[Dialogue] spong guest column

[kroegerd@aol.com]

To My Readers: 
Guest Column: Brokering the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict 

This week, I continue a feature that I trust my readers will enjoy. I will seek out and present four guest columnists during the course of each year, chosen because of their particular expertise on a given subject and their skill at communication. I hope to make these voices better known in the process and to tap pools of wisdom that need to be heard. The publication of these guest columns is not necessarily to be understood as an endorsement of the writer's position but rather to provide a forum in which their views can be offered for edification and debate. If the letters we receive in response to a guest columnist merit it, we will publish the best of those letters in a subsequent column. 
You have already met Harry T. Cook. Now I want to introduce you to our second guest columnist of the year. He is one of the people that I admire most in this world. His name is James L. Hecht, PhD, of Denver, Colorado. Dr. Hecht is a chemical engineer who spent his professional career with the DuPont Company. He has also been a leading citizen in confronting safety concerns in our nation's federal parks, in opposition to discrimination in housing in both Buffalo, N.Y. and Richmond, VA. As this present column will reveal, he has also become a competent advocate for peace in the Middle East. He is the author of a book on fair and open housing entitled "Because It Is Right" published by Little Brown. Dr. Hecht lives with his wife Amy, who has an EDD degree in Higher Education and Administration and is an expert in that difficult arena we cal 'end of life' decisions. They are the parents of two children, Charles, a partner in the law firm of Hamil and Hecht in Denver, and Margaret, a senior vice president with Dex Media, the supplier of telephone directories and Yellow Pages for fourteen states. Those who wish to respond to this column may do so by writing support at johnshelbyspong.com. 
--John Shelby Spong 
Not since the civil rights struggles in the 60s and 70s have Americans been confronted with as compelling a moral issue for government action as the need for the United States to help broker a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As was true at the start of the civil rights movement, most Americans do not understand either the magnitude of the injustice or the stake that all Americans have in our government's need to find an acceptable resolution. 
When my wife and I visited Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria in the summer of 2001, we were well versed in what was happening in the region. I had had a special reason to learn all I could about the Arab-Israeli conflict when asked to give a talk to the World Affairs Council of Jordan, an elite group whose President, the former Prime Minister, had negotiated the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan. That evening, which included a one hour question-and-answer period as well as extensive discussions before and after the meeting, was when I realized the magnitude of the hatred of the American government as a result of perceived U.S. support of Israeli oppression of the Palestinians. The people with whom we talked, in addition to the former Prime Minister, included ambassadors and former ambassadors, a general, the editor of a newspaper, the head of an Arab think tank, and a former cabinet minister. 
Not one person mentioned that the American stake was to prevent terrorism; they spoke only of the great injustice. That the result would be terrorism was a conclusion we drew before 9/11. we reasoned that if only one percent of the 1.2 billion Muslims did not distinguish between hatred of the American government and hatred of the American people, and only one percent of these decided to act on that hatred, there would be 120,000 terrorists willing to strike at Americans. Interestingly, two years later that same analysis was given by a distinguished Pakistani journalist in a lecture I attended. 
What are the injustices that so angered the people with whom we met? They include land confiscation, restriction of movement, appropriation of water supplies and collective punishment. However, for a settlement to take place there must also be an appreciation of the Israeli side. Centuries of discrimination against Jews, the slaughter of 6,000,000 in the Holocaust, the need to fight and win four wars to preserve Israel as a country, and continuing terrorist attacks have made Jews nearly paranoid about security and unsympathetic to the fact that the tragedy of the Jews also has become the tragedy of the Palestinians. Since its quick and decisive victory in a preemptive war in 1967, Israel has occupied the land of the Palestinians. Already in control of 78 percent of what less than 100 years ago was a Palestinian area with a small Jewish minority, since 1967 Israel has built settlements on confiscated land which now provide homes for about 400,000 Israeli Jews. This is a clear violation of international law and is condemned by every other country including the United States. 
In order to protect the settlers, the Israelis established checkpoints along the roads long before the beginning of the intifada. Some of these checkpoints are to keep some roads reserved for use by Israelis. For those roads, which allow Palestinians passage, the checkpoints cause significant travel delays. To get to where they work or to visit relatives, Palestinians often have to travel one to two hours for a trip that an Israeli could make in 15 minutes. In addition, the young Israeli conscripts who work the checkpoints frequently humiliate the Palestinians passing through. The horror of the checkpoints was brought home by a story we were told by Dr. John Waterbury, President of the American University of Beirut and a Middle East scholar who was a professor at Princeton prior to becoming a university president. He related how a Palestinian man was trying to rush his wife to a nearby hospital to have a baby when they were pulled over at a checkpoint and, despite his pleas, were not allowed to pass. After two hours while their papers were being checked, the man tearfully told the young soldier that the baby had been born dead. The reply, with no emotion or apology, was "sorry." After our return to the United States I read in the New York Times of a similar incident where both mother and child died. 
Most Americans do not understand the appropriation of Palestinian water supplies by the Israelis. When Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, it enforced stringent methods to monitor and control water. Only 15 percent of West Bank water was allocated to the Palestinians. The rest was given either to the settlers or pumped to Israel. As a result, 90 percent of the land cultivated by Jewish settlers was irrigated as opposed to only 3 percent of the land farmed by Palestinians. For personal use, West Bank Palestinians have been limited to an average of only 88 liters per person per day, less than the 100 liters considered to be the minimum for an acceptable quality of life. Jewish settlers consume more than four times as much. 
The use of collective punishment is another injustice that has angered the Muslim world. Israeli policy has been to try to deter terrorism by retaliation. For example, when in the summer of 2004 Palestinian fighters killed 13 Israeli soldiers in the town of Rafah in Gaza, the Israeli army struck back, killing 43 Palestinians, many of them civilians, and demolishing 277 buildings making nearly 3,500 homeless. This policy has been counterproductive; on February 16, 2005 the Israeli government announced that they no longer would demolish homes of militants because the practice had not deterred terrorism and had increased hatred. 
The anger of Arabs and Muslims is directed at the United States as well as at Israel because of the strong U.S. support given to Israel. That support has included $3 billion a year in aid, far more than given to any other nation. About $2 billion of this is given as military aid including Apache helicopters and F-15 planes used in retaliatory strikes killing innocents. Equally important, the United States continually supports Israel in the United Nations, preventing sanctions for Israeli violations of international law. 
There is hope. Israelis desperately want peace if it comes with security, the end of living in terror and relief from shouldering the enormous costs they pay for what security they have. The Palestinians and their Arab supporters also want peace, and are willing to enter into a peace agreement with Israel and normalize relations provided Israel ends the occupation of the territories conquered in 1967. This is a sea change from their previous position. The Arab world now recognizes that the clock cannot be turned back beyond 1967. 
A settlement will require an active role for the United States. In this small corner of the world, an Israeli minority believes that all of the Holy Land, including the West Bank and Gaza, was given by God to the Jews and the Palestinians have no right to the land, while a minority of Palestinians do not accept the right of Jews to live in peace in the pre-1967 borders of Israel. Israel has also become dependent on water from the West Bank. In May, 2002, when Israel's Likud Party vowed never to allow the creation of a Palestinian state, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared, "A Palestinian state would control the aquifer which gives us 30 percent of our water. Yes to a Palestinian state means no to a Jewish state." 
The greatest barriers to peace are the determination of boundaries and the need of the Palestinians to have the control over their territory that other nations enjoy. Israel has shown no inclination to give up the minimum that Palestinians are willing to accept. Few Americans are aware that the peace offer made at Camp David in 2000 was one that no Palestinian leader could accept because its terms continued Israeli control of many roads in Palestinian territory. Only if the U.S. exerts strong pressure coupled with generous incentives will Israel accept the conditions necessary for a settlement. The carrots should include funding a major part of the 10 to 25 billion dollars needed to provide housing for the settlers moving back to Israel; helping finance large desalination plants to alleviate a water crisis without requiring Israel to cut back on its highly subsidized agriculture; a strong pledge that, in the unlikely case that a foreign power attacked Israel, the U.S. would consider it the same as an attack on America; financial incentives to the Palestinians to build infrastructure in return for land swaps that allowed some of the large settlements close to the 1967 border to become part of Israel; and compensation to Palestinian refugees in return for giving up the right to return to land their families once owned in what now is Israel. The sticks, a last resort, would start with loss of U.S. aid and, if necessary, a willingness to join with the rest of the world in sanctions. There is great urgency for moving forward rapidly. The newly elected Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, will be as flexible as any Palestinian leader can be. But if he is not able to make real progress quickly, he will lose control to more radical elements. 
Unfortunately, a pro-Israeli lobby is one of the most powerful in the U.S. While many American Jews, possibly a majority, disagree with the policies of the Israeli government, they do not form a counter-lobby, nor is there any other effective lobby. One group that has potential, since it already is doing an excellent job in defining positions for the U.S. government and making them known to policy makers, is Churches for Middle East Peace (CMEP), which consists of 20 national groups including the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the United Methodist Church. Information about CMEP can be obtained at www.cmep.org. Another good Website for information is that of the Foundation for Middle East Peace: www.fmep.org. 
—James L. Hecht 
 
Dick Kroeger