Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May/June 1998, Page 66

Seeing the Light

A Personal Retrospective

By Rob Swanson

Mouhammed Musleh was a senior in my English IV class. His name was in my grade book and on the class roster, but after weeks of teaching at the Anglican International School in Jerusalem, I had yet to meet him personally. Every day I checked attendance, and every day I put an ²XÓ next to his name¾absent again.

Mouhammed was not skipping school or even sick. Actually, he wanted to be at school with his classmates, as it was winding down to the last few weeks of his senior year. Mouhammed's problem was this¾he was a Palestinian resident of the West Bank town of Jericho.

Following the spate of suicide bombings in late February and early March of 1996, the Israeli authorities cut off access from the West Bank to Jerusalem. Every morning Mouhammed got dressed, got his books and homework together, and drove to the checkpoint. And every morning he was sent back home. He was being denied what I considered to be a given: the right to an education.

Episodes like this during my four-month teaching experience at the British International School in Jerusalem brought to me a fuller, more fact-based understanding of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and I have never been the same.

Before my trip to Jerusalem, I held a common Western stereotype of the conflict, picturing Israel as the tiny David fighting the Goliath of the Arab states around it. I saw the Palestinians as mostly restless fighters and terrorists who sought the destruction of the Jewish state. I had formed my opinion based on what the mainstream American media fed me, and I was totally in the dark.

When the truth hit, it was a blinding light, and it hurt. My views about the Middle East were turned upside down starting from the time I stepped off the plane. I could not understand why there was such a glaring contrast in the quality of life¾former refugee camps turned into makeshift villages, void of running water and adequate sewage systems, standing in stark contrast to beautiful white stucco and tile-roof homes. I soon came to realize that the former was the fate of the Palestinian, the latter the life of the Jewish settler.

While in Jerusalem, I rented an apartment from a wonderfully hospitable family who had lived there for over 30 years. Chuck Kopp was the pastor of Narkis Street Congregation and was openly in favor of the peace process and equal rights for the Palestinians. The Jewish residents of the neighborhood were not pleased with the presence of a Christian congregation there and had decided to set fire to the church in 1994.

As I heard this story and others, I became aware of the sense of lawlessness from which right-wing Israelis operate, and it did not fit well with my view of a people who were incessantly oppressed. I was shocked to hear of the memorial in Kiryat Arba to Baruch Goldstein, who had murdered 29 Palestinian men and boys as they prayed in a Hebron mosque. But I soon realized that right-wing radicalism was allowed to a large extent, and seemed to run free in the West Bank. I was seeing the light.

My confusion soon turned to outrage as I saw television reports of the IDF bombing of innocent women and children in south Lebanon during ²Operation Grapes of WrathÓ in April of 1996. And, contrary to my expectations, I saw that many Israelis around me were also outraged by the military action. Even more disconcerting was calling home to discuss the situation. No one had heard of the refugee camp bombing. As usual, the American public was offered media coverage that put Israel completely in the right.

At this time I began to make the connection between American foreign aid to Israel and the careless actions of the Israeli government. In an essay immediately following the ²Grapes of WrathÓ debacle, noted MIT professor and foreign policy critic Noam Chomsky summed up the situation: ²It is well to remember that Israel­s actions, however one assesses them, are conducted with virtual impunity. As Washington­s leading client state, Israel has inherited the right to do as it pleases.Ó I could not have agreed with him more.

The longer I stayed, the more I understood the injustices against the Palestinian people. This was compounded by visits to Palestinian friends. My nightly exercise routine began to include a bicycle ride to a friend­s house in Beit Jala, a village just south of Bethlehem. It was difficult to reconcile the difference in living conditions between Jewish West Jerusalem and the Palestinian West Bank. There roads were nearly impassable in spots, left to deteriorate¾ much like the hopes of the Palestinians.

When my time in Jerusalem ended and I returned to the United States, I knew I had to put the things I had seen into perspective; I had to put intellectual meat on the bones of my experience. The reading I did had a profound impact on me. One of my students at the Anglican International School, Sari, gave me a book, Justice and Only Justice, written by his father, Naim Stifan Ateek. Naim is canon of St. George­s Cathedral in Jerusalem and writes from a Palestinian Christian perspective on the liberation of his people. His book, along with Victor Ostrovsky­s By Way of Deception and Noam Chomsky­s Deterring Democracy helped me build an intellectual and political foundation to supplement my convictions.

Despite all of the reading I have done and the conversations I have had, I see no easy resolution in sight, especially amidst the current climate of media misinformation. I have, however, come to view the 1967 United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 as a necessary component to peace, as it recognizes the rights of both parties to live in the region and offers a land-for-peace solution.

In a book review in the Nov. 24, 1997 edition of The New Yorker, critic Lawrence Weschler recognized a common ²Three StoogesÓ dimension to many ethnic conflicts¾Moe hits Larry, who in turn whacks Curly. He recounted asking a Serb student in the Bosnian town of Banja Luka why all of the town­s mosques had been reduced to rubble. Without hesitation, the student replied, ²Because of what the Ustasha did to us during the Second World War¾they leveled our Orthodox churches.Ó Weschler then noted the problem with the student­s logic: ²The Ustasha were Croats.Ó

Weschler­s analogy is well-noted, for nowhere is this phenomenon more glaringly apparent than in the Middle East. Indeed, the Shoah was one of the darkest chapters in human history. But why does it seem that many of the victims and their descendents have not learned from their suffering under the murderous Nazi regime and have passed their own oppression onto the backs of the Palestinian people?

When I left the Anglican International School, I was given a yearbook as a reminder of my students. I never got to meet Mouhammed, but he inspired me. Under his senior picture, Mouhammed included a quote by Eleanor Roosevelt which illustrates not only the Palestinian optimism in the face of oppression, but also a vision of light which I also share:

²It­s not enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it­s not enough to believe in it. One must work at it.Ó