Jerusalem – Qalandya 2006

PEACE LINES MESSAGERIES DE LA PAIX www.peacelines.org peacelines@gmail.com

Belfast, Northern Ireland 2022

 

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 ?

They, the IRA Provisional, murdered the present king’s great-uncle, Lord Mountbatten, at the age of 79, in his fishing boat. 1979. Foul murder, you could say. 1984 : they devastated the Grand Hotel in Brighton, targeting the British Prime Minister, killing five, wounding more than thirty. How interesting, the bomber was identified, sentenced to eight life sentences, but was released after 14 years, in 1999, aged 48. He met the daughter of one of his victims in 2000, Jo Berry, and together they have participated in countless meetings organized by Building Bridges for Peace, in Rwanda, Lebanon, and… Israel, Palestine, as well as in Belfast.

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.

May 8, 2023 A striking coincidence that this day « Victory » is being celebrated in ceremonies and fanfares, across much of Europe and the world. The victory against evil and destruction. Is it such a victory, when you learn that over 600,000 people have been killed in Ethiopia, and close to 400,000 in Yemen, right across the Red Sea ? Predictably, local media, regional news, will not cover what is happening across the fences they establish.

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.

The vertical dimension provides the lever needed to lift reality to higher grounds, not to get caught into quagmires of déjà vu, déjà entendu. Take it back to the birth of the millenium. The famed year 2000. How did it start ? With the explosion of the Thermostat, at the hinge of the continents, blood on the Esplanade, in Jerusalem.

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.

It was published in Le Monde Diplomatique in December 2000, with the support of 33 Nobel laureates, reminding us of Einstein’s warning : « Peace cannot be kept by force, it can only be achieved by understanding ». The Dalai Lama joined in this Call, with Joseph Rotblat (one of the signatories of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto), Roald Hoffmann, François Jacob, Werner Arber, and quite a few distinguished researchers, but to no avail. So that we reiterated with a more focused campaign in 2001, Peace through Justice, supported by 18 Nobel laureates this time (among them Ilya Prigogine, Desmond Tutu, Maurice Wilkins…). The focus was « the settlements recognized as sources of inequity and hatred », which « have to be evacuated non-violently ». It would take time to the Israeli leaders to heed this call though, as they had to face a raging campaign of suicide bombings in all public places, cafés, buses, restaurants…

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. »

 

 

 

	PEACE LINES MESSAGERIES DE LA PAIX www.peacelines.org peacelines@gmail.com
Newsletter n°115 April 2023    1993-2023 Thirty Years Later On the Mistakes of War

 

 

To think it all started thirty years ago, this continuous commitment to peace…. It was born in the summer of 1993, when it was reported that Sarajevo was besieged, and peace pilgrims were expected to reach the starving city. Sarajevo, where the first World War was triggered, on a fateful day of June 1914, when the Archduke of Austria and his wife were assassinated, at point-blank range. The assassins’ motive was to free Bosnia Herzegovine from the Austro-Hungarian rule, and establish a South Slav, Yugoslav, state. Instead, the shadowy game of alliances led to the first world conflagration with its horrific toll of 20 million killed, half of them civilians, and 20 million wounded, maimed.

This is where we come from. We the French, the Russians, the Germans, the Austrians, the British, the Italians, the Serbs, and so many more. It is easier to point to the European countries who were wise enough not to get involved into this mass butchery. Namely, the Swiss, in the very heart of Europe, the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, the Spaniards, and few others.

Twenty-one years later, the Second World War was initiated among the very same belligerants, within the same vortex of European nations, this time with a toll of 50 to 70 million killed. Fewer peoples were strong enough not to get caught into this « civilized » inferno – the Swiss, always, the Spaniards to a large extent, the Portuguese.

Why reminisce ? As I write these lines, April 23, 2023, I have received a message from skydiving friends who inform me that our airfield is being occupied by troops for about three weeks, due to « military training inter-armies of great amplitude ».

« Ne remuez pas les bottes ! C’est mon principe. » Arthur Rimbaud, August 25, 1870

Reasons to worry : over thirteen thousand people have been killed since February 2022, and through the « jeu des alliances »  more and more countries are implied, not only the U.S.A. but Germany and France, England, Poland, selling weapons of all kinds, a flourishing business if any – last year alone, Ukrainian imports of armament were multiplied by 60.

Now, if you take a look at the seven main world exporters of deadly devices, you will find the USA on top, with 40% of the lethal trade, followed by Russia, with 16%, little France with 11%, China with 5.2%, Germany with 4.2%, Italy with 3.8%, the United Kingdom with 3.2%, and Spain with 2.6%. Source : https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/l-ukraine-troisieme-importateur-mondial-les-ventes-d-armes-dans-le-monde-en-cinq-infographies-2001505 and SIPRI.

https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2023/surge-arms-imports-europe-while-us-dominance-global-arms-trade-increases

Not that we need any kind of moralistic finger-wagging at anyone in particular. Just delve into history, to get a better perspective at where we come from, where we’re going. The major war the US were actors of, after WW II and Korea (1950-1953, over 4 million killed, most of them Korean), was Viet-Nam, for which Robert McNamara was the « architect », as Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968. By many in his homeland, he was considered as the brain behind the three million Vietnamese killed that the US left behind, after their defeat and hasty retreat in 1975.

You should really listen to the same man, thirty years after he took office in Washington. When asked by Carl Bernstein, for TIME magazine, whether the war in Iraq was moving out of control in early 1991, he retorted : « No military operation can be totally under control, especially one with high-tech weapons. » « I tell you Jesus Christ himself can't keep one of these things under control. »

This was a man in his 75th year speaking, long considered a « falcon », and by no means a pacifist at any time of his life. I cannot even begin to say how moved I am by this confession, simple and straightforward as it is.

Ever since I first read it, thirty-two years ago, it has stayed with me.

Robert McNamara (whose middle name is Strange) passed away in 2009. Strange indeed. Bless his soul. I mean, the courage it has taken him, for such a coming out.

What was true then, is just as true, or truer today.

« It's not just events moving out of control. […] because of misinformation and misperceptions, there are misjudgments as to where a nation's interests lie and what can be accomplished. – [Take the missile crisis, for example, 1962] you cannot imagine the extent of misjudgment, misinformation. Events were really out of the control of either party, though both the Russians and we were trying to maintain control. »

Don’t we feel like repeating the content of this expertise ! You cannot imagine the extent of misjudgment, misinformation and misperceptions involved in the political processes leading to sending men to their untimely death and demise.

Please listen to Robert S. McNamara. He can be found online :

https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,972307-5,00.html

« The consequences of military action are unpredictable. I learned this as Secretary [of Defense] time after time after time. »

And if you wonder why the heartbreaking horror inflicted to Ukrainians on both sides of the divide, has not spread even farther, take the case of Viet-Nam, China & Russia vs the US and their allies, when after a few years the commanders did not know what to do, and decided  « one of the greatest bombing campaigns in the history of warfare » :

• Q. You thought the bombing would work at the time?
• A. No, I didn't think it would work at the time.
• Q. Why undertake it then?
• A. Because we had to try to prove it wouldn't work, number one, and other people thought it would work.

Isn’t just this exactly as they always do ?

I had read the Bernstein interview of Robert St. McNamara, when it was published, in February 1991 – just one week before the end of the Gulf War. Had he somehow whistled the end game ?

How we all forget fast… The toll : over one hundred thousand killed among the Iraqi people, less than 300 for the U.S. and its usual allies, the U.K., France, Germany, Canada, Italy… Was war over in early March 1991 ? By the end of the same month of March 1991, it broke out in the Balkans, in Bosnia. First in Croatia, then Slovenia. Who remembers the bombings of Vukovar, Dubrovnik ?

The question, for me then, and for some others in France, Italy, Greece, Spain, Sweden, Belgium… was : We cannot let this happen, and look the other way !

If you take a closer look at Europe as a geographic entity, you realize that its center of gravity actually is in Switzerland. Between Zurich and Davos. You could also say it is in Austria, in Innsbruck. Checking upon the maps, you then realize that the distance from Davos to Dubrovnik is 800 km, to Sarajevo : 745. From Zürich to Sarajevo : 860 km. The dreadful fire of war was at our door.

The problem, though, was to find volunteers to go there. Guess what, nobody wants to go to war ! Even as a peace volunteer. You can’t blame them, can you ? Showing clearly that men get dragged into war, it doesn’t fall on them naturally. Plus, what fleet, what means, did we have ? Was there a We only ? The picture of four standing people shows our first volunteer, in the winter of 1993, with three British soldiers of the U.N.Protection Force, around a meagre fire of planks, on the Diamond Road, the only mountain track open, from Split on the coast to Sarajevo and the north of Bosnia. On the left you see a small Renault van, filled with solid food, milk, books, blankets, under the label HUMANITARNA POMOC (pronounced Pomotsh), our first two words in Serbo-Croat. Pomoc meaning Aid, Relief.

 

Such was our pass, across the sixty-some checkpoints on our way. To protect us, and all civilians, you had these men of the UNPROFOR, at the most dangerous spots. And protect us, they did, indeed, including a tank which fired a shell at a sniper who was taking aim at us. Praise be to these British and French soldiers of peace who paid a heavy price in casualties to contain the devastation.

Over 60,000 people lost their life in this war. The lessons to us were many : You do need an efficient, reliable army to stem the rogue elements who behave as war profiteers, or terrormongers. You can’t feed hundreds of thousands of people. Food alone is not the issue. You won’t play Santa Klaus for a week and then disappear. You had better find ways of acting upstream, on the fabric of war. In this enterprise you need help from people of authority & prestige. It is a long struggle, that only ends with a « return to normal ». You will save countless numbers of unknown people on the way, and you may save your own soul, but you will lose some others that you thought you knew. Anyway, never expect anything in return. You need to be strong to sustain, and dedicated within to really pursue. There is no frontier between others and self. Empathy prevails.

 

You wonder where the astronaut comes into this picture.

His name is Edgar Mitchell, and he is one of the twelve men who walked on the moon. Also the author of books well worth reading, The way of the explorer, Earthrise, Reflections of the Moon, We Are One…   We, who were nobodies thirty years ago, who had nothing, who did not know anything either abour the Balkans, we needed support from bigger people. Edgar Mitchell (Apollo 14), with his space colleagues Russell Schweickart (Apollo 9), J-F Clervoy, Umberto Guidoni, came to our rescue in 2005, on our fourth campaign, Against Terror, For Common Sense (« Because we are all human beings »).  We definitely had come to the conclusion that we needed a global view from above, to distanciate ourselves from exclusive, partisan sides. That will be another story.

 

Back to our beginning, we, who had nothing, borrowed combis from second-hand car dealers, obtained food from generous directors in malls, gas-oil from oil field prospectors… The support we needed on a « moral » ground, we fast received from none others than Coretta Scott King (Martin Luther King’s widow), Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Reverend Tutu, Pdts Gorbachev and de Klerk, Arafat, PM Rabin…

Such commanding voices were heard through the battlefields. It worked. The Sarajevo-Zenica Call was aired on the radios, on tv in Bosnia, and through the world.

« ENOUGH ! Enough blood ! Enough speeches ! Enough alibis ! »

As for the young man crouching with his hand on a friendly wild roe, he is our new Thoreau, and has lived seven years in the woods. His name is Geoffroy Delorme, and he has been lecturing to teenagers and adults about saving our environment. Looking at it from the moon, you’d say he is one of the best guardians actually fighting for peace through the true riches, preserving what is left around us.

 

PEACE LINES MESSAGERIES DE LA PAIX www.peacelines.org peacelines@gmail.com

 

Newsletter n°117

July 2023

 

« … the task of diagnosis. To identify, through some sensitive traces, what is happening. To detect the event raging inside of rumours that we cannot hear anymore, inured as we’ve become. To state what there is to be seen in the things we see every day. To shed light, suddenly, upon this grey hour which has befallen us. »  

                                                                 Michel Foucault, Le discours philosophique  (2023)

 

Who will tell the price they pay ?

Speaking of the nameless babushka, in the night of June 5 to June 6, 2023, when she heard the terrifying sound of the flood rushing down from the collapsed dam, and found the dirty water rising above her knees. Who cares that she is « West Ukrainian », « East Ukrainian », or « Russian » ? All that we know is that she was left stranded, likely a widow, with her two terrorized dogs, in a devastated home that she had to leave.

« I cannot forget war. I would like to. I sometimes spend two or three days without thinking about it and all of a sudden, I see it again , I feel it, I am exposed to it again. And I am afraid. »  Jean Giono, Refus d’obéissance   (1937)

I cannot forget the babushka on the wrong side of the dam.

I cannot forget Mary McHugh, lying on John Regan’s grave, in Arlington, Virginia. John was her cherished fiancé. He lost his life in Iraq, in May 2007, from the explosion of a homemade bomb, set by local insurgents against the invasion of American troops. One of the 4,614 who came back home from Iraq in a flagged coffin. Or take a broader view : one of the 655,000 victims of this American war « for freedom » (from 2003 to 2006 ; Lancet survey).

What did John Regan die for ?

The motive was possession by Iraq of Weapons of Mass Destruction that posed a threat to the US and other nations. Weapons that could never be found. Did they die for a lie ?

32,292 Americans were flown back wounded and maimed, that nobody cares about, except the forsaken mothers and wives. The Philadelphia Weekly ran six pages on that in January 2007. THE PRICE THEY PAY Countless Iraqis maimed.

 

How dare we forget ? How dare we look the other way ?

 

I am not afraid like Jean Giono wrote he was. I have worked in war zones in Bosnia, in Kosovo, in Algeria, in Palestine, in Israel. It is not fear that I feel facing the prospects of more wars. It is rage and disgust. Rage at those who send younger men to death and murder. Disgust at those who choose to close their ears and mind. Have they lost every notion of humanity, of belonging to an endangered species, our species ?

How truly happy we could be in this here world, if we could sort of identify the germ of murder and destruction, and spread some vaccine against it.

DEATH OF TERROR MASTERMIND

June 10, 2023

The main problem we have is with memory. Memory in time. Memory going back twenty, thirty, fifty years, and beyond, seventy to a hundred years, providing context. This is the tool we need to delve into the structures, substructures of the dams that may be targeted next.

The dams of understanding and rationality, common sense and coexistence.

Meaning, a quiet daily system of activities as we normally enjoy it, whether in Davos, Belfast, Gaza, Dakar or Montelimar, holds thanks to dams of logics and mutual interest, that protect the fabric of society as a whole. Beyond these invisible dams lay the vast reservoirs of human potential for boundless powers. The powers that be, the hidden powers of togetherness or destruction.

Take it from an expert in global analysis and predictions, Yuval Noah Harari, Artificial Intelligence already has hacked the fabric, the operating system of our civilization.

https://www.ynetnews.com/article/bkszgnrvn

Leave this to further investigation. The point now is the deadly virus that  thrives within the human minds to transform pretty ordinary folks into war criminals, serial killers, terrorists.

Regarding mass murder through warfare, it is altogether obvious that « everything counts in large amounts » as the lyrics go. At which stage, all you have to do is check into the stats of the Arms Industry worldwide, again, and find the US and France positioned as N°1 and 2, with Russia lagging behind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_industry Including the list of the major weapon manufacturers.

It may be more interesting, on another level, to look into the making of one particular serial killer. Taking the case of Ted K., who passed from cancer/suicide in an American jail, on June 10, 2023, at the age of 81, after 27 years in prison.

He was sentenced to eight life sentences without parole, for killing three and wounding 23 (professors, computer store owners mostly). A mathematics prodigy in his early twenties, the man had become an assistant professor at U.C.L.A . Berkeley at the age of 26, before he resigned in 1969 and went out to live in a shack in the woods, in Montana, from 1971 until his arrest in 1996. Without electricity or running water. The man had a vision, and is best known for his Manifesto, Industrial  Revolution and its Future, partly based on Ellul’s works.

As you can see, when you read his stance and lines, the man makes quite a few points about land and the survival of the human species in a friendly environment. So why did the FBI have to spend 50 million dollars in its longest quest (17 years), delegate 130 to 150 agents to his capture,  with a million-dollar reward for any information leading to him ?

Simply because of the means he used to « make a change ». Killing and maiming.

Admittedly, he was a very small level Handwerker, artisan, managing to hurt twenty people and kill three « only » with sixteen bombs in all his wild years. Reminding us of how ineffective the operators of Islamic Jihad have been lately, in Gaza, launching some 150 rockets, and only able to target an old woman to death, and a Palestinian worker.

Not discussing the rationale here, behind the acts, all the Whys. The line is loud and clear. As long as you disregard reverence for life, Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben, there is no difference between the large-scale industrial killer and the small scale one. Let Inga Avramyan remind us.

 

Making it pretty hard to grasp how on Earth the Tehran Islamic Jihad-backing régime could ever « congratulate » their protégés over their « historic triumph », « firing over 1,000 rockets » – in which process  33 Palestinians were killed and 150 wounded.

 

« Lies and deception, and in the end you lose. It’s always the same.» (J.J. Burnel)

Not entering into rhetorics and winding recesses of theology, but doesn’t the Quran say that « Whoever kills an innocent person it is as if he has killed all of humankind. »  Surah 5, 32.

Actually, the translation « innocent » is quite questionable, since the real wording for « innocent » is something like « someone who has not committed murder or done mischief in the land ». Mischief in the land leaving much room to interpretation for the hangmen.

The surface case made here against small scale operators being their pathetic lack of success in their endeavours, we may recall another bomber, by the name of Timothy McV, who was much more effective, in

Oklahoma City, five days after Ted K.’s last bomb (which managed to take Gilbert Brent Murray’s life – Gilbert Murray, president of California Forestry Association). In Oklahoma the toll was of 168 killed and 680 wounded, on April 19, 1995. A brilliant recruit of the Infantry corps at the age of twenty, Sergeant McV was known as a top-scoring gunner, became an expert in firearms and explosives, and then he was sent to Iraq for « Operation Desert Storm » in early 1991 (estimated toll of 40,000 killed among Iraqis & Kuwaitis, 75,000 wounded in action ; 113 US troops were K.I.A.)

 

Sergeant McV was greeted as a hero once back home, rewarded for his gunning scores of 998/1000 and 1000/1000 and actions in Iraq with six medals.

The Big Red One    The Combat Infantryman Badge 

The Bronze Star    The Commendation Medal 

The National Defense Service Medal    The Achievement Medal 

On April 19, 1995, he packed a rented truck with over three tons of explosives and parked it before a Federal building at 9 a.m. Arrested shortly afterwards, he was strapped to a death bed in an Indiana prison, on June 11, 2001, and injected with pentobarbital, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride.

Like Ted K. Timothy McV left his weltangschauung in writing, published by Media Bypass.

https://web.archive.org/web/19990429110745/http://www.4bypass.com/stories/mcveigh.html

A short 956-word text, it is titled An Essay on Hypocrisy.

Here is part of the Iraq hero’s testimony, his rationale :

« When a U.S. plane or cruise missile is used to bring destruction to a foreign people, this nation rewards the bombers with applause and praise.

[…] The truth is, the use of a truck, a plane, or a missile for the delivery of a weapon of mass destruction does not alter the nature of the act itself.

These are weapons of mass destruction – and the method of delivery matters little to those on the receiving end of such weapons. 

Whether you wish to admit it or not, when you approve, morally, of the bombing of foreign targets by the U.S. military, you are approving of acts morally equivalent to the bombing in Oklahoma City.»

From the Whys and the rationales – with a clear realization that there is no difference in nature between jet bomber pilots and wanton terrorists, only a difference in degree – to the Hows, we’re back to the bottom line : there are no two ways about reverence for life.

Either you stand for it whole-heartedly and make sense in all your acts and involvements, or you don’t, and then it is one long and winding highway to the bloody destruction of dozens or hundreds, thousands, depending only on how high you rank in a hierarchy of murder, inc. (be it national, religious, commercial, or private). As for the concept of reverence for life, Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben, it came to Albert Schweitzer, during a boat trip on the Ogooué river in Gabon.

 

« Ethics is nothing other than Reverence for Life. Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting and enhancing life, and to destroy, to harm or to hinder life is evil. »         Civilization and Ethics

 

END OF JUNE 2023… FUBAR…

Look at them. Elisha, 17. Nachman, 17. Ofer, 60. Harel, 21. Mohand, 25.

Something’s dead wrong there. They’re all dead now. It happened at a service station, in Eli, half way between Ramallah and Nablus. On an ordinary morning of June 2023. Just any old day in Samaria, Palestine. They were all happy, good-looking human beings, weren’t they. The kind you would relate to, without a doubt or defiance. Good eyes, the five of them.

But then the man on the far right came with a gun and sprayed the others with bullets, until he himself was cut down, by a guard, whom he wounded before dying.

Pogroms, random killings, riots.

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/why-these-pogroms-continue/?

FUBAR. Fouled Up Beyond All Repair, I call it. Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.

And then you have France, where seven hundred police, i.e. peacekeepers, were wounded in five days of urban rioting, and some five thousand vehicles were burnt down, five hundred police stations and banks attacked, destroyed.

The speeches of justification are many, in both cases. Revenge being the key word. You even get an old man in a white beard and black turban, an ayatollah, from Tehran, who admonishes the French authorities for their « violence » – but then in his homeland, they hang people for being « gay » or « deviant », don’t they.

 

In the name of « response », of « goals [to be] achieved in freedom and independence », what we find before our eyes is chaos, death and destruction, the maiming of human bodies and minds. Always more retaliation. Enough with speeches and morals now. We only need to cut through it, to the core of the action, the gesture itself.

It is an easy thing to throw stones, molotov cocktails, fireworks.

It is an easy thing to hit and run, shriek and call for mayhem.

It doesn’t take much brains to pull a trigger, does it.

 

Be it in Strasbourg, one of the two capitals of the European Union, or in Turmus Aya, a couple of miles from Eli in the West Bank, the rationale behind burning and looting has to be questioned. Is this what we were born for ?

Speeches and rhetorics are all « very fine » in their short-lived while, but they get sickening so fast. It takes an American general in service, by the name of Milley, to break the news, put it as it is.

"War on paper and real war are different. In real war, real people die. Real people are on those front lines and real people are in those vehicles. Real bodies are being shredded by high explosives."

He was relating to the war in Ukraine, warning, « It’s going to be very, very bloody. And no one should have any illusions about any of that. » When a US chief of staff speaks his truth, we had better listen. After Viet-Nam, Iraq, and Syria, they know what they talk about.

Leaving us all, whether we live in Gaza, Eli, Nablus, Strasbourg, or Bakhmut, Kherson, with the red thread choice of where we do stand, each of us. What kind of motion, of acts, of attitude, we want to take daily, live up to, deep down.

At the end of the fiery day, it is never a matter of morals, of good and evil, really.

More a divide between beauty and ugliness. Between harmony and foulness.

Admittedly, flames and fire may be exciting, especially in the mind of a young male in his early teens. The result, though, is ashes and blackness, the foulest smells. Likewise with the destruction of a human body. From a distance, for a sharpshooter, it may look simple and clear, as Prince Harry put it in his autobiography, almost boasting of his death count as a chopper gunner in Afghanistan. From up close, though, for the nurse, the doctor, it is a cause of added high-level stress and concern, the deepest disgust.

When General Milley speaks of « real bodies being shredded » he is as close to the truth as can be. Born in 1958 and close to retirement, I guess this is his final statement before resigning.

The trouble with any kind of violence is that it triggers counter-violence in predictably growing proportions.

The trouble with all forms of terror and attacks on physical integrity is that they not only backfire, but they aggravate the general condition of humankind.

There is a lot of talk about the German-made Leopard tanks they are selling to the Kiev régime these days. Such a vehicle runs with 340 liters of fuel for 100 km. How about that for CO2 taxes ? The Germans have built 3,600 of them. How do the Green partisans fare with that ?

At the end of this atrociously bloody day, Sergeant McV was right, in his Essay on Hipocrisy, the use of a weapon [be it of random mass destruction or of limited scope] does not alter the nature of the act itself.

The question lingers on, how do you cross the line, into a serial killer’s mind.

Either submission, or the masculine urge to emulate Spartan heroes. To become one.

Unaware that the hero syndrome is way over-rated. As the blues songs go, What was it you wanted ? Tell me, great hero, but please make it brief, Is there a hole for me to get sick in ?

Where you see an opportunity for glory and the picture of the heroic deed, I see only the aftermath of the act. The overflowing pain and misery. The women’s tears, and the horror that will remain. I see the mother, stranded in the smoky night, holding her little daughter’s hand against her ribs, dragging the boy’s arm, and hurrying to some dubious haven, the way Inga Avramyan was pushing her handicapped husband’s wheelchair towards a shelter, when the missile struck. This is all I see, for this is all there is to be seen, when all is said and done.

 

 

 

	PEACE LINES MESSAGERIES DE LA PAIX www.peacelines.org peacelines@gmail.com
Noa Argamani		Shani Louk

Newsletter n°118

October 2023

There was a festival, a Peace Music Nova Festival. A rave party, in the wilderness. “The event will take place in a powerful natural location full of trees, stunning in its beauty and organized for your convenience, about an hour and a quarter south of Tel Aviv” had promised the organizers, omitting to warn it was situated three miles only from Gaza.

 

Paris BaTaClan on November 13, 2023. And for the same reasons. Because any music festival is regarded as « haram » , as a deadly sin, by those who hold their sharia above any human standards. Be it in France, Israel, or Afghanistan.

It did not « stop » there. They also kidnapped girls, women, the way they do in Nigeria, in the name of Allah and Boko Haram. Boko meaning everything that is related to Western ways and manners.

In Nigeria, just a few years ago, scores of young girls and women were abducted. This clearly had nothing to do with Israel and the alleged « desecration of holy sites » in « occupied Palestine ». Sickening rationale and « moral » speechifying, be it in Nigeria, 2014, or Israel, 2023.

Or in Irak, in 2017, when hundreds of Yazidi girls and women were likewise kidnapped, and later sold, used, as sexual slaves, by Daesh, in the North of Iraq.

 

Daesh, the Islamic State, born in Iraq in 2006, from the consequences of the American invasion, installed as a Caliphate in 2014 over the North of Iraq and the South of Syria, had the one and only aim of eradicating everything non-Islamic on its way.

October 7, 2023 : with the massacre of hundreds of Israeli civilians in a few hours, and the abduction of a hundred, unequivocally, the perpetrators – Hamas and the Islamic Jihad in Palestine – have placed themselves on the same footage as Daesh and Boko Haram, regardless of their surface claims.

The bottom line of their strategy is clearly seen in the way they operate. We hear there are over 220 hostages as of October 23, 2023.

Kidnapping not only women but helpless grandmothers, children and infants, babies. Parading them half-naked in streets. Spitting on them, for what they are supposed to be, disbelievers.

Kuffar… Kaffirat… Infidels all. Nonbelievers. The opposite of, the enemies as such of all Muslims. The word Kafir (singular for kuffar) is used 134 times in the Quran. Verbal extensions of Kafir are used 250 times. Such is the fate of all deniers, kuffar and kuffirat (fem.) They are not exactly human, are they. In Gaza, a common way of calling Jews is « pigs », « monkeys ».

Dafna Zin, 15. Her sister Ella is 8. Adi and her baby.

Ariel, 4, and his brother Kfir, 9 months, from kibbutz Nir Oz. Likewise snatched from their home.

“Islamic values command us not to imprison women, children and elderly people. This is a humanitarian action [releasing them] that must be implemented immediately.”
Mansour Abbas, Head of Israel’s Islamic party Ra’am and Member of the Knesset.

Do people know that 10 Members of the Knesset out of 120 are Israeli Arabs ?

***************************************************************************

My name is Yaakov Armagani, from Beer Sheba, Israel.  This is what I have to say after my only daughter Noa was kidnapped from the Nova rave party in Re’im , on October 7, 2023 :

« I think that a negotiation is good for both sides. What’s the use of killing each other ? Vengeance brings nothing. We have to think with our heart, not with logics. There are dead people in Gaza, people who also cry. What’s the point of it ? The best is to sit down, talk, and shake hands. That’s what we did with Egypt, Jordan. With the Palestinians, we are like brothers. We have the same blood, sort of. »

The author of these lines now does not think he would shake hands with whoever would have been one of the abductors. But then, he does not have a daughter captive in Gaza.

The very aim of our longest campaign (2015-2019), Open the Doors, was against taking people hostages. Israel must end the Gaza blockade, end all killings, and enable Gaza to open to the world, so as to guarantee the possibility of a viable economy, and improve the humanitarian situation.

The Palestinians must end all attacks against Israel and the Israelis.

Human beings are not bargaining chips.

 

 

	PEACE LINES MESSAGERIES DE LA PAIX www.peacelines.org peacelines@gmail.com
Noa Argamani		Shani Louk

Newsletter n°121

October 7, 2023 – December 7, 2023

The horror. Days weeping and oversleeping, stunned and dazed, paralyzed. It’s only getting worse by the days. The details of the October 7 rampage, the massive slaughter of defenceless civilians in the Gaza envelope (not 240 but 364 massacred at the Re’im rave party), the torching of homes and shelters, burning people alive, the raping, the maiming, and the kidnapping of over two hundred, they all come up more and more, from witnesses and footage – Shani Louk has been declared killed eventually, Noa Argamani is one of the twenty women still missing, kept somewhere underground.

They say the present rulers of Gaza would not release them, for fear of what they would disclose about the abuse they have been subjected to. And that was the reason the cease-fire stopped. For fifty days we counted the dead, and hoped for hostages to be freed. The double-edged anguish – for there are dear people that I know, with whom I have shared time, meals, thoughts and smiles, on both sides of the fence, in Beit Lahiya, in Sderot, in Jabaliya, in Kfar Aza, in Shejaya, in Nahal Oz… Very dear people, so human, so like the rest of us all, sometimes like the best of us all.

Vivian Silver, for one. From a picture taken before the Gaza wall, a few years ago, with the peace group she co-founded, Women Wage Peace. Checking the winds, they were sending peace balloons to the other side, beyond. She lived in Be’eri, 4 km from Gaza, always so trustful.

Vivian’s last words, sent to friends via WhatsApp : “They are breaking down the door of my house. I am hiding in the wardrobe. If I survive, I promise I will hide a big knife in my shelter. I can’t believe this is happening.” A minute later she said: “Please don’t call me, I need the battery.”

 

From then on, nothing was heard from her. We thought she had been abducted to Gaza. It took five weeks to identify what was left of her. Charred remains in her vicinity.

I am not talking here about people you’ve heard of in the news, who reached some kind of fame to propel them out from anonymity. I am talking of people you love, you deeply respect, whom you feel honoured to listen to, to hear, to hug. Human pillars, human beacons, light bearers through all times of doubt and darkness. People you can trust, because they’re there, so selflessly, so intelligently, and you know they’re there, and they always will be there – even if you’re not at times.

What they do or say, they don’t do or say for personal profit or out of status habits, conformity, career prospects. In any society, any continent, they are the salt of the earth, the lights of the world. They are supposed to live a hundred years, and keep shining gently, always.

I should have met Vivian again on October 4 in Jerusalem and at the Dead Sea peace gathering of the Women Wage Peace, Israelis and Palestinians. We would have met again on October 5 in Jerusalem, as we’d done the last time around. Then, would she have invited me with other friends to her place by the Gaza border, or would have our ways parted, and I would have gone on my own to visit my friends in Sderot, on October 6 ?

I could have stayed for the night in Sderot, and we’d have had our usual conversations, about kids, education, screens, changing patterns, lack of prospects, Time and its leaking… Take it back to 2007. Rachel was in her kitchen with her elder daughter when, for some gut reason they moved down the corridor to the bathroom. The next instant a Gaza rocket burst through the kitchen wall and blew the place up.

 

Barack Obama, who was a senator yet, had visited them for photo ops and all. We’ve not heard Nobel Peace laureate Obama about October 7 since, have we ? Are there any other Peace Nobel laureates we’ve heard ?

In Sderot, on October 6 in the afternoon, I would have gone to visit other people, notably the friendly, weary cops of the police station, who’ve kept storing exploded rockets from Gaza, since the Muslim Brothers seized power in Gaza in June 2007, with Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In the morning of October 7, 2023, the police station of Sderot was raided by heavily armed fighters who massacred the eighteen cops who were there.

Three thousand rockets were fired that day, from Gaza into Israel. People were sent running to shelters all day, a sacred shabbat of rest and peace if any (cumulating the coronation of the Sukot period and the celebration of Sim'hat Torah) – enabling three thousand men to break in through the fence, and commit the worst pogrom of all, nine hours of shooting, looting, slaughtering, raping, kidnapping, leaving 364 corpses at the Re’im rave party massacre, and dragging over 240 people down into Gaza’s streets and tunnels.

 

What does good will have to do here ? Good will, good intentions, good-doing and the like. When it rains rockets, shells and bullets, what good will a big knife do ?

 

Naama Levy, 19. Where is she now ? How is she treated by her captors ?

Can she even see daylight after seventy days in captivity ?

Naama, like Vivian, believed in dialogue, in listening to others, and sharing. One of the truly gentle souls, open to « the other side », trying to understand. If you want to try to understand what « Gaza » is about, you could take tips from one who knew, professionnally, for working there as a BBC correspondent three whole years, spanning pre-Hamas Gaza in 2004, until his own kidnapping in 2007. Alan Johnston.

 

« Gaza is battered, poverty-stricken and ovcercrowded. It’s short of money, short of hope and many other things. But it’s not short of guns.[…] There are more security men here per head of population than almost anywhere on earth, but sadly they deliver very little in the way of security [and] there are even more freestyle characters, gunmen who look after the interests of their powerful clans. And all these forces merge and rub along together in the chaos of Gaza. […] But in the end it was Palestinians killing Palestinians. » describing the Strip chaos as early as October 2006. Was it any better earlier ?

January 2006, Johnston had written about The Kidnap Craze, following the abduction of a young human rights worker, Kate Burton, and her parents. « We’d seen all this before. About seventeen foreigners have been kidnapped in the past year (2005).[…] Often they’ve been used as bargaining chips, a way for a group of gunmen to get attention.

Gaza is awash with bands of militants [… after the Israeli settlements were evacuated in the fall of 2005] the boys from the brigades  find themselves with time on their hands. »

July 2006, after a tunnel was dug into Israel, and corporal Shalit was taken down into Gaza underground (until October 2011) : « There are too many guns, too many armed factions and not nearly enough hope of something better to come. »

For a while things seemed to change when Hamas came to power, violently, in June 2007, after outgunning their secular rivals backed by the Ramallah regime. There was, indeed, a new sense of order, and it felt safer in the streets, along with a measure of hope – that a pious government would make a difference. I was there to witness it.

Still, the Gaza enclave remained stuck between two powerful neighbours, Egypt and Israel, who did not want to have anything to do with the Muslim Brothers – Hamas being an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Nor do they want anything to do with the Iran-backed Islamic Jihad, known to be more extreme than Hamas.

Take it back to October 6, 2023. Everything so quiet and rather easy, on both sides of the fence. The Sukot festival is an eight-day reminder of the exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt. Each family is supposed to build some sort of a hut, with a roof of palm branches, and share time underneath, to remember how transient life is, how uncertain. Then, it culminated into Simhat Torah, to refocus on the Bible as the cornerstone of any spiritual, mental artchitecture. Anyway, during any shabbat, starting on a Friday afternoon, every observant Jew is not allowed to go out, drive a car, use a tool, or do any kind of business. People are all to stay at home, or join in the synagogue, for prayers, meditation, and the simplest forms of togetherness. Shabbat is an absolute commandment for the Jewish people, to forget about the external, material world, and devote themselves to peaceful introspection, avoid any loud or superficial behaviour.

Making the first weekend of October 2023 the easiest time to attack them and catch them offguard. Somehow the most cruel profanation of their rituals and spirituality.

Vivian had a mantra of her own, that she shared with her many sisters, be they Jewish, Muslim, Christian, or else : she often repeated that we’ve been living under an overwhelming paradigm all these years, that only war will bring us peace. She said that this belief had been proven false, time and time again, that we could not put up with it anymore. The saddest surge of fate being that her last words and wishes were for a « big knife », if she survived. Leaving us to face with the limits of non-violence, in the bloody wake of October 7. Beyond wishful thinking.

 

October 7, 2023 will remain the starkest, darkest beacon pointing to the limits of non-violence. We’re not jumping to conclusions. As of this day, December 10, 2023, we are deep into the fog of war. Remember McNamara’s late confessions, The Fog of War. There are no media to be fully trusted. You have to double-check everything endlessly. Facts get twisted endlessly, depending upon where you live, and which language you speak. It’s getting harder to find sense anywhere.

The horror. The horror is spreading, further and deeper.

It’s cold and damp in Gaza in December and January. In normal times it is the worst period of the year, with no heating devices to be used. Storms and floods the rule. The sandy yellow earth gets spongy, mushy. You don’t want to be there, if you can spare it. What, when you’ve lost everything, and you don’t have a roof and walls to protect you ?

 October 7, they have pulled the temple down upon themselves, and us all.

« But climb on your tears and be silent, Like the rose on its ladder of thorns. »

Some 120 men remain hostages, with fifteen women, in the dark, damp tunnels, along with over two million men and women of all ages, likewise hostages of a bloodthirsty power. Along with their millions of neighbours, to the East and the North.

 

 …/…

 

 

 

PEACE LINES MESSAGERIES DE LA PAIX www.peacelines.org peacelines@gmail.com

 

Newsletter n° 123

December 30, 2023

Argumentaire for the Nobel Call of December 2023 Gaza/Israel

 

We started circulating a Nobel Call for the release of hostages and for a durable cessation of hostilities on December 22, 2023, worldwide. The bottom line, loud and clear, being precisely the core of our last Call, « Human beings are not bargaining chips », supported by 77 Nobel laureates and 414 Members of the European Parliament (the majority), in 2015. Among the signatories then : Peace laureates – the Dalai Lama, Pdt Carter, Bishop Belo, John Hume, Archbishop Tutu… ; Literature laureates – John Coetzee, Dario Fo, Toni Morrison, Elfriede Jelinek… ; Chemistry laureates – Robert Huber, Sir Aaron Klug, Sir Harold Kroto, Elias Corey, Yuan T. Lee, J-M Lehn…

Medicine laureates – Christian de Duve, Günter Blobel, Roger Guillemin, Torsten Wiesel…

Physics laureates – Zhores Alferov, Brian Josephson, Jack Steinberger, Leon Lederman, Tsui… Economics – George Akerlof, Daniel Kahneman, Sir James Mirrlee. Among the non-Nobel signatories were the Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra, the Israeli writers David Grossman and Amos Oz, the film director Jean-Luc Godard, the British bluesman John Mayall. For them, we had to go, find them – John Mayall before a concert in Folkestone, Godard in his Rolle home in Switzerland, Khadra, Grossman and Oz in Paris. There was joy in such support, and I shall always remember how long it took Amos to read the text of the Call, weigh each of its 100 words, a pencil in his hand, a serious frown in his gaze, until he decided there was nothing wrong in it, and to add his name.

 

http://www.peacelines.org/open-the-doors-campaign-2015-2019-c25456496

There is gravity in joining a campaign, when the quest for peace means thousands of lives are at stake. We suspended the Open the Doors ! Campaign in 2019, upon admitting that Israel alone was not the only cause of the Gaza blockade. Egypt also played its crucial part. We had to keep objective, impartial, to avoid taking sides. As a humanitarian n.g.o. we are strictly non-partisan, our only stand is for the weaker side, the most threatened, suffering people.

On October 7, 2023, we were horrified to learn of the barbaric attack from Gaza on the twenty communities surrounding it. It sent us back to the worst days of the Black Decade in Algeria, with a toll of 150,000 killed, and to our Nobel Call for Algeria, supported by 68 Nobel laureates. Among them, Peace laureates – Norman Borlaug, Pdt Gorbachev, Elie Wiesel…

Literature laureates – Saul Bellow, Claude Simon ; Chemisry laureates – Sir John W. Cornforth, Ilya Prigogine, Arthur Kornberg,  Richard Ernst, Stanley Cohen, Ernst Otto Fischer..

Medicine laureates – Baruj Benacerraf, Jean Dausset, François Jacob, Cesar Milstein, Maurice Wilkins… Physics laureates – Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Jerome Friedman, Arno Penzias…

Economics – Gérard Debreu, Franco Modigliani, Herbert Simon.

This Call for Algeria was not coined in some cozy office in the Northern lands, but debated upon, and worded, in Algiers, with endangered journalists, and some priests who had devoted their life to the Algerian people. At the time (1997), there was a death order on any European foreigner’s head in Algeria, journalists, intellectuals, simple people, had been slaughtered by the thousands, and seven monks had been kidnapped, most of them old, in March 1996. Their heads alone were found, two months later, hanging from trees.

The Call for Algeria was 158 words long, and started thus :

We are human beings.

Horrified by the slaughters in the name of fundamentalism, we express our ultimate and universal reprobation concerning all acts of bloody savagery committed by the armed groups which terrorize Algeria. No political or religious speech, whatsoever, can ever legitimate the massacre of innocents, the murder of a child, the rape of a woman.

Some signatories were closer to us than others, somehow, and their support was impressive, thus Saul Bellow, François Jacob, Maurice Wilkins, Ilya Prigogine, Arthur Kornberg, but one formula, handwritten by Bellow, sticks out, through time : « It is sure to intidimidate those nasty bastards ».

 

I first was uncertain how he meant it, but it became clear after analyzing the way terror groups survive. Around the hard core of leaders, whose names are known (half a dozen or a dozen at most), you find their armed escorts and militias (hundreds to thousands), who terrorize people. That alone, however, is not enough to last. Their long-time strength is found in the « non-committed » people who sympathize with their stand, and support them in speech and money. The core battle against terror groups is won on this level.

http://www.peacelines.org/algeria-1997-1998-c24712112

In his 1970 Nobel speech, Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it simply :

« Some will say : what can literature [words] do against the savage onslaught of violence ? Let us not forget that violence does not live on its own, it is incapable of living on its own : it is intimately associated, through the tightest natural bonds, to lies. Violence finds its only shelter in lies. […] But violence ages fast. Add a few more years, and it loses it self-assurance ; to maintain itself, to pretend it is good-looking, it has to look for the support of lies.

 

And that is precisely here you can find, neglected by ourselves, but so simple, easy to access, the key to our liberation : The refusal to participate personally in lies ! […] For when men turn away from lies, lies cease to exist, plain and simple. Like a contagious disease, lies can only exist through a collective of people.»

October-November-December 2023 : the lies we are exposed to speak of « armed resistance » as a sacred duty, in the context of a « war of liberation ». But even the Algerian gunmen did not commit such horrendous crimes as what happened from Kfar Aza to Nir Oz on October 7. Can slaughtering helpless civilians en masse (the Re’im revelers), raping women, kidnapping infants, children, and elderly men and women, be attributed to nationalists ? They are the signature of terror groups. Hostage takers belong to the family of the Islamic State in Syria and Irak, the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria, and Boko Haram in Nigeria.

Terror is terror is terror.

Is it only a matter of means ? Tactical errors ? Was October 7 a tactical error ?

Check the DNA behind it then, and the five articles (20, 23, 25, 26 , 30) of the new Hamas Covenant (2017), as explicit as can be. What is the aim, the end ?

Art. 20 : Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.

Art. 23 : Resistance and jihad for the liberation of Palestine will remain a legitimate right, a duty and an honour…

Art.  25 : Resisting the occupation with all means and methods is a legitimate right (…) At the heart of these lies armed resistance…

Art.  26 : Hamas rejects any attempt to undermine the resistance and its arms.

Try as we could, in our years of presence in Gaza, with our Experimental Bilingual Programme (English-Arabic), to be implemented in schools (after written encouragement by then Minister of Education Nasereddine Al Shaer, in the name of 2006 PM Haniyeh’s government), the stumbling block always remained their « legitimate right » of « resisting the occupation with all means and methods », and our tools (« The spirit of Luther King » in 55 paragraphs, crowned by « The main principles of non-violence »), were seen as « an attempt to undermine the resistance and its arms. »

;

These pictures were taken in Shejaiya, in a school, where a small part of our attempts took place. You look at these kids : do you see any difference with those in your schools, studying and playing with your children ? On the wall you see the identity :  Directorate of Education  Gaza.

 

Where are they now ? In tents in the cold winter wind and the rain ? Under rubble ?

The place was the El Yarmouk School, in the heart of Gaza City, between Rimal and Tuffah, a few hundred yards from Jabalia. Visibly financed by the European Union.

Think again. On October 6, all was quiet in El Yarmouk, Rimal, Jabalia, and further South-East, in Shejaiya, Nahal Oz, Kfar Aza, further South in Be’eri, Re’im, Nir Oz…

What was this decision to breach through the fence and attack twenty peaceful communities, slaughter a thousand civilians, and kidnap over two hundred more ?

Among them, Haim Peri, 80, Yoram Metzger, 80, Amiram Cooper, 84. Through the Telegram grapevine, it’s been posted that the three of them died in an Israeli bombing.

Likewise, it has been reported by the abductors that the Bibas family, with baby Kfir who was ten months old when he was kidnapped, and his brother Ariel, 4, perished under bombing.

They talk of « indiscriminate bombing ». How can bombing be so discriminate in urban warfare ? A young Israeli deserter, Tal Mitnick, who’s been jailed for a month, states that he believes in negotiations « at the end of the day ». The harder question is How could you negotiate with the Islamic Armed Group and the Islamic Front in Algeria in the nineties (after they had won elections in 1992)? The choice of the Algerian authorities was to eradicate the terrorists, with the end result that Algeria has remained stable, in peace, since.

How did the Egyptian authorities negotiate with the Muslim Brothers (of which Hamas is an offshoot) in 2013, after the latter had ousted President Mubarak in 2011 ? The Muslim Brotherhood was banned, the islamist President, Mohamed Morsi, was removed by his successor, General el-Sisi, and jailed (he died in jail in June 2019). In Rabaa, on August 14, 2013, the Egyptian police « cleared » two squares by killing over a thousand pro-Morsi protesters, and that brought the « Egyptian revolution » to an end.

We could go on like this, back to Black September in 1970, and its toll of 3,400 Palestinians killed by the royal Jordanian army, that expelled the survivors to Lebanon (hence the ensuing Lebanese Civil War, from 1975 to 1990), or to the way Syrian President Hafez el-Assad sent 12,000 troops to Lebanon in 1976, against Palestinian militias…

In Davos, Switzerland, in January 2006, after Hamas had won the last Palestinian elections Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel made this declaration : « Forgiveness will be, I think, the next step… « First they must renounce the policy and ideology of destroying a neighbor state… What worries me is that, after all, it shows that the overwhelming majority of the Palestinians voted for Hamas, whose main principle is the destruction of Israel. »

 

Back to square one : how and when will Hamas revise its Covenant, as the PLO did in 1989, when President Arafat declared in Paris, on May 2, that its charter was obsolete, caducous. He said it in French, « c’est caduc ». In Geneva, in December, Arafat clearly « recognized the right for Israel to live in peace and security », and « renounced terrorism » – thus opening the door to the first talks between sworn enemies in Madrid, in 1991, gateway to the Oslo Accords in 1991.

Landmarks for similar terror organizations : after a first « temporary cessation of hostilities » in April 1994, and the « Good Friday » Belfast Agreement in 1998, the IRA issued a final statement in April 2005, to use « exclusively peaceful means ». Gerry Adams, the political leader of the IRA, demanded that all militants lay down their weapons, and concluded :

« All IRA units have been ordered to dump arms.   To complete the process to verifiably put its arms beyond use in a way which will further enhance public confidence and to conclude this as quickly as possible.    We are conscious that many people suffered in the conflict. There is a compelling imperative on all sides to build a just and lasting peace. » 2007 spelled the end of The Troubles between Ireland and the United Kingdom.

In the same spirit, after a forty-year terror campaign, the Basque ETA pledged for a « full dissolution and apologizing to its victims and their families ».

« ETA has decided to declare an end to its historical cycle and its role, thereby bringing its path to an end. ETA has completely dissolved all its structures.

This decision does not bring an end to the conflict between the Basque homeland and Spain and France (…) Let’s not repeat our mistakes. Let’s not let our problems fester. Doing so would only give rise to new problems. »

Looking for an opening, an alternative to blind violence and terror, we start hearing other voices. On December 27, « senior member » of the Hamas leadership Mashal, declared to the French media that « his group would consider recognizing Israel when the time comes to establish a Palestinian state ». Another « senior member », member of the Palestinian National Council, in an interview with a  UAE-based news outlet, conceded that « Here in Gaza, a massacre took place; it's not something that happened randomly. »

 « It means that October 7 is considered a mistake. Hamas says 'we won,' and Israel says 'we won.' So, tell me, who was defeated? Everyone won; the Palestinian people are the ones who were defeated, Palestine was defeated, families in Gaza were defeated, millions of infants were defeated. »

« Those who caused this made a mistake, and they should be held accountable and answer for their mistakes since the day of the coup [2007]. We feared reaching this day. We were afraid that Hamas would lead Gaza to what it has become today. »

In this spirit, precisely, and for a « durable cessation of hostilities », according to the formula coined at the United Nations Security Council, on December 22, in a resolution upon which all agreed ((13 votes pro, 0 against), « we support a permanent end to all attack tunnels and the demilitarization of the Gaza Strip ».

What has been achieved in Ireland and the Basque homeland has opened the way to a practical way to stop the endless bloodshed, what Pope Francis called the « aimless voyage » of war, « a defeat without victors » in his Christmas message.

This Newsletter started with a picture of Gaza kids, taken on a beach, in the summertime, flying kites, aiming at a world record of a maximum of kites flying, under the guidance of young UNRWA monitors. It echoes the parallel symbolic action taken by Women Wage Peace before the Gaza Wall, in 2017, on the other side of Shejaiya. The woman on the left, in purple trousers, is Vivian Silver. She was burned alive in her home, in Kfar Aza, on October 7. Her last words, to friends, through WhatsApp, was that she promised she would keep a knife in her shelter if she survived.

 

Would you believe this was the last vow of a devoted pacifist, in the morning of October 7 ?

Let Lao Tsu answer, on arms at large : « Those sharp weapons are instruments of evil omen, and not the instruments of the higher beings ; the higher beings uses them only on the compulsion of necessity. Calm and repose are what they prize ; victory by force of arms is to them undesirable. To consider this desirable would be to delight in the slaughter of men ; and he who delights in the slaughter of men cannot get his will in the kingdom. »

When used without the damnable desire and delight, but « only on the compulsion of necessity », « a skilful commander strikes a decisive blow, and stops. He does not dare, by pursuing his operations, to assert and complete his domination. He will strike the blow, but will be on his guard against being boastful or arrogant in its aftermath. He strikes it as a matter of sheer necessity ; he strikes it, but not from a desire of domination. »

 

 

 

 

 

PEACE LINES MESSAGERIES DE LA PAIX www.peacelines.org peacelines@gmail.com

 

Newsletter n° 126

February 2024

 

« The land of prophets has become the arena of modern times, as if yesterday’s wars had not been enough to teach the ones and the others that there is no truth except in life, and nothing is sacred but the duty to live and let live. »                                        Yasmina Khadra

« We must not let despair infect us. »                                                     Nobel Roald Hoffmann

                                                                                                                       

Four months into this blood-curdling war that started on a bleak Saturday morning in early October 2023, when two thousand men and more broke through their neighbour’s border, rushed to plunder, burn, kidnap, rape, and slaughter. They came upon a music festival a few miles from the border. They massacred 360 of the revelers, raped some, kidnapped others. They set houses on fire, in hitherto peaceful, defenceless, mostly rural communities. In a number of cases, they set fire to shelters, with people inside.
One of them was Vivian Silver, burned alive in her Be’eri home on October 7. Vivian, born in 1949, was a devoted pacifist, one of the founders of Women Wage Peace, and as a dedicated member of The Road to Recovery, she would spend time driving sick Palestinians to Israeli hospitals.

Some 1,200 civilians were massacred that morning, in a few hours. The Israeli army was nowhere around, its commanders convinced that Hamas had eventually turned to coexistence.

Nir Oz was a kibbutz of some 400 people. A quarter of them were murdered or abducted. Among the 80 kidnapped, Shiri Bibas and her two infants, Kfir then aged 9 months, and Ariel, 4 years old, along with historian Alex Dancyg (born 1948) and journalist Oded Lifshitz (born 1940).

Among the missing, Noya Dan, 12, suffering from autism, and her grandmother Carmela, 80.  Noya was a fan of Harry Potter, and author JK Rowling pleaded for her release. On October 19, their bodies were discovered in Gaza by the Israeli army, near the border.

The Nir Oz survivors have nowhere to return to. What will the 1.7 million Gaza refugees return to, when they are allowed to do so ?

The pictures of manmade insanity and organized cruelty add up, and leave you crying in helpless, bitter loneliness.

« To deplore is not enough. To condemn has no more echo than a scream in apnoea. »

Yasmina Khadra, October 23, 2023. Algerian writer, translated into 48  languages.

You turn around, looking for « authorized » voices, of human beings who might have something else to say, in such times of impending disaster, that could make a difference. You fumble through the net, night and day (presently 3 a.m.), as the amplitude of the disaster permeates through sleep and dreams.

«…it’s a nightmare. A nightmare beyond comparison. No words to describe it. No words to contain it. » David Grossman, October 12, 2023. Israeli writer, translated into over 30 languages. Yet, Nobel friend Roald Hoffmann sent a message yesterday : « We must not let despair infect us ». And this is the lifeline, the bottom line, through these endless hours.

« A world at war leaves no one spared. » is another message received yesterday.

The illusion would be to be spared, to escape it all, and live a « normal » life, as if. Escapism : a deceptive trap, leaving one even more crazed, dazed and confused.

It is a fact : we are going through a deep sense of betrayal (in Grossman’s words as in Yonathan’s words – who lives down South-East, close to Jordan, far from Gaza). In my own mind as well.

Year after year I spent in Gaza, pushing for our Bilingual Experimental Programme, teaching non-violent resistance and constructive coexistence. « I believe that amid today’s rocket bursts and whining bullets, there is still a hope for a brighter tomorrow. »

These kids in Al Yarmouk school have been betrayed. They were betrayed ten years ago, when our programme, adopted and encouraged in writing by the Palestinian government in 2006 (then headed by Hamas PM Haniyeh), was officially discarded and boycotted. Al Yarmouk is close to the heart of Gaza City, famous for one of the oldest stadiums in Palestine. What’s left of the Yarmouk stadium now ? Who’s left intact among the seven kids who were holding these thoughts of Martin Luther King in their hands ?

The feeling is one of rage, outrage. So many meetings through the years, with just about anyone in Gaza in a position of authority and power. Ministers, leaders, Hamas cadres, from Zahar to Haniyeh to Sinwar. Not one of them said he was against it, face to face. It had been a governmental decision to implement it, after all. They just made sure to shelf it, and never let any school really apply it. They also did not agree to have the little bilingual book published in one of their printing houses. That much was clear.

Something else should have triggered my wariness. As early as 2008, 2009, I was curious to take pictures inside tunnels to Egypt. I asked everyone in charge for permission – obviously, you could never go anywhere important without clearance. It was not formally denied, but the green light never came. I did not suspect that they had that many tunnels, others than those leading to Egypt. Young Gilad Shalit was then detained in one of these underground « facilities », and they simply did not want anyone but their troops underground.

Everybody knew there was some kind of secret substructure in the Gaza Strip, but to what extent was a mystery. When the Israeli army finally entered Gaza with its tanks in late October 2023, they discovered hundreds of miles of fortified tunnels. Up to 500.

Underneath Gaza City, underneath Jabalya, underneath Al-Shati, underneath Beit Lahya, underneath Khan Yunis, you name any sector of the Strip, they found miles and miles of tunnels, hundreds of access hatches and stairs. Under ordinary buildings, under hospitals, under schools, under mosques, under ordinary homes.

Author Khadra said that « Israel’s reaction is beyond understanding ». Forget « Israel ». Forget any specific label for a nation. To ask a simple question : what can you do, as a force, when you find out about such an enormous underground network, conceived as a global fortress and arsenal, against your people ?

The extent of the Gaza military underground, to us all, remains what is beyond understanding. To us all, meaning to any rational, unbiased mind, simply trying to understand.

Somehow, the tunnel insanity could have been a natural response to the constant pounding of aerial attacks by F-15 bombers and Apache helicopters. Had it remained a defensive structure, for the people. But then, what of all the attempts at border-crossing into the enemy state ? What of the onslaught of October 7, the hundreds methodically massacred for hours, and the 250 hostages abducted that morning, their ages ranging from 9 months to 90 years old. Making it the worst pogrom in the history of the Jewish people, after the nazi period.

Unconcerned here with sides, and partisan postures, the prevailing feeling in the night, the endless night, is that we live on borrowed time, all of us, whether we are more conscious of it than before 2023 or not.

Back to Grossman’s statement about a deep sense of betrayal. Mentioning « 80 breaches into the most advanced border fence in the world ». Where were the protection forces, and the dozens of Apache helicopters to be found, until the afternoon of October 7 ?   Like some Janus curse from the ancient times. The dual face of betrayal. Janus, the god of beginnings and endings, of choices and gates, of duality.

One face turned to the past, the other turned to the future. Never before such a deep sense of duality and duplicity, betrayal ? I actually experienced one of parallel amplitude, involving the man who was the first Palestinian president, Yasir Arafat.

Take it back to January 1, 2002. For the sake of getting closer to the heart of the matter, into the ancient curse of deadly duality.

A series of meetings had been arranged by the late Gabi Baramki – who was then involved in Higher Education—with the Palestinian icon. I was in the company of Nobel Peace laureate Mairead Maguire, from Belfast. I had our Experimental Programme in mind, which needed support at the highest level. I don’t know what Mairead had in mind, but we did go the whole round, from the Nativity Church in Bethlehem to the tightly controlled presidential Muqata in Ramallah, to the Knesset where the Speaker Naomi Chazan expected us, to a meeting in Tel Aviv.

Arafat, Abu Amar, as he was known to his followers, was his usual seducing self. Charming, hugging, and kissing. He offered Mairead a traditional shawl, and gave us a fastuous meal the next day, with « the best hummus in the land ». It was difficult not to like him, as a person. [He was a star and a hero in his own right, had escaped death so many times, from Jordan’s Black September, in 1970, when thousands of Palestinian fedayeen were killed by the king’s troops, to Lebanon and Tunisia, until his homecoming in Gaza in 1994 – but was it a real homecoming, since Mohammed Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Husseini was born in Cairo in 1929 ? During our last meeting in 2003, in presence of Gabi Baramki, so melancholy, as if each of us knew we would not meet again, he confessed to me he even held a military record from the Egyptian forces.  He truly was among the heroes of the past century, in the line of Castro, Mandela, add Gaddafi, whether you hate their guts or not…

After all, in May 1989, in Paris, with these two words, pronounced in French, « c’est caduc », he had declared their charter obsolete, recognizing the existence of Israel as a state ; but as early as December 1988, in Geneva, he had gone farther, to pledge : « Our Palestine National Council has (…) reaffirmed its rejection of terrorism in all its forms, including state terrorism.(…) The position is clear and free of all ambiguity. And yet, I, as chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, hereby once more declare that I condemn terrorism in all its forms. » Clearly paving the way to the 1991 Madrid peace conference, and the long-expected Oslo Agreements, in September 1993, and clearly opposed to the rejectionist Hamas, founded in 1987.

The failure of the Oslo process throughout the nineties, and of the Camp David summit in July 2000, led to the second intifada, in October 2000, and the resumption of terror. Arafat’s position, from 2000-2001 till his death in November 2004 in France, was far from « clear and free of all ambiguity ».]

Water under the bridge ? We’re standing on the edge of the same abyss between the side of non-violence and the one of armed resistance. In Gaza, the party of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) toppled violently its P.L.O. opponents in June 2007, and the chasm between Ramallah and Gaza has remained gaping since. Check Battle of Gaza (2007). There have been no elections held by the Ramallah regime since 2006, for fear Hamas might win them.

Is the whole scheme of coexistence doomed ?

Yahya Mahamid, in February 2024, does not think so, and he has his points to make. The last words of this Newsletter will be his.

But let’s go back to the Muqata meeting with Arafat and Mairead Maguire. The atmosphere, despite the impending siege of the building by the army, was warm but tense. He did complain that his helicopter had been destroyed by the Israelis, and that there was no way he could leave the building. He looked haunted then.

Just in case one would forget for a moment what this is all about, let me recall how it started, in the morning of October 7, 2023 – and I shall repeat « started », as it was so quiet on that second Saturday of October, when hundreds of men in arms broke and rushed through the border, into Nir Oz, to kidnap Chaim Peri, Yoram, 80, Amiram (84), with others, and murdered so many who were so helpless, in their shelters, in their homes.

We did not know them before. We now know them, they stay with us. This is an old photo of Chaim, with a quote from Yitzhak Rabin, as he was a peace activist. One of those who would drive sick Palestinians from the Erez terminal to the best hospitals in Israel. 

The way Vivian Silver did, and Haim Katsman, from Holit. Both slaughtered on October 7.

From October 7, 2023, in Nir Oz, Be’eri, Holit, to January 1, 2002, in the Ramallah Muqata :

We were, Mairead and I, peace activists on our way, with a « mission » after all – fifteen months into the second intifada, growing losses both for Palestinian and Israeli civilians made it urgent to check upon the Palestinian president’s stand.

There had been some thirty car bombs and suicide bombings in 2001, most claimed by Hamas, some by the Islamic Jihad, from Netanya on January 1, 2001 – 60 injured, by Hamas, to Haifa on December 2, a suicide bomber sent by Hamas, killing 15, wounding 40, on a bus.

Among the most murderous attacks : Netanya again, on May 18, 2001, 5 killed, 100 wounded, by Hamas ; Tel Aviv, the Dolphinarium discotheque, on June 1, 21 killed, over 100 wounded, by Hamas ; Jerusalem, the Sbarro restaurant, on Yaffo street, 16 killed, 130 wounded, by Hamas & Islamic Jihad ; Jerusalem again, the Ben Yehuda market, 11 killed, 188 wounded, by Hamas.

We could see the Palestinian president ill at ease. Something was not clear, Arafat was on edge  – what could it be ?

The answer came three days later. When we heard that a freighter carrying 50 tons of weapons, the Karine A, had been intercepted in the Red Sea, on January 3, and taken to the harbour of Eilat, where its cargo was unloaded on the quay, for all to see.

Aboard, you had 122mm and 107mm katyusha rockets, two and a half tons of high explosives, crates of kalashnikov rifles, sniper rifles, ammo, and all sorts of deadly goodies.

The ship had been acquired at the end of August 2001 by the Palestinian Authority, from a Lebanese company, and its captain was a Palestinian colonel and Fatah activist. The crew admitted it was their third such trip, and added that there had been other such ships – the Calypso II…, the Santorini, from Tyr, Lebanon, which was seized on May 6, 2001, with 40 tons of weapons (107mm katyushas, 4 Strella missiles, 13,000 kalashnikov cartridges, and so on and so forth). Arafat’s spokesperson, whom we’d come across at the Muqata, had loudly protested, « for sure, we have nothing to do with the shipment ».

So much for credibility and trust.

The Karine A, for me, was the end of the line. How do you deal with betrayal ?

Things happen for a reason. Lies and deception. It’s always the same, is it not.

Kids or adults, likewise, the ones who lie, in the very act, do not perceive themselves as liars. More like interpreters, directors, facing the stage, their audience at a given time. I maintained the connection with Abu Amar though. All through 2002 and 2003, until the end.

By the end of January 2002, on the 27th, hundreds of women were gathered around Arafat in Ramallah, for a special meeting, in which he claimed that women and men were equal, and that they were his « army of roses which would crush the Israeli tanks ». His leit-motiv was« Shahida, shahida… all the way to Jerusalem ! ». He made his point clearly, « You are the ones who will release your husbands, your fathers and your sons, from oppression. You will sacrifice yourselves, the way women have always sacrificed themselves for their family. »

That very afternoon, January 27, 2002, Wafa Idriss blew herself up in a Jerusalem mall, killing one and wounding dozens, becoming the first Fatah female kamikaze. The armed wing of Fatah, Arafat’s party, Al Aqsa Brigade of Martyrs, claimed responsibility for the act.

 In the same period, 2000-2001, Barbara Victor, an investigative journalist with over twenty years of experience in the Middle East, was writing her memoir, Army of Roses : Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers.

Came February 2002, and the tensions were riding high and higher in Ramallah. People in charge, or who thought they were in charge, were getting ready for war. In gradually empty ministries, and everywhere I went, all I heard was the rising speech of war. Educated men, men with responsibilities, they were all inebriated with it. I could see the wild burning light in their eyes, it was beyond rhyme and reason.

In vain I pleaded with them – not for the sake of morality, or good vs evil, God forbid, but for the sake of rationality, of a sane, lucid anticipation about the balance of power. What the chances of success were, if any, to put it simply. They were all intoxicated to deafness.

This was only five months after September 11, 2001, mind you.

Remember the mass murder-suicide of Jonestown, Guyana, in November 1978. 918 men, women, and children, dead in a matter of moments, all members of the Peoples Temple, followers of their leader Jim Jones. Call it the Jonestown syndrome – Ramallah, January 2002 / Gaza, October 2024. Jones was no ignorant guru, he had read his Stalin, Lenin, and Mao Ze Dong, praised them as his heroes. Nor did he actually force his followers to drink the poison. They had been trained towards what the leader termed « revolutionary suicide ». There had been votes, and previous tests.

« Everyone, including the children, was told to line up. As we passed through the line, we were given a small glass of red liquid to drink. We were told that the liquid contained poison and that we would die within 45 minutes. We all did as we were told. » testified one of the survivors, speaking of preparatory meetings, meant as « loyalty tests ».

I stayed in the West Bank and Jerusalem until early March 2002.

After January 27, 2002, Arafat’s Fatah also claimed responsibility in Tayibe for a bombing, and on March 2, in Jerusalem, for a massacre in a yeshiva, killing 11, wounding over 50. It became a conjunction of terror, from Fatah, Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hamas again, with the Café Moment in Jerusalem, killing 11, wounding over 54, on March 9, and the Passover massacre in Netanya, on March 27 : 29 killed, 140 wounded, by Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

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Wake-up on a Sunday morning, with the pain and pressure (more bad news in view ? no echo from Masoud’s family in South Gaza, no echo from Yonathan in the Negev) – the accumulated pain, and the pressure of impending gloom over one million refugees to be displaced again around Rafah : where to ?

Searching for clues and issues, throughout the long, dark, damp tunnels we have been forced into.

 Unmündigkeit. Couldn’t that be the word, the key.

From Immanuel Kant, 1784. Pointing to immaturity, the status of minority, as devoid of full legal responsibility. What we could call the Jonestown syndrome. Or the various discourses of voluntary servitude (La Boétie, 1550), the pervading politics of obedience.

Looking back into the matrix of the ongoing chaos and devastation (« It’s a destruction of hugemost biblical proportions » in Avi Issacharoff’s words, on February 9, when he was allowed into Gaza), you find there was a time, the lost decade, from 1988 to the late nineties and 2001, when the Palestinian authority, with Yasir Arafat at its head, was willing to try the way of non-violence.

It shifted by mid-2001, and the end of 2001, with the choice of cargoes of weapons from Iran, leading us to the Karine A (+ Santorini) fiasco, and the gradual rapprochement between the rejectionists, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and the Oslo actors of the P.L.O.

The result was Operation Defensive Shield, launched on March 29, 2002, two days after the Netanya Passover massacre. The largest military operation in the West Bank since the 1967 war. Then Arafat was placed under siege in his Muqata compound, until his death.

***************************************************************************

I see myself in Ramallah again, in February and March 2002, objecting and arguing. All for the sake of common sense, and predictable prospects. In Ramallah still, from 2002 till the last meeting with Arafat, by the end of September 2003. He was sick then, not quite the man he’d been known to be. I gave him our little red book, The Spirit of Luther King, and it made him happy. He liked the cover. « Charrming ! », he exclaimed.

2004 was a year I skipped. My sabbatical year somehow. 927 people were killed that year, including five foreign nationals. They had started murdering « collaborators » too. 2003, two of them were dragged through the streets of Ramallah, and hung by the feet from a metal structure of pylons that was in the center of Manara Square, between the stone lions. That was the way some of them dealt with betrayal.

In Tel Aviv, on January 2004, a hundred thousand people had gathered to protest PM Sharon’s plan to disengage from Gaza and parts of the West Bank. As Peace Lines, we had campaigned for this withdrawal, as early as 2001, with our Peace through Justice Call, supported by 18 Nobel laureates (3 Peace laureates only : Desmond Tutu, Mairead Maguire & Betty Williams) and 7 Members of the European Parliament.

« After decades of ongoing feuds and wars, the 2000-2001 bridging proposals can bring solutions to the painful matters of territories and refugees. In the spirit of U.N. resolutions 242 and 194. The colonies recognized as a source of inequity and hatred have to be peacefully evacuated. The majority of settlements will be attached to Israel, exchanged for equivalent surfaces. Why delay any more the birth of a free Palestinian State ?

Both Palestinians and Israelis share the same tiny piece of land. Both breathe the same air, drink from the same sources… address each other with the same peace salute : Shalom, Salam… »

Kennedyesque in style, it acted as a beacon for leaders of good will, at all levels. Arafat passed away in France, on November 11, 2004 – some say poisoned by someone close to him. He had been powerless for a couple of years, in his besieged compound. A helpless prisoner in his ruined palace.

On January 9, 2005, presidential elections were held for the first time since their historical predecessor in 1996. Mahmoud Abbas was declared winner, for a four-year term, with 67% of the votes, before Mustafa Barghouti (21%). Hamas and the Islamic Jihad boycotted the process. There have been no elections since.

 In February 2005, the Knesset approved of the disengagement plan (59 pro, 40 con, 5 abst.) ; 500 Palestinian prisoners were released, as a goodwill gesture to the new president, and 400 more in June. Jericho and Tulkarm were handed over to the Palestinian Authority, in the same spirit. Despite continuous bombings by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, in August 2005 the disengagement plan was completed in Gaza. In September, the last troops were pulled out, and four settlements in the West Bank had also been evacuated – speaking of « the colonies recognized as a source of inequity and hatred », but who’s to say where on earth the alleged source lies ?

The architect of the Gaza & Ganim disengagement, PM Sharon, had created a new Party, Kadima, breaking away from his original Likud, to act more freely. Three months after the last soldiers left Gaza, on December 18, 2005 he suffered a first stroke, did not heed the doctors’ orders for bed rest, and was hit by a second stroke on January 4, 2006.

He fell into a coma that was to last eight years, until his death on January 11, 2014. Ten years after his arch-enemy Yasir Arafat had left the stage, to slip into oblivion. Many are the observers of the endless drama who feel that both entities have been rudderless since 2004 and 2006. Without anyone of real daring insight at the helm. Explosive-laden ships without tillermen aboard.

Hence the two-sided catastrophe of October 7, 2023.

Let’s admit there is something like the heart of the matter. And something did go dead wrong with this heart of ours on October 7, 2023.

But what was it we wanted, to start with, in this Newsletter ?

To get Shiri Bibas and her infants, from Nir Oz, out of Gaza, with the historian Alex Dancyg, born in 1948, and Oded Lifshitz, born in 1940. To get Haim Peri and Yoram Metzger (both 1944), along with Amiram Cooper (1940) out of Gaza, and back into their lives.

To get our friend Masoud’s extended family of ten out of the refugees’ tents in Rafah, let them come back to their homes in Gaza City, if the buildings are still standing.

My deep feeling of rage, outrage, at betrayal is relentless, rising by the days.

How could anyone give orders to kidnap them all, from babies less than a year old, to men and women in their eighties ? They now say that the head of the Gaza military quintette did not foresee all the consequences of their decision, that the attack did not go as planned, and the main decision-makers did not expect it to go as far as it did.

Still, the military leaders had given their orders in the night, and licence to kill, kidnap, and all. When it was all perfectly quiet on the Southern front, they opened the lid of this nightmarish hell. And, by some wicked twist of fate, the military leaders on the other side had not foreseen that such an attack could happen, that it could go as far as it did. They had given orders to leave the whole Gaza Envelope and its residents totally unprotected. Worse, it took them astounding hours to react, and counter-attack.

On one side you had a billion-dollar network of massive invasion tunnels. On the other side, you had another billion-dollar network of underground and overground state-of-the-art fences and devices. « Sometimes it’s better not to say anything at all » ?

They say the army found footage of Shiri Bibas and her infants in Khan Yunis on cctv. She’s being pushed and shoved by half a dozen young men, from one cell to another. They cover her from head to toe with some sort of blanket.

What a shame. What a shame on the human species. What a shame on us all, wherever we live, for letting this happen. Don’t ask why it happened, just realize « Muslims » did this. Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Muslim Brotherhood. Allahu Akbar ?

 

I see myself again in Gaza, from Jabaliya to Gaza City to Khan Yunis, from 2008 to 2013, pleading  relentlessly for our bilingual programme centered on peaceful means, constructive coexistence. Remember Gabi Baramki, a chemist, President of Bir Zeit University in Ramallah, from 1974 to 1993, and then in charge of Higher Education. Remember Rami Hamdallah, an English teacher, President of An Najah University in Nablus, from 1998 to 2013 – when he was appointed Prime Minister, for six years.

Call it another window of opportunities, with such basically good men, academics, principled individuals.

The welcome window was shut by the Gaza leaders though, secretly busy all the time digging their subterranean fortress. 2014 was the birth of the self-proclaimed Islamic State in both Iraq and Syria, which came to control most of the Syrian territory and of Northern Iraq in 2015, with outposts South of Damascus as close to the Sea of Galilee as less than 40 km. Daesh, the Islamic State, viewed itself as a worldwide caliphate, with extensions as far as Bengal, Caucasus, Yemen, Somalia, Central Africa, Sahara, Libya, Algeria, Sinai.

The Jihad fever spread all over, East to West, from its epicenters, vowing to conquer all.

2015 was the black year for France, when Al Qaeda partisans massacred the Charlie team of cartoonists in Paris (Cabu, Wolinski, Honoré…), then Jewish customers at a kosher store, and later in the year Daesh partisans slaughtered revelers by the dozens at the BaTaClan theatre, and ordinary people enjoying an evening at cafés and restaurants.

2014 and 2015 were also black years in Egypt, due to the Sinai Insurgency, from a dozen jihadi groups who indiscriminately killed soldiers, policemen, civilians, judges, and downed a Russian passenger plane, with 224 on board. 2016, 2017 weren’t much better, with the Palm Sunday church bombings, killing over 363, wounding uncounted scores.

Such was the context, from 2014 onward. When the Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah went to Gaza, for another attempt at reconciliation between the sides of the Palestinian divide, on March 13, 2018 « they » tried to kill him, whoever they were.

On March 30, 2018, the Gaza leaders started organizing border protests under the banner of The Great March of Return – the aim of which was meant to be the return of all Palestinian refugees since 1948 and their descendants to present-day Israel. These gatherings, Trojan horses, never were peaceful the way they were supposed to be initially. As soon as April 2018, a parallel campaign of incendiary balloons and kites was started, with a devastating impact on crops and woods, including a huge fire in the Be’eri Forest. Whereas the border riots stopped by the end of 2019, these arson attacks continued until 2021.

 

Such is the timeline, and the context, from 1987 (the foundation of Hamas) and 1988 (Arafat’s coming out in favour of non-violence, reneged in 2002) till the present day.

Some people do evoke the need to contextualize the onslaught of October 7, 2023. Right they are, it is always misleading to take events or statements out of context. You wish they would do a thorough job of it though, and not stop on the conventional surface of political software from the past century – caducous as they are.

Do we need reasons to reject discourses of war, and demand a durable cessation of hostilities in February 2024, with its conditions of possibility ?

As a human being, and coordinator of a humanitarian organization which has been involved in war zones for thirty-two years, all I can say is that I reject, contest, abhor war, and its countless alibis.

Warfare kills people, in numbers, but it also kills, and poisons, maims their spirit.

Long after actual war stops, post-trauma stress burdens the soul and mind, triggers violent nightmares, wrecks nights and dawns.

War thrusts you into abyssal grief and mourning. War steals the joy from your eyes.

War robs you of your freedom first, with a view to rob you of your life, or limbs, integrity.

To start with, through mobilization orders, warfare convokes you, abducts you, wherever you are, under the threat of calling you a deserter, and sending you to jail.
The double catch of warfare : either you submit, don the uniform, seize the gun, and do as you’re told, and you’re in, or you recoil, but they go for you, get you, and drag you into a cell, you’re in as well.

What warfare brings you first and foremost is personal submission and blind conformity – the fastest way to alienation.

The tools and ways of war are all miserable and mind-twisting. There is no beauty in war, whatsoever. It only teaches to lie and deceive, through propaganda and binary speeches.

Warfare diminishes a human being’s capacity for understanding, in depth. It always comes crawling on you through a heavy fog, the famed « fog of war », in which you cannot discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal.

The first victim of war, with truth, is trust. You can no longer trust anything stated by the warwaging authorities. In war, regardless of international conventions, all means are acceptable, as long as they hurt and defeat the « enemy ».

In war, human beings accept to dehumanize others and be dehumanized, to be transformed into something else than the striving individual they were to begin with. Something like some metal insect, equipped with fangs and pincers, venom vesicles, something unlike anything they might have been in the first stages of their life.

Warfare devours your time, cannibalizes your life. Warfare is the worst thief that sneaks through your fences and self-defence devices.

Regardless of whether it is a « just war » or not, the end result is the same. Any war catapults you into inhumane tension, devastation, and angst. There are no joyous warriors. Only demented automata, whose only motto is to kill or get killed.

Call warfare the most perverted language that has ever been invented to communicate between people(s). For war is language, and little else. Language for the cripples, the legless, and the lame. War makes you a gimp, whether you think you’re educated or not – as it cripples your mind, and then proceeds to cripple your body parts.

And if you think that warfare can make you a hero through crafty tactics and strategy (like, you could say that the use of paragliders and explosive drones to disable surveillance cameras was brilliant, on October 7), I will object that this is the most twisted, short-sighted vision of all.

The first feelings may be of exultant victory – over the overwhelmed enemy, surprised in his sleep – but the immediate end result is the foulest perception of broken bodies, the most aborted perception of a relation to Others.

All you find after a « successful » operation is ruins, charred remains of what once stood, and the stench of rotting and brutal death.

I abhor war as part of the human experience.

 

I would curse war and warriors, if I did not believe in the priority of lighting candles.

 

And yet, I will stand by Yahya Mahamid, Arab-Israeli speaker, and torch-carrier, born in 2003, who says that « education is the road to peace «  and that « coexistence is not just an idea; rather it is a vital necessity ».

Making his point that there have been no Arabs’ riots in Israel to support the assailants of October 7, he stresses the fact that « the Arab community reacted with remarkable restraint and maturity ».

« Evidence of our commitment and belief in a common future where coexistence and mutual respect are above all. »

 

In this ageless duo of ends and means, the end can never justify the means, since the means do determine the very nature of the ends they engender.

 

If life has any sense, it is to strive for the simple, amazing grace of ordinary / extraordinary gestures and moves – be it on ice skates, on a bike, in the flux of a river, at a keyboard, with a violin, a harp, a flute, a brush, pencils, a camera, a hammer, a chisel,  and the whole unrestrained  power of your brain and heart.

 

Let us see all the hostages released !

Let everybody go home, where there still is a home. And where there is none leflet us rebuild, in peace.

Not one more rocket, not one more shell or missile !

Let us have a demilitarized State, from Jenin to Rafah !

Let us teach the codes of non-violence in the schools !

 

 

 

PEACE LINES MESSAGERIES DE LA PAIX www.peacelines.org peacelines@gmail.com

Yocheved Lifshitz

 

Newsletter n° 124

January 2024

 

THIRTY YEARS ON

 

Thirty years I have been involved in continuous action against warfare, and for constructive coexistence. Since the summer of 1993, from Sarajevo and Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Kosovo, to the civil war in Algeria, and then Israel & Palestine. On my birthday, October 22, 2000, I was in Ramallah, a rare foreigner there during the explosion of the Second Intifada. Ten days after two waylaid Israeli reservists in a civilian vehicle, Yossef Avrahami, a toys salesman, and Vadim Nurzhitz, a truckdriver, were taken to a police station, which was stormed by a raging mob, who lynched them to death.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Ramallah_lynching

That very night, October 22, 2000, I was taken away by two young men in jeans and leather jackets to a no-man’s land outside the heart of the city, a desolate place with unfinished construction, and I had no choice but to follow my captors into an empty building with no doors, no windows. They suspected I could be a zionist spy. I was fortunate enough to pass the test, and they sent a young boy to buy pita and hummus for a shared meal. I spent the night with them on foam mattresses on the floor in this bare flat without windows, and in the morning they drove me back to town. I realized, looking at mounts of dirt and rubble on the way out, that my destiny would have ended there had I not passed the audition.

That’s the way it goes, at those latitudes. Until October 7, it was rather all quiet though. Take a look at the Lifshitzs, before 2023, in front of their little cottage in Nir Oz, South-East of Gaza. Yocheved is the woman you see, in the upper corner, after her release from the Gaza tunnels. Oded, her husband, 84, is still detained down there.

 

Or take Masoud’s family, in Gaza, in their little garden, where he loves to grow aromatic plants and light a little fire, with his children around. Now his family has been displaced, along with one million others they say, to the South-West of Gaza, to a barren space without drinking water from the taps, without shelter, without any proper food. Where infants have passed away, due to the lack of food. It’s cold, windy and rainy now there.

 

All these people were happy before October 7. Happy and quiet.

• Why do you feel you have to tell us of these people in particular ?

Because I happen to know Masoud. In Amos Oz’s words, he is « an agreeable man, reflective, soft-spoken, a receptive listener ». An English teacher at university level, like my father, he is a good teacher, clear-headed, open-minded, and patient. I went to his classes at the Islamic University in Gaza, right in front of the UNRWA headquarters – his students like him, all strive to progress under his guidance. Nineteenth-century and twentieth-century English literature, from Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells to Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, have few secrets for him. I admit I have a foible for English teachers. I see them as ambassadors of the universal mind – isn’t English the easiest language in the world ? Masoud also invited me in their Barcelona Park modern flat, and I felt comfortable there, quite at ease.

• What of the Lifshitz couple then ?

I have only been to Sderot, where I have friends that I care for, and to Kfar Aza, Nahal Oz, with Vivian Silver and her group of Women Wage Peace, by the Fence. As you will remember, Vivian, born in 1949, was burnt alive in her home in kibbutz Be’eri, five kilometers South of Nahal Oz, fifteen North of Nir Oz, where the Lifshitz lived. Note that Oded Lifshitz, born in 1940, defended Bedouins ; he was a journalist witnessing what happened in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982. With his wife Yocheved, they have four children. One of their grandsons, Daniel Lifshitz, a former goalkeeper, also is a peace activist, helping Palestinians from Gaza in need of medical transportation, driving them from the Erez Terminal to hospitals in Israel, where they could get the best proper care.

 

 

• Why focus more on Yocheved Lifshitz then, Oded’s wife, since she’s been released ?

 

Maybe because on the picture of her in hospital she reminds me so much of my mother, when she was hospitalized. And also because she came across Sinwar when she was detained in the Gaza tunnels, and she had the nerve to face him and speak her mind to him, without any fear.

« How can’t you be ashamed of yourself ? » she cried out. « To do such things to people who, for years, have upheld peace with you ? »

She says he remained silent, did not flinch. For he is not the flinching type.

2013 was the time I met him in Gaza, some twenty months after he had been relased in the Shalit deal, after spending twenty-two continuous years in Israeli jails. I met him not in a tunnel, but in a ministry, surrounded by people, ordinary people. He was fifty-one then. Intense and tense, a man of few words, with an overloaded agenda. I had the feeling of hugging a cold-hearted man, who would never smile, and who had no time to lose with me. He knew who I was and what I was about – our Experimental Bilingual Programme, approved by his government in 2006, to teach teenagers the codes of non-violent resistance and constructive coexistence, and that did not seem to match his priorities. I think I could tell the Lifshitz family why he was not ashamed of ordering the October 7 onslaught.

• Does that mean you consider terrorists as partners in dialogue ?

David Grossman, probably the most profoundly human analyst in Israel, wrote in January 2006, that « To think (or to write) about the enemy does not necessarily mean to justify him. » adding, for anyone « to write about the enemy means, primarily, to think about the enemy (…), even if he is absolutely convinced of his own justness and the enemy’s malice and cruelty. » and, to me, this is so essential. Besides, all those years, I had a work permit delivered by the Israeli COGAT – the Coordinator Of Government Activities in the Territories, and I would enter the Gaza Strip through the Erez Terminal, not sneaking through the Egyptian backdoor. Grossman defines an « Archimedean point », with his « ‘principle of Otherness’, whose deep-seated meaning, if you wish, is the rightful existence, the stories, pains, and hopes, of the Other.» « If we can only reach this Archimedean point, we can begin to dismantle the barriers and detonators that prevent us from solving the conflict. »

A pretty tall order, where we’re at, in  January 2024, but wars come and go, appear and disappear, like hurricanes or viruses. There have been six wars, or « operations » (2008/2009 – 2012 – 2014 – 2018 – 2021 – May 2023) between Israel and what we call « Hamas », since they seized power from their secular rivals in 2007, and this seventh war, started by Hamas on October 7, 2023, will pass too. Our concern is to properly anticipate the way this war may evolve and can end.

• How do you define your stand then ? What is your interest in this conflict ? Do you have family in Israel, or the Palestinian Territories ?

My first entry visa into Israel was February 1984. I don’t have any family there, on either side. In 1984 I had a visa to Egypt, and I crossed the Gaza Strip from North to South on my way to Rafah. I then stayed with a family of Palestinian teachers who have since emigrated to Canada. I had my first violent taste of how the people reacted to the Jund, the army, and the « Yehudi » – they would not say « Israelis », but « Jews, Yehudi » only. I later returned to Gaza, during the First Intifada (1987-1993), including to Jabalia, the place where this uprising had started. In many ways, I feel deeply at home in this land. More than I could say. My experience of the civil war in Algeria (1990-1998), my native land, has made me wary and weary beyond limits of any speech legitimizing bloodshed and bloodbaths. 150,000 lives lost in Algeria, how many wasted, amputated : Muslims against Muslims. In the name of what ?

 

I just do not believe in the ancient creed of endless wars, unavoidable conflicts. My point-of-view is that of a stretcher bearer, a nurse, a surgeon : we have far enough loads of pain to carry in ordinary times, with obesity, diabetes, cancers, and what not, to afford any extra burden.

• What else about your encounter with Yahya Sinwar ?

As he’d been released after spending most of his adult life in jail, I expected to feel a sense of recovered freedom in him, but it was not the case. Escorted as he was, maybe by his younger brother, he was not a free man. But then, who in upper power circles is a free man ? And how can you be a « free man » when you live in an enclave, with the exit gates locked, blocked and controlled by both neighbours, the Israelis and the Egyptians – as none of them wants to have anything to do with the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is a part. The Egyptians actually ban it, repress it, don’t they. Remember the Rabaa massacre in Egypt. August 14, 2013. A « zero-tolerance policy of dissent », according to Amnesty International. We always hear about Israel as the gatekeeper of Gazans in their « open-air prison » (in British PM Cameron’s words in 2010), but it is only fair to recall that this is a duo of gatekeepers, not just a solo.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/14/turning-point-what-happened-during-egypts-rabaa-massacre-10-years-ago

Looking for that Archimedean point, you come upon a recent inquiry into who exactly Yahya Sinwar is, documented by one of his interrogators when he was a prisoner in Israel, who insists he is « a very intelligent, charismatic person, with unusual leadership skills. »

https://www.ynetnews.com/magazine/article/hyw00ksu00a    YNet News, January 6, 2024

You may wish to check into another inquest, the first interview ever given by Sinwar, well worth reading, by Francesca Borri, an Italian journalist working for La Repubblica :

https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-5364286,00.html   October 5, 2018

• What is your main concern, as of now, January 2024 ?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/13/world/middleeast/houthis-yemen-us-strikes-gaza.html

The lack of food for displaced Gazans, on top of the number of destroyed houses and buildings. Coupled with the growing insecurity for Jews, from Europe to the United States, unrelated as they are to the current war between Israelis and Gaza Palestinians, targeted for what they are, sending us back into the darker days of racial hatred.

This is not « just » a local problem, restricted to one limited portion of the globe. We see « Houthi » militias in Yemen, Iran-backed, attacking commercial vessels in the Red Sea, in the name of solidarity with Gaza. Forcing some two thousand ships around Africa instead of using the Suez Canal. Back to Huntington, and his Clash of Civilizations? Michael Kobi, the man who interrogated both Ahmed Yassin – the spiritual founder of Hamas in Gaza – and Yahya Sinwar, in jail, concludes : « Hamas’s war against us is a religious war and they want to annihilate us because we’re Jews. Period. »

 

• Could he, Kobi, be prejudiced ?

It’s not just Kobi, but Dr Becker as well, who has his own angle, as a clinical criminologist and psychotherapist. “On the one hand, I don’t want to accuse an entire society, but on the other, beyond doubt, a society has developed in Gaza that is unrestrained and that sanctifies death and violence. » Adding, about Sinwar, « He’s a man with an extremist political and religious agenda that lead him do things that shock us, but that he regards as advancing his life-long cause. »

Concerning Michael Kobi, the man who dealt with both Yassin and Sinwar in Israeli jails, he states that they do go by the Hamas Covenant, and that the latter is widely taught in Gaza schools.

« Sinwar ensures that the covenant is taught in all schools in Gaza. »

As for Ahmed Yassin, during interrogations, « he wasn’t afraid to say that they would wipe us off the face of the earth – if not now, then in a decade’s time, and if not in a decade, then in a century. Ultimately, they would set up an Islamic state in the Middle East and after that, they’d make the whole world Islamic. »

• Revisiting Francesca Borri’s interview in May 2018, doesn’t it strike you, the sort of visionary warning that was emitted then by Sinwar: «I don't wish prison on anybody. But really anybody. Not even those who today—across that barbed wire—knock us down like bowling pins and laugh, and don't realize that they might end up in 25 years at the Hague. » It’s been a little over 5 years, not 25, and here we are, with South Africa making a case for genocide at the International Court of Justice in Haag.

Sadly, Mandela passed away ten years ago, and Archbishop Tutu departed in 2021. Their legacy seems to belong to the past century. The current South African stand has one merit though : it pushes one to find precedents as far as their present accusation goes.
History has recorded three genocides in the twentieth century :

The way Turks exterminated 77% of the Armenian population in 1915 – by their Grand Vizier’s own estimates. « The definitive solution to the Armenian Question » , in his own words, meant the massacre of one and a half million people, the deportation of the others, or their forced islamization.

The better known Holocaust led to the murder of six million Jews in German-occupied Europe, from 1941 to 1945 (cf map). Two thirds of European Jews were exterminated by the nazi system. One and a half million Jews were murdered in just a hundred days, from July to October 1942. «a rate approximately 83% higher than the commonly suggested figure for the Rwandan genocide ». (Wikipedia)

 

Taking us to Rwanda, in 1994, where two thirds of the Tutsis were massacred by the Hutus and their militias – close to eight hundred thousand slaughtered in a hundred days, from April to mid-July. In the same time, « rape was the rule, systematic, and was used as a weapon », according to the UN special Rapporteur Degni-Segui, in his 1996 report on Rwanda.

Sickening as these forays into the history of our common humankind are, they remind us that we skate on very thin ice, as far as « civilization » goes, from Turkey to Europe and Africa, not even going further into the bloodbath of three million Vietnamese killed by the US, the million and a half victims of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the seventies, the genocide of the Native Americans by the Europeans in the 19th century, with its toll of some five million victims,  and closer to us, in 2014, the enslavement and massacres of the Yazidi and Christians, by Daesh, the Islamic State, in Syria.

• What do you make of the Hague ruling then, on January 26 ?

The first impression is that what we call « the international community » has double standards. When the Russians practised carpet bombing, « indiscriminate bombing », in Aleppo, Syria, for instance, in 2015, and killed around 20,000 people to « eradicate terrorism » and the Islamic State, a few NGOs worldwide protested, but nobody seemed to care. When the Americans and their allies, in the same period, recaptured Mosul, Iraq’s second city, from the blood-stained hands of Daesh, the Islamic State insurgents, they left 40,000 killed behind them, fast forgotten.

The second impression is that we are facing a new kind of awareness about the horrors of war on a massive scale. As if they did not watch the effects of war from the Netherlands, but from the moon. The Hague justices did not choose to order Israel to stop its operation though, as they could have.

Their ruling was based on the heavy destruction of houses and buildings in Gaza, and the blood-curdling losses of the Palestinian population in a hundred days, but, again, it stopped short of condemning Israel. It actually gave it licence to pursue its operation, with the warning it was being watched closely.

• How do you analyze the Resolution that was passed by the Security Council of the United Nations, prior to the Hague ruling, on December 22, 2023 ?

Interestingly, it was passed with 13 votes, and two abstentions only (Russia and the US, the old world gendarmes competing for supremacy). None voted against. It is noteworthy to stress that the Security Council then was not composed only of its main core of five, China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, but also of small Albania, Brazil, Ecuador, Gabon, Ghana, Japan, tiny Malta, Mozambique, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates.  A fairly balanced equation, if any.

 

The document itself, Resolution 2720,  is composed of thirteen specific points, the majority of them concerned with the « protection of civilians and civil objects » and « humanitarian assistance » (1, 2, 3, 9, 10, 11) ; three of them being about the nomination of a « Senior Humanitarian and Reconstruction Coordinator » and the safety of UN personnel (4, 5, 6, 13) ; one, to « demand the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages » (7) ; and one reiterating an « unwavering commitment to the vision of the two-State solution » (12).

The Senior Coordinator has been appointed since, a Dutch citizen, Mrs Sigrid Kaag.

We wish her good luck.

Whether the Coordinator will have « the necessary personnel and equipment in Gaza » (6) remains to be seen. Truly hoping that this goodwill mission will not know the fate of the UN headquarters in Baghdad, August 2003, when a terror attack resulted in the death of 22 people, including the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Sergio Vieira de Mello, thus terminating any prospects for the role of the U.N. in Iraq.

• How come you don’t ask for an immediate cease-fire, the way peace organizations have done, since you are one of them ?

« It is an easy thing » to bleat with the sheep and howl with the wolves – even the heads of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad demand a cease-fire. Like an abstract proposition, out of the blue, going nowhere fast. Then « the groan & the dolor are quite forgotten And the captive in chains & the poor in the prison & the soldier in the field », in William Blake’s words. As if one were some long gone Urizen, some celestial incarnation of reason and law, so high above, pretending to measure the terrestrial mess with perfect tools… or a would-be guru chanting for rain in the drought. « Stop war ! », « Time to stop the killing ! ». Etc. Even the Security Council of the United Nations and the Hague justices refrained from such vain incantations.

• What is your position then, as far as the cessation of war goes ?

It’s the conditions of possibility  of a « durable cessation of hostilities » – in U.N. parlance.

• Meaning ?

We need to check the exact chronology, from 2005 till now, from the evacuation of the Israeli settlers in Gaza till October 7, 2023, since the crux is Gaza. Double-check the Deaths preceding the (present) war again (above). 6,407 Palestinians killed, from January 1, 2008, to the summer of 2023 – along with 308 Israelis. Compute it with the number of rocket and mortar attacks at Israel.

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

Isn’t it high time for the Gaza strategists to revise their vision of the future, conceiving what a win-win scenario could be, instead of the same stuttering lose-lose ?

• Are you taking sides then, blaming one against the other ?

I’d rather address the core of the issue, if there is one to be found.

Amos Oz, one of the most precise observers of the past century, has always brilliantly maintained that the problem is of Right vs Right, a conflict Between Right and Right (To cure a fanatic, Princeton University Press, 2006). Unfortunately, he passed by the end of 2018.

Wouldn’t he say now that it has tragically switched to Wrong vs Wrong ?

Remembering Yocheved Lifshitz’s outcry, facing Yahya Sinwar, in the dark, damp tunnels : How can’t you be ashamed of yourself ? But also remembering the endless hours in the morning of October 7, when the unarmed inhabitants of the communities around Gaza were left unprotected, helpless before their aggressors.

• What do you make of the endless feeling ?

There was this TIME magazine cover, back in 1988, conveying the feeling. Israel, since its birth, has had to confront six main wars, 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2006, plus the two Intifadas (1987-1993 and 2000-2005), with the whole series of Gaza wars and operations : 2008-2009, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2021, 2023-2024 …/…

As for the Gaza children born around 2000, all they have known is bombings, rockets and missiles, drones and Apache helicopters.

The whole devastating chorus of Defiance and Crackdown. Begging out loud for a switch in visions, a shift in strategies. The way it happened in Ireland and the Basque homeland.

 

• How can you compare Ireland, the Basque homeland, and Palestine ?

Simply enough. Take this picture. From a video released on October 20, 2011. It shows three leaders of the ETA announcing at a press conference that their group, defined as a terrorist organization by the European Union, « has decided the definitive cessation of its armed activity ».

At the end of the video, they raise their fists, as a last-minute reflex, and conclude :

« It is time to look at the future with hope. It is also time to act with responsibility and courage. »    To act with responsibility and courage.

It took ETA six years from that point on to fully demilitarize. In April 2017 it handed in its last weapons, and in 2018 it went as far as to apologise to its victims, a few days before it formally and finally declared its dissolution.

• Are you daydreaming of the dissolution of Hamas and Islamic Jihad ?

It could be convenient to elaborate a modest version of « I have a dream », bearing in mind that yesterday’s dreamers have become todays’ elected leaders, Martin Luther King having morphed into Barak Obama. In the course of forty years.

Any way you look at it, we’re not talking about a dream here. Terror has no future in modern, solid societies. Regardless of the alibis it covers itself with. The Irish first, in Europe, and then the Basque, have shown the way. Have they reached their stated goals ? Not that we know of. Does that mean they have failed ? Undoubtedly, they have failed to convince people of their righteousness, of the adequacy of the means they resorted to.

In this uncompromising light, the choice for their operatives, as they’re also called, is twofold : either the Irish way, dump arms deliberately, by and by, of their own volition, or the Algerian way, a forceful eradication by military means. In Algeria, the civil war imposed by terror groups lasted ten years, and cost the nation its second profound scar in the span of forty years. In the end, terror as a « political » strategy disappeared. The Algerians, after choosing eradication of terror,  have more or less forgotten their Black Decade (1992-2002).

Call it Gandhi’s victory post mortem. Give it two generations, and you go the American way, get Obama, whether he was your candidate or not – or you go the Algerian way, and you get Bouteflika (with his plan then for a national reconciliation) and a violent end to all terror attacks.

• What of the Islamic context then ?

No Muslim state is willing to fund terror groups in 2024 – with two notable exceptions, Iran and Qatar. Look at it long enough, and find out that, paradoxically, the radical insurgents, from Algeria, Afghanistan, Iraq, to Palestine, have been working, actually, for the arms industry. Somehow, objectively speaking, Bin Laden and Zawahari, al Baghdadi, have been commercial agents for Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman Corporation.

Deif and Sinwar are good for Israel Military Industries (IMI) and Rafael (the National Armaments Development Authority) – and for all the companies involved in building walls and barriers, with their exponential load of sensors and surveillance devices.

• Is this part of a Wrong vs Wrong theory ?

What is dead wrong for people, for human beings, is so profitable for others – others with a vision of personal profit galore plus progress. Take the case of Smart Shooter, a small startup which has developed into a self-sustaining enterprise. Its CEO states clearly, « This is the finest hour of the defense industries », and it « would also be nice to be purchased for a billion dollars ».

2023 ? It’s been « the best year ever in Israel’s history », as far as exports go of weapons systems, with the war in Ukraine and now the war in Gaza. Registering unprecedented peaks in orders from all over the world – the US, the UK, Germany, India, the Netherlands… Reminding us that Israel ranks number nine among the world’s largest arms exporters, with a record of 831 million (Trend Indicator Value). In between Poland (452) and Spain (950). Still far behind the UK (1,504), Germany (1,510), Italy (1,825), and China (2,017). Lagging behind the three giants : Russia (2,820), small France (3,021), and the usual winner, the US, so high above the pack of competitors (14,515).

This is no confidential information – the latest Top Ten (2022) can be found at SIPRI’s (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) and with Wikipedia. The Smart Shooter CEO’s world vision can be read from Ynet News, December 23, 2023, and she does have a point or two about minimizing the risk for soldiers on the field, deterring instead of killing, and « ensuring that innocent civilians remain unharmed ».

https://www.ynetnews.com/business/article/hkpuon4pp?utm_source=taboola&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=internal

• What is the rationale of the Nobel Call you support, « For the Release of Hostages and a Durable Cessation of Hostilities » ?

We’ve heard of a « suicidal drive » by Deif & the Sinwar brothers, the military quintette in Gaza. Their original plan for October 7 must have been brilliant (to breach through the border in some twenty points, neutralize all cameras and sensors with explosive drones, launch attackers in paragliders over the Wall) – admittedly well conceived and executed, taking the enemy by surprise, but the follow-up was a disaster, for lack of well-disciplined troops, and letting just about any potential criminal rush through the breaches. More than this, the unforgivable part was, from the start, giving the order to kill as many people, civilians included, as they could, and kidnap the rest in numbers, men, women, infants, of all ages.

The rationale of this Nobel Call is in the same spirit as the Nobel Call for Algeria, in 1998.

We are human beings – wherever. I MI SMO LJUDI was the password in Middle Bosnia. I mi smo : We are… Ljudi : Human beings.

We are the members of the same human species – come what may.

Little wonder that we oppose bargaining with hostages’ freedom and lives, the way it is being done between Gaza and wherever the political leaders reside, in Qatar or Turkey. The simple idea of treating human beings as pawns, bargaining chips, is horrendous, is it not.

Hence our demand for an end to all attack and sequestration tunnels in Gaza.

• Don’t you know of the polls in the West Bank showing a surge in popularity for Hamas and its allies ?

Call it a rash instant reaction, mixing denial of the facts and emotional vainglory at the short-lived technological victory. In the past century, they could have got away with it. Not anymore. Anybody with access to irrefutable info has had to realize that the scope of the 10/7 onslaught and its atrocities make its perpetrators and commanders universal outlaws.

Add to it that the military quintette seized power from the political echelon, and did not inform them until the last instant, in the early hours of October 7. Had they limited themselves to a « clean » military op, with only soldiers captured, it would have meant an amazing victory. This will not remain the only case in which a deviant military wing overpowered the political establishment, to be later discarded and eliminated.

Again, when you manage to rise above the damning circumstances, you realize that no Muslim leaders, emirs, authorities, condone October 7 – except in Tehran, to a degree.

• Now, when all’s said and done, isn’t there a growing urge, inside out, to get it over with?

Quite the opposite. You should stop viewing this « old blood feud » the way Kafka portrayed it in 1917, as just a local, alien mess between Schakale und Araber, Jackals and Arabs. It is more of a universal divide between a Spartan democracy (with some Athenian tendencies) and a Persian tyranny (in the Greek sense of the word). If you will, a conflict within us all, between two ways to govern – oneself and others. Take the way the Gazan war chiefs decided to attack their neighbours, burn, loot, seize hostages and bring captive females back as trophees : the way Greeks made war, thirty-two centuries ago – remember the siege of Troy and its ransacking (1184 B.C.). Except that this is the 21st century in the common calendar, and this is not just a war between nations as ways of life.

You have other actors in the shades : the major weapon manufacturers, whose fortune depends on warmongering – the Russians at Almaz (98% of the total Almaz revenue from weapons) ; the British, with BAE Systems (95%) ; the Americans with Lockheed (89%), RTX Corp. (87%) and Northrop (86%) ; and some smaller players, the Italians with Leonardo (72%), the French and the Chinese, with Thales, and China Electronics Technology Group (46%). Arms have to be manufactured on a massive scale, for massive profit, and have to be tested, used, sacrificed, for the following generations of military products.

The (in)famous lie about Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, as spread by the highest authorities, in the US and the UK, was a necessary ploy and alibi to get the whole financial market rolling, back in 2003. The real Weapons of Mass Destruction were around the bend, waiting to be used. With their toll of 300,000 human beings massacred, including 200,000 civilians.

Thence, rather than howling with the usual packs of wolves, or bleating with Panurge’s sheep, maybe we’d better just start thinking things over, from their concrete, non ideological, chains of causes and effects. Thinking outside the boxes of caducous software.

In Martin Luther King’s words, « there is little hope for us until we become tough-minded  enough to break loose from the shackles of prejudice, half-truths, and downright ignorance. »

In our words, in Algeria, (Nobel Call for Algeria, 1998), as in Israel and Gaza today : « Let the will to live prevail, free and fearless ! » No political or religious speech, whatsoever, can ever legitimate the massacre of innocents, the murder of a child, the rape of a woman.

What was true in Algeria in the nineties remains true in Israel and Palestine in 2024. A demilitarized Palestinian state already exists in the West Bank. Let it prevail. The Gaza Strip is part and parcel of Palestine. « There is the way of nonviolent resistance. »     ( MLK ) 

 

 

 

PEACE LINES MESSAGERIES DE LA PAIX www.peacelines.org peacelines@gmail.com

Newsletter n° 122

December 23, 2023

 

To all our friends in the Nobel community, worldwide, One year ago, on December 21, 2021, our main source of inspiration, as far as non-violent resistance goes, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, passed away. Always the first on a Nobel Call for peace and common sense, against terror. Let this not deter us or diminish us. In this hour of horror we remember that the smallest lights shine brighter in the deepest darkness. Let this call be one of them.

 

 

NOBEL CALL FOR THE RELEASE OF HOSTAGES AND FOR A DURABLE CESSATION OF HOSTILITIES

Because we are human beings, and human beings are not bargaining chips,

Because we are horrified by the carnages and pogroms of October 7 in the name of « armed resistance »,

We express our ultimate and universal condemnation concerning all acts of bloody savagery allegedly for the sake of a « war of liberation ». No political or religous speech, whatsoever, can ever legitimate the massacre of innocents, the murder of a child, the rape of a woman, the kidnapping of elderly people in their home.

We demand the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages detained in Gaza. Prisoners of war can be exchanged. Abducted civilians are not prisoners of war.

Gaza civilians also are hostages in this horrendous chaos.

For a durable cessation of hostilities, we support a permanent end to all attack tunnels and the demilitarization of the Gaza Strip.

 

When partisan minds speak of « resisting occupation with all means and methods » as a « sacred right »*, we strongly object that kidnapping elderly civilians in their home is by no means part of a liberation struggle. Neither is the parading of young women seized as trophies.

 

• Article 25 of Hamas Charter (2017)

Why we look forward to a total demilitarization in Gaza : after a 40-year terror campaign that left over 800 killed, half of them civilians, « ETA has decided to declare an end to its historical cycle and its role. ETA has completely dissolved all its structures. » It abandoned its armed campaign in 2011. Their ultimate statement is that, although « this decision does not bring an end to the conflict between the Basque homeland and Spain and France », the full dissolution was enacted in 2018, and included apologizing to its victims and their families.

« Let’s not repeat our mistakes.

  Let’s not let our problems fester.

  Doing so would only give rise to new problems. »

Likewise, 2007 was the end of The Troubles in Northern Ireland, with the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning first launched in September 1997. The IRA then pledged to use « exclusively peaceful means ». « All IRA units have been ordered to dump arms… to complete the process to verifiably put its arms beyond use in a way which will further enhance public confidence and to conclude this as quickly as possible. » The IRA conclusion was :

« We are conscious that many people suffered in the conflict.

There is a compelling imperative on all sides to build a just and lasting peace. »

There is no other way in Gaza and the whole of Palestine.

 

When Hamas won the 2006 elections, Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel declared in Davos that Hamas should be accepted, as long as it renounced its goal of destroying Israel. « Forgiveness will be, » he added, « the next step, but first they must renounce the policy and ideology of destroying a neighbor state. » He concluded with the « hope the international community will prevail and tell Hamas to change ». We may be another year, or ten years, from a just and lasting peace, but there is no alternative to demilitarization, as it happened in Ireland and the Basque homeland, if we don’t want to witness the horrendous cycle of October 7 and the bombings that ensue. There must be a human way out of this abhorent insanity.