Interview with Gershon Baskin

In any event, I got very involved in, I guess you call it leftist Jewish politics. In my multiple visits to Israel, trying to talk to my relatives in Israel and other friends in Israel, I was always attacked by them telling me, you know, “You’re some stupid naive American, you don’t understand anything.” The sentence that got me more than anything else, and I heard it hundreds of times, was, “You don’t know them—” them of course being the Arabs. It didn’t occur to me to ask them, at that time, “Well, do you know them? What kind of experience… when was the last time you actually spoke to a Palestinian?” I wasn’t knowledgeable or aware enough about Israeli society to be able to challenge them with that kind of a sentence. But it became clear to me that if I was going to do anything meaningful in Israel as an Israeli that I would have to gain the kind of credibility that could not be contested.

At first I thought I would go and do a graduate degree at the American University of Beirut. I applied and got accepted. They sent me these registration forms where I had to sign all kinds of wavers saying that I understood that Beirut was under war and that sometimes classes were moved from one campus to another and that the campus had been blown up a few times, etc. I said, “This is a little too much for me to handle.” A friend of mine who was living in Boston had seen a poster in the Hebrew Teacher’s College library in Boston of a Reform rabbi who was looking for Jewish graduates to go and live in Arab villages in Israel and do community work. It was called Interns for Peace. They had an office in New York. I was down on 5th Avenue by downtown New York, and I was studying at NYU, so I walked up there one day during my lunch break, went into the office, picked up the papers, next day I came up and said, “how do I sign up?” I then became the first Intern for Peace. When I finished by BA in September/October of ’78 I came to Israel in the framework of Interns for Peace. I was in Kibbutz Bar Kai12 for a six-month training program and then went to live in Kufur Kara13 for two years.

I had thought that Israel was facing three major problems at the time, which are probably the three major problems that exist today. One is the Israeli Palestinian conflict, one is how Israel defines itself in its relationship with its non-Jewish citizens, meaning the Palestinian Arabs,14 and the third are the social gaps that exist in the country between the rich and poor, developed and non-developed. At the time I didn’t think there was anything that could be done on the Israeli Palestinian issue. I thought there was no starting point. We were in a situation of mutual non-recognition, and there was no place to actually begin doing something that was meaningful. I thought the social gap issue, while it was interesting and important, was not something that I was interested in, and I was very interested in the Jewish Arab question, so that’s where I decided to devote myself.

I finished Interns For Peace, and I came to the conclusion that the work of Jewish Arab relations in Israel was something that had to be done at the governmental level, something that the state of Israel had to take responsibility for. I had done a little study and found out that there wasn’t a single civil servant in the entire civil service of Israel who was responsible for improving Jewish Arab relations in Israel. So I convinced the government of Israel to hire me and I became the first employee in the state of Israel whose responsibility it was to work on the improvement of Jewish Arab relations. I got a position in the Ministry of Education, which eventually led to the establishment of the Department for Democracy and Coexistence in the Ministry of Education. A year later, through the Ministry and Prime Ministers office, I was asked to develop an educational institute for Jewish Arab coexistence, which I directed. It was independent, but it was linked to the Ministry of Education and the Prime Minister's office.

The first intifada15 broke out in the end of November of '87.16 I like most Israelis was struck that something very different was happening. It took the Palestinians 25 years to create an uprising, and I had been doing teacher training on Jewish Arab coexistence and of course had to confront the issue of the intifada. Even though it wasn’t about Jewish Arab relations in Israel, it was what the teachers were concerned about when we were doing these teacher-training programs, and 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.

I was struck by the fact that something monumental was happening and I really wanted to understand it. I began reading the political leaflets that were being distributed by what was called the United Leadership of the intifada.17 One Saturday morning I decided that I was going to go and meet Palestinians and find out first hand what was going on. I had a little motorcycle, a little Vespa, and I rode my little Vespa to Dheisheh Refugee Camp.18 These were the days when you could move around, even though they were throwing stones! I took the risk and I drove into the refugee camp. There’s an UNRWA19 school at the entrance of the camp. I took off my helmet and these young people came up to me immediately, and with my minimal Arabic that I spoke then I told them that I was an Israeli and that I wanted to learn about the intifada from their eyes, from their perspective. We stood there talking for about twenty minutes and then one of the people invited us to go to his home and talk. About thirty other people joined along, I spent about six hours in Dheisheh. This was in the beginning of March 1988. I was buzzing with energy and excitement because I heard things there that I had never heard from Palestinians before.

What did you hear from the Palestinians you spoke with during the first intifada that surprised you?

The biggest thing that struck me was that for six hours I was talking to a group of young refugees from Deheishe Refugee Camp and not once did I hear “right of return.”20 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.” And while I was aware that there were changes going on in the PLO since the 1970s, it was also true that those people who were leading the changes were subsequently executed, were assassinated, and Palestinian moderates within the PLO were not known to survive very long. Here was an uprising that was based in the Palestinian population. Instructions weren’t coming from Tunisia; they were coming from here, from the refugee camps.21 And I thought that the moment had come when Israeli Palestinian engagement could occur.

Why was it important for you to hear that the Palestinians you spoke with during the first intifada were focusing on ending the occupation?22

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.

So I thought this was something that I thought was new and important, and for a few days I thought about what could be done. My way of working, my belief, was that people need to work together. That’s what I had been doing with the Palestinian Israelis and Jewish Israelis inside the Green Line. I wrote a little advertisement, which I asked a friend to translate to Arabic, and I went down to three newspapers in East Jerusalem that come out in the territories, Al Fajr, Al Shaab, and Al Quds,23 only one of which exists today, and I published the ad. I asked that it go in on a Friday morning, I thought that was the best day. The ad said something like, “If you believe in the two-state solution, if you believe the Palestinians and the Israelis can work together to develop peace, if you are a university graduate, if you’re curious about this, give me a call,” and I put my home phone number. By Saturday night I received 43 phone calls. I scheduled appointments with anyone who was willing to talk to me. I took a table in the courtyard of the American Colony Hotel,24 and for a week I sat there and I met 23 people, and the idea of creating IPCRI [Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information] was born.

I quit my job; I notified my board of directors and told them I was quitting. I called a friend who was the director of a community center and asked him if he could find a small room in his community center for me to work out of until I was able to get established, and that was it. I collected unemployment from the State of Israel, so the State of Israel funded the beginning of the creation of IPCRI. When that ran out I cashed my pension plan from the Ministry of Education, and I went out to talk to Israelis and Palestinians about what could be done, what should be done. I made an error, I think, at that time, that I put too much emphasis on institutionalization.

What do you mean by "you put too much emphasis on institutionalization?"

Well, it was no problem to find Israelis who were willing to give their name and support and to be on a board of directors of this joint institute, but at the time there were no Palestinians who were willing to give their name. Out of the tens of Palestinian leaders that I spoke to, I only met one who said it was a bad idea. All the others said it was a very good idea, but it was too soon, we weren’t ready for it. Everyone wanted to know who else gave their name, and when I couldn’t use any name, people said, “When you get someone’s name, come back to me.”

I don't remember the date, but when Faisal Husseini25 was released from prison, I went to see him on the night that he was released.26 I went to his home, I had never been to his home, I had never met him before, but I knew that he was a leader. I arrived at his home and there were two or three hundred people waiting on line to shake his hands and kiss his cheeks. I knew that I wouldn’t have a chance to talk to him but I waited on line like everyone else. I introduced myself when it was my turn, and I gave him a letter and I said, “I think this is very important and I would like you to read it.”

The next morning I received a phone call from him. He had read my letter, and he asked me to come back that day at 4 in the afternoon. I came back and again there were hundreds of people waiting to greet him. He took me into the inner salon of his house. He interrogated me for about twenty minutes, and then said, “I’ll support you. You have my name, and you can tell others that I’m supporting you.” After Faisal joined on there was no problem getting Palestinians anymore. But I think I wasted about a year trying to do this. Maybe it was a waste, maybe it wasn’t, because what I did during that year is every day I was meeting people and talking to them.

On the Israeli side I met someone who gave me the best advice I ever got. This was a member of Knesset,27 Matti Peled,28 who was very well known in the peace camp. He said, “We don’t need another peace organization that’s going to be on the margins on the left that no one cares about, that makes no impact. So what I recommend to you is stay away from me. Don’t use my name; don’t put my name on the letterhead. You need my advice, I’m here, you can come to me any time. I’ll give you advice, I’ll support you in whatever you do. Your challenge is to get people in the Center, to get people on the Right. Speak to people in the Center, to the establishment.” That was the most important bit of advice that we got. It took a long time to shape our identity, but that advice shaped the way we work.

The first three working groups that we established were an economic working group, a water working group, and a Jerusalem group. At the first meeting of the economic working group we had representatives of the Israeli government at the meeting. This was 1989.

Was that problematic for the Palestinians to meet with Israeli government representatives?

No. They were seeking dialogue with these people. And what we provided was a safe forum where they could dialogue, where they could talk professionally, politically, without it being in the newspapers. We had a Chatham House Rules29 kind of thing of no quotation. We had a few journalists who were involved in some of these working groups but they were there as professionals, not as journalists. We had agreed at that time that it would be counterproductive to publicize any of this. What we needed to do was to enable people to begin to know each other at the professional level, as much as possible involving government people. It was very problematic because of our name.

Several months after we began I was called by the head of the Research Department of the Foreign Ministry in Israel, who sat me down and started the meeting by saying, “This meeting isn’t taking place. If you say to anyone that it is, we’ll deny it-- we never met you. Secondly, why don’t you change your name-- Israel Palestine Center-- call it even the Israeli Palestinian Center, that would be okay.” I said, “You just don’t get it. That’s the point. The name is the context, the context is the name, and if you don’t accept it today, believe me you will, because there is no other possible reality that we can live in that will enable us to reach peace.” And of course eventually they do and we have officials from all the government ministries sitting in our various working groups, appointed and approved by the government. But then it was a struggle. It was very clear when the official negotiating process began, and the official negotiators began showing up at official negotiating sessions, that a large number of them knew each other for years because they had been meeting under our framework.

Were you involved in some of those negotiation sessions at the governmental level?

At a later time. I was involved in providing information and data and ideas throughout the process. Later and during the Barak30 years, at the end of the process, I was a member of the experts committee on Jerusalem. I was not a negotiator, but I provided information to the negotiators, which they basically didn’t use.

What were some of your strategies at the beginning, for, as you said, “reaching the Center?”

Well, the most important thing was to develop a model of different kinds of interactions and relationships between Israelis and Palestinians, a partnership based on equality and parity and mutual understanding. It was very difficult, even for myself. When Zakaria Al-Qaq31 joined it took us well over three years to learn to work together.

What was difficult at first about working with your Palestinian partner?

We 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.

In fact, it took us going to an international conference that we did on the future of Jerusalem in ’92 I think, in London-- we had created a branch of IPCRI in London which helped us facilitate meetings between Israelis and PLO people, because it was illegal for Israelis to meet with the PLO then. At the end of one of these conferences in London, two of our friends from IPCRI UK called Zakaria and me into a meeting and repeated to us the behaviors that we exhibited during that conference. It was to the extent that if I said black he said white, if he said yes I said no. This was all in public, sort of making a point to disagree with each other in front of the whole audience that was gathered there.

These two gentlemen, one a professor at University College London, and the other a Reform rabbi, said to us, “If you two guys can’t model the kind of relationship that you’re trying to tell people they should have, then IPCRI doesn’t deserve to exist.” And we had a three and a half hour therapy session, marriage counseling session, and the end result was that after looking at ourselves in the mirror very closely, we decided we had to change the way we worked. And we did. I would say that was a point, a sea change in IPCRI, in our ability to work and our ability to succeed.

What did you do in order to learn to share power more effectively or more fairly?

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.

Do you have a mechanism in the organization, among the staff and yourselves to facilitate when you have disagreements?

We’ve brought in outside people at different times to help facilitate differences, problems in the staff. There are always problems that arise. Often they are not about Israeli-Palestinian or Jewish-Arab kinds of things, but they have undertones of that. One of the things that we are trying to do now is to greatly empower people to take more responsibility for the decisions they make. It’s been very easy over the years to “throw everything to Gershon and Zakaria and they’ll make the decision.”

Particularly in our education staff, where that has been the trend, we decided we were going to put an end to that. We have three co-directors of this department: a Palestinian from the West Bank,32 a Palestinian Israeli and a Jewish Israeli. We decided we were not going to intervene anymore on decisions, and that the three co-diretors had to make the decisions, and that they had to make decisions on the basis of consensus. If they couldn't reach consensus, then we would help them reach consensus, but we would no longer take responsibility for the decisions they were going to make.

It got so absurd. We’re having a lot of activities this summer in which we need facilitators, and we do co-facilitation, and the question arises, how do we utilize or divide the Palestinians, because we have Palestinians from ’48 and Palestinians from ’67. So the Palestinian Israeli director and the Palestinian West Bank director were arguing with each other on what the split should be. Should we have two-thirds Palestinians from the West Bank and one-third from Israel-- it was so absurd, the whole argument. It got completely out of control and they came to Zakaria and me and said, “You decide.” And I got to the point where I said, “This is a conflict in your team, you have to work out the conflict, you have to decide how you’re going to decide and on what criteria.”

When we made the decision that we were no longer going to take responsibility for the decision, it was at the point where they came to us and gave us the names of one Palestinian from ’67 and one Palestinian from ’48 and told us to decide. There was one open slot. I went to Zakaria and said, “What criteria do we use to decide?” They were both qualified, trained facilitators. They were both good people, it wasn’t that one was a man and one was a woman and should we take the woman because we wanted to have more women… they were both men. On what basis should we decide? So I took out a coin and I flipped the coin and then I went back to the team and said, “I want you to know this very important decision we made by flipping a coin.”

I told them that we would no longer be making these decisions. So sometimes by empowering people to make decisions and to have an agreement that decisions are made by consensus, you have to build consensus. We’ve done mediation courses here, and people have participated in mediation training. There are always conflicts, and there are always things that need to be dealt with.

I would say that one of the things that I tell people who contemplate going into a joint organization of this nature whether it be here or in Cyprus or in the Balkans or wherever you are, is that every day is a negotiation, there is not a single day in which negotiation doesn’t go on, it’s part of the work. It started for me at 8 o’clock this morning, dealing with an internal staff problem that inevitably crosses the Israeli Palestinian boundaries. People don’t know how to read each other’s hidden messages and sensitivities, and there’s a lot of it here.

Can you give me an overview of the programs here?

Conceptually what we do are peace making and peace building. Peace making we loosely define as bringing Israelis and Palestinians together in the policy arena to develop alternatives for advancing peace between the two sides. Peace building we loosely call bringing Israelis and Palestinians together to work on something that they have to work together on.

Within that framework IPCRI is divided into three main department areas. Our big new department, or new organization-- we’ve made very, very big changes in the way we work this year-- is our strategic affairs department. We have a water and environment department and a peace education department, which are in the area of peace building. The peace education program today is running in 50 schools in Israel and in the West Bank.

We have curriculum that was prepared for 10th and 11th grade classrooms; next year we’ll be introducing a new curriculum in the Palestinian schools for the 10th and 11th grades. We also had a team working on writing supplementary material in peace education this year, and by the end of the school year we’ll have a hundred lesson plans from kindergarten through twelfth grade on peace education. By the end of next year we’ll have 200 lesson plans, and we’re conducting teacher training this summer on those lesson plans. The Israeli curriculum was also rewritten this school year and reintroduced into the schools that are taking part. All in all there are between three and four hundred teachers in the program, about five thousand students are going through the program this year. We also did evaluations this year of Israeli and Palestinian textbooks. We wrote reports on textbooks and recommendations on how the textbooks on both sides can and should be improved. Next week we’ll be issuing a second report on Palestinian textbooks that we issued this year on fourth and ninth grade textbooks. We have about 16 people on the educational staff.

Our water and environment program is an area where Israelis and Palestinians have to work together on issues of water and environment. We have a number of activities going on right now, a rather large activity on agriculture…

We have a whole program on dealing with agriculture and the environment, because the Israelis and the Palestinians will no longer be able to export to Europe by the end of this year if they don’t meet the new environment standards in Europe, so it has both an economic impact and an environmental impact of working with the farmers to stop using poisonous chemicals and use more advanced environmental green technologies. So that program is a major emphasis.

Our strategic affairs department has now established twelve joint strategy thinking teams that are working on a regular basis now, and we’re taking them abroad for long weekend meetings three times between now and November. We're building up to November 22-23, when there is going to be a major policy conference held in Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Gaza.33 People will be hooked up with video-conferencing. The conference is aimed at trying to learn lessons from our errors in the past, enabling the public to be involved in the public policy debates and discussions, and focusing a lot of media attention on an event where Israelis and Palestinians will hopefully be interacting in a constructive way. The goal is to have about 150 Israelis and Palestinians who are empowered in these strategic thinking teams. It’s no longer something which is being focused and organized and directed by IPCRI, but it’s really empowering this team with two team leaders, an Israeli and a Palestinian trying to model down this cooperation and partnership.

Where do the people who will participate in the policy conference come from?

All over. In general, the people that we involved in the programs come from three areas: civil service, government; academia; and professional people. We made a concerted effort of bringing in about 1/3 new people that we’ve never worked with before, people who are outside of what’s called the 700 club-- the 700 Israelis and Palestinians who have been involved in peace work for the last 15 years and know each other very well and travel around the world in the peace circuits. So at least 1/3 of the people are completely new, many of them have never participated in a joint activity with the other side. We also made a very big effort, and we’re still working on that, to increase the number of women in the activities, because Israeli Palestinian peace activities are overwhelmingly male. So we’re trying to work on that.

What do you hope to accomplish?

Well, our hopes are on the here and now, on creating possibilities for Israeli Palestinian reengagement. Everyone’s talking about disengagement.34 Well, disengagement politically is a good thing if it’s done in coordination and cooperation through negotiations. We are not working on final status issues. We’ve been working on final status issues for 14 years. In our assessment, basically most of the options, alternatives, possibilities have been researched to hell. There’s very little more at this point in time that we can come up with that would be creative new ideas on how to deal with Jerusalem or how to deal with the settlements, or any of these final status issues. They’re not relevant at this point in time.

Geneva35 is a great initiative, but Geneva too will fizzle out if there’s no way of turning Geneva into something real, where it is virtual now. In other words, if tomorrow Arafat36 and the entire Palestinian leadership would sign onto Geneva, and say, “we support this agreement,” that would turn it into real. But right now it remains virtual, so our focus is here and now: how do we get out of the impasse, how do we rebuild trust. Our assessment is that most Israelis and Palestinians are ready to make peace with each other in terms of their understanding of the substantive issues, and the compromises that they are willing to reach.

In a certain paradoxical way, we’re closer to peace than we ever were before, but on the other hand we’re further away from peace than we ever were before, and it’s mainly because of the lack of trust that exists. If at the beginning of Oslo37 we could say there was a zero basis of trust, and we need to build on that, we talked about confidence building measures and all, today we’re at a negative basis: “I know the Palestinians won’t do whatever they say they’re going to do, I know that the Israelis won’t do whatever it is they say they’re going to do.” So it’s this negative.

Most Israelis and most Palestinians don’t believe there’s a partner on the other side. It’s so amazing for one who’s in this field to hear the same sentences from both sides about the other side. It amazes me the extent that Israelis and Palestinians are incapable of realizing the opposite side’s narrative. And not the narrative from 1948, but the narrative of the last 4 years: they’re completely different stories! The whole interpretation of how the violence began and who’s responsible and what went wrong… they’re mirror images, but there’s no ability of the two sides to understand each other. We have to find a way of reengaging, of bringing as many people as possible into the field and building up to a process where we can open this up to the world, to the media, to the Israeli and Palestinian publics.

I have a question about the textbook study. Where is that—who’s using it?

Well, it’s on the PLO’s website, the negotiation affairs department. It was used by the Palestinians in their report to congress and the European Union. We’re using it… we could have written a much harsher report than we did, to be truthful. We softened the words in the report. 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. So, other reports talk about the non-recognition as being the message that that Palestinians are passing on. Our report opened the doors and a second report which will be submitted to the Palestinian Ministry of Education is a list of specific recommendations that we made for changing the wording in some textbooks, or for amending the textbooks or for improving them. A fourth and ninth grade review of textbooks will be coming out in a couple of weeks. And we felt we had an obligation to do a study on Israeli textbooks as well, although didn’t have funding to do it. We’ve gotten some of our teachers to conduct a study on a parallel set of critera that we’re using to evaluate the Palestinian textbooks, and that’s up on our website also.

Can you talk a little bit about why you’re working in an NGO now, instead of in the government, where you started out?

When I left government, I left government because I thought I could be a lot more effective as an NGO.38 For one, the government didn’t give me the budgets that I wanted to work with. And when I was called by the Ministry of Education, at that time Zevulun Hammer39 from the National Religious Party, who asked me to stay in the Ministry. I said, “I’d be happy to, I’m very happy working in the Ministry, if you give me a hundred fifty thousand dollars of budget activity money”-- which is what I was having in this NGO from the German Government-- “I’d be more than happy to stay here.” I wanted to more not less. Of course, they couldn’t provide me with the budgets.

Today I think if I were an employee, an Israeli civil servant in the government, I would be trapped. I don’t know how I would be able to represent the government of Israel, what it’s doing and what it’s done. I have the freedom and the ability as an Israeli citizen to work for the benefit of what I perceive as Israeli national interest, to do it independently and freely. My reputation is based on what I do, what I achieve, my integrity. I’m free to criticize the government of Israel, which I do all the time, I’m free to criticize the Palestinian government all the time, which is what I do, and to offer constructive criticism. Would I be more effective if I were a senior civil servant in the Israeli government today? It’s hard to tell. What if I were an advisor to the Prime Minister? Would he listen to me? I doubt it. I try to get him to listen to me today; there have been a couple of times when it has worked on a micro-level, a couple of times over the years on macro levels.

On what issues have you succeeded in "getting the ear of the Prime Minister?"

On the micro-level of a Palestinian farmer whose land was confiscated because the army claimed a tank was blown up on his land. It wasn’t-- it was blown up on a piece of land that was adjacent to his-- but the army came and destroyed 50 dunams40 of hot houses and high tech equipment and confiscated his land. I couldn’t get anyone in the army to listen because they had already convinced themselves that the tank blew up on his land. I approached [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon41 directly and Sharon had it investigated and three weeks later the guy got his land back. There was no one in the army that I could talk to; they wouldn’t listen. So Sharon actually intervened and got it done. So that was a very good case in point where personal contact, personal intervention worked. And policy issues, there were all kinds of things throughout the years. The unfreezing of the Palestinian money that was held by the Israelis at the beginning of the intifada was a process that we began in our working group. And the model for how it would be released was eventually what was adopted with the American intervention.

What are some of the challenges that you face?

The main challenge that anyone in this field faces is how you wake up every morning and continue doing what you’re doing when you read the newspapers and you hear the news and it seems absolutely hopeless. So much violence, so many people being killed.

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.42 Thursday night when we got the permits43 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 checkpoint44 would be allowed to go.

It just so happened that the chief of staff and the commander of the Southern Command was in Gaza and the army had set up a checkpoint before Erez and they were stopped at that checkpoint. We tried to have General Mishlev's office,45 the coordinator's office, intervene, and they tried to, but then the general of the southern command who was with the chief of staff got word that we were trying to move Palestinians through this checkpoint, and the chief of staff blew up. He got hysterical, he said, “We’re looking for body pieces of soldiers who were blown up yesterday,46 and Palestinians from Gaza are going to meet with Israelis?” and he prohibited it.

This past weekend we were at an Israeli Palestinian meeting that did manage to get the Palestinians out. We were in Turkey. You hear what’s going on at home. There have been so many occasions when we’ve been in these Israeli Palestinian meetings when there was a terrorist attack or an Israeli incursion, or our staff people couldn’t get in. Two teachers in our peace education program, one Israeli and one Palestinian, have been killed in the intifada. So that’s the most difficult thing. The biggest challenge is how to keep going.

We got a discouraging message this morning from the Danish government, from whom we were hoping to get a grant for our Strategic Affairs Department. It says, “Currently the Danish Prime Minister is not considering a contribution to IPCRI. However, it is possible that the Ministry will reconsider its position.” We have been asked “to keep the Ministry informed about contributing donors and your activities in general.” That’s not a great, encouraging message for the morning.

Do you have strategies for keeping yourself motivated and allowing yourself some rest?

No, there’s no rest here, ever. Even when I’m on holiday I’m working. My computer is with me all the time; I’m hooked in 24 hours a day. For me it is the realization, the recognition that we have no alternative. 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.47 That’s the alternative direction. So that knowledge, that awareness, that belief keeps me going with more intensity and more activity. We’ve doubled the size of IPCRI over the past year. We haven’t gotten the funding for it yet, but we’re doing the work of double with the hope that we’re going to get the funding. I’m starting to lose sleep over that now. But we’ll get it.

The other thing that gives me strength is the people that we work with. We have these meetings every week, all the time, and we’re successfully bringing people together even with all the difficulties. People want to talk to each other and people want to remain in contact. With all the criticism around normalization48 and all that kind of garbage, we haven’t lost people. The number of people wanting to be involved is growing.

How has the conflict affected your life personally?

Well, my daughter, who is going to be 18 in July, has decided to refuse to serve in the army.49 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.

What do you think of that decision your daughter’s decision to refuse military service?

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.

Did you serve in the army?

Yes, I did the army, and I was released from reserve duty last year. But for the past very long time I was in the Education Corps, and I lectured to officers about Palestinian society. For the years of the peace process I was a regular lecturer to the commanders of joint patrols, those who had to go and serve with the Palestinians. I made a point of telling these officers to break their orders, because they had very strange orders.

These commanders of joint patrols50 were told that they shouldn’t interact with the Palestinian officers at a personal level. You used to see these joint patrols when they would stop for their coffee break-- there was a Palestinian jeep and an Israeli jeep, they would park about 15 meters apart and sit down and drink their coffee separately, eat their sandwiches separately. I told them in these lectures—I was invited by the army to lecture as a reserve officer—that if they remember anything from my lecture, the one thing that they should remember is that they should use every opportunity they have to develop a personal relationship with these other people, because in a time of need it will not only help you to do your job, it may save your life.

In fact, the first Israeli who was killed in the intifada was the commander of a joint patrol who was killed by his Palestinian counterpart.51 That was the first Israeli casualty in the intifada, on the second day of the intifada. Joint patrols were created to deal with problem situations. In every crisis in the period of the peace process the joint patrol system broke down, except in one area, the Jenin area, because the two commanders became very good personal friends. They had visited each other’s homes, their families had become friends.

What are other ways the conflict has affected your life?

IPCRI’s office was in Bethlehem for four years. We had moved in 1996, made a decision that the time had come for Israelis to be coming to the Palestinians, and not only the Palestinians coming to the Israelis. For four years Bethlehem was a part of my life. I was a part of Bethlehem and Bethlehem was a part of my life. I went there every day and I knew many, many people, and did all my shopping there. I tried to support the Palestinian economy in whatever way I could.

When it no longer became possible to go to Bethlehem, I would go to sleep every night, I live in Kiryat Yovel,52 and from my backyard we can see the Cremisan53 and the mountains. When there was shooting between Gilo and Beit Jala the shots would echo in the mountains, and the sound would come right into my bedroom. I think for about three months I didn’t sleep. Literally, I was sleepless for about three months, thinking about all those people. The conflict becomes very personal when you know people. I know so many hundreds, thousands of Palestinians. Every day it becomes very personal. And Israelis I know have been hurt by the conflict. It affects everyone. I can’t think of anything specific.

Everything I do is about the conflict, so everything in my life is about the conflict and about peace making. Last year, as a result of the reality here of not being able to hold Israeli-Palestinian meetings here, last year in 2003 IPCRI spent 29 weekends abroad. Of those, I was probably at 25 of the 29 meetings. That means I was traveling abroad twice a month. That means I was not with my family twice a month on weekends, and that put a lot of pressure on the family. We’ve reorganized this year, and it will be probably half that amount of travel this year, hopefully, with many more Israelis and Palestinians meeting. Instead of traveling one weekend with our Jerusalem working group, and another weekend with our economic working group, we now have six working groups going out at one time. Because we changed the way that we work, that Zakaria and I don’t have to facilitate and centralize and focus on every individual group, there are team leaders who are in charge of each group and we’re working with the team leaders and helping them facilitate.

Have you seen small successes along the way?

Helping Israelis and Palestinians reach agreements and understandings is success. Yesterday our steering committee of the economic group met and there was a chance in the morning that they would disband and cease to meet. After a 2 hour meeting we were able to arrive at a common agenda, to the extent that they decided that they are not two teams working but one team, a joint team. So that’s a small success, which is very demonstrative of what we are trying to do. Helping them work out a common agenda hopefully will enable them to come up with policy recommendations that will be much more substantial.

When you think about international audiences that are influential here, who do you think is the most significant?

I think that international audiences in general are not influential, and that there are influential policy makers and leaders who have a great deal of influence. Obviously the White House, the [US] President, the National Security Counsel, Congress, the State Department, [Javier] Solana from the European Union, [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair, [German Chancellor Gerhard] Schroeder, if he wanted to be. Smaller, but very significant leaders like [Egyptian President Hosni] Mubarak and [Jordan's] King Abdullah, and less significant but important, like Morocco, Turkey.

What do you think are some of the biggest misconceptions about the conflict?

That there’s no one to talk to on the other side. Depending on which side you’re on you have all kinds of assumptions, stereotypes… if you’re pro-Palestinian, the Jews can never live with anyone, they’re trouble makers, they control the world, they control America, they use their power, might makes right, that kind of thing. If you’re pro-Israel the Palestinians are all terrorists, Islam is not compatible with democracy. Arafat is the reincarnation of Hitler, Arafat never recognized Israel, was never ready to make peace, this was all premeditated, it was part of their strategy to destroy Israel, Israel’s survival is at risk. All those kinds of myths. They’re not new by the way, they’ve been around for a long time. At least since ’48.

Can you talk about previous peace processes, and why you think they failed, or why they turned out the way they did?

I think that what we have here is at least a 10 year experience of failed peace-making. Many people, I believe, misunderstand or misstate that the agreements themselves were bad agreements. Therefore you have things like in Israel people saying, “Let’s put the initiators of Oslo on trial." In fact that’s not a reflection of what really happened here. 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,54 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 closures55 and permits that developed in the peace process. Before the peace process Palestinians could move throughout this land freely, no checkpoints,56 no permits. And all of a sudden you have a peace process and life becomes more difficult?

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 Rabin57 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.

I think that Barak went to the end of the peace process being advised by almost everyone that it was too early to go for a summit: that it was wrong to try to reach end of conflict at this point; that there were at least two issues that would take more time -- Jerusalem and the refugees; that enough preparation work hadn’t been done to prepare the publics for peace, to close the gaps between them, to build a process that was good for people, that they could believe in it. Palestinians were slow to take action on terrorists, and Israelis continued the building of settlements without explaining to the Palestinians that this was internal Israeli politics and not a long term strategy. Israelis didn’t implement their commitment to withdrawing from territories and re-deploying from territories. The time schedule that was built into the peace process was derailed immediately when Rabin said there are no holy dates. It turns out that in agreements and peace processes there are holy dates. You make an agreement based on a time schedule, and you have to keep to it, because if you don’t, it means you’re not intending to implement anything.

So I think all of these things together: the peace process didn’t build into it a culture of peace. The people to people aspect of Oslo was an afterthought; it wasn’t an inherent part of the peace building. There was this attitude that the leaders would make peace agreements and it would trickle down to the people and everyone would celebrate in peace, and it didn’t happen.

Do you see anything happening on the ground now that makes you think that makes you optimistic?

No. I see that if there is a peace agreement of some kind or another it’s going to be a very different peace agreement than what was possible in the past. It will be a peace agreement based on borders as walls rather than borders as bridges, and we are going to have to work very hard to tear down the walls in order to build peace in reality. What’s most important now is to arrive at a ceasefire, where people stop killing each other. That’s the most important thing now, and it’s more important now than building cooperation or building a peace of bridges rather than a peace of walls.

Have you ever had any doubts amidst all of this about the effectiveness of your work?

Never. I’ve always, every day, tried to think about how to be more effective, but I’ve never had doubts about whether or not it’s effective or important or if it’s what we should be doing.

Where do you see yourself and your work in relation to restarting a peace process?

I hope that the work we are doing this year will be very significant and that it will have an impact, that we will have serious people presenting serious recommendations that will have to be taken seriously by decision makers. I think our comprehensive approach that we are taking now enables the interaction and integration of the areas that are linked. We have an economic development group and a water group and an agriculture group and an environment group-- these are all inter-linked-- and a security group, and we have a group dealing with the specific issues of security and movement of people, looking at the technical aspects of what kind of technology can be brought in.

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.

Our experience is that whenever you bring Israelis and Palestinians together to discuss these issues, the Palestinians raise the problems and the Israelis say, “security, there’s nothing we can do, security.” So we decided to try to deal with that by bringing together former security officials who are now working in the private sector selling security equipment all around the world. They have the knowledge, and the experience, they know what the problems are, they know what the system is. They’re working with a group of Palestinians who are also from security and from the business world, who can bring to them the problems that they face on the ground, and come up with practical solutions.

How does the construction of the wall affect your work, and prospects for joint ventures?

The wall creates many problems. For us it’s nothing compared to the problems of the people who live next to the wall, but anything connected with movement is a problem for us. It's becoming more and more difficult to get people in and out. We received a very disappointing letter yesterday from the head of the Shin Bet58 on our request to meet with him to talk about the problems of moving Palestinians in and out of the airport. Basically the bottom line of the letter was “kiss my ass.” We have to remind ourselves that even the head of the Secret Service is a clerk, a civil servant. He has a boss, and his boss is the Prime Minister. We have to get to the Prime Minister on this issue. We have made a point-- we’ve been maintaining that point over the years and been successful-- of saying that as a result of the reality we have to travel abroad to hold these meetings, and that as a point of principle Israelis and Palestinians who are going to meet abroad should travel together abroad and come back together. That means they have to go through Ben Gurion Airport.59 We’ve been successful in doing that until this past month, when for the first time our assessment was that we were not going to get permits. So we decided to move the meeting to Haifa. Last week when we asked for permits to bring people through the airport we were turned down. It wasn’t people who have a security problem, it was a flat out no.

In the big picture do you see anything that makes you optimistic right now?

Well, public opinion polls make me optimistic. When almost 80% of Israelis say “let’s get out of Gaza and let’s remove all the settlements,”60 that makes me very optimistic. One hundred-fifty thousand Israelis showed up in Tel Aviv for the demonstration;61 that makes me very optimistic. You know you can find all kinds of things when you read public opinion polls; there are great contradictions within them. The majority of Palestinians still support going back to a peace process even at the same time that they still support killing Israelis.62 So there are reasons to be optimistic, but not many.

End.