Should peace be a process?

(This blog entry is by Mary Cox.)

I am sitting in Al-Khalil's CPT apartment right now. We just arrived (6:30pm) in Al-Khalil (the Arabic name for Hebron) by bus and then walked a ways to the apartment.

But before arriving here, we spent the day in Jerusalem. After eating breakfast in the Hashimi Hotel, we gathered up on the rooftop of the hotel, overlooking the Muslim quarter of the Old City. It was beautiful, bright, and a refreshing greeting after such a long day of travel yesterday.

The main event of the day was meeting with the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). This is a political organization that started in 1997 and is dedicated to ending the Israeli occupation and achieving a just peace for Israelis and Palestinians. To dramatize the problems of the occupation, ICAHD focuses on home demolitions by working to prevent homes from being demolished (sometimes standing in front of bulldozers) and by illegally rebuilding some homes after they've been demolished. The following picture is of a demolished Palestinian home we saw in Jerusalem.


We took a tour of Jerusalem led by ICAHD, and I began to think about lots of questions. I need to think and question....we all do! One area in particular that I gave thought to today: Negotiation.

One of the things I love about President Obama is his overall willingness to engage in international negotiation. And the U.S. has played a prominent role in negotiations in the past with Israel and Palestine. But what I considered today is that making peace into a process is exactly what Israel wants and needs in order to continue their occupation, because negotiating takes time, and it always has the potential to fail. As long as Israel can continue to appear willing to negotiate...as long as they can continue to make offers to the Palestinians, and as long as the Palestinians continue to reject Israel's offers, then Israel looks like they are trying for peace, and Palestine looks like they are not cooperating. This gives Israel more apparent legitimacy, and more time to continue expanding settlements.

But how could the process ever be on equal terms? How could Palestine ever actually accept any of Israel's offers? -- All of the offers Israel has given to Palestine have truly been unacceptable: separating Palestinians from each other, cutting them off from Jerusalem, and controlling the water sources, by retaining the land bordering the Jordan River, for example. So of course, Palestinians have turned down the offers.

Is this a situation in which negotiation will not help the Palestinians and Israelis? It's not actually in Israel's best interest to negotiate. Right now, they are in control of so many aspects of the area, that they only stand to lose through real negotiations. It seems like the only way that negotiation would really be a viable option is if both the Palestinians and the Israeli government genuinely wanted it and could gain something from it. The last question I will leave you with then is:

How can we change the situation so that Israel would want to negotiate fairly?

-Mary Cox