Holy War, Holy Peace

holy war, holy peace 4 Holy War, Holy Peace How Religion Can Bring Peace to the Middle East marc gopin 1 2002 3 Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and an associated company in Berlin Copyright © 2002 by Marc Gopin Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gopin, Marc. Holy war, holy peace : how religion can bring peace to the Middle East Marc Gopin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-514650-6 1. Arab-Israeli conict—1993—Peace. 2. Arab-Israeli conict—Religious aspects. 3. Religion and politics—Middle East. I. Title. DS119.76 .G67 2002 956.05—dc21 2001035850 987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper To Ruth Sarah Gopin, my daughter Ruthie I write this for you to give you a spiritual path for the future, a way to be a proud Jew, a Jew who heals, a Jew who loves, who hates only hatred, who forgives for the sake of life, and for the sake of the Divine Spirit that inhabits all things. I give you a way for us to be together always. Find me here if you should ever miss me. Acknowledgments I want to thank my colleagues and friends who have supported me in many ways in the course of this difficult work. Entering into the heart of the Israeli- Palestinian conict and learning how to empathize with the lives and feelings of people on all sides of this tragedy have been wrenching experiences. Sometimes it is difficult to move from day to day, not with the writing, but with the dark knowledge of exactly who of my friends is at risk, who has been hurt, and who has died. I thank many friends for continuing to support me in this writing, such as David Little, Aviva Bock, Julia Lieblich, Gordie Fellman, Andrea Bartoli, Arnold Resnicoff, Ted Sasson, Roger Hurwitz, Yitshak Melamed, Patrick McNamara, Robert Eisen, and Bob Carroll. In particular I want to mention Kevin Avruch for his intellectual mentoring and personal support, Joseph Montville for his unwavering friendship and devotion to our work, no matter how difficult, and Doug Johnston who has courageously marched forward in this eld. I also thank Scott Appleby and Louis Kriesberg, who continue to teach me in many ways. I single out Vamik Volkan, whose psychological genius and personal compassion form the two cornerstones of what I believe the world needs most for a healthy future. I thank him for a lifetime of ser- vice, and for teaching my teachers. With the help of Initiatives for Change (IC), for which I am deeply grate- ful, Bryan Hamlin and I have been partners on this long journey of Israeli and Palestinian friendships, through the exhilaration of breakthroughs and the heartbreak of witnessing the consequences of human failure. Together we have been committed to the human heart as the source of all the trouble and all future hopes. I honor with all my heart his friendship and courage. I also thank too many other members of IC to mention. Charles and Kathy Aquilina, Pierre and Fulvia Spoerri, Dick and Rande Ruffin, Christoph and Marianne viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Spreng, Anne Hamlin, and many others have at times facilitated this difficult process and have been friends to me in the deepest sense. I thank my students at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy for stimu- lating my thinking in class. I thank colleagues at Fletcher for being support- ive friends and guides, especially Eileen Babbitt, Peter Uvin, Dean Bosworth, Joel Trachtman, and Terry Knopf. I thank many friends at Temple Beth Sha- lom of Cambridge, an extraordinary group of people who have put up with my passions and heartbreak around Israel, and my obsessions as a writer. I thank the U.S. Institute of Peace and, in particular, David Smock and Judy Barselou for respecting my work and giving me a much-needed boost of personal encouragement at a critical time. I thank my Israeli friends, whose commitment, each in their own way, to peace and compassion bewilders me in its persistence and lls me with wonder at the surprising capabilities of the human spirit: Yehezkel Landau, Betsy Cohen-Kallus, Eliyahu Mclean, Yehuda Stolov, Rabbi Menahem Frohman. As the years pass, I nd myself less and less able to convey in words my love for and solidarity with them. To my Palestinian friends, to the Abu Ghazaleh family, and to some of the most honorable men in the security forces who will remain nameless here, I thank you for everything you have taught me, for your graciousness and hos- pitality, and for your role model of dignity in the worst of circumstances. I wrote this book always with you in mind and with the peace and justice that we can see together before our eyes. And to Sheikh Abu Saleh, a man of unsurpassed spirituality and humanity whose courage in peacemaking is an astonishing teaching for me. Finally, I thank my family, as always: my wonderful wife, an incredible mother to my daughters, two amazing children, astonishing creations whose gifts, whose beauty, whose laughter and love of life carry me through the most difficult days of my work. Brookline, Massachusetts M. G. March 2001 SEE LIST ix Contents Part I: Analysis 1. The Interaction between Religion and Culture in Peace and Conflict, 3 2. Family Myths and Cultural Conflict, 7 3. Political and Mythic Interdependencies, 37 4. Patterns of Abrahamic Incrimination, 58 5. Conflict, Injury, and Transformation, 92 Part II: Practical Applications 6. Patterns of Abrahamic Reconciliation: Act, Ritual, and Symbol as Transformation, 103 7. The Use of the Word and Its Limits: Dialogue as Peacemaking, 144 8. Ritual Civility, Moral Practices of Interpersonal Exchange, and Symbolic Communication, 160 9. De-escalation Plans and General Steps toward a New Relationship, 186 10. Specific Steps toward a New Relationship, 198 Notes, 229 Bibliography, 255 Index, 261 i 4 analysis 1 4 The Interaction between Religion and Culture in Peace and Conflict The complexity of human social relationships seems to require a degree of healthy conict, by its very nature.1 Yet it is clear that what is a normal part of social intercourse often turns into a phenomenon that is destructive to at least one but usually all parties to a conict over time. This is as true in the life of individuals as it is true in the life of peoples, nations, and religious communities. We all have experienced both productive disagreements as well as destructive conicts. We all have experienced difficult moments of crisis that led inexorably to better self-knowledge, as well as better and deeper relationships, but also personal confrontations awash in resentment and anger that may have died down but were never resolved. They thus fester and be- come shelved in the space we leave in our souls for lifelong regrets. The same holds true for nations and religious civilizations, except that just as some individuals remain unconscious of past mistakes that thwart their abil- ity to ourish, so do many civilizations. Just as, by contrast, other individuals, plagued by feelings of shame over bad habits of the past, tend to forget the goodness that also resides in their souls, or the gifts that are to be found within their families, so do refugees from nations and civilizations. They reject with horror the destructive side of their community, and they tend to forget or need to suppress the gifts that they have within them. They tend to deny that all things change and evolve, depending on how we view them and treat them. They thus squander the cultural assets conducive to a full and ourishing life, as well as the skills necessary to prevent or resolve difficult confrontations. It is a fundamental belief, call it a principle of faith, of those who practice peacemaking or conict resolution that human beings can better resolve conict with aid from others, as well as with the help of various processes of self- awareness and healing. The same holds true of great civilizations, cultures, 3 4 ANALYSIS and historical religions. Just as individuals evolve endlessly, whether for the better or for the worse, until the day that they die, the same holds true for civilizations. What they evolve into is very much up to us, what we put into them, how we treat them, and whether we encourage their evolution along a path of peace or a path of violence, along a path of love or a path of hatred, a path of life or a path of death. There are numerous causes of human conicts, and they all interact in complex ways that theoreticians and practitioners sometimes overlook. In our search for some semblance of order in the chaos and nebulae of conicts, we search often for one overriding causal factor, to nd a way to solve the conict or the damage that results. Often this is self-serving, in that individuals and institutions gravitate toward singular causes to promote singular solutions in which they specialize, thus making themselves useful.

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