At his first inauguration as US President, back in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt famously said “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”.
Over 90 years later, that phrase could be applied to the Palestine/Israel conflict or, more precisely, to Palestinians and Israeli Jews. The biggest driver in preventing a solution is that Palestinians fear Israelis and Israelis fear Palestinians.
Of course, many individual Palestinians and Israelis have friends, good friends, on the “other” side but there are also many more who do not have any contact across the divide except through the ongoing violence as participants, as victims, or simply as observers.
It is this lack of knowledge about the lives, the desires, the pain of those who live close by but in a different world that has allowed cynical politicians on both sides to exploit the natural fear most of us have of those who we don’t know. Especially when there has been a long, bloody history of attacks and atrocities by both sides for over 100 years.
Israel’s long held policy of security through strength has failed. It has just led to more wars. The Palestinians, whose policy is to eradicate Israel from the map, have also failed and caused more misery for the very people they claim to represent.
Both of these policies have simply created more fear, more violence, more deaths on both sides. Both nations need a new policy of accepting the other’s existence and move towards working out how to live side by side. This means addressing the fears both sides have and looking at how those fears can be negated.
I have no illusions as to the problems this will involve. Getting people to face up to ingrained fears is difficult. Getting people to break their lifetime ways of thinking is hard. But unless this happens, achieving a lasting peace will be almost impossible, regardless of how well thought out any peace agreement is.
This is where we here in the UK can help. I challenge the supporters of Israel to talk to Palestinians, ordinary people from the towns and villages in the Occupied Territories to hear their stories. I also challenge the supporters of Palestine to do the same with ordinary Israelis, to listen and understand their fears, their concerns. Because if we here start to do this, we can then help Palestinians and Israelis do it as well.
We need to break down barriers and talk. This is why cultural and academic boycotts are so dangerous, because they build such barriers to dialogue and help prolong the conflict. Such boycotts also stop us challenging those who use the fear of the other side to feed the conflict.
* Leon Duveen is President of Liberal Democrats for Peace in the Middle East (ldfpme.org.uk), a group of Lib Dems working to support those trying to a solutions to the Palestine/Israel conflict and other conflicts in the region and to providing information about those working for peace there.
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6 Comments
“This is why cultural and academic boycotts are so dangerous, because they build such barriers to dialogue and help prolong the conflict”
I disagree. We very much need dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, but cultural and academic boycotts of Israel are necessary to make clear that any country that conquers territory, then seizes land to build settlements for ‘its’ people, annexes territory unilaterally (Golan Heights) etc, can not be treated the same as any other country.
I share Leon’s view that contact and communication with those whose views on the conflict differ from our own is vital.
There are many NGOs in the UK with good links into Israel and Palestine that can help. I encourage everyone to play a part in this, whether large or small.
Full disclosure. I chair Liberal Democrats for Peace in the Middle East.
I find Leon’s statement ‘The Palestinians, whose policy is to eradicate Israel from the map, have also failed and caused more misery for the very people they claim to represent.’ utterly bewildering. There may indeed be some Palestinians who, after years of misery and dispossession by Israel want to wipe that Nation from the map, but to glibly generalise like that is to stoop very low indeed. Palestinians are not occupying and ethnically cleaning Israel. Most are just desperately trying to cling on to their lives, livelihoods and possessions as the settlers rampage through the West Bank supported by the IDF and while those in Gaza who have not yet been slaughtered are being tortured to a slow painful death, through malnutrition, disease, exposure, lack of medicine or the most basic comfort. To call the fears of the Palestinians imagined when they are largely unarmed civilians bombarded on every side, tortured, imprisoned and dispossessed, is impossible to grasp in the circumstances and with all the evidence since 1948.
@Miranda, I may have phrased it in elegantly but I didn’t mean all Palestinians have a policy to eradicate Israel (i have too many Palestinianfriends to think that), but there are more than a few. It is those I was referring to.
Leon Duveen, that comment was false, defamatory and inflammatory. Elegance has nothing to do with it.
Lib Dems should be doing all they can to stand up to Netanyahu and Trump’s illegal, autocratic warmongering. Just as we stood up to apartheid South Africa, or Nazi Germany.
Let’s use boycotts and sanctions, and when there is food, justice, free speech and free movement then dialogue can of course take place.
It might help to move this conversation forwards if we understand where fear comes from. Fear like all emotions is due to our thinking, not the object of our fears. This becomes clearer when we see that some Palestineans and Israelis get on well. So Franklin Roosevolt was in a sense right in that if we dissolve our fears we will see more clearly what is going on and act accordingly. All people act from how they see the world, not how the world actually is.