In Reply to Ullas Sharma and John Chuckman

I was very impressed by the article by Ullas Sharma about Ghandi and how he might have dealt with the current situation in the Middle East. Here was a serious attempt to try and see a possible way forward without blackening one side or the other. On the other hand the pieces by John Chuckman are so one sided as to illustrate why peace is so hard to achieve.

I do not like Ariel Sharon. Never did. But he did not kill anyone at Sabra and Shattilah. Arabs killed Arabs there. Sure he was condemned by the Kahan Enquiry because as the commanding General he should have foreseen what might happen. For this he was condemned. But Israel held a public enquiry. And I see no sign of such openness or independent judiciary in the nations still at war with Israel.

What the critics seem to forget is that Israel has a very powerful secular left wing element that can put half a million protestors on to the streets of Tel Aviv to demonstrate against Government policies. The Peace Now movement is very vocal and it has braches throughout the Jewish world. But these voices have been muted of late. Why?

Remember it was a left wing Government under Rabin that started the serious quest for peace. He shook Arafat’s hand and signed the Oslo accord. Remember it was left wing Barak who offered more to the Palestinians than anyone had ever done since they rejected the UN partition plan in 1947. Not enough perhaps but surely it was something to build on? How did Ariel Sharon, not particularly popular in  Israel ( Netanyahu was and is the darling of the right ) get into power?

Why was the Left Wing thrown out of power? Because of violence. Who started it? I don’t mean who provoked. Ghandi was provoked almost beyond imagination. I mean who actually invented the suicide bombers? It was this violence that convinced Israelis (perhaps wrongly) that Palestinians didn’t really want peace. So now thanks to violence there is a General in charge of Israel who pursues hard line policies.

Most of my friends are desperately sorry that Olso failed. But if failed for two kinds of reasons. It failed because the Israeli Right wing expanded the settlements and it failed because the education systems of UNRWHA and HAMAS continued to preach hatred in their schools. Long after the left wing Minister of Education in Israel Yossi Sarid (hated by the Israeli right) ordered Israeli school textbooks to be changed to reflect the possibility of peace and equality with Palestine, the PA was still encouraging hatred at grass roots level. Now I agree this hatred was as much if not more because of occupation. But occupation was not the aim in 1967.

John Chuckman quotes a pre 1956 Dayan talking about disenfranchising Palestinians. I was in Jerusalem in 1967. I remember how the Palestinians then welcomed the Israelis because they hated the Jordanians who had denied them their rights. They hated the Jordanians responsible for the Black September massacre of far more Palestinians than Israel had killed. The post 1967 Dayan publicly begged the Arab League to trade land for peace. He is on record as supporting a Palestinian state on the West Bank. He spent time with King Hussein working to achieve it.

John Chuckman quotes Ilan Pappe but his one sided revisionism has been discredited as much as those who have tried to deny that the Nazis ever tried to harm the Jews. In Israel there is open debate, revisionist historians like Avi Shlaim and Benny Morris are listened to.

Currently the present coalition government in Israel fell precisely because the Left Wing refused to support investment in the settlements instead of investment in the poor and underprivileged. But they will never get back into power as long as there is violence.

This is why I weep for the memory of Ghandi. If pray that God will send us a Palestinian Ghandi. I desperately want peace. I desperately want to see an end to the endless killings and humiliations and suffering. So far violence has got us nowhere. Give Ghandi a chance.

Jeremy Rosen.