Like many Israelis right now, I am inconsolable. I have watched for days as the grief for lost lives and hostages builds. This is hell and the days to come will be worse.
But this moment is unbearable for me for another reason. In those frantic early hours of October 7, as events unfolded, I feared they might spell the final failure of my life’s work—a commitment to peace, justice, equality, and the reduction of political violence.
I have dedicated much of my career to working on grueling political campaigns for parties that I believed were committed to ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and achieving peace. I advise numerous human rights and peace organizations. I have plumbed the depths of ethnonationalist conflict and democracy in my academic work. I write and promote these causes, and I dedicate my time as a volunteer to promoting yet another peace plan that sometimes seems doomed to failure before it is born.
This is not virtue signaling. If anything, my peripatetic activities reflect despair at the failure of every previous effort to reach an agreed political solution to the conflict. However, at every juncture, I felt an inexplicable need to keep trying, to keep exploring paths.
I’m fighting the feeling that there are few paths left to explore.
This month, when war broke out in my home, I was in Armenia, spending hours talking to people whose lives have been torn apart by war. In September, thousands of people from Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian-populated enclave within Azerbaijan, were expelled by a lightning Azerbaijani military attack. In a decrepit Soviet-era kindergarten, quickly repurposed as a shelter, people told me about their overwhelming sense of loss. One man just kept repeating, “Homeless, homeless, homeless.”
War is around us. Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Sudan, Israel: these are not just names, they are people’s lives. Some places, like Nagorno-Karabakh, in the farthest corners of the South Caucasus, are tragically easy for the world to forget—until they explode. Others, like Israel and Palestine, are always on the world’s mind and also explode.
Hamas’s savage attack was a shock—but not a surprise. We have all seen the failure of the peace effort here, as often happens. This is not just a crisis for community peace activists, it is a major failure on the global stage. Lately, the whole notion of resolving conflicts and containing violence through international norms and institutions, the international system itself, seems totally inadequate to the task of protecting people and preventing wars.
One might well ask, what international system? The global institutions built over the decades do not seem to compete at all with the things that really rule the world: money, oil, weapons, interests. Armenians feel betrayed by the international community for its almost total inaction in the face of Azerbaijan’s nine-month siege against Nagorno-Karabakh since December, which left 120,000 people without food, medicine or fuel.
The UN sent its first mission to the enclave in 30 years only after violence drove out most Armenians. Azerbaijan was also frustrated for nearly 30 years by the impotence of international law, as seven additional areas of its sovereign territory conquered by Armenia during the Nagorno-Karabakh war in the 1990s remained under Armenian control.
Israel has flouted international law for decades by expanding settlements, annexing territories conquered in war and suffocating Gaza’s civilian population through a 16-year siege, with few repercussions. Countries that don’t like international courts – including the United States – largely ignore them. Vladimir Putin will likely escape prosecution for his invasion of Ukraine. Hamas was definitely not worried about international prosecution or the fate of the rules-based liberal world order when it massacred more than 1,300 Israelis. Much of the world will see Israel’s brutal retaliation as justified.
Worse still, voters around the world don’t seem to care: many are electing authoritarian populists instead of democratic governments. In turn, those leaders, from Donald Trump to Hungary’s Viktor Orban to India’s Narendra Modi, make a mockery of the international system. Orban disdains the institutional values of the European Union. Trump attempted to drastically reduce funding for the United Nations. These leaders convey to their constituents that power and interests rule, that values are weak and that the international system is a farce.
Perhaps the truth is that many people prefer war and cruelty to peace.
But I can’t leave it there. I’ve also seen the other side—the solidarity that transcends bitter political divisions. My Palestinian and Israeli friends and colleagues comfort each other in times of escalation; We are united by our commitment to ending systems of oppression and injustice, and we deplore violence against civilians. Hundreds of Jewish and Palestinian activists in Israel gathered via Zoom amid the horror of October 7 to organize against the terrible specter of violence in Israel’s mixed Jewish-Arab cities.
As old paradigms of peace collapse, those of us working on new approaches toward peace based on partnership, rather than the division that stokes competition between us or them, generate new energy. Political peace may be light years away, but these rare sparks of optimism are the fuel that will get us there.
By: INTELLIGENCE/Dahlia Scheindlin
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6945390, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-10-19 22:00:07
#Conflict #Gaza #War #surrounds #room #optimism