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Brian from Toronto

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Palestinians who want peace

What's long been missing on the Palestinian side is a peace movement. In the last few years this has begun to change. I've previously mentioned the One Voice movement. Here's another voice, a posting from Mahmoud Jabari, a young citizen journalist who lives in Hebron...

 

Palestine... Sooner or Later 


By: Mahmoud Jabari

 

One day is enough for you to walk in the streets of any of the West Bank cities, visit the shops, and have a cup of tea with the shops’ owners in order to be able to summarize the public opinion atmosphere. This is what politicians don’t do here in the West Bank and Gaza, or at least they don’t seem to, judging from the way they choose to represent their people, the way they have made the Palestinian people lose trust in their leadership.

 
Sometimes, statistics and studies are not enough to reflect people’s economic or political situation. 

 

Palestinian people are paying the price of mistakes that political parties have made over the past decades and over the past five years in particular. Fatah & Hamas are no longer as popular as before, and they are not as trusted as before by the people; and especially by Palestinian youth who look for a third way to follow in their search for an equal life like other nations in this world. They are bored of watching politicians playing on the political theatre all the time with no progress. 

 

The government in the West Bank is making great efforts to develop private and public sector, streets, electricity and stability. But it still not that good if you go onto the streets by yourself and hear from people about how the rich became richer, people with low income are suffering worst situation than before and the gap  is expanding between both of them day after day.

 

In addition to the miserable economy in Gaza, a colleague youth journalist, whom I had the chance to meet in Paris last month, told me that if a woman does not wear the head cover (Hijab) there, she becomes oppressed by the security forces of Hamas government. That’s very bad.  The Palestinian political parties were more destructive of the Palestinian cause and Palestinian people than beneficial. This is why political parties are not trusted as they used to be, and the future will prove that.

 

On the other hand, Israel’s government is still determined to keep on building settlements, and to keep its inhumane policies toward Palestinians. Here, I say again that Palestinian people are the first to pay the price of their leadership policies, and the first to suffer from the Israeli policies toward them. So, what is the solution? Will they have to continue paying prices and suffering? 

 

I will turn the lens and focus it on the possibilities we have in front of us to make progress on the Palestinian side, and on the Israeli side as well. As I mentioned before, we have had a great difference in the look of the West Bank, which can be a model for how Gaza can be if Gaza with the West Bank become united in one Authority. We need to recognize that Dr. Salam Fayyad’s plan has planted the seeds of the future Palestinian State.
 
 
Meanwhile, Palestinians should no longer bet on unity between Fatah & Hamas, which the Palestinian public is tired of waiting for. However, Palestinians have to bet on Palestinian public unity between West Bank and Gaza people, which will keep up the pressure to create real change in policy & policy makers, strategies, and actions that these parties have been deciding for Palestinians over decades. 

 

The Palestinian leadership is going to the UN next September to ask for recognition of Palestine as a State. That’s great, but for me, I would not accept to go for such a step unless it is agreed to by both sides (Israel & Palestine), and unless both sides are going there to ask for such a step from the UN. This is the only way if we really look for progress. 

 

There are people who are thirsty to see peace achieved, and to see themselves live as normal as any other nation, especially the Palestinian youth. Whatever the percentage of these people might be, the mission should be to empower them, and prove to the other parties that this group of moderates is right. Israel has a role here, and Israel needs to take actions to rescue the peace talks and work hard to reach a peace agreement that strengthens the position of moderates and moderation in the region instead of giving more opportunities for extremism to grow on both sides. 

 

We need to believe, that the youth on both sides will not accept to have the same future as our present, but they will rather be read to go more far than anyone expect and pay the price of achieving peace, that will lead to security for both sides and equal states for both sides. 
 
 
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graeme's picture

graeme

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There's also a Peace Now Movement in Israel  (and North America.) But it's not very popular with your sort.

Who wrote the post that you sent? It obviously wasn't you.

 

EasternOrthodox's picture

EasternOrthodox

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This is slightly off-topic, but is nevertheless a positive story about Muslims and Jews:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/24/us/distinctive-mission-for-muslims-con...

September 23, 2011
Distinctive Mission for Muslims’ Conference: Remembering the Holocaust
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

One afternoon this week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran addressed the United Nations General Assembly, once again casting doubt that the Holocaust had occurred. Almost exactly 24 hours earlier, an otherwise obscure college student in Morocco named Elmehdi Boudra was convening a conference devoted not to denying the Holocaust but to remembering it.

Mr. Ahmadinejad’s speech, not surprisingly, made major news around the world, as had his similar pronouncements in earlier years and his Tehran convention of Holocaust deniers. Mr. Boudra’s conference, meanwhile, attracted virtually no media attention of any kind.

Yet it should have been trumpeted, all the more for its coincidental timing. While Holocaust denial or denigration in the Muslim world is a sadly familiar phenomenon, hardly news at all, the conference put together by Mr. Boudra and several dozen classmates, all of them Muslim, may well have been the first of its kind in an Arab or Muslim nation, and a sign of historical truth triumphing over conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic dogma.

The conference — held at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, a town in the Atlas Mountains about two hours south of Rabat — brought together Holocaust scholars and survivors, leaders of Morocco’s Jewish community and American Jewish and Moroccan Muslim students. Its twin mandates were to teach about the extermination of European Jewry and to pay homage to the courage of Morocco’s wartime king, Mohammed V, in resisting the orders of the Vichy French occupation government to round up and turn over Jews for internment and probable death.

Uncommonly among Arab and Muslim nations, Morocco has accepted the reality of the Holocaust, rather than either dismissing it outright or portraying it as a European crime for which those countries paid the price in the form of Israel’s creation. Partly, no doubt, because of Mohammed V’s stand against the Vichy regime, the current king, Mohammed VI, called in a 2009 proclamation for “an exhaustive and faithful reading of the history of this period” as part of “the duty of remembrance dictated by the Shoah.”

Still, the recent conference would never have occurred without Mr. Boudra. Now 24 and majoring in political science, Mr. Boudra grew up after much of Morocco’s Jewish population had moved to France or Israel. But he heard from his grandmother about her childhood in the Jewish quarter of Casablanca, and a grandfather still had Jewish neighbors in his apartment house.

Those few personal connections kindled a broader curiosity. That curiosity ultimately led Mr. Boudra to study with Simon Levy, a scholar who directs the Museum of Moroccan Judaism of Casablanca, and to read such classic Holocaust memoirs as “If This Is a Man” by Primo Levi and the diary of Anne Frank.

“What upsets me about this subject,” Mr. Boudra wrote in an e-mail message last week, “is some people’s claims that the Holocaust never took place. It is simply absurd to hear such claims in the light of the historical evidence the world has today.”

As a student at Al Akhawayn, an elite university with an international orientation, Mr. Boudra and several dozen friends formed a club around their shared interest in Morocco’s Jewish culture and heritage. They named it Mimouna, after the holiday that Moroccan Jews celebrate on the final day of Passover.

Through Mimouna and Al Akhawayn, Mr. Boudra met another barrier-breaker named Peter Geffen. The descendant of a distinguished rabbinic family, Mr. Geffen had founded a Jewish day school in New York and an organization, Kivunim, that provided students and teachers with study and travel in Jewish communities around the world.

Last December, Mr. Geffen took 60 Kivunim participants to Ifrane to meet with the Mimouna Club. As the session ended, Mr. Boudra pulled him aside to say that the club wanted to hold a Holocaust conference and to ask if Mr. Geffen could help.

“The whole power of it is that it was their idea,” Mr. Geffen said in a recent interview, recalling the conversation. “This is before the Arab Spring, and here’s a group of Muslim students, 20, 21 years old, on an Arab campus in the Arab world. And to have an intuitive recognition that opening the discussion in the face of widespread Holocaust denial is a major human step forward.”

In the intervening months, Mr. Geffen and Mr. Boudra worked both separately and together to assemble financial support, formal sponsorship and a schedule, which included scholarly presentations, panel discussions, first-person testimony, museum visits, a concert of Moroccan Jewish music and scrupulously kosher meals.

So it was that on Sept. 21, the eminent Holocaust historian Michael Berenbaum spoke of the Jewish genocide in Europe, the tide that Mohammed V succeeded in holding back in his nation. An 80-year-old survivor, Elisabeth Citron, recounted her childhood in Romania and Hungary — wearing the yellow star, being deloused with gasoline in front of a laughing first-grade class, being deported to Birkenau, watching the daily selection of inmates for the gas chambers and ovens.

“I don’t expect any of you to understand how today I’m here standing in front of you,” Ms. Citron said. “I have no clue why I am here.” By which, of course, she meant alive.

For their part, the Moroccan students asked questions and got answers. Were there any German Jews powerful enough to intercede with the Nazis? Was propaganda the way the Nazis justified the Holocaust to non-Jews? Why hasn’t Mohammed V been listed among the righteous gentiles in the Holocaust museum of Yad Vashem?

At one point, a Jewish adviser to the current king, Andre Azoulay, addressed Mr. Boudra and the Mimouna Club directly. Mr. Azoulay was born in 1941, during the Vichy occupation, which made him a half-century older than the students. To make sure all the visitors, too, would understand him, he switched from French into English.

“You have decided by yourself,” he said. “No one asked you to do it. It was your decision, your vision, your commitment.” He mentioned the significance of naming the club for Mimouna with its connection to the Exodus. “You Muslim students decided to be identified with our liberation,” he said. “It’s not something usual.”

graeme's picture

graeme

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A man I taught with, Frank Chalk, wrote a well received study of the holocaust.  (And, yes, he is Jewish). In it, he also examined other genocides. Many very conservative Jews were furious with him. Only Jews were allowed to have a genocide. I'm quite serious.

(Frank is Jewish and, to the best of my knowledge, observant).

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