Newsletter n° 114

January-May 2023

In April 2022, mid-April, the decision was taken to suspend updating this section, see what the passing of time would do. How different things would be after a while. We let the while last about the time of a pregnancy, some nine months. When we chose silence, there had been a “terror wave” in Israel, leaving a trail of shock and blood. Nine months later, what do we see ? A massacre of nine Palestinians by the Israeli army in Jenin, the Northernmost Palestinian city, followed by a massacre of seven Jews in a synagogue, and another two Jews elsewhere, a father and a son, shot down by an Arab teenager who is barely thirteen. Sadly, this feels like the umpteenth rerun of the same old feud, dating back to Kafka’s days, when he wrote Jackals and Arabs, first published by Martin Buber, in 1917.

What was the Northern traveler’s perception, after meeting talking jackals and Arabs in the Middle eastern desert, way back in the days of World War I ? “I don’t presume to pass judgment on matters so far removed from my own concerns; it seems to be a very ancient feud; a blood feud, probably; so it will probably take bloodshed to end it.”

Don’t these people know how to count corpses ? Nine to nine, and they will stop, until the next round.

As things were, the jackals of the time had some great expectations regarding the passing Northerner : “Master, you shall end the feud that divides the world.” To which the Arab retorted : “They will continue to be with us until the end of time.(…) They cherish a quite absurd hope, these animals; they are fools, complete fools. (…) Wonderful animals, eh? And how they hate us!”

By the way, the pictures to start this Newsletter 114 : the « same » wall, expanding on some 500 km, to separate Israelis from Palestinians in the left image ; to separate Protestants from Catholics in the right one. You count 15 km of these walls in Belfast proper, coincidentally called Peace Lines. No, we did not pick our denomination in Northern Ireland, but still…

We all live in a world of barriers and borders. Where they are higher and thicker you have to wonder why. In Northern Ireland, people seem to « want » these walls, on both sides. Others, in Europe, and elsewhere, know nothing about this. The dirty little war between the British and the Irish – the British Irish and the Republican Irish – ended in April 1998, with the Good Friday Agreements. Do we have to recall some details ?

In 2005, the IRA formally ended its armed struggle, and proceeded to decommission all its weapons – after killing one thousand armed British personnel and over 600 civilians, in the course of two generations (1969-2005), wounding, maiming thousands ignored.

A bloody forgotten civil war, in what was then the European Union, United Kingdom included. Likewise with the Basque in Spain and France. Euskadi ta Astakasuna (ETA) was formed in 1959, with its symbol of the Snake (the political way) around the Axe (violence), and its motto : « to pursue both ways », until it officially renounced violence and dissolved itself in 2018. Leaving over eight hundred killed and thousands wounded, maimed.

Again, think of another dirty little war, a civil war, within Europe, that lasted over half a century, and that everybody else chose to discount. Baptized Christians killing Christians.

Speaking of the twenty-first century. And then, you have a locked-down world, from 2020 until 2021-2022, immediately followed by war in Ukraine, ongoing. You look at it from space, and it makes you wonder : is this a rational place at all ? What is its rationale ? Its purpose, if any ?

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio-web/the-funeral-murders-they-were-like-hyenas-ripping-their-kill-apart-1.3433100

Terror operations led by the IRA and the ETA had a political aim, they were supposed to bring « national liberation ». Yet, they did not achieve any. In 2023, things in Northern Ireland are pretty much the way they were before, the British flag is still flying high. The Europa Hotel, in Belfast, once the « most bombed hotel in the world » (33 times) is still standing, hosting Van Morrison concerts – Van Morrison, the one, only outspoken poet and musician against lockdowns.

As for the Basque country, it is, in 2023, as far from independance as Catalunya is, on the opposite coast of Spain.

What has changed is the perception that people, in Europe and elsewhere, have developed of terror as a means, since September 11, 2001, in the US, and October 13, 2002, in Moscow ; March 11, 2004, in Madrid ; all « in the name of Allah ». You can add Paris, in January and November 2015 ; Brussels, in March 2016.

In Iraq, during the American intervention of 1990-1991, over fifty thousand people lost their life, in the name of « Operation Iraqi Freedom », and up to one million were killed, during the American invasion of Iraq from 2003 to 2011. 2011 being the year war broke out in Syria, with a toll of 600,000 killed, and Libya was destroyed in depth.

Look at it from above, the way space travellers will, and hear moonwalker Edgar Mitchell (Apollo 14) confess : « It was clear that those tiny pinpoints of light, in brilliant profusion, were a part of the plan. They were linked together as part of the whole as they framed and formed a backdrop for this fragile planet Earth.

[…] However, as I continued to gaze at Earth, the euphoria, the sense of oneness, of wholeness, of participation, changed into a feeling of deep despair – the darkest, blackest despair. The most agonizing emotional pain I had ever felt, as I contemplated man and his condition on Earth, behaving like ancient warring tribes fighting over food and territorial rights… »

« We are universal beings. We are stewards and keepers of spaceship Earth. » Look at it, as it is. Parched and bleached from burning heat and drought. Doesn’t it make your blood curdle ? Make it a broader swath, including the North of Africa, down to the horn of Ethiopia-Somalia. What do you find there, more deserts, deeper misery in sweltering heat. The scorched arid earth prevails. Whereas tiny Israel could boast itself of having transformed the desert into an oasis.

Hence the need and power of the global view, from a vertical distance.

Praise be to the first man who ever went up into space, for a triple ride around us. 1961, April 12. The man who always smiled, kept his grin. Yuri Gagarin.

Followed in June 1963 by the first woman ever up in space, Valentina Tereshkova. They did not go up in a spirit of territorial conquest. The vision clearly was to extend the comprehension of humankind and its sailing, drifting,  fragile spaceship Earth.

Passivity amounting to complicity was no option. What had worked in Bosnia, with the Zenica, Sarajevo Call to the fighters and leaders in former Yugoslavia  had to be tried again.

To really understand what the feeling was like, by the end of 2000 and mid-2001, you should check upon a list of all the random attacks against civilians, going as far back as 1993-1994 actually. Mostly by Hamas, from the first one in October 1993 until November 1999, with five of them by members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

You have to double-check two lists, one in English, the other in French, to get the facts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_Israel

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronologie_du_terrorisme_palestinien

An unprecedented breakthrough between archenemies, who agreed to meet face to face, listen to each other, after half a century of mayhem and bloodshed. The Jews had their Shoah in Europe, and then the exodus of hundreds of thousands from Arab countries in the sixties. The Arabs had their Nakba, in 1948. 1991-1993 : at last, their leaders could convene, for the sake of peace.

There had been the Madrid Conference in 1991, which paved the way to the Oslo Accords, signed in Washington on September 13, 1993.

Except that some, in the Palestinian community, wanted no such thing, and the first reaction to Oslo came three weeks after Washington, when a boobytrapped car exploded in Beit El, leaving some thirty wounded, and then in the spring of 1994, two more bombs aimed at buses, leaving thirteen dead. October 1994, two more terror attacks, in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, scores of maimed and killed. ember 1994 : Palestinian Islamic Jihad joined in the attacks, which were not to abate until the summer of 1999, the first car-ramming into a crowd, by Hamas. Malls, cafés, restaurants, markets, bus-stops, no place in Israel was safe. Violence was running out of control : in February 1994, at the Cave of Patriarchs in Hebron (where supposedly Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, and Lea are buried), an Israeli settler opened fire on a Friday, during prayer, on the worshippers at Ibrahim’s Mosque, and left 155 in their blood, 29 of them lifeless.

Hence the long bitterness, on one side, against Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, to this day ; on the other side, against such faceless individuals in the Israeli community, perceived as settlers, extremists, and deadly dangers on the way – one of those shooting at Prime Minister Rabin in his back, on November 4, 1995. Leaving Israel rudderless at the time.

You have to see that nothing was clear-cut, in terms of leadership. As for peace accords, not only do the leaders have to survive long enough, but they do not materialize on the ground as long as a real peace policy is not implemented, and institutionalized, from the kindergartens and schools to the mainstream media. The fact is that no such policy was ever organized, in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Ramallah or Gaza.

effects. The tenth Prime Minister of Israel had been on the job one year, he would stay in power eight more months only.

Oslo redux, July 2000, in Camp David, Maryland, a military base sixty miles from Washington. Same causes, same

After him came General Sharon, with possibly more personal and military prestige than his predecessors combined. The second Intifada, uprising, had broken out though, in October 2000, five months before his election. The extent of deadly terror attacks since October 2000 (making it blood-clear that no peace process could be in the works) was such in 2001 and 2002, rising from 4-5 a year in 1997-1998 to 12 in 2000, 65 in 2001, 63 in 2002, that the first priority of the Israeli side, during these hellish two years, was to protect itself, not only through counter-attack with tanks and missiles, but through the erection of a high wall, à la Belfast, to prevent terrorists from easily  entering their territory.

To make things clear, people born after 1990-2000 should know that circulation was free and fluid, all through Israel and Gaza, before the fatal years 2001-2002.

Here is what the Qalandiya checkpoint, between Jerusalem and Ramallah, looked like. All you had, in terms of military presence, was a small sentry-box and a sort of tent, on a slope, and a few large rocks along the road. A handful of soldiers manned it, less than five, sometimes no more than 3.

That was Qalandiya in the summer of 2001. Very little control of identity and car documents, far and in between. One soldier, or two, would stand in the midst of the passing crowd, without angst or any protection to really speak of. The same applied to the Gaza Strip. During the First Intifada I had walked, and hitch-hiked, from the North, Beit Lahia, to Egypt, without any hindrance, whatsoever.

Now, this is what we got instead. All the way from Jenin up North to Ramallah and Gaza.

They started building the first segment of the « Security Fence » in the summer of 2003, also calling it « Separation Fence », Geder HaHafrada. A concept that Yitzhak Rabin, possibly, was the first to coin officially, as far back as 1994, declaring « We have to decide on separation as a philosophy », which he put in a famous nutshell « We must take Gaza out of Tel Aviv ». After a vision à la de Gaulle, regarding the French presence in Algeria. It was a simple demographic equation.

Now that the Security/Separation Wall was being built, General Sharon had freer hands to deal with the problem of the non-violent evacuation of what the Peace through Justice Campaign of 2001 called « the settlements recognized as sources of inequity and hatred ».

Except that he did not have a majority for that, his own party, the Likud, was opposed to it. On the grounds that it would lead to chaos in evacuated zones, once done. August 2004, he still lacked the support needed to act.

No matter what, he did it all the same, got it approved by the Knesset in February 2005, and sent troops to implement it in August 2005. It was done by September 12.
The all time hero, who had taken part in every war (1948, 1956, 1967, 1973) and been wounded twice (1948 & 1973) made it.

His main opponent, the present Prime Minister, however, had warned against the move, arguing that Gaza would become « a huge base for terror ». The fact is, several hours only after the completion of the evacuation, the first two rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel, at Sderot and Yad Mordechai.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_Israel_in_2002%E2%80%932006

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_Israel_in_2001

Not that rockets and mortars began in September 2005, as can be seen from the lists of rocket attacks prior to the evacuation, but they intensified continually, increasing in size, range, and power of destruction. We then launched our third Nobel campaign in 2005, the Nobel Call Against Terror, For Common Sense, « Because we are all human beings, Because we are horrified by this endless waste of human life in the name of nation or religion, Because we refuse the logics of blood pacts and any terror, We whole-heartedly praise[d] the courage of the Israeli and Palestinian leaders and people who are taking bold steps on the way to justice and common sense. » http://www.peacelines.org/israel-palestine-2000-2014-c24800090 « Be sure the world is watching, with deep expectations. We are at your side. »

May 10, 2023

The writing of this Newsletter was interrupted, on May 9th, by a new round of « armed dialogue » between the conflicting sides, when a wave of forty combat helicopters and jets raided into the Gaza skies, to decapitate the top echelon of Islamic Jihad, leaving three of their commanders dead, with their wives and children.

Predictably, hundreds of rockets were fired into Israel in that wake, 350 they say, half of them falling short, within the Gaza Strip. What a striking coincidence that the last item in this Newsletter has been a map about the Range of missiles launched from the Gaza Strip…

Living under the cleaver, under the gun. The sword of Damocleus always suspended above our heads. I have spent wonderful times with families both sides of the fence, in Gaza and Sderot. I love these people. When together, we talk about subjects in depth, the generation gap, the relations between parents and children, the shift from authority in excess to lack of credibility, the use of social media, artificial intelligence, and so on. They describe to me what their life feels like, under the permanent threat of missiles and rockets. These friends in Sderot recall the time the mother and daughter had retreated from the kitchen into a back room, just seconds before a rocket exploded in the kitchen. I can see all the remains of burst rockets on the metal shelves of the police station in Sderot.

I mean, please, don’t minimize the size and effect of these rockets from Gaza. I have had meetings with doctors and psychologists telling me what constant pre and post-trauma stress do to people’s minds, starting with infants, children. In Gaza, I have spent time with a teenager turned blind after a missile exploded in the street as he was going to buy bread at the baker’s. I also see all the wounded veterans gathered on a beach at night, with their amputated arms or legs, for recreation of some kind.

I don’t see any « Israelis », « Jews », « Palestinians », or « Muslims » there. I only see people. Hurting people, suffering people, built the same way, dressed the same way, eating the same way, aching the same way.

In 2005, we had hopes. Eleven Peace Nobel laureates supported our stand – South Africa’s President de Klerk among them, Shirin Ebadi from Tehran, Jody Williams (against landmines), Joseph Rotblat again, followed by 57 others, and as we thought this wouldn’t be enough, we addressed people who could make a difference, based on their courage too, and world vision : astronauts Edgar Mitchell, as a moonwalker, Russell Schweickart (who circled around the moon), Jean-François Clervoy, Umberto Guidoni ; Jean-Bernard Bonnet (for his world record in skydiving at 11.000 m) ; Loïc Leferme (world record in No-Limits apnoea at -171 m) ; and the sailor Maud Fontenoy,

who rowed 3700 km across the Atlantic ocean when she was 25, and then 6780 km across the Pacific ocean, two years later. We thought these seven brave souls commanded absolute respect, from their experience of what our world is really made of, and how we can relate to it. People would look into their lives, and draw inspiration from them.

It did not matter that they were « American », « French », or « Italian ». All that mattered is that they had done it, they had been where no others had been, and brought another angle, to think outside the usual boxes.

As fellow journalists in Israel had warned us that Nobel laureates might not be enough, we added about a hundred Members of the European Parliament, among them General Morillon (for his role as UNPROFOR commander in Bosnia), ex-PM Michel Rocard, and more, from 22 other European countries. There was a real feeling of togetherness, of commitment, of care.

« Whatever obstacles may come now, everything you achieve for the sake of peace, justice, and non-violence, will benefit the whole human species. »

To understand the nature of the obstacles that came after the evacuation not only of Gaza, but of four settlements in the West Bank (notably Kadim and Ganim near Jenin in the North, but also Khomesh, a few kilometers above Nablus), one has to take a look at the whole context, between 2005 and 2007, from North to South – and face the bottom-line question : were our 2001 and 2005 hopes not founded in reality ? Was General Sharon wrong to push for the forcible evacuation of « the settlements recognized as sources of inequity and hatred » ?

Whenever things get that heavy, I suggest we take a double approach : distance ourselves from the conundrum, far enough, and then check out about the specifics on the ground, in terms of fairness. On this picture, taken in February 1984, you see Bruce McCandless II, floating into space, the first human being to ever fly freely, untethered, into the black vacuum of cosmos. Some twelves hours in all. A former naval aviator, he makes you think, well, it all is a matter of vision, understanding of possibilities, and training, isn’t it.

With the right people, at the right place and time. But basically, first a matter of personal, and collective, vision. Whether you end up flying 286 km above Earth, or watch the world and things as they are from your watchtower, somewhere. What do we see tonight, as of May 11, on the second day of rockets fired from Gaza (one thousand of them in two days) ? These deadly fireworks – the launchings from the South, the interceptions further North. Is this a way to live ? And still counting.

A popular Israeli singer held a concert before 40,000 people in Tel Aviv tonight, claiming « No one can silence us ! ». In the meantime, hospitals in Gaza are stuffed with blood-covered stretchers and wounded. The Islamic Jihad leaders rejoice at their few hits in Israel, and call for the people to climb on rooftops and celebrate the pain and loss of life in Israel.

« Est-ce ainsi que les hommes vivent ? » (Aragon). Can’t they see we have other burning concerns ? 1 The rising global heat, with its countless tragedies worldwide. 2 The current threat of a world war, nuclear (the US vs Russia). 3  The appalling lack of personal purpose ; blind resignation all over. 4 The growing collapse of the birth rate in one hemisphere. 5 The damage done yet by Artificial Intelligence to the fabric of society (« AI has hacked the operating system of our civilization » Harari).

Last but alas not least, the incredible amount of misperceptions, miscalculations, among leaders.

And the unholy alliance of political and so-called religious views leading to the use of terror attacks against civilians, East and West, North and South. Seven scourges to deal with, most urgently.

« Our house is on fire ! » cried the young Greta Thunberg in Davos, the epicentre of Europe, at the World Economic Forum, in January 2019 – and what has changed since ? Do we see more firemen and firewomen than before ? The very clear and simple question for each of us, whether we live in Gaza, Davos, Belfast, or Tunis, Montelimar, being : have we redefined our purpose and capacities, in the light of the global plagues burdening us all presently ?

The people who celebrate the loss of life and the pain on « the other side », thirsty for vengeance, don’t they realize how it is all intertwined, and that an eye for an eye will turn the world blinder yet than it already is, speaking of their own world ? For « it is an easy thing to hear sounds of love in the thunderstorm that destroys our enemies’ house … Then the groan and the dolour are quite forgotten (…) and the poor in the prison and the soldier in the field When the shatter’d bone hath laid him groaning among the happier dead ». (William Blake, The Price of Experience)

May 21, 2023

As this Letter is getting close to its end, dozens of us have their mind in Cape Canaveral, Florida, the Kennedy Space center, where a team of four astronauts is due to take off shortly before midnight, to join the ISS, International Space Station, where seven others are expecting them, three Russians, three Americans, and an Emirati, Sultan Al Neyadi, who was the first Arab on a space walk in April 2023. Their names : Rayyanah Barnawi, a breast cancer researcher, from Saudi Arabia ; Ali Al-Qarni, also from Arabia ; Peggy Whitson, a Nasa astronaut, and John Schoffner, from Tennessee. A few years ago, women were not allowed to drive a car in the Saudi kingdom. Look what a few years will do…

Did we not mention three Russians and three Americans manning the ISS together, with the first Arab spacewalker, whereas on the ground in Eurasia, other Americans are planning to send F-16 jet fighters to bomb Russian troops ? For thirty years now, Americans and Russians have been busy working for and in that visionary vessel flying above the Earth. Where’s the catch-22 ?

In the meantime, back at the Hinge of Continents, named Palestine by some, Israel by others, since our mind is focused on rockets now, we’ve had some fifteen hundred rockets, loaded with explosive heads, sent from Gaza randomly towards Israeli territory. Their achievement was to kill an old lady, aged 80, wheeling her handicapped husband towards a shelter, and a Palestinian worker from Gaza.

Whereas the counter-attack missiles from Israel decimated the leadership of the rocket launchers, murdered thirty people (half of them identified as terrorists) and wounded over one hundred fifty, from all walks of life.

What’s the sense ?

Thinking of Rayyanah Barnawi’s intent gaze into our reality, and her joy at the idea of sharing her experience through cameras with kids in the Middle East while aboard the ISS : « Being able to see their faces when they see astronauts from their own region for the first time is so thrilling… »

This letter is intended, among others, for these kids. Thinking outside the boxes. Addressing the commanders on the field, « all these rather primitive rockets, what’s the point ? what do they achieve ? to kill an old lady pushing her husband in his wheelchair, and a countryman from the Strip, father of six, mutilating his brother by his side, was this what the Struggle is about ? Repetitive as it is, time after time after time… »

« Can’t you hear the commanders of the Others scoffing, ‘so you want to play R & M ? Rockets and Missiles ? Fine with us – you’re Islamic Jihad, by your own volition, we’re the Good Guys… let’s play ! »

This lack of sense, of personal purpose, whether we are in Kiev, Gaza, Davos, or Montelimar, drags us down, and blocks the issues, as can be seen in all situations of ongoing conflict and suffering.  Blind to the context, the global view, the big picture.

Whereas we have highly qualified human beings, in their continuous quest for the precise decisions, the perfect gestures, out there, slowly dancing into space – and we’d keep rushing blindly, down here, to the next stumbling block, the next predictable obstacles ?

Look at it all from the ISS. It may be pilot Sultan, or Rayyanah, the first woman from the Middle East into space.

And who cares that it was, indeed, the first spacewalk in Arab history ?

« We are locked in history » says Werner Herzog in his humble film, The Cave of Lost Dreams. If all it takes to get unlocked is to raise our eyes, and see what the stars owe to the night, then, as Greta puts it, « No one is too small to make a difference. »