Israel and Me
    My love for Israel began at an early age, viewing myself as exiled to Canada, 40 days and 40 nights after my birth. But perhaps this identification with the Promised Land began well before my conception, in the tragic suffering of the 1947-48 partition of India, with my parents as children, fleeing from what became Pakistan. Armed bands of Muslim marauders ambushed, raped, and massacred Hindus and Sikhs on trains the day before and the day after the train which carried my father’s siblings to safety. Such scenes repeated themselves multiple times on each side, leaving “ghost trains” to limp silently to stations across the border.

    Fast forward the picture to Montreal in the early 90s, during my family medicine residency, where I experienced warmth and welcome amongst the Jewish community. It was then that I began to feel a strong sense of kinship at work, at the Jewish General Hospital, at rest, in my cozy apartment building across from the park and at leisure, as a member of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association. During the Gulf War, as Scuds were flying over Israel and people were donning gas masks, the fear that Saddam Hussein could potentially launch a terrorist operation on this very hospital, an ocean and a continent away, appeared so real to us that even our lunch bags were subject to close inspection. This shared fear, however, only seemed to bring us closer together as a community.

    In the late 90s I went twice to visit a cousin studying in Israel, expecting to find hope as prospects of peace were blossoming. To my disillusionment, I found a land without national purpose or inner peace, with divisions even amongst Jews, left and right, religious and secular, Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Russian and Ethiopian and calls for celebration by many of gory exploits of Cave of the Patriarchs/ Ibrahimi Mosque mass murderer Dr. Baruch Goldstein and even of Rabin’s assassin, Yigal Amir. In contrast, visits to the region in this decade to study the mental health of Palestinians, revealed solidarity and resiliency in the face of roadblocks, arbitrary arrests, house demolitions, and “targeted” assassinations.

Forgotten Narratives
    As a young adult I discovered multiple personal narratives in the war to liberate India, much as amongst Turks and Armenians or Kurds, Serbs and Croats, Bosniaks or Kosovars, all with a shared history of grievances. My mother’s family, which had lost all in Pakistan, found a small dwelling on a busy street in Karol Bagh in Delhi, where I spent several childhood summers. Just last month I found out that my mother’s great uncle needed to clean that very house of rotting corpses as they moved in. During all these years, I had never asked questions, assuming that the government had arranged refugee housing for them, as they had for my father’s family; but there was another forgotten story—that of an anonymous Muslim family who perished to provide childhood abode for my mother.

    Benny Morris gave lie to yesterday’s one-sided narrative of Israel’s glorious roots: “a land without a people for a people without a land” which, beyond the massacre at Deir Yassin, required systematic mass deportation of entire villages wiping their narrative off the map of history. In fact, “making the desert bloom” involved uprooting olive trees tended to by generations and expelling tens of thousands of people out of “security zones” often without compensation.

Truisms
    The tragedy I find is that Israel today is unable to confront hard questions, with consensus only on spouting “truisms.”

    We will not negotiate with terrorists. Today’s refusal to negotiate with “terrorists” conveniently neglects yesterday’s terrorists: Menachem Begin’s Irgun blew up the King David hotel in 1946 and Yitzhak Shamir’s Lehi assassinated United Nations mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948. David Ben Gurion termed Irgun “the enemy of the Jewish people,” despising these figures for such terrorist tactics, yet these men became Prime Ministers of Israel. Even Ariel Sharon, who allowed massacres in Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps, must claim at least as much blood on his hands as Haniyeh or any of Hamas leadership.

    We have the most moral army in the world. The most “moral” and “effective” army in the world manages to kill more Palestinian children than the senseless murderers on the other side kill Jews. For the bean counters of the world, three to four times as many Palestinians as Jews have died in factional violence since the second Intifada. The measure of success becomes let’s see how many more eyes for eyes we can get.
   

    Higher fences and more weapons will make Israel safer. Good fences, geopolitically, do not make good neighbors. With people separated from their family and friends, there will always be deep grievances that will cultivate and enhance political, economic, and social insecurities.

    Of course the most “moral” army in the world also has a unique right to nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. While this may be accepted internally, it has allowed Arab countries and Iran to justify their own programs to their own populations and further endangers Israel’s security.

    Palestinians have never “missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” Palestinians are expected to be grateful to be allowed at the negotiation table. In return, they must “end all terror,” accept Israeli borders, which even Israel is unwilling to recognize, and give up the right of return of people from 60 years ago, while Jewish rights date back more than 2000 years ago. Why would Palestinians balk at such generosity?

    Our tiny sliver of land. Israelis agree that their internationally recognized sliver of land, excluding Judea and Samaria, is something that no people should be forced to live on. Meanwhile Gaza’s 1.8 million people live on one tenth the land per person of Israelis. Israel’s verbal recognition of a Palestinian state amounts to acknowledging the need to create Bantustans on no more than 22% of pre 1948 Palestine, largely of its choosing.

    “Facts on the ground,” many illegal even by Israeli standards, continue to be created and are later “regularized.” As these expand, Israelis feel the right to unilaterally redraw the map to maintain contiguous borders and it is unreasonable to make “painful” compromises, regardless of international law or UN resolutions.

Friends and Enemies
    Nobel Peace Prize winner, Desmond Tutu, found roads devoted solely for settlers snaking across the Occupied territories, beatings at checkpoints, arbitrary denial of passage of the those gravely ill, the inability to move to work, to school, to one’s own fields, and overall conditions that are reminiscent of the most egregious aspects of the Apartheid state. When old friends such as Jimmy Carter, who brokered Israel’s first peace agreement with an Arab state, voice such criticisms they join the enemies list, consisting of Arabs, Europeans, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, US Churches, the UN, and indeed almost all of the outside world. From the point of view of much of the population, the only “friends” that remain are those fundamentalist Christians who seek the rapture and Armageddon, those who view Jews as the murderers of Christ, and those who egg on what is considered the “Israeli lobby,” representing neither the view of the majority of American Jews nor Israeli interests.

Israel’s Spiritual Health
    While I see the Occupation’s brutal and lethal effects on my Palestinian friends, strangely enough I am more concerned with the Jewish and Israeli psyche than the actual death and suffering. Occupation not only has an economic and diplomatic price, but it destroys Israel spiritually from within making it unable to differentiate between friend and foe.

    Most Israelis view with horror scenes of Hebron settler youth, enabled and protected by their Army, abusing Arab grandmothers with impunity. Yet the opinions of Rabbi Meir Kahane have become mainstream. A survey by Geocartographia found that two-thirds of Jews would refuse to live in the same building as an Arab, almost half would not allow an Arab in their home, and four in ten want segregation of entertainment facilities and a similar proportion believe “the state needs to support the emigration of Arab citizens.” Publicly joking about the strangulation of Gazans, as putting them on a diet, forcing them to tighten their belts or to travel on foot, belies the deliberate humanitarian catastrophe.

    Physicians for Human Rights-Israel has documented bureaucratic denial of medical care to those needing cancer care and kidney transplants, with people dying and women giving birth at checkpoints. Israeli physicians are ambiguous about “moderate physical pressure” and Israeli intelligence has even taught these techniques to despotic regimes around the world. The Landau Commission said that a person should be free from prosecution provided they acted under the belief that “the harm caused by him was not disproportionate to the harm avoided.”

    Nufar Yishai-Karin, a clinical psychologist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who interviewed 18 ordinary Israeli soldiers and 3 officers with whom she had served in Gaza in the 1990s, heard confessions of frequent brutal assaults against Palestinians aggravated by boredom, poor training and discipline, and poor supervision. Her comrades admitted to actually enjoying the violence, the power, the sense of chaos breaking the routine. An officer beat a four-year-old boy: “He broke his hand here at the wrist, broke his leg here. And started to stomp on his stomach, three times, and left.” “You feel that you are the law. You are the law. You are the one who decides...” be it kicking a woman in the crotch to destroy her uterus in retaliation for throwing a clog or a rifle butt destroying facial bones in response to a woman spitting in a soldier’s face. What transforms ordinary young people into torturers? Staff Sergeant Liran Ron Furer, who served in Gaza, explored his own spiritual degradation in Checkpoint syndrome: “You stuck me in this stinking Gaza and before that you brainwashed me with your rifles and your marches, you turned me into a dishrag that didn’t think anymore.”

    In “The End of an Intimate Disregard,” (Ha’aretz, 30 April, 2006) former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti reviews history since Israeli’s creation. “The neighbor became a refugee or an infiltrator, and was swallowed up in the hostile “Arab world.” The Arab minority that remained under Israeli rule existed in the margins of Jewish consciousness—not belonging at best and a fifth column at worst.” In the 21st century now the equation is changing. “For the first time since the beginning of the tragic encounter more than 100 years ago, the Jews are divorcing the Arabs.”

A New Direction
    The limitations of hard power were found a year and a half ago with the ragtag fighters of Hezbollah fighting the world’s fourth largest military power to a draw. Winograd might have searched for another direction, at other ways of dealing with Israel’s neighbors. What is the future of a single state from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean, without a fairly negotiated settlement with Palestinians, where the demographic reality is that Jews will soon no longer be a majority? Ha’aretz columnist Tom Segev shows from declassified documents that for this reason policy makers prior to the 1967 war felt that taking over the West Bank was strategic folly. Yet Israel seems no more inclined to reassess than the Romans were after the Masada, seeking instead to divide and rule.

    Rather than attempting to convince the world that Palestinians, who somehow did not engage in suicide bombing for a couple of millennia of shared history, are now genetically programmed to do so, true “Realists” might investigate the root causes of why the Palestinians, who had no history of fundamentalism, all of a sudden changed tactics in the last decade and elected a Hamas government. Collective punishment of turning off the taps is no more likely to be successful in swaying the hearts and minds of Gazans than the collective punishment of Qassams on Sderot.

Hope for Change
    If Israel is to survive another 60 years the needed changes are spiritual, not demographic or strategic. The Torah preaches responsibility to, and co-existence with, non-Jewish neighbors. Rabbi Lerner and Tikkun, representing the Jewish diaspora, offer another way. The beauty of Israel is the many self-respecting, rather than “self-hating” Jews who are willing to stand up to injustice, righteous at great peril to their reputations and physical security. I have met people like Anat Biletzki of B’Tselem examining human rights in the Occupied territories; Nurit Peled, daughter of a 1967 war hero, Major General “Matti” Peled, who lost her 13 year old daughter to a suicide bomber in 1997, but continues to speak of her own nation’s culpability; Amir Locker who like the refusenik pilots did his tour of duty but refused to serve; and Hillel Schenker, editor of the “Palestine Israel Journal” trying to establish a common ground for dialogue. To its credit, many of Israel’s harshest critics are internal, including Amira Hass living amongst Palestinians, and writing of the Uber-Wardens that control every aspect of Palestinian life and treat Gazans as laboratory rats locked in and subject to slow suffocation with overcrowding and gradual withdrawal of food, oil and electricity; and Gideon Levy who gives human faces to children killed by the IDF and decries the Little Ahmadinejads whose racist propaganda considers these details of history.

    Seeds of hope are also more mainstream. Institutionally the Israeli Supreme Court of Justice, while imperfect, continues to outlaw egregious acts of torture, the separation wall, and denial of civil rights to Palestinians. In the 1980s, the Kahan Commission, established by a right wing Likud government and chaired by President of the Supreme Court, asked Sharon to draw the “appropriate personal conclusions” i.e. to resign as Defense Minister for culpability in the Sabra and Shatila massacres. The vast majority of Israeli healthcare personnel treat Arabs and even people from the Occupied territories without prejudice.

A Peace Studies Perspective
    A focus on “ending the violence” and the cessation of direct hostility, may not be enough. Palestinians are not innocent, pacifist victims but neither are they neo-Nazis. Violence including suicide bombing, bombs placed in buses and throwing Molotov cocktails may be explainable but not justifiable, though Israel, in terms of direct violence, is far from innocent.

    From within Peace Studies, security is viewed more holistically as having resources to obtain basic needs while violence is seen as the violation of these needs. Occupation is a form of indirect or structural violence denying Palestinians access to basic resources including water and electricity, thereby impacting the fundamental conditions and resources for health as represented by the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion—peace, shelter, education, food, income, a stable ecosystem, sustainable resources, social justice, and equity. With every individual response from Palestinians to these violations, Israel becomes more insecure. Violent practices on each side are enabled by cultural violence in terms of perception of self and other.

    Conflict is defined as perception of incompatible goals. This does not need to be a zero sum game. A shared solution to issues of water resources and energy needs with neighbors can help to build an atmosphere of trust and provide the basis for long-term security on both sides. I am on the Scientific Board of Healing Across the Divides, which seeks connectors, dignity, justice and respect for the other, recognizing inequality of circumstance, in cooperative projects to optimize diabetes management and to help achieve reconciliation.

Choosing a Future
    After centuries of war, France and Germany have chosen to live together rather than building walls. The US chose to offer a Marshall Plan to defeated Europe. The risks of ending Occupation are far fewer than its costs. Reconciliation can be achieved; Israel must “draw its own conclusions” now from a position of strength, before it becomes an international pariah. As Ben Gurion recognized, Israel can choose at the most two of three: being democratic, Jewish or Occupier.

    The land of my birth, India, has been forced to choose between the Gandhian vision of co-existence and love—or intolerance. And while it still has riots, occasional terrorist attacks, economic and social injustices, as well as an army which does not act perfectly in many regions in dispute, and at least one state government complicit in massacres, it has largely chosen the former. In fact, as India recently celebrated its 60th anniversary in August, many Muslims in Pakistan looked on with envy for its peace, functional democracy, civil and religious rights, home to more Muslims than any other nation, save Indonesia.

    Today, Israel 60th anniversary should be a case for genuine rejoicing around the world, with democracy, a free press, a strong education system and a viable health care system. Arabs in Israel share in these, with greater rights and prosperity than in any country in the Middle East. Israel should be a beacon to others in the region, yet the question remains: Is Israel brave, capable and generous enough to be up to the challenge?