Gershon BaskinIPCRI (Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information) |
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“ …I had a big map of Israel on my wall next to my bed at the summer camp, and I had it marked in the different places that I had visited and things like that, and one day I was looking at the map and I noticed that someone had come in and drawn the Green Line on the map, which hadn't been there. I looked at the map and I saw my kibbutz up in the North, and Jerusalem in the center of the country. I used to travel through the Jordan Valley to get from kibbutz to Jerusalem, back and forth. I looked at the map and I said to myself, "That's interesting, how am I going to get to kibbutz?" […] And then all of sudden I realized that I had spent almost a whole year in Israel, and not once during that whole year did I ever talk to an Arab. All of a sudden it made me aware that something was very wrong. ” [Source in Complete Interview]
Intifada and Occupation:
“ The first intifada broke out in the end of November of '87. I like most Israelis was struck that something very different was happening. […] I was struck by the tremendous lack of information and the tremendous ignorance that existed in the Israeli public. The most common response amongst Israelis was, "how could they do that to us?" With the notion that we had created this benevolent occupation and we were so good, and they should be thanking us and not throwing stones at us and attacking us. ” [Source in Complete Interview]
“ The biggest thing that struck me was that for six hours I was talking to a group of young refugees from Deheishe Refugee Camp [during the first intifada] and not once did I hear "right of return." What I heard from these young, mostly young men, in Deheishe in March of '88 was, "end the occupation, create the Palestinian state, and let's live side by side in peace." And this was very different than everything I had heard from Palestinians before, like the gentleman in the United Nations in New York, who said, "No two-state solution, only the secular democratic state." ” [Source in Complete Interview]
“ It was important for me to know that there was a starting point for Israelis and Palestinians to talk to each other that was based on the possibility of mutual recognition, not one on the account of the other, and not one in the place of the other; that it was no longer a zero sum game, that there was a place where Israelis could live and survive and exist. I always believed that the basis for coexistence is existence, that you can't have coexistence if one side is wiped off the map. ” [Source in Complete Interview]
Obstacles and Challenges and Israeli/Palestinian Power Dynamics:
“ We [my Palestinian partner and I] fought all the time, politically. In a lot of ways the office became a kind of microcosm of the conflict. Often, for strange, probably psychological unknown reasons, we felt a need to express to each other positions that were actually much more extreme than we both held. There were patterns of behavior that developed that were very difficult to break. For me it was very difficult to share power. This was my baby; I created it. It became very symptomatic of relations between people in groups with different levels of power. Rather than creating an alternative model, we mirrored the outside model. […] It took a long time to learn how to do it and to do it well. Periodically even up to today we have major differences. We disagree politically on a lot of things, we disagree on our analysis of a lot of things, but we learned how to disagree. ” [Source in Complete Interview]
“ We're not attempting to demonize Palestinian education or Palestinian educators, but to create an opportunity to engage the Palestinian Ministry of Education to consider how they can improve what they're doing. And therefore there are statements that are used in our study that are quoted by the Palestinians that are truthful statements but are only partially truthful, like, "the textbooks don't incite openly against Jews, against Israel, etc." It's true that they don't openly incite against, because they completely ignore the existence of Israel. ” [Source in Complete Interview]
Obstacles and Challenges and Occupation:
“ Last week we had meetings of our strategic working groups, and we had 80 people-we were supposed to be in Turkey and we couldn't get permits for people to go to Turkey, and we decided to hold the meeting anyway, and we held it in Haifa. Thursday night when we got the permits for the West Bankers, the army told us to wait until Friday morning for the permits for the Gazans. Friday morning we called, and we were told that any of the Gazans from the north of Gaza who could get to the Erez checkpoint would be allowed to go. ” [Source in Complete Interview]
“ We have no alternative. There are people out there who are saying the two-state solution is dead, we have to talk about the one-state solution. I don't believe there is such a thing as the one-state solution. I think there's a one-state disaster, and if we have to come to the point where the two-state solution is no longer an option, then we are deciding that Israel and Palestine become Sarajevo, and instead of talking about four or five thousand people killed in a four year period, we're talking about 250 thousand people. That's the alternative direction. So that knowledge, that awareness, that belief keeps me going with more intensity and more activity. ” [Source in Complete Interview]
Family and Occupation and Israeli Military Service:
“ Well, my daughter, who is going to be 18 in July, has decided to refuse to serve in the army. She's written her letter to the army saying why she refuses to serve in the army because she refuses to support the occupation. She wrote in her letter that since she was a baby she's been going to demonstrations against the occupation, so how now as an adult could she go and serve the occupation. […] I fully support her. I sat with her to make sure that the reason that she was refusing to serve was not because she was lazy and didn't want to do the army service, or that she was looking for a way out. There are a lot easier ways to get out, and I wanted to be sure that she was willing to pay the price for her decision. I believe that in a democratic society when you refuse to observe the law you have to be prepared to pay the price, going to prison. I told her that I would be very happy to come and spend my Saturdays over a year or two years visiting her in prison. I wanted to make sure that she made as a point in her letter that she was a loyal Israeli and was willing to serve the country in a non-military civilian service. She is and she's willing to do that, and she wants to push for that. I'm fully supportive of her. If I had to go into the army today I would do the very same thing. ” [Source in Complete Interview]
Political Peace Processes/Political Leadership:
“ The agreements had problems with them, but there's no peace agreement that doesn't have problems. You can find flaws with every agreement, every treaty. The problem is that what they agreed on, they didn't implement. There was a great deal of good will at the beginning of the process, the good will got lost very quickly. Five months into the process there was the Baruch Goldstein massacre in Hebron, at which point I think the Palestinians began to lose good will. The peace process brought with it a situation that made life more difficult for Palestinians rather than easier, with the whole policy of closures and permits that developed in the peace process. Before the peace process Palestinians could move throughout this land freely, no checkpoints, no permits. And all of a sudden you have a peace process and life becomes more difficult? ” [Source in Complete Interview]
Political Peace Processes/Political Leadership:
“ The fruits of peace never showed up for most common people. The agreements were never implemented; there were different interpretations of what the agreements said, and of what the obligations to the agreements were. Violence didn't stop, terrorism didn't stop. The power of the spoilers, the extremists on both sides grew. The Israeli leaders from Rabin on didn't know how to confront the settlers, and they became more and more powerful. What were good intentions became bad intentions and lack of trust. As the breaches grew, and there were no mechanisms within the agreements to deal with breaches other than complaining about them, it became such that the breaches were more than what was being implemented, and people lost faith in the peace process. ” [Source in Complete Interview]
“ Dealing with security issues is not new in this world. Millions of people move through airports and through seaports, goods are moving every day, and the security of the world is not threatened. They have developed technologies to deal with it. The idea of two 19-year-old kids at a checkpoint providing security is not the answer, not the solution. ” [Source in Complete Interview]
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