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PEACE LINESMESSAGERIES DE LA PAIX www.peacelines.org |
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Newsletter 135
February 17, 2025
500 DAYS OF WAR DEMENTIA
The intro to our last Newsletter in English (May 9, 2024) :
« On the verge of exhaustion, and beyond. »
“At this crucial moment, while a tangible opportunity for the release of the hostages is on the table, it is of the utmost importance that your government manifest its strong support for such an agreement, This is the time to exert your influence on the Israeli government and all other parties concerned to ensure that the agreement comes through which will finally bring all our loved ones home.” the Hostages and Missing Families Forum
https://messageriesdelapaix.org/index.php/category/english/newsletters/
Then there were four letters for French-speaking people, until the end of 2024.
https://messageriesdelapaix.org/index.php/category/francais/lettres-de-liaison/
More downs than ups. No end in sight. Some hopeless roller-coaster.
Until one month ago, January 15, the announcement that a Ceasefire had been signed. With a trickle of releases based on the equation 1 Israeli civilian = 30 Palestinian prisoners / But 1 Israeli soldier = 50 Palestinian prisoners / 1 Thai civilian = 0 prisoner. Then, whom to trust ?
« I won’t talk of hope and despair, » said Jonathan Dekel Chen, from Nir Oz, last month. « I won’t ride that emotional roller-coaster. We’ve all endured too many dispappointments and frustrations. I coudn’t personally stay sane on that path. »
How to confront such levels of pain ? « I have to hold onto optimism because there’s no alternative. » says Jonathan, adding he had to focus on bringing his son back to his wife and kids, waking up every morning and that’s what I do. « Hope is a dangerous thing ».
His son Sagui Dekel Chen was released on February 15, with Iair Horn, from Nir Oz too, and Sasha Troufanov. There are still 73 Israeli hostages in Gaza (out of 255), as of mid-February 2025, half of them presumed to be dead.
The horrendous business of trading human beings as if they were metal chips.
Another sad heavy day, hearing that most likely the Bibas infants from Nir Oz and their mom were killed in Gaza – by an Israeli bomb ? by their captors ? – along with their neighbour Oded Lifshitz. Oded was born in May 1940, making him the oldest hostage detained in Gaza. Four victims among the fifty thousand killed (1,700 of them Israelis, 224 of them humanitarian aid workers – including 179 UNRWA employees / surely not all of them terrorists ?).
1-Take it back to Nir Oz, October 7, 2023.
Such a lovely rural community of four hundred souls until October 6, in the ideal oasis wrestled from the desert by Ran Pauker, the Nir Oz gardener. The man who planted trees.
« On October 7, 2023, 50 members of Kibbutz Nir Oz were killed, and 76 were kidnapped. Twenty remain in captivity, including nine confirmed dead. Forty women and children from the kibbutz were freed in a November 2023 deal, and nine more have been released so far as part of the second agreement. Additionally, the bodies of seven kidnapped residents were recovered in IDF operations in Gaza. » (Haaretz, February 15, 2024).
Let me tell you about Nir Oz. In Nir Oz 207 homes were devastated or burned to the ground, out of 220. What’s left of Oded & Yocheved Lifshitz’s home : 
Yocheved, a committed peace activist born in 1938 was also kidnapped from their home in the morning of October 7. When she was confronted to Yahya Sinwar in one of the tunnels, she asked him if he was not ashamed of doing such a thing to people who had struggled for peace all their life. Nir Oz is only about a mile from the border. Yocheved was known for driving sick people from Gaza to adequate hospitals in Israel. Sinwar was stunned, he remained silent. https://messageriesdelapaix.org/index.php/2025/02/19/nir-oz-2017-2024/
Yahyah Sinwar, the failed mastermind of the October 7 rampage (1,200 people massacred in a few hours, most of them civilians, 255 kidnapped), was killed on October 16, 2024. If we had a final equation to offer to shed light at the end of these tunnels of shame and their aftermath, it would be that the man behind so much horror and vain pain was aptly named : Sin War.
2- From a strictly non-partisan point-of-view, is the human tide of January 27, 2024, of tens of thousands of ruined human beings walking back « home » from the refugees’ camps in the South, any less heartbreaking, shameful for humankind ?
What could they find back « home » ?
70% of buildings and structures in Gaza destroyed, by the most common estimate. Speaking of 2,200,000 people living, surviving there. Raw facts : 80% of them urban, their median age 19.5, most of them decently educated (14 years of school life for girls, slightly less for boys), 40% of them under the age of 15 (close to 900,000). Their average monthly wages, $250 before the war – reduced to nil since. This is Gaza gazing at us. NaGazaKi.
What did the Gazan strategists think ? Did they care at all about human costs ?
Everybody knows there were no shelters for civilians in Gaza. The endless tunnels were only for war.
35,000 people were killed in Nagasaki (10% of the population). 50,000 have been killed in Gaza.
There stops the parallel. Nagasaki is 10,000 km from the USA. NaGazaKi is right next to Israel. Next door. The USAF bombers were manned by few men, who did their job from a high altitude. Whereas thousands of young men have been sent to Gaza, to destroy it and trudge through the ruins. How can these men survive and pretend their life is fine ?
How can Gazans survive at all, without water, without electricity, without schools ?
The last message we received from Gaza said : «… our flat is more than partially demolished. Thieves left nothing to us, including all our furniture, doors and clothes, taps… No water in the building. The sewage system is also broken. Life is miserable in Gaza. » That was sent on February 2. No news since. The man who sent the message was a highly respected university teacher, in love with English literature of the early 20th and late 19th centuries. What is left of the university itself ?
3- From Dekel Chen to Einstein and Luther King.
From Jonathan Dekel Chen’s viewpoint (« No amount of military pressure will bring them home ») to Einstein’s formula (« Peace cannot be kept by force ; it can only be achieved by understanding. »).
When do we, in the rich, profit-driven countries, start focusing on the ways to achieve understanding ? Granted that hope is a dangerous thing, but can be replaced by a degree of optimism, we have to remember and repeat that « Violence ends by defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. » Martin Luther King
The same reminds us that « The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows. »
Not to forget that « The physical casualties of the war in Viet Nam [3 million Vietnamese & 58,281 Americans killed, plus the countless wounded] are not alone the catastrophies. The casualties of principles and values are equally disastrous and injurious. Indeed, they are ultimately more harmful because they are self-perpetrating. If the casualtie of principles are not healed, the physical casualties will continue to mount. »
4- Landmarks on the way out : Palestinian Prime Minister Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran on July 31, 2024. Hezbollah leader Nasrallah was killed by bombing in Beirut on September 17, 2024. Eventually, as stated above, Sinwar himself met his death in Rafah on October 16, 2024.
What more was needed to stop the war machines ?
5- Day 500 + 3. What’s the point of « a strictly non-partisan point-of-view ?
The writer of this Newsletter was in Nir Oz repeatedly last year. A witness of the horror and devastation that engulfed the lovely community on October 7. The images are vivid in my eyes. The surviving elder, Nathan, took me around – March, April, May, we met again in November. Nothing had changed since October 7, 2023. Nir Oz has become my heart anchor in Israel. I can see the homes of Haim Peri, Alex Dancyg, Amiram Cooper, the Bibas family, Oded & Yocheved Lifshitz in detail. I keep and cherish a golden teaspoon given to me by Rita Lifshitz, Oded’s step-daughter. It was a shared wink between us, to Amos Oz’s theory that we should create an Order of the Teaspoon, and wear it on our lapel : there is a fire endangering us all, and we need to bond our forces to extinguish it. With whatever comes at hand, hoses, buckets… If there are no buckets left, use jars or even glasses. When you cannot even find jars and glasses, seize spoons : the number of committed volunteers will make the difference.
We long kept Oz’s portrait as our gate opener in our Peace Lines site. Recently replaced by Martin Luther King, Ibn Arabi and Spinoza. Plus the video of Tula and Dina singing United, Playing for Change. Does it matter that Tula and Amos Oz are Israelis, Yehudi, and that Dina is Egyptian ?
Do we have to wag our index, label, and reject ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vT_7AX06UQ&list=RD6vT_7AX06UQ&start_radio=1
Take a tip from Amos : « … if I were a European [or an American for that matter], I’d be careful not to wag my finger at anyone. Instead of wagging your finger, calling the Israelis this name or the Palestinians that name, I would do anything I could to help both sides (…) if you have an ounce of help or sympathy to offer, now is the time to extend it to the two patients. You no longer have to choose between being pro-Israel or pro-Palestine. » Between Right and Right, How tu cure a fanatic
6- Looking for context, from Gilad Shalit (2006) to Yahya Sinwar (2011-2024) and beyond
My Gaza testimony too.
The rising danger we now face, everywhere, is to let ourselves carried away by violent emotions related to shock, extreme pain, and dismay verging on rage; to share in and spread the « convenient » denial of the Other, that « there are no innocents in Gaza », that they’re all monsters. Six years I have spent in Gaza, off and on. My first time there was during the First Intifada, in the eighties. I have been a witness to the evolution of the Gaza Strip from pre-Hamas days, under the fragile authority of Yasir Arafat, until the days of PM Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar.
Our job there was to instil the principles of non-violent resistance in schools – with the clearance and hopeful approval of COGAT – Israeli Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories.
In the process I have to say, straight ahead, that we failed. Despite a written agreement of the Palestinian government, then led by PM Haniyeh, our Bilingual Experimental Programme (for ten schools in ten cities, from Jenin to Rafah) was never implemented.
Still, you will often learn more from the failure of an experiment, than from a success.
And then, a vital part of it was not a failure, according to our criteria. In the summer of 2011, I was in Gaza, one of the longest stays there, pleading with senior leaders of Hamas for detained captive Sergeant Shalit, a prisoner underground since June 2006 – one year before Hamas seized power.
Sergeant Shalit was eventually released two months later, in October 2011, after more than five years of detention incommunicado in Gaza tunnels, against one thousand Palestinian prisoners (among them Yahya Sinwar) and twenty-seven women.
It should be reminded that the young corporal at the time of his abduction on June 25 was only 19, and he was captured in his 65-ton Merkava tank by a squad of Palestinian fighters composed of three groups, the Qassam Brigades (Hamas), the Army of Islam, and the Popular Resistance Committee (a mixture of secular Fatah, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas).
To make the point clear that this type of strategy, to dig tunnels into Israel and abduct Israelis in exchange for Palestinian prisoners does not originate in « Hamas » alone, nor did it begin with the June 2007 coup, when Hamas + Islamic Jihad seized power from secular Fatah in Gaza.
In Nablus, heart of the West Bank, you could find posters, in May 2007, that read « May we have a new Gilad each year ». In November of the same year 2007 (Nov 11), you find a rare editorial, in Haaretz, titled « An endless pool of prisoners ». It can still be found online.
Since it appears that the fate of prisoners, for both sides, is the burning crux. Some would dismiss the Haaretz editorial, due to its « left wing » reputation. It does not matter to us which side a source of news may be, as long as it provides unprecedented angles and takes. Should it ?
Our Media section daily spans all kinds of media, from Al Arabiya, Al Monitor, Al Jazeera, The Middle East Monitor, Egypt Today, L’Orient Le Jour, The Jordan Times, to Israel National News, The Jerusalem Post, YNet News, The Times of Israel, The Guardian, BBC News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Le Monde, etc.
7- « Are there innocents in Gaza ? » A close friend, in France, without any connections whatsoever to Israel, upon learning of the Nir Oz infants’ fate in Gaza, sent me an emotional message – « as far as I am concerned, Palestine must be razed ». For him, and for anyone with similar thoughts, I will simply testify that I have only met with innocents in Gaza, during my many stays there. High-school teachers and school heads, lovely pupils – my heart and throat squeeze when I look at their pictures : what have they become ? University teachers, crowds of decent students of both sexes. Opticians, shopkeepers, waiters, nurses, doctors, ordinary kids on the streets, old men, smiling, serious women… I truly loved them all on my way. Did we not speak together, eat, drink, joke, laugh, share good times ? Did they not host me in their homes and flats, did they not open their favorite places to me ?
True, I stood as an outsider. A non-partisan. How Nice to Be an Outsider, writes Nobel laureate Roald Hoffmann, in one of his deepest works, On the Philosophy, Art, and Science of Chemistry.
How nice, indeed, to make yourself an alien, and look at it all from outside, on the outside of whatever side there was/is, as another Nobel poet put it. Or, in Paul Arden’s words, « WHATEVER YOU THINK THINK THE OPPOSITE .» Not just to think outside the box, but eventually escape from whatever box you were in.
Only innocents in Gaza ? What of the senior Hamas leaders I had to meet then ?
We had so many conflicts over the years. Rough, direct, but never final. I guess a measure of mutual respect was present, at the core. How to define the divide between us then ? Was it a case that we, our peace-minded side, did not try hard enough ? Could there be common ground between our Weltanschauung, worldview, and theirs ?
The conflicts between us were not about the ends (freedom and daily quiet), but about the means to get there, and the rationale behind the means. At times, they were about the type of society we envisioned, the type of time control or mind control it implied.
The eternal mistake being procrastination, the weak idea that it can wait.
Take the day they fired an antitank missile at this yellow schoolbus across the border, April 7, 2011, killing Daniel Viflic, 16. It happened to be a Russian Kornet missile, seized by militants from the libyan arsenals bombed open by the French bombers during their anti-Gaddafi military campaign. I was there then. They were so proud and excited with their new toy. I raised my voice, yelled at them. Don’t you have field glasses ? Can’t you make the difference between one lone teenager on a yellow schoolbus and a military target ? They kept smiling, and did not really understand. To them, any Israeli was either a soldier or a soldier to be.
There were no innocent Israelis in their view. Hence the October 7 attack.
How does that compute with the above statement « I have only met innocents in Gaza » ?
In the midst of ideological deafness-blindness you find a sort of ignorance that verges on innocence.
They simply lack the elements of complexity that would take them to another level of awareness.
The mental frames of their experience are what you find in Obedience to authority (Milgram) and Mass psychology of fascism (Wilhelm Reich). No judgment there. The opposite of a judgmental conclusion. The human mind builds the hardest shells depending upon the depth of trauma it experienced. Achilles himself, the mythological prototype of the Angry Man was post-traumatic. You could add Achilles in Vietnam, by Jonathan Shay, to your booklist about war and its consequences. And read a recent article by Ofri Ilany (January 4, 2025), Israelis and Palestinians are Trapped in an Endless Cycle of Trauma, and May Never Heal. Subtitled Only recently have we begun to process the traumas of the previous century, and yet here we are, living from war to war again, from tragedy to tragedy.Trapped.
For a fact, this was years before October 7, 2023, and I never met with Islamic Jihad members, or the most hardened fighters of the Qassam Brigades. My one meeting with Yahya Sinwar in 2012 was brief and without a future. He knew what we were about, with our Bilingual Experimental Programme, based on Martin Luther King’s teachings, but it was clear it was of no interest to him. The man was never alone, escorted by his younger brother, bodyguards, and was hard-pressed for time. He obviously had other plans.
That’s where our ways parted, and I got tired of struggling against walls of inertia year after year. They had the means to print hundreds of copies of our little red book, and the power to let us bring them to high schools, but we were only authorized to go test it at the Islamic University, with students of English, and our stock was too limited to really last beyond a few seasons.
And yet, there were manifest signs that they, the politico-religious nomenklatura at the higher echelon, were open to changes. It was printed in the media : Hamas Shifts From Rockets to Culture War. The New York Times, July 24, 2009. Palestinians try a Less Violent Path to Resistance, ibid., April 6, 2010. Those were the years of our commitment in Gaza – again, with the approval of the Southern Command, headed from 2005 till 2010 by Yoav Gallant. Then, by General Rousso, from 2010 to 2013, and General Turgeman, from 2013 to 2015. All three generals never vetoed our continued attempts in Gaza. 2014-2015 is when we stopped our work there, having run out of that dangerous thing, hope.
To put it simply, it had become manifest that they would not cooperate, despite the original written agreement, first supported by PM Haniyeh. Their faith in the armed struggle was too deeply rooted. Along with the separatism between East and West, hugely bolstered by the birth of ISIS, the Islamic State, in nearby Syria and Iraq in 2013-2014. Isis, spreading tentacles into Palestinian territories and Sinai, leading to the Sinai Insurgency (2011-2023), gathering up to fifteen organizations of jihadis, with some twelve thousand fighters. Among them, the Army of Islam (2005-2025), the Mujahideen Brigades (2006-2025), Ansar al-Quds (2011-2014), Tawhid al-Jihad (2008-2012), Wilayat Sinai (Egyptian branch of ISIS, 2014-2023)…. All of them having ideological and logistical connections in Gaza, which became a hotbed for jihad across borders in those years, 2008-2014.
8- Remember Einstein’s equation : Understanding Over Force.
If it were only Hamas… Where does that obsession with just one side of it come from ? What for ?
Contextualizing our catastrophies, it was clear to whomever spent time in Gaza between 2006 and 2015, that « Hamas » was an umbrella front aiming, in their words, at a « centrist ideology ». Check out with a veteran writer for The Jerusalem Post, Khaled Abu Toameh, April 2015 : https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/hamas-launches-a-campaign-to-combat-extremist-ideology-says-official-396812
And yet, the cadres of the nomenklatura in power in Gaza were busy secretly digging tunnels all the time. The tunnels were their Manhattan Project, so well guarded that I was never allowed into one of them, even to Egypt, despite my repeated requests. The leaders were prodded by hard-core Palestinian Islamic Jihad, with its ten thousand men, following the Lebanese model of Hezbollah, supported and armed by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Contextualize our catastrophies. If it were only the old blood feud in the Holy Land (cf Jackals and Arabs, Kafka, 1917), we could circumscribe it rather simply, but it englobes the Afghan wars (1979-2021) as well, the Gulf wars (1990-2011), the Syrian wars (2011-2024), the Lebanon wars (1982-2025), the Yemen wars (2014-2025), and up to the war in Ukraine (2022-2025). They all connect.
« The very word ‘war’, therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. » (1984, Orwell) Has ceased to exist as a real, personal danger in the saturated minds of the post-1984 citizens.
Open the French mainstream media at random, as of, say, February 21, 2025, and what do you find there ? « The executive power wants to prepare the French society to the premices of an unprecedented war effort since 1945 » . No less. By being continuous, the state of war reveals itself as a permanant norm for those societies that belong to the Top Ten of Arms Exporters, i.e. war inciters.
[USA, France, Russia, China, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, Spain, Israel, South Korea – SIPRI source]
Read the Text of the Address by President Eisenhower, his State of the Union speech in the White House, on January 17, 1961 – about « This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry », aptly baptized by him « the military-industrial complex ».
The sense of defeat, from a human point-of-view, is overwhelming.
And yet, we’re still breathing, searching, reaching out.
Through and over the rubble, the ruins of hope.
Like Mosab Abu Toha, the Gaza poet.
« I am neither in nor out. I am in between. » Displaced
For we truly hold that there is no fundamental difference, no existential gap, at heart, between him, Mosab Abu Toha from Gaza, and Jonathan Dekel Chen from Nir Oz, or between Tula in Israel and Dina in Cairo. Only external circumstances separate them. Scientifically speaking, the human matter, the blood groups, are identical. Spiritually speaking, the believers’ God is one and the same.
Not a question of nature, but of degrees. And context.
A case of external circumstances : meaning how each of us relates to them, and chooses to interact.
The constant, daily choices we make, in thoughts, decisions, connections.
« You no longer have to choose between being pro-Israel or pro-Palestine. You have to be pro-peace. » (Amos Oz). Unless, of course, the peace word and concept has become off limits for you, taboo. But then, you would have no interest reading anything related to Peace Lines, would you.
9- The baby elephant in the room.
At that stage in the unfolding of facts and insights, a fast reader could object that there are only pictures of Israelis in these pages, Yocheved Lifshitz, Tula, Amos Oz, Gilad Shalit, Daniel Viflic, with an American President – therefore indicating a clearly pro-Israel bias. What then do you make of the image of the Palestinian January 27 exodus ?
For this is the heart of it all.
You do have two million two hundred thousand people in the 360 square kilometers of the Gaza Strip. Almost a million of them under the age of 15. One million children.
« According to UNICEF, more than 14,500 children have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war: that’s more than the number of children killed in 4 years of wars worldwide. 25,000 children have been injured: Gaza has the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world. »
10- The volcano behind the fence.
https://messageriesdelapaix.org/index.php/category/media/media-2023-2024/
Not that the writings were not on the walls.
“In January 2008, activists broke through the heavy metal fences. Half the population (800,000 at the time) rushed to Egypt, and were driven back after a few days. Check Gaza Border Breach.
What Israelis fear is another Border Breach of such magnitude, this time into Israel. »
https://messageriesdelapaix.org/index.php/2025/02/21/gaza-facts-echoes-2016-2018/
https://messageriesdelapaix.org/index.php/2025/02/21/gaza-gazing-at-us-sending-out-an-s-o-s-2018/
- General Eiland interview, David Horovitz, The Times of Israel, April 2, 2018
“I don’t know what IDF could do if 300,000 try to trample Gaza fence” - https://www.timesofisrael.com/ex-general-i-dont-know-what-idf-could-do-if-300000-try-to-trample-gaza-fence/
11- A symmetry of illusions.
The French Maginot Line, built from 1930 to 1937 at tremendous cost, just like the Gaza Fence, «created an illusory atmosphere of safety and security », actually blinding people as to the reality of what was going on on the Other Side (Lazar Berman, Times of Israel, October 10, 2023)
Think of it : a $1.1 billion project of 2 million cubic meters of concrete, 140,000 tonnes of iron and steel, having required 1,200 workers erecting and digging – underground and overground, for years.
Likewise, the construction of Gaza’s formidable underground citadel, from 2006 until 2023, made its architects look and feel invincible.
One side never thought the Fence, « a creative, technological project of the first order », could ever be breached in so many ways. The other side never thought the counter-reaction could destroy 70% of its structures.
12- February-March 2025 Crossroads : Dangling Deal. What to do ?
As of February 22, there are still 60 hostages being held in Gaza, less than half of them alive only. We’re nearing the end of the first phase of the agreement. Talks on the next phase must proceed. Whereas secrecy is of the essence for such negotiations, its key necessities should remain in the light, rather than shrouded in darkness. For there are two paths we can go by : fifty thousand human beings have been sacrificed to the bloodthirsty gods of war, and the choice before us is clear. Shall we sacrifice another ten thousand in the weeks to come ?
What to do with Gaza ? with Gazans ? What to do with the West Bank, with Palestinians ?
Force alone fosters chaos. Twenty-five centuries ago it was clear that « Whoever uses force uses weapons for his misfortune. » (Tao 31). In Princess Reema’s words, « communication is the key. If you want progress you can’t not talk to other people. » (Al Arabiya, February 20, 2025)
In 2018, we launched a call to the European Union, with fifteen Nobel laureates, to re-monitor the Rafah Crossing between Gaza and Egypt, and let the people go. It has taken seven years for this call to be heard, until the European Border Assistance Mission was manned again (January 31, 2025).
We cannot wait another seven years to finally face our responsibilities ! We cannot wait seven months or seven weeks to stop the killing machines ! Now is the time to push for the second phase of the Ceasefire. Let the voices of humanity and common sense be heard. Do it now.
The Jerusalem – Nablus Call to end the war
For the sake of humankind
Are we not the same blood groups ?
End all fighting now.
Let them all go home,
All the forsaken survivors,
The hostages, the displaced.
Let the fighters lay down their arms,
let them all recover from the deadly din of war.
The only final victory is to break the endless cycle of retaliations.
We are all in counted time, on a limited stretch of land. Let us make the best of it, both in separation and togetherness.
In support of the European border commitment at the Rafah Crossing with Egypt, we call all parties to consider/remedy the condition of severely suffering civilians.
For a true cessation of hostilities, we call for a permanent end to all attack tunnels
and empowering the lasting reconstruction of Gaza within a peaceful, demilitarized Palestinian state alongside Israel.
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