The Battle to Rebuild Trust

The conference was sponsored by the Institute of the Study of Israel in the Middle East at the University of Denver, the University of Oklahoma's International Programs Center, Netanya Academic College's Strategic Dialogue Center in Israel, and the Three Cultures Foundation in Seville, Spain. Speaker after speaker from Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, the United States, and Europe condemned the deteriorating situation and with little or no recriminations pointed to the need for concrete actions to end the violence, something all participants viewed as the critical first requirement toward rebuilding trust. To that end, a clear consensus emerged, suggesting that trust between Israelis and Palestinians can be sustained only if it is built on a shared perception of long-term mutuality of people-to-people interests. In other words, trust will develop only when the Israeli and Palestinian people develop a vested interest in each other. Most speakers also agreed in seeing a direct correlation between the Israeli-Palestinian violence and the current chilly relations between Israel and Egypt and Israel and Jordan. As Dr. Bahiedin Elibrachi, an Egyptian scholar and an attorney, observed, "The vision for the future [without a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] is dominated by the fear of hegemony [Israeli hegemony]; hence normalization of relations became a threat instead of a renewed hope for progress." Indeed, as long as the violence continues, the prospect of improving bilateral relations remains dim at best. Most of the speakers strongly supported the notion that the Israeli-Palestinian struggle instigates terrorism and feeds into Islamic extremism. Although this conflict is not its only cause or source, terrorism will continue to escalate and destabilize the entire Middle East and beyond as long as it remains unresolved.

While space does not allow for a comprehensive review of the two-day deliberations by more than 25 speakers, here are some of the critical measures highlighted during the conference that, I believe, will generate greater awareness and a call for action that will hopefully usher in a new era in the Middle East.

Rebuilding trust: On how to rebuild trust, Professor Shaul Gabby, the Director of the Institute for the Study of Israel in the Middle East, advanced the idea that "Trust is the foundation of relationships; its existence allows for the buildup of productive ties, while its absence drives the waste of resources in preempting potentially hurtful action." He believes that the achievement of a much higher level of trust therefore requires a strategy based on long-term mutual dependency projects which must be supported and managed by an international network of interested resourceful and committed actors, such as the United States, Russia, China, EU countries and the UN, as well as other Middle East countries. These projects revolve around water, energy, and/or waste management, combined with professional people-to-people efforts in which Palestinians and Israelis work together on social programs through NGO's and other institutions as a core relationship embedded within a larger network of committed international players. This writer suggested that the first prerequisite for building trust is a mutual recognition of each other, not only of the 'right to exist,' but the 'right to self-determination' in one's territories, Israel within the 1967 borders and Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza. These rights include political and demographic safety-valves, to ensure the continuity of Jewish and Palestinian national identities in their respective states.

While there is a growing tendency among the Palestinians to accept Israel's 'right to exist,' a considerably smaller number accept the Jew's 'right to self-determination.' This distinction is of paramount importance, because while Israeli Jews view Israel as the political expression of their inherit right, the Palestinian Authority accept Israel's right to exist as a pluralistic democracy, mainly because it hoped to change in due course Israel's demographic makeup by the influx of Palestinian refugees. This is why Arafat insisted on the right of return at Camp David in the summer of 2000. The eruption of the second Intifadah was able to shatter overnight all the so-called confidence-building measures realized between 1993 and 2000, because they lacked the fundamental requisite on which sustainable trust can be built. Certainly, rebuilding trust involves many other social, economic, educational, religious, psychological, territorial, political, and security measures, and only the combination of these activities on a day-to-day basis can re-establish sustainable trust. Ilai Alon, a professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University, suggested a number of steps to rebuild trust, such as unilateral steps to create credibility, including presentation of positions about trust-building prior to official opening of talks and then the selection of delegations after consultation with each other.

Professor Alon also noted that Jordan can be extremely helpful in promoting trust between Israel and the Palestinians. In the present circumstances, with trust all but shattered and formal negotiations suspended, Professor Menachem Klein, senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, asserted that pursuing track II diplomacy and thus initiating contact between individuals from both sides was an extremely useful way to start to rebuild trust. The Track II approach facilitated the Oslo accords, and it can open up new formal channels of communication if pursued vigorously on all fronts. Water offers a good example of how this approach may work. According to former U.S. Ambassador Edwin Corr, water is viewed by both parties as so important that it remains subject to negotiations even though other areas of interest have been put on the back burner. Thus, multilateral groups are still working on water issues, and however unhappy the Palestinians have been about inequities in its distribution between the settlers and Palestinian communities, on the whole the multiple-track approach has contributed to better relations.

Ending violence: Since all participants agreed that ending the violence was the essential ingredient for rebuilding trust, many offered ideas about how to stop it. Professor Joseph Ginat, Co-Director of the Center for Peace Studies at the University of Oklahoma and the driving force behind the conference suggested, "There is a way to put an end to the vicious circle of violence by adopting the ancient Muslim notion of hudna, whose roots go back to the pre-Islamic period. Hudna means a ceasefire for a period of time specified by the parties in a blood feud; [it] could end the violence for one year, revive tourism in the region, enable international investments in Israel and the Palestinian territories to thrive, and would enable the parties in the dispute to sit down at the negotiating table and try to advance the peace process." Dr. Asa'd Busool, Professor and Department Chair of Arabic Studies at the American Islamic College in Chicago, IL, added that peace cannot come to the region unless violence in all forms, including destroying homes, uprooting trees, and humiliating the Palestinians is stopped. Rateb Amro, a political scientist from Jordan, echoed this message, saying, "From a political and moral point of view, we stand against targeting Israeli civilians . . . and strongly condemn political assassination and believe that this policy will only lead to further escalation of violence and instability in the region."

The role of the press: The role and responsibility of the press provoked lively discussions among participants. From the perspective of this writer and many others, Arab media, which is largely government controlled, plays a major role in shaping public opinion in the region and beyond. If the media is hostile to America and Israel, it is because this is precisely the attitude Arab governments choose to convey to the general public and this in turn negates the premise of trust building. The same of course goes for the Palestinian press in regard to Israel. Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, stated, however, that contrary to the views of the majority, the media does not necessarily contribute much to shaping the Arab and Muslim public opinion. He insisted that the Israeli occupation, America's lack of evenhanded policies in the region, and how these are then perceived are behind the negative views the Arab masses have of the United Sates and Israel. Here too though it was agreed that more balanced reporting and analysis by the media are critical to the rebuilding of trust, because perception and images are often stronger than the reality, and the media remains the prime source of communication that convey these images and thus create the perceptions of the masses.

The role of women: The important role of the women and its effect on the relations between Israelis and Palestinians and on rebuilding trust between the two communities was illuminated by Dr. Camelia Suleiman, who is involved in women's organizations involving Palestinians and Israelis, argued that the conflict between the two parties might have ended much sooner had women played a larger and more active role. In both societies, women are considered the anchor of the family and revered for their role in instilling education in children, religious teaching, and family traditions. "There are three different women's groups in Israel," said Dr. Suleiman, "Jewish women who support the withdrawal of Israel to the 1967 borders and an end to the occupation, and Israeli-Arab women who struggle for more visibility for Arab women in the Israeli public life …they too support a two-state solution . . . and Palestinian women who live in the West Bank and Gaza and who are part of the Palestinian national struggle to end the occupation of their land." According to Dr. Suleiman, when hundreds of thousands of Israeli and Palestinian women join forces and demand an end to the violence and make it their life-long agenda, the politicians will have to heed their voices. Dr. Maya Melzer-Geva spoke about the importance of and the need for workshops where Israelis and Palestinians of all backgrounds gather together to "learn about each other and explore the complexities of their own narratives and of others in the group….There, within the complexities of a discourse based on identities and not on rights, people weave new connections and interrelations between revealed intentions, feelings, fears, anxieties and suspicions, principle overt values and culturally covert codes and assumptions, in order to rebuild trust."

The responsibility of Jewish and Palestinian clergy: The other important issue that received considerable attention is the role of the clergy in Israel and among the Palestinians. The participants largely lamented the absence of an activist clergy that preached for and demanded an end to the vicious cycle of violence that both Islam and Judaism reject. This writer suggested that Jewish and Muslim clergy, men of true religious wisdom, must make their voices heard. More than any others, they have a sacred responsibility to speak out against this raging madness. They must not allow religious lunatics to pervert the holy Koran or distort the moral tenets of the Old Testament in the service of unholy alliance with the devil. Trust, in the final analysis, cannot be rebuilt if religion, which provides the basic tenets of Palestinian and Jewish claims to the same land, is used as a divisive instead of a uniting force.

Ending the occupation: Most speakers insisted that an end to the Israeli occupation is another key to rebuilding trust, and it must begin with freezing the expansion of existing settlements and include the uprooting of the outposts constructed in recent years. In this regard, although many saw Prime Minister Sharon's plan to withdraw from Gaza and a few settlements in the West Bank as inadequate, they accepted that any withdrawal from any territory is good as long as it is coordinated with the Palestinians. Danny Yatom, a member of the Israeli Knesset and former head of the Israeli intelligence, Mosad, spoke about the unsuccessful Israeli-Syrian negotiation in 2000 and also blamed Mr. Sharon for a failure in leadership in rejecting Syrian President Bashar Asad's call that Israel resumes negotiations with Syria over the Golan Heights. Like many others in the conference, Yatom believed that peace with Syria could usher a new era to the Middle East and help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The role and responsibility of the United States: All participants agreed that the United States' role in helping Israelis and Palestinian to make peace remains of paramount importance. Both Egypt's Abdel El Adawy and Professor Moshe Ma'oz, one of Israel's most noted scholars of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, agreed that the Road Map, if implemented, would eventually provide the basis for a permanent two- state solution. The consensus was that the United States remains the only nation that can effectively bring about such an outcome. It was noted that since the creation of Israel in 1948, no agreement between Israel and the Arab States has been made without the direct or indirect involvement of the United States. With the best of intentions, the Bush administration left the Israeli and Palestinians to their own devises, which brought both peoples to the precipice. Mao'z and Adawy also agreed that, along with the United Sates, Egypt can and should play a much larger role to bring about an agreement.

Regrettably, space does not allow me to cite the significant contributions by the other distinguished participants without which the conference would have been incomplete. Those include: Sa'ad Salim Kasim Abudayeh, Dr. David Altman, Mr. Clifford Chanin, Jamal Gharbieh, Ms. Dina Kaldi, Mr. Gerold Mills, Sandra Moratinos, Dr. Reuven Pedatzur, Ted Saad, and Ms Deborah Schlueter. To achieve something concrete from one of the most comprehensive and unbiased discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by academics of exceptional background and experience, it was determined that each participant submit a written paper on the area of his or her expertise to be compiled into a book. The book would then be distributed to policy makers involved in the conflict. In addition, the participants assigned a steering committee comprised of one representative of each of the four sponsoring institutions, representative of the Legacy Project and this writer to come up with concrete, doable, and timely proposals to begin the awesome task of rebuilding trust between Israelis and Palestinians and thereby returning sanity to a region that has witnessed more than its share of tragedies.

Former U.S. Ambassador Edward J. Perkins, currently the Executive Director of the University of Oklahoma's International Programs Center at the University, created a wonderful tone and setting for the opening of the conference and in his closing remarks at the end of the two-day discussions. He challenged the group not to allow complacency to set in and never to succumb to despair at what may appear to be impossible. Israeli and Palestinians, he insisted, are destined to coexist in peace and in harmony, and it is up to us, to people like ourselves, and others to make that dream possible.

While the carnage in Israel and the occupied territories continued, (during the first week of September, twin suicide bombings and the inevitable retaliations by Israel, claimed the lives of nearly 40 Israelis and Palestinians), in Denver, Colorado, a conference of academics tried to sort out ways to rebuild trust between Israelis and Palestinians. The participants agreed that trust between the two parties had virtually evaporated since the second Intifadah, and rebuilding it is essential to any progress. After two days of deliberations, it became clear that though the task is daunting and time is running out, something must be done to end this tragic, all-devouring conflict.

The conference was sponsored by the Institute of the Study of Israel in the Middle East at the University of Denver, the University of Oklahoma's International Programs Center, Netanya Academic College's Strategic Dialogue Center in Israel, and the Three Cultures Foundation in Seville, Spain. Speaker after speaker from Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, the United States, and Europe condemned the deteriorating situation and with little or no recriminations pointed to the need for concrete actions to end the violence, something all participants viewed as the critical first requirement toward rebuilding trust. To that end, a clear consensus emerged, suggesting that trust between Israelis and Palestinians can be sustained only if it is built on a shared perception of long-term mutuality of people-to-people interests. In other words, trust will develop only when the Israeli and Palestinian people develop a vested interest in each other. Most speakers also agreed in seeing a direct correlation between the Israeli-Palestinian violence and the current chilly relations between Israel and Egypt and Israel and Jordan. As Dr. Bahiedin Elibrachi, an Egyptian scholar and an attorney, observed, "The vision for the future [without a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] is dominated by the fear of hegemony [Israeli hegemony]; hence normalization of relations became a threat instead of a renewed hope for progress." Indeed, as long as the violence continues, the prospect of improving bilateral relations remains dim at best. Most of the speakers strongly supported the notion that the Israeli-Palestinian struggle instigates terrorism and feeds into Islamic extremism. Although this conflict is not its only cause or source, terrorism will continue to escalate and destabilize the entire Middle East and beyond as long as it remains unresolved.

While space does not allow for a comprehensive review of the two-day deliberations by more than 25 speakers, here are some of the critical measures highlighted during the conference that, I believe, will generate greater awareness and a call for action that will hopefully usher in a new era in the Middle East.

Rebuilding trust: On how to rebuild trust, Professor Shaul Gabby, the Director of the Institute for the Study of Israel in the Middle East, advanced the idea that "Trust is the foundation of relationships; its existence allows for the buildup of productive ties, while its absence drives the waste of resources in preempting potentially hurtful action." He believes that the achievement of a much higher level of trust therefore requires a strategy based on long-term mutual dependency projects which must be supported and managed by an international network of interested resourceful and committed actors, such as the United States, Russia, China, EU countries and the UN, as well as other Middle East countries. These projects revolve around water, energy, and/or waste management, combined with professional people-to-people efforts in which Palestinians and Israelis work together on social programs through NGO's and other institutions as a core relationship embedded within a larger network of committed international players. This writer suggested that the first prerequisite for building trust is a mutual recognition of each other, not only of the 'right to exist,' but the 'right to self-determination' in one's territories, Israel within the 1967 borders and Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza. These rights include political and demographic safety-valves, to ensure the continuity of Jewish and Palestinian national identities in their respective states.

While there is a growing tendency among the Palestinians to accept Israel's 'right to exist,' a considerably smaller number accept the Jew's 'right to self-determination.' This distinction is of paramount importance, because while Israeli Jews view Israel as the political expression of their inherit right, the Palestinian Authority accept Israel's right to exist as a pluralistic democracy, mainly because it hoped to change in due course Israel's demographic makeup by the influx of Palestinian refugees. This is why Arafat insisted on the right of return at Camp David in the summer of 2000. The eruption of the second Intifadah was able to shatter overnight all the so-called confidence-building measures realized between 1993 and 2000, because they lacked the fundamental requisite on which sustainable trust can be built. Certainly, rebuilding trust involves many other social, economic, educational, religious, psychological, territorial, political, and security measures, and only the combination of these activities on a day-to-day basis can re-establish sustainable trust. Ilai Alon, a professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University, suggested a number of steps to rebuild trust, such as unilateral steps to create credibility, including presentation of positions about trust-building prior to official opening of talks and then the selection of delegations after consultation with each other.

Professor Alon also noted that Jordan can be extremely helpful in promoting trust between Israel and the Palestinians. In the present circumstances, with trust all but shattered and formal negotiations suspended, Professor Menachem Klein, senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, asserted that pursuing track II diplomacy and thus initiating contact between individuals from both sides was an extremely useful way to start to rebuild trust. The Track II approach facilitated the Oslo accords, and it can open up new formal channels of communication if pursued vigorously on all fronts. Water offers a good example of how this approach may work. According to former U.S. Ambassador Edwin Corr, water is viewed by both parties as so important that it remains subject to negotiations even though other areas of interest have been put on the back burner. Thus, multilateral groups are still working on water issues, and however unhappy the Palestinians have been about inequities in its distribution between the settlers and Palestinian communities, on the whole the multiple-track approach has contributed to better relations.

Ending violence: Since all participants agreed that ending the violence was the essential ingredient for rebuilding trust, many offered ideas about how to stop it. Professor Joseph Ginat, Co-Director of the Center for Peace Studies at the University of Oklahoma and the driving force behind the conference suggested, "There is a way to put an end to the vicious circle of violence by adopting the ancient Muslim notion of hudna, whose roots go back to the pre-Islamic period. Hudna means a ceasefire for a period of time specified by the parties in a blood feud; [it] could end the violence for one year, revive tourism in the region, enable international investments in Israel and the Palestinian territories to thrive, and would enable the parties in the dispute to sit down at the negotiating table and try to advance the peace process." Dr. Asa'd Busool, Professor and Department Chair of Arabic Studies at the American Islamic College in Chicago, IL, added that peace cannot come to the region unless violence in all forms, including destroying homes, uprooting trees, and humiliating the Palestinians is stopped. Rateb Amro, a political scientist from Jordan, echoed this message, saying, "From a political and moral point of view, we stand against targeting Israeli civilians . . . and strongly condemn political assassination and believe that this policy will only lead to further escalation of violence and instability in the region."

The role of the press: The role and responsibility of the press provoked lively discussions among participants. From the perspective of this writer and many others, Arab media, which is largely government controlled, plays a major role in shaping public opinion in the region and beyond. If the media is hostile to America and Israel, it is because this is precisely the attitude Arab governments choose to convey to the general public and this in turn negates the premise of trust building. The same of course goes for the Palestinian press in regard to Israel. Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, stated, however, that contrary to the views of the majority, the media does not necessarily contribute much to shaping the Arab and Muslim public opinion. He insisted that the Israeli occupation, America's lack of evenhanded policies in the region, and how these are then perceived are behind the negative views the Arab masses have of the United Sates and Israel. Here too though it was agreed that more balanced reporting and analysis by the media are critical to the rebuilding of trust, because perception and images are often stronger than the reality, and the media remains the prime source of communication that convey these images and thus create the perceptions of the masses.

The role of women: The important role of the women and its effect on the relations between Israelis and Palestinians and on rebuilding trust between the two communities was illuminated by Dr. Camelia Suleiman, who is involved in women's organizations involving Palestinians and Israelis, argued that the conflict between the two parties might have ended much sooner had women played a larger and more active role. In both societies, women are considered the anchor of the family and revered for their role in instilling education in children, religious teaching, and family traditions. "There are three different women's groups in Israel," said Dr. Suleiman, "Jewish women who support the withdrawal of Israel to the 1967 borders and an end to the occupation, and Israeli-Arab women who struggle for more visibility for Arab women in the Israeli public life …they too support a two-state solution . . . and Palestinian women who live in the West Bank and Gaza and who are part of the Palestinian national struggle to end the occupation of their land." According to Dr. Suleiman, when hundreds of thousands of Israeli and Palestinian women join forces and demand an end to the violence and make it their life-long agenda, the politicians will have to heed their voices. Dr. Maya Melzer-Geva spoke about the importance of and the need for workshops where Israelis and Palestinians of all backgrounds gather together to "learn about each other and explore the complexities of their own narratives and of others in the group….There, within the complexities of a discourse based on identities and not on rights, people weave new connections and interrelations between revealed intentions, feelings, fears, anxieties and suspicions, principle overt values and culturally covert codes and assumptions, in order to rebuild trust."

The responsibility of Jewish and Palestinian clergy: The other important issue that received considerable attention is the role of the clergy in Israel and among the Palestinians. The participants largely lamented the absence of an activist clergy that preached for and demanded an end to the vicious cycle of violence that both Islam and Judaism reject. This writer suggested that Jewish and Muslim clergy, men of true religious wisdom, must make their voices heard. More than any others, they have a sacred responsibility to speak out against this raging madness. They must not allow religious lunatics to pervert the holy Koran or distort the moral tenets of the Old Testament in the service of unholy alliance with the devil. Trust, in the final analysis, cannot be rebuilt if religion, which provides the basic tenets of Palestinian and Jewish claims to the same land, is used as a divisive instead of a uniting force.

Ending the occupation: Most speakers insisted that an end to the Israeli occupation is another key to rebuilding trust, and it must begin with freezing the expansion of existing settlements and include the uprooting of the outposts constructed in recent years. In this regard, although many saw Prime Minister Sharon's plan to withdraw from Gaza and a few settlements in the West Bank as inadequate, they accepted that any withdrawal from any territory is good as long as it is coordinated with the Palestinians. Danny Yatom, a member of the Israeli Knesset and former head of the Israeli intelligence, Mosad, spoke about the unsuccessful Israeli-Syrian negotiation in 2000 and also blamed Mr. Sharon for a failure in leadership in rejecting Syrian President Bashar Asad's call that Israel resumes negotiations with Syria over the Golan Heights. Like many others in the conference, Yatom believed that peace with Syria could usher a new era to the Middle East and help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The role and responsibility of the United States: All participants agreed that the United States' role in helping Israelis and Palestinian to make peace remains of paramount importance. Both Egypt's Abdel El Adawy and Professor Moshe Ma'oz, one of Israel's most noted scholars of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, agreed that the Road Map, if implemented, would eventually provide the basis for a permanent two- state solution. The consensus was that the United States remains the only nation that can effectively bring about such an outcome. It was noted that since the creation of Israel in 1948, no agreement between Israel and the Arab States has been made without the direct or indirect involvement of the United States. With the best of intentions, the Bush administration left the Israeli and Palestinians to their own devises, which brought both peoples to the precipice. Mao'z and Adawy also agreed that, along with the United Sates, Egypt can and should play a much larger role to bring about an agreement.

Regrettably, space does not allow me to cite the significant contributions by the other distinguished participants without which the conference would have been incomplete. Those include: Sa'ad Salim Kasim Abudayeh, Dr. David Altman, Mr. Clifford Chanin, Jamal Gharbieh, Ms. Dina Kaldi, Mr. Gerold Mills, Sandra Moratinos, Dr. Reuven Pedatzur, Ted Saad, and Ms Deborah Schlueter. To achieve something concrete from one of the most comprehensive and unbiased discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by academics of exceptional background and experience, it was determined that each participant submit a written paper on the area of his or her expertise to be compiled into a book. The book would then be distributed to policy makers involved in the conflict. In addition, the participants assigned a steering committee comprised of one representative of each of the four sponsoring institutions, representative of the Legacy Project and this writer to come up with concrete, doable, and timely proposals to begin the awesome task of rebuilding trust between Israelis and Palestinians and thereby returning sanity to a region that has witnessed more than its share of tragedies.

Former U.S. Ambassador Edward J. Perkins, currently the Executive Director of the University of Oklahoma's International Programs Center at the University, created a wonderful tone and setting for the opening of the conference and in his closing remarks at the end of the two-day discussions. He challenged the group not to allow complacency to set in and never to succumb to despair at what may appear to be impossible. Israeli and Palestinians, he insisted, are destined to coexist in peace and in harmony, and it is up to us, to people like ourselves, and others to make that dream possible.