suffer a whole lot more than Israelis. Overall, they are certainly at the lower end of this war. However, my interest is not to pass final judgement, but instead, to understand as much of the complexity of this conflict as possible. So surely my first impulse should be not to analyse the conflict in its entirety, but to begin by trying to immerse myself in the stories of either side, independently of who is right and who is wrong. It is impossible to arrive at something like an overarching, disconnected and impartial ‘truth,’ there are only a million subjective truths, a million individual stories - on both sides.
In a sense, what I went through, relates closely to what Katherine Tengtio described in her article on understanding:
‘We listen autobiographically, filtering in everything we hear based on our own perceptions and our own personal experiences. Our responses are determined by our own personal opinions.’
Instead of asking whether I agree with the message entailed by this or that story, it might have been more useful had I asked: ‘How did he or she get there?’ This is true, for example, for the much talked-about collective Jewish fear resulting from centuries of anti-Semitist persecution. Objectively speaking, Israelis may have less reason to feel afraid than Palestinians do today, as the majority of Palestinians are probably more likely to be killed, tortured or imprisoned than the majority of Israelis. But how do you measure fear? Jewish fears of persecution are more than merely a collective paranoia. They are real because they are part of a collective but also very individual national memory and because people feel they are real. Whether this fear may be the result of public scare mongering or is at least an instrument of certain institutions is not really the question. The first step is to understand it.
It is about time we move away from those one-sided analyses that only look to blame one side or the other. The time has come for a broader and better-informed discourse on both sides. A discourse that is critical of the predominant ideologies on the respective side and which goes beyond the usual finger pointing. This discourse already exists, but for some reason it seems to have been unable to reach the largest part of both societies.
If this can be achieved, then there may still be hope that one day there will grow a new generation of Israelis and Palestinians. One that will be able to find new and more humane ways of interacting with one another. And yet, while I am still typing these words, the images of barbed-wired Israeli settlements and heavily armed Israeli teenage-soldiers guarding checkpoints in the West Bank come back to mind and I wonder if Palestinians really have the time to wait for such a generation to grow...
Julia Ley is German and studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. She spent three weeks in the West Bank and Israel this summer.