Peace Now in the Holy Land -- An Obama-Era Possibility?

Almost two weeks ago, I stood below the steps of the U.S. Capitol and watched Barack Obama take an oath, sworn in as an embodiment of change in American democracy. The shouts, the chants, the tear-filled eyes and genuine exhilaration in the air had transported me a lifetime away from my world of only several days before. As I huddled in a stairwell in Be’er Sheva, in the Negev Desert in Israel, the explosions I had heard came from Hamas rockets rather than fireworks and the tears were those of fear and pain rather than hope and pride. With violence now threatening to reignite conflict in the region, we in Israel and Palestine need the weight of American diplomacy and Obama-era diplomatic rhetoric to maintain peace on both sides.

Whether or not Israel and Hamas achieved their stated aims during the war in Gaza is questionable. Israel has not ended its blockade of Gaza, for which Hamas broke the ceasefire with Israel in December. Hamas’ hold among the Palestinian people and authority over Gaza does not seem to have been weakened by the Israeli offensive. While the Qassams have thankfully stopped falling, their infrastructure isn’t only material. It is also rooted in the will of a people who elected them in large part because they promised to provide services, like health care and food supply, which are severely needed in the area and which Fatah failed to deliver.

A large part of the professed Israeli strategy in the war was to inflict sufficient damage on Hamas in order to teach the people of Gaza a lesson. The Israeli campaign was meant not only to destroy the infrastructure for rocket launching and supply tunnels from the Sinai but to show Palestinians in Gaza that the policies they supported through voting in the Hamas leadership have brought about too painful consequences and thereby to turn the Palestinian people away from Hamas leaders. Though the jury is still out, it appears that this strategy has not succeeded. Rather, the common perception in Gaza appears to be that Israel was waging an offensive not solely against Hamas but against the population of Gaza for the crime of being Palestinian.

If there is anything that the past month has taught, it is that a violent response to violence is an ineffective strategic solution and a disastrous humanitarian policy. Far too much of the political rhetoric surrounding the offensive on both sides has an eye-for-an-eye flavor too it. One side promising to avenge the sins of the other. And everyone living in fear, insecurity, and under the shroud of violence as a result. On the strategic front, Israel has not succeeded in uprooting Hamas leadership. On the humanitarian front, the IDF has brought relative quiet to the South of Israel but has not entirely lifted the insecurity that hangs over the region. Relationships between the local Jewish population and Israeli-Arabs, including the Negev Bedouin, who are caught in the middle of the conflict, have also grown more tense. Meanwhile, the humanitarian toll on the Gazan side is beginning to surface as foreign journalists enter the Strip and document the “collateral consequences” of warfare.

As a Fulbright Scholar working in Be’er Sheva and Jerusalem on joint Palestinian-Israeli public health interventions, my primary concern is for the health and welfare of people in the region, regardless of their racial, cultural or national identity. Blockades limiting the flow of urgently needed medical supplies into Gaza and restrictions on the passage of Palestinian patients into Israel, where infrastructure and will exists to treat them, raise glaring red flags about the kind of moral and ethical example Israel wishes to represent in the region and its attitude toward the right to health of the Palestinian people. Health care is a privileged sector through which Palestinians and Israelis have always interacted on positive terms, in which concerns over physical welfare have superceded mistrust and overridden barriers to interaction. This is one area which both sides should be encouraging, and it is extremely unsettling to see joint efforts faltering because of mistrust and lack of institutional support. As we move forward beyond the violence, narratives of the many powerful joint Palestinian-Israeli efforts, particularly in health and medicine, need to be brought out and encouraged more than ever.

As in the days and weeks following September 11th, violence in the region has succeeded in opening up an opportunity for a different kind of path to be taken. The election of Obama, the appointment of Middle East envoy George Mitchell, and Mitchell’s early trip to the region signal a different level of engagement in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process by the U.S. Presidency, which for at least the past eight years has taken a better late than never kind of approach. Obama’s commitment to diplomacy, rhetorically and already in practice, needs to be translated into helping actors in this region wage a different kind of negotiation strategy. Rockets and bombs do not change hearts and minds, if they were ever intended to. They only feed a cycle of hatred, violence, and mistrust, and their harshest consequences are always felt by those least deserving – families and children on both sides whose lives become shaped around conflict.

Since its founding, Israel has represented a remarkable new kind of democracy in the region, a bastion for free speech, intellectual fervor, gender equality, law and justice. It is strong enough to defend itself, act on its ideals, and withstand criticism. As a true lover of Israel, a Jewish student and public health academic who has chosen for myself to live in the country, I feel an obligation to bring out my voice in the public debate about the actions of the country that has impassioned me. This, I believe is democratic patriotism, as Americans and Israelis have always understood it. Israel should be the “Light Among Nations” that it was founded to be by working with the full force of its strength toward peace.