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Veteran journalist Orly Halpern writing an excellent piece in the Globe and Mail, deepens the story on the Gazan peacemaker/doctor whose three daughters were killed. The shocking reactions of some Israelis to his agony is an important clue to understanding the deterioration of the political/psychological atmosphere in Israel, and why the country, and its dwindling supporters, may be headed for a clash with the rest of the world.

“I prefer to believe the Israeli army, that a sniper shot from his house, and not [to believe] the doctor,” one Israeli posted on an Israeli news website.

“Is there such a thing as an Arab who is not Hamas?” asked another.

“How can anyone not believe this man?” a third wondered.

Ezzeldeen Abu al-Aish grieves at a Tel Aviv hospital this month. The doctor, whose Gaza home was shelled, worked in Israeli hospitals for more than 20 years.

Ezzeldeen Abu al-Aish had worked in Israeli hospitals for more than 20 years and became a familiar and trustworthy voice during the war as he gave phone interviews to Israeli TV and radio about the situation in Gaza. It was the night before the war ended, and Dr. Abu al-Aish was about to give another phone interview when two Israeli tank shells tore into his apartment. For 3½ minutes, the heart-ripping, bloodcurdling wails of Dr. Abu al-Aish filled the TV studio and living rooms across Israel.

“My daughters, my daughters, oh God, oh God,” cried the doctor, his voice gushing with pain. “I want to save them, to save them. But they are dead. They were hit in the head. They died on the spot.”

The Israeli campaign in Gaza raged for 22 days and claimed the lives of more than 1,300 Palestinians, hundreds of them children. Thirteen Israelis were also killed. But despite the high number of civilian casualties, few Israelis protested. Many expressed indifference or claimed it was “unavoidable.” An overwhelming 94 per cent supported the war, according to a Tel Aviv University poll taken in its second week, after the ground invasion began.

The media coverage of Dr. Abu al-Aish’s anguish forced Israelis to confront the notion that their government was responsible for killing the family of a man of peace, someone who had publicly condemned Hamas, someone who had treated Israeli patients. He’d been considering a move out of Gaza to take a job offer in Canada.

For the first time since the war began, the personal tragedy of a Palestinian civilian in Gaza grabbed Israeli headlines. Since then, Dr. Abu al-Aish’s story has been endlessly debated on Israeli television and radio, discussed online and in print and argued on video on Facebook and YouTube.

Some Israelis expressed remorse, but many reacted by blaming the doctor or Hamas.

One of the most discussed reactions came from Levana Stern, whose three sons were soldiers in Gaza.

She pushed past the reporters interviewing the doctor a day after the shelling, and yelled: “Who knows what weapons you had in your house. … If there hadn’t been fire coming from the house they wouldn’t have fired on it.” She lashed at the reporters, calling them “crazy” for listening to his “propaganda.”

The doctor dropped his head in hands and cried: “They don’t want to know the truth; they don’t want to know the truth.”

Larry Derfner, an American-Israeli columnist at the Jerusalem Post, said that the truth is too painful for Israelis to accept, so some just refuse to believe that innocent civilians were killed.

“The worse it gets, the harder you have to defend it,” he said. “There’s too much to admit, there’s too much guilt to take on.”

We call this ‘cognitive dissonance’ in our field of conflict resolution, borrowing it from social psychology. It means that people cannot cope with the reality of this doctor and his slaughtered family. His identity as a peace loving Palestinian strips away all of their rationalizations for the killing of his children, for the actions of their sons and husbands in the war. It is unbearable, and so they must demonize him or dismiss him in some way.

Often in our field people will say that such cognitive dissonance leads to destructive reactions, like those of the people in the story. I don’t think so. I think, on the contrary, that this is precisely what anyone goes through when they start to strip away falsehoods that prevent average people from exercising their conscience. That is why Orly has done such an important job of not just exposing the doctor’s story but also telling the tale of what Israelis need to face about their future if their sole approach to their neighbors is one of conquest and punishments. They cannot continue to exist with the fantasies of their youth. They must face the consequences of victory, the consequences of all these dead Palestinian children. They have to decide whether the price for their self-image, for their souls, is worth it.

Finally I add these letters from Bryan Hamlin and Yehezkel Landau who report on the doctor who they both know. Yehezkel was given his phone number by my old peace partner, Bryan Hamlin of Boston, who worked closely with the doctor at one time. And so, this becomes more and more real for me. These are all my friends of twenty five years who have been swimming upstream, always hoping that people will see a better way than violence. Our hearts are broken but we persist. Here are the two letters:

Dear various friends,

I write to tell a very tragic story and to ask your advice. Soon after the Israeli bombing of Gaza began I phoned a friend of mine Dr. Izzeldin Abulaish who lives in Gaza. Anne and I had got to know him when he did a year’s postdoctoral program at the Harvard School of Public Health. Izzeldin is a gynaecologist and used to work in the Israeli town of Beersheva where, as he would say with a smile, he had delivered many Israelis.

This past September his wife was suddenly taken ill and before any real diagnosis could be had she died leaving him with 8 children. When I phoned some days ago it was ten at night for him and he was huddled in his apartment with his 8 children, cold, with no power (his cellphone still worked), and little food. He was amazingly upbeat and talked of his faith his and gratitude for Israeli friends phoning him to ask after him.

Yesterday, while Anne was driving home she heard on National Public Radio an account from Quil Lawrence who he had talked with ..and the name sounded to Anne very similar to our friend. A tank shell had hit this home and three childred were killed. This morning I phoned the Izzeldin’s cellphone hoping that it would be someone else it had happened to. As soon as Izzeldin answered I knew something was seriously amiss – gone was his usual cheery voice. “Is it true ?” I said. Then I heard the story – two tank shells destroying their home, killing four children – three of his daughters and a niece, and injuring four others, one, another daughter, seriously. “It’s a crime”. he said. “You must get people to know the truth”. He still expressed gratitude for Israeli friends that had kept in touch by phone. Amazingly, although angry, there still seemed to be no hatred.

I am devastated for my friend. I thought I should tell you, my friends and acquaintances. How can we end this madness?

Bryan Hamlin

Letter from Yehezkel Landau:

Dear friends, I phoned Dr. Abuleish today (thank you, Bryan, for his number) and spoke with him for about ten minutes, offering whatever solace and support I could. His spirit was strong and his faith unbroken. I am in awe of him. The most heartbreaking moment was when I offered condolences over the prior death of his wife, and he said that, as he was trying to support his 12-year-old son in the wake of his sisters’ tragic deaths, the son said, “Daddy, you should be happy. Mommy wanted her daughters close to her and so they are now all together.” So both son and father are supporting each other through this terrible ordeal.

Shalom, Yehezkel

Dr. Abu Al-Aish and one of his surviving children

THE FOLLOWING IS A LETTER BY MUTSUKO SUGITA, WHO RECENTLY SPENT A MONTH DOING PEACE WORK WITH ISRAELIS AND PALESTINIANS. HERE IS HER RESPONSE TO MY PREVIOUS POST ABOUT THE GAZAN PEACE DOCTOR. What is important about the letter is that it comes from a place of admiration and solidarity but at the same time a willingness to honestly share the world’s disappointment with Israel, as well as possible lessons from Japan’s experience. Here it is:

I also felt strong shock when I watched Doctor’s story on the CNN last week. It is a living hell.
“I wanted every Palestinian treated in Israel to go back and say how well the Israelis treated them,” he said. “That is the message I wanted to spread all the time. And this is what I get in return?” “Why did they do this?” I don’t know. I really don’t have an answer for him. During my stay in Israel, I found a lot of answers for the questions that I had. However, I still have a question that I couldn’t find the answer during my stay. “Why they are destroying their culture by themselves?”
“Every culture is beautiful.” This is the words that my friend told me when I told her that her country’s culture is very beautiful. It became one of my most favorite words. I still remember how much I was amazed by the beautiful view of Israel and Palestine, friendly people, great hospitality, creativity and wisdom, monotheistic spirituality and ancient heritage. From my eyes who is from Far East, who imagined Arabian night and dreamed to go to the mysterious and beautiful world, everything looked very unique and sparkling.

I was reporting and sharing the beauty of their culture to my family and friends, as much as people I could. But they didn’t let me enjoy their beautiful culture for my entire stay. The war in Gaza started. My family started asking me to go back home. I had to lie to my family that there is no riots, I’m not taking any bus and I’m feeling ok. When my family received big box of souvenir from Israel/Palestine from me, they told me that they were scared to open and eat. I just wanted to share the beautiful culture that I experienced. They told me not to go there anymore. They are suffering from the images on the the TV. War in Gaza completely wiped out the beautiful image of their culture from our mind. I admire that they preserve their culture very well, but how they preserve their culture make us disillusioned.

“Someone of authority must come to the Middle East and say, as the soldier said at the end, ‘Enough, go home. Enough’.” Someone told me that what differentiated the history of Japan and Israel was the lessons that they learned from the tragedy (even though this is not a fare comparison). Japan lost millions of people by the war in Pacific, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But we relatively live in harmony with the US and other countries. We abandoned the right to go to war and decided to seek the eternal peace because we learned that “the war was wrong”. There was someone of authority who came to Japan and told us ‘Enough, go home. Enough’. The GHQ ingrained us the sense of guilt for our mistakes by the War Guilt Information Program (WGIP). It was not a pleasant treatment for us at all, but it worked for us in that sense. On the other hand, Jews learned that they were taken and murdered. Self-protection is on their hands, otherwise we will be vanished.
Now while they protect themselves and culture, they destory their culture. Culture stay inside of people. But foreigners eyes reflect on how culture is properly preserved and displayed. In fact, one of my friend who work for tourism in Israel lost his full-time shift to part-time. PLease let me praise them more. Please let me celebrate on their beautiful culture together. I don’t need to have an answer of my question but I want to have chance to share with people the beauty of their culture that I experienced.

The Peace Statue in Nagasaki Peace Park, surrounded by doves

Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, before the successful Gaza War with Hamas

At first I was shocked when I read the story of the Gazan peace doctor who has been working with Israelis for years, whose daughters were decapitated and cut to pieces in front of him, from an Israeli shell aimed without care or caution at Hamas.

But then I went through a second stage of reaction when I was warmed by how amazing a reception he received in Israel. His surviving wounded daughter was operated on to save her eye as he was surrounded by sobbing Israeli Jewish colleagues. Here are excerpts from the story:

“I dedicated my life really for peace, for medicine,” said Dr. Abuelaish, who does joint research projects with Israeli physicians and for years has worked as something of a one-man force to bring injured and ailing Gazans for treatment in Israel.

“The Israeli Defense Forces does not target innocents or civilians, and during the operation the army has been fighting an enemy that does not hesitate to fire from within civilian targets,” said the spokesman, speaking anonymously on behalf of the army.

The Israeli public became witness to the Abuelaish family’s tragedy on Friday night when a conversation that a television journalist was having with Dr. Abuelaish was broadcast live.

After the broadcast, an ambulance was sent to a border crossing to pick up the doctor and the two wounded girls. His four other children remain in Gaza and are expected to join him in Israel soon.

At the Chaim Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer on Saturday, Dr. Abuelaish was surrounded by Israeli colleagues. Several were crying. Tammie Ronen, a professor of social work at Tel Aviv University, knelt beside the doctor. “You cannot let yourself collapse, you have your living children to take care of,” said Dr. Ronen. Dr. Ronen had worked with him in researching the effects of conflict-related stress on Palestinian children in Gaza and Israeli children in Sderot, a border town that has been the main target of Gazan rocket fire in recent years.

“Tell them who my children were,” said Dr. Abuelaish, spotting Anael Harpaz, an Israeli woman who runs a peace camp in New Mexico for Israeli and Palestinian girls that three of his daughters attended, including his eldest, Bisan, 20, who was killed Friday. The other two daughters who were killed were Mayar, 15, and Aya, 13. The doctor’s niece who died, Nur Abuelaish, was 17.

Dr. Abuelaish recalled that it was Bisan who, after her mother died of leukemia, urged him to continue his work in Israel, saying she would look after the younger children.

In a hospital room, Ms. Harpaz held 17-year-old Shada Abuelaish’s hand as a nurse placed drops of medicine on her tongue. The girl’s forehead was covered in bandages as was her right eye, which had been operated on in hopes of saving it. The niece who was wounded is in critical condition, with shrapnel wounds.

Outside the room, Ms. Harpaz crumpled into a chair, sobbing.

I read this story several times in several versions for a number of days, and then weeks. I just was confused by something but could not pin it down. I was amazed at the rapidity of medical attention for this man’s remaining children because he personally knew Israelis and they knew him so well. Also, it is well known in the community of peacebuilders that Israeli hospitals are a remarkable exception to the deeply segregated society, and that it is the one place, when bodies are broken, that Arab and Jew seem to get along well.

Then it donned on me what confused me. Jabalya refugee camp is comprised of hundreds of thousands of people who used to live in Ashkelon, in Ashdod, in what is now part of Southern Israel. Many of those refugees are still hoping to come back, or for some justice and acknowledgment by the world of what happened to them in 1948.

So I thought maybe everyone from Jabalya should get to know some Israeli, like this doctor, be invited to visit, maybe live in Israel, and the whole conflict would be gone. But, then I remembered, you can only be welcomed back with love and open arms if your body is broken, and your three sisters were cut into pieces.

So then I wondered, maybe each refugee family should  get to know any Israeli, then surrender one child to be cut down by bullets, killed, and another child wounded, and then the survivors invited to recover and live in Israel. Then the whole conflict would be over. This would be ‘the right of return’ achieved through child sacrifice. It sounds barbaric but maybe it would be more orderly, more predictable, less traumatizing, at least for the survivors. I thought maybe it would be more efficient and faster to just skip the war part and get to the child sacrifice. And we can do it proportionally to be fair. Find out the proportion of Palestinian kids and Jewish kids who are killed every ten years, say, line them up and shoot them, and then welcome everyone to fall into each other’s arms with guilt and grief and regret, and then build a new world for the survivors together. We can call the children’s killing place, Babi Yar, or Bergen Belsen, or Deir Yassin, or Sabra and Shatila.

Now that the war has left Hamas in power, and now that more and more stories will emerge in Israel of what really happened, and now that Hamas will be determined to build bigger and better rockets, I wonder how long it will take for Israeli liberals who supported the war by the thousands to feel cheated, betrayed, as Americans came to feel after Abu Ghraib. Don’t know. The evidence in this conflict is that there is very little learning going on, an endless cycle of revenge that has fed successive generations of fighters, criminals–call them what you like–on both sides.

Of course, that is why I place my trust in outsiders to guide, with a strong hand, those sad children of Abraham who place their undying faith and trust not in God but in guns, even as they scream their prayers in synagogues. Such is war in the “Holy Land”, but it does not resemble the religion of my youth.

I cannot abide this deterioration of great cultures in these decades of my life. After 9/11 and in the wake of the craze of suicide bombings in the Islamic world I exposed every nook and cranny of extremism in that world. I was interviewed on television constantly by a world thirsting to know what was wrong with Islam.

And now we face an overwhelming Israeli support for this use of so much excessive force that anyone not blinded by prejudice and fear of annihilation would call the blowing up of 400 children and the wounding of thousands more a war crime. I see a world of Jews and Judaism, especially Orthodox Judaism, sinking to endless depths in support of this violence, and I must ask what we asked of Islam, what has gone wrong with Jewish culture, with Judaism?

The answer in both cases was never really about the religion, or about the culture. What is right or wrong about Islamic or Jewish culture has always been there. These are conservative cultures that conserve every last text of history, and they therefore are a repository for every political and military view imaginable. Comes along states and powerful forces of history and they mold and shape to their needs. They reek havoc on the human psyche, a psyche waiting to be ordered, to obey, to follow blindly whoever says, ‘I will protect you, but you must kill for me, you must thirst for blood, you must give me some of your children, you must kill the children of others, and then I will make you safe’.

Stanley Milgram and others have proved the inexorable and eternal potential of the human psyche to move in this direction. Yes, some always protest, but most fall prey to orders, to the promise of safety, and the order that this way, the way of killing and murder, is the only way to live, to guarantee life. Life through blood, through the shedding of the blood of children.

This is not religion or anti-religion, this is the tale of humanity. And the obedient killers only retreat from their killing sprees when someone in authority orders them to retreat, just as happens at the end of Waltz with Bashir, or I should say, at the end of the Sabra and Shatila Massacre.

Someone of authority must come to the Middle East and say, as the soldier said at the end, ‘Enough, go home. Enough’. Is it George Mitchell? Is it Barack Obama? Is it the Son of David?Is it every major leader in the Middle East together with Obama?

Must they come together with the leaders of the European world, and their churches, a world that destroyed the body and the psyche and the hopes and dreams and the decency of my powerless people for a thousand endless years? Do they all have to come together to Jerusalem, to the Jews who finally have weapons after a thousand years of passivity? Do they have to plead with these Jewish people, plead for the life of the Palestinian people? Do they need to say to them, “Dai! Enough! We are sorry for history, we promise never to kill you again in history, we will stand with your right to life, but we are ordering you to stop, we are ordering you to no longer sacrifice in blood in order to live”? Everyone is waiting, everyone is afraid, but we do not know who is giving the orders. Who can order us to stop? But someone must. Someone must order, with love and forgiveness, Dai kevar. Dai. Habibi, dai kevar.

Sabra and Shatila Massacre, 27 years ago

Rabbi Frohman

Rabbi Froman, who we have written about before, is determined to convince the Israeli leadership to speak to Hamas. The pressure to do so is mounting, even now in the capital of Israel’s only real ally, the United States. It is especially mounting due to the slaughter of civilians in Gaza, and the war crimes that are likely to be exposed in detail by the Western media’s entry now into Gaza. But Rabbi Froman always has one idee fixe, namely, that religious people need to lead the way into the conversation with Hamas, an odious idea for government people in general. Rabbi Froman is one of the most courageous and controversial peacemakers in Israel. Notice how he empathically engages his Jewish listeners. What one cannot see here is how he does exactly the same thing as he engages his Arab audiences. This combination is a rare gift and goes to the heart of true peacemaking.  Here are excerpts from his latest article:

During the “Gaza War” the question of how Israel defined its goals for the operation kept resurfacing time and again. It is morally and pragmatically wrong to stop half-way. “Changing the security reality” and “obtaining a lasting calm” are worthy goals. But as Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav said: “Have no fear at all,” and go all the way. Do not fear to define the operation’s targets as mid-way stops en route to the final goal of peace.

In brief, there are two ways to win the war: Either force your enemies to capitulate entirely or make them change their mind so they cease defining themselves as your enemies. Do we currently have the capability of entirely effacing Hamas? On the other hand, can we change Hamas’ hostile stance? From years’ experience dealing with Hamas leaders and their ideology, I can say that there is such a chance and we should try.

The election of the first black president of the U.S., Barack Obama, makes one believe that surprising changes can happen. Hamas’ basic hostility toward Israel and the U.S. is rooted in its feeling that “the world is against it.” However, that may soon change. Obama is about to give Hamas an opportunity to change its hostile stance. From my acquaintance with the Hamas leadership and its state of mind, it will not remain indifferent to such an overture and will be willing to take action to prove it is not part of the forces fighting world peace. It may consider a peace treaty with the Jews as serving its interests of gaining recognition by the U.S. and the West.

Should we assist Hamas in reaching that decision? Should we reach an agreement with it that will change its stance toward us and the world? Answering that question requires a detailed debate on many issues, including the nature of Islam, its accommodation of change, expected developments in the international arena and relations between the PLO and Hamas, as well as how we view our ties with our neighbors.

For now, perhaps it’s best to raise questions concerning the goals of the war in Gaza. After all, aren’t peace talks the best way to “change the security reality” and obtain “a long-term calm”? Isn’t it best to use the blow Hamas suffered to have it change its position?

It certainly is, but it’s easier said than done. It’s easier to remain entrenched in one’s preconceptions. Changing those preconceptions requires new ways of thinking. For instance, to successfully negotiate with Hamas, one needs to understand how the religious organization thinks. From my personal experience, those who understand that best are religious Jews. If so, then we should send our rabbis to speak to Hamas. Common sense shows chances of their succeeding in talks are greater.

Even the people who claim to lead the Israeli peace camp and Kadima – which splintered from Likud because it allegedly wanted to make peace – are scared to say the “Gaza War” was fought to obtain peace. In a situation where peace is considered an unrealistic objective, we need men of faith to return our former glory. Men of faith who will bring back our faith in our original beliefs, Zionism’s original belief as is written in Leviticus: “I will give peace in the land.”

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Blessed Are the Peacemakers is a new series in marcgopin.com that will feature writing by or about significant peacemakers who are confronting the conflicts facing humanity with courage, creativity, and passion.

The essay below is written by Hind Kabawat, the foremost peacemaker of Syria and my partner of five years in Middle Eastern peacemaking:

WHAT THE MIDDLE EAST NEEDS IS THE “AUDACITY OF HOPE”

For the last five years or so, I have been actively working with Jewish colleagues in the US and elsewhere to help broker a lasting reconciliation between Israel and its Arab neighbours. But in the wake of the carnage in Gaza, it is impossibly difficult to be optimistic about the future of the peace process in the region. Though Israel has apparently has had its way by force of arms, it has won this so-called “victory,” at a terrible cost to itself and its neighbours.

The real legacy of the Gaza War is likely to be the further hardening and entrenching of the intense antipathy of the Arab and Muslim world to the presence of the Jewish state in the heart of the Middle East. Is this the outcome the Israeli government and public really desire? Do they honestly think their ongoing security will be guaranteed decade after decade by forever brutalizing the Palestinian people? Do they think they will acquire the political legitimacy in the region, they crave, by keeping the Arab people of the former Palestine “penned” like animals into their Gaza gulag without any hope of creating a viable economy, a functional political system and a future for their children. The Israelis may think so. But they are wrong.

Has Israel a right to exist? Only the most extreme and intractable elements in the Arab world now say, “No.” As almost all informed Israelis know, most of the Arab world has long ago accepted the reality of a Jewish state in the Middle East. Certainly until now. So why does the Israeli leadership compromise this goodwill among the wider Arab community by engaging in acts of such carnage and barbarism as the world has witnessed in Gaza over the last twenty days. It is hard to fathom. It truly beggars the imagination.

Israelis, of course, justify such over-the-top military brutality because of the Hamas rockets targeted on southern Israel. Nobody in the Arab world, with any sense, approves of such unprovoked provocations. And before the Gaza campaign, Hamas was generally a marginalized political force outside of Gaza which been encouraged in the beginning by Israel to weakness the Palestinian Authority. But, in reality, what did all these Hamas missile attacks actually accomplish. Very little. A few-very few-unfortunate Israeli fatalities and a modicum of material damage. For this, Israel proceeded to flatten Gaza to the ground, leave hundreds of thousands of people homeless and destitute and over a thousand souls-half of them children-dead. There is an old phrase, “cracking a peanut with a sledgehammer.” Is there a metaphor that better describes the Israeli government’s action in Gaza? The adjective “disproportionate” has been used over and over again during the last few weeks to describe the Israeli campaign in Gaza. But disproportionate is a sadly “clinical’ world to describe the death, destruction and suffering of the Palestinian people.

From who? The Democratic civilized country!!!!! Israel….

So where do we go from here? Again, another ceasefire has been called between Israel and Hamas. But how long will it last? The hatred between many elements on the Arab Street against Israel is now more intense, more visceral than ever. During the course of the Gaza campaign, commentators around the world made allusions to the Holocaust, another instance of a brutal enemy, armed to the teeth, inflicting horrendous suffering on an essentially defenseless people. Obviously, the scale of the devastation is different. But spiritually how different is Gaza from Auschwitz? The lesson the Holocaust taught the Jews was seemingly this: Slaughter your enemy before they slaughter you. Is this the lesson the Israeli government wants Arabs and Palestinians to learn from Gaza? No mercy. Just kill, kill, kill.

Such a strategy is, literally, a complete dead-end for both sides-a course of action whose inevitable conclusion is an unthinkable Armageddon in the Middle East where the casualties on both sides will be in the millions, not the thousands. It is only a matter of time before “both” sides truly possess weapons of mass destruction. So how do we-Palestinian and Israeli, Arab and Jew-pull ourselves back from the brink? COMPROMISE is surely the only solution. But though both sides have been talking compromise (paying lip service to it) since the Oslo Accord, no one, on either side, has really been practicing it. For years, Israel has embraced the “two-state solution,’ at the same time as they systematically permitted hundreds of thousands of Jews to settle in the occupied Arab lands of the West Bank. So much for compromise. So much for the two-state solution. And unfortunately many Arabs today are certain that Israel doesn’t want a two states solution.

Ironically, the Gaza Holocaust occurred just days before the inauguration of the first African-American president of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama, an epochal event that is occurring just forty-one years after Martin Luther King made his famous speech, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, “dreaming” about a time when the racial divide in America would finally be bridged. Forty-one years ago, Arabs and Israelis were killing each other. They still are.

As we despair the wreckage in Gaza, let us pause to reflect on these extraordinary days in America. Barack Obama is the new 44th President of the United States and Black and White America has been reconciled. Who could have imagined just a few short years ago that the descendents of the slaves who built the White House would be living there as the “lord and master”? Why can such miracles occur in America and not in the Middle East? Well, the reason is because, one by one, Americans began to realize the absurdity of treating one’s neighbor (whether they be black or white, brown or yellow, Jew, or Christian, or Arab, gay or straight) as your enemy as opposed to your friend and colleague.

Barack Obama has often talked, and indeed written a book, about the “Audacity of Hope.” That is exactly what is missing in the Middle East. Audacity. Courage. Hope. It is time to harness HOPE in this beautiful historic part of the world, which we all share together. It is time to preach the gospel that we will all be stronger if we work together to create ONE COMMUNITY in the Middle East-Arabs, Jews and Christians, Sunni or Shia, Palestinians or Israelis. Maybe I am an idealist. But so too was the Reverend Martin Luther King who dared to say, I HAVE A DREAM. Rev. King’s dream has become a reality in the United States. Our dream can become a reality here too. All of us in the region have a choice: more Gazas. More wars. More hatred. Or work tirelessly, day by day, year by year, to make the dream of peace and compromise a reality.

But for now let’s all of us includes our leaders in the region Arabs and Israelis to give the Palestinian People, who are our brothers and sisters the Audacity of Hope.

Hind Aboud Kabawat/ Damascus, Syria

Recipient of the 2007 Women’s Peace Initiative Award awarded by the Tanenbaum Centre for Interreligious Understanding of New York.

Hind Kabawat

A surprise development in the million dollar question of who President Obama will appoint to oversee  Israeli/Palestinian conflict intervention. I had lobbied hard in these pages earlier in the year for George Mitchell to be sent in. More recently there had been much speculation and controversy over the appointment of Dennis Ross. Serious media reports now indicate that former Senator Mitchell may be a strong possibility, and that this will meet with a much better reception in the world beyond the United States. I want to reiterate my arguments earlier for why Mitchell is crucial.

Here is an excerpt from Change in U.S. Middle East Policy:

The president must be a person who sees the need for constant engagement on the ground in Israel, so that both sides have a third party they can rely on to push for compliance to agreements. Both sides of the conflict need a U.S. president who understands that there is no military solution to this conflict, and that careful negotiation has yielded the most hope and progress over the years. The president must have a keen understanding of the Jewish community of Israel, but also of the Arab world.

I once had a conversation with Sen. George Mitchell about what worked in his successful intervention in Northern Ireland. The answer was deeply committed engagement in which he as a special envoy could personally represent the president’s wishes and guarantees. This meant that as he negotiated, he could help both sides commit to a step-by-step process of positive change.

Here is an excerpt from What Exactly is Pro-Israel?

The American people must decide what is pro-Israel and what is anti-Israel. Some interesting lessons learned come from Northern Ireland. On March 26, 2007 Ian Paisley, co-founder of the DUP party of Northern Ireland, sat side by side with Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein, his most reviled enemy, and the two of them pledged their full participation in an Irish government. This is the same Ian Paisley who had consistently been the voice of Protestant opposition and demonization of Catholics. This is the same Sinn Fein that had represented the Irish Republican Army as it carried out decades of violence against Protestants. How did these enemies get to 2007? There was a little stop along the way in 1998, in which the United States and one George Mitchell played a central role. In 1998, former Senator George Mitchell, of Irish descent, oversaw the completion of the historic Good Friday Accord that led eventually to the power sharing arrangements which Northern Ireland now enjoys. He was supported by another man of partial Irish descent, President Bill Clinton. Senator Mitchell once told me in person exactly how he managed to successfully outmaneuver the spoilers in the Irish/Protestant conflict. He explained to me: I had a pad of paper with my handwritten notes. I had the only copy. On it I placed what each side pledged to do, and exactly when and in what sequence they would do it. I let them know that if either side failed in the sequence, then the President of the United States would publicly lay the blame for the failure of the entire accord on the side that had broken their word. These words were so simple, so remarkable, so pristine in their understanding of negotiation and arbitration. And this is precisely what has been missing from Palestinian/Israeli peace processes from the very beginning. It is not as if the American road to Irish peacemaking was easy. There were spoilers in America, just as there are now regarding the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. There were people on both sides who thought they were pro-Irish. But were they pro-Irish all those decades or anti-Irish? In the end, it was Mitchell and Clinton who were the most pro-Irish, because they stopped the killing of Irish children once and for all. It goes without saying that the issues were exceedingly complex, that it took years to identify the compromises, and that Mitchell’s charisma and skills added up to much more than a pad of paper. However, what was irreplaceable was the American political will to authorise Mr. Mitchell to boil it all down to that pad of paper and its conditions. Perhaps it is time to finally tell our congressmen to tell George Mitchell to go to the Holy Land, with a single pad of paper in hand, armed with the only weapon necessary: the American will to write on that pad of paper what needs to be written, what everyone knows must be written. How many more Palestinian and Jewish children have to die before the American people find the willpower to send a brilliant negotiator to the Middle East with a single pad of paper?

SO PLEASE WRITE TO PRESIDENT OBAMA RIGHT AWAY WITH A MESSAGE OF SUPPORT FOR MITCHELL’S APPOINTMENT, AND AT THE VERY LEAST THE APPOINTMENT OF A TEAM FOR THE ISRAELI PALESTINIAN CONFLICT THAT WILL TRULY WORK FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE.

George Mitchell

President Obama at the Lincoln Memorial

This is a conversation on the Religion and Ethics Newsweekly of PBS that I wanted to share with you. Here is the link to the video, and below is the transcript of part I.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Now, a conversation about the spirit of the country on the eve of the Obama inauguration. Alice McDermott is a writer, a National Book Award winner, whose latest novel is “After This.” Rabbi Marc Gopin is director of the Center on Religion, Diplomacy, and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University in Virginia. And Dr. Robert Franklin is president of Morehouse College in Atlanta.

Welcome to all of you. Bob Franklin, the mood of a country is an ambitious and sometimes elusive thing to try to get at. But what do you sense, especially among African Americans?

Dr. ROBERT FRANKLIN (President, Morehouse College, Atlanta, GA): I think that Barack Obama’s election has evoked a sense of renaissance – of rebirth, renewal of our confidence and deep spirit of hopefulness that America can truly live out the meaning of its creed, as Dr. King said in 1963. And what I encounter all around the county is a sense of new possibility. At my college, Morehouse, two day following the election we gathered the students. We had a couple thousand students in the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel on the Morehouse campus, and I asked the guys, “Look you have an open mike today. I’d just like to know what is the meaning of this for you, your families,” and they said, “Dr. Franklin, we were very excited. We feel that this is just tremendous. It shows America’s greatness. But we really didn’t appreciate the full impact of this until we called home and heard mothers and grandfathers weeping on the other end of the phone,” and that sense that their prayers were being fulfilled is just amazing at this time.

ABERNETHY: And some of them said some things to you about their own prospects?

Dr. FRANKLIN: Oh, I’ll tell you, it was an amazing theme that began to emerge that can be summarized in two words: no excuses. I mean, one after the other they got up and said, “You know, after this election it means there’re no excuses for our academic underperformance, for our irresponsible behavior – no excuses. And one of the young men looked at the rest of the students and said, “You guys, there are a few of you who come to class late, a few of you who are not prepared for class – no excuses.” So it’s interesting the way in which the sense that Obama has achieved this, we are now able to achieve. America permits achievement.

ABERNETHY: Is that showing up in work habits, in homework done?

Dr. FRANKLIN: It already has, believe it or not.

ABERNETHY: Really?

Dr. FRANKLIN: Yes, I’ve already seen this sense in the guys. You know, at Morehouse we teach students how to become Renaissance men with social conscience and global perspective, and we talk about the importance of being well-read and well-spoken and well-traveled, well-dressed and well-balanced. And already these guys are saying, “You know, Obama’s a Renaissance man.” He reads. He writes, Alice. He writes coherent, elegant sentences in his own hand. Gee whiz, that’s refreshing.

ABERNETHY: Well, that’s refreshing. It’s amazing.

Dr. FRANKLIN: It really is inspiring college students.

ABERNETHY: Alice McDermott, what about the rest of the country? Bob Franklin is talking about how it is for African Americans. What about the people you know, and the people you’ve written about?

ALICE MCDERMOTT (Author): Well, first I have to start with as a writer how wonderful it is to once again hear people talk about language as something that does something other than obscure and misdirect – that wonderful, beautiful language is not just rhetoric that we dismiss, but something that can inspire us and speak to our hearts and speak to our spirits. It’s, as a writer, it’s been a wonderful resurgence of hope for me on a personal level that Obama’s language and Obama’s speech has once again opened up, I think to all of us, the possibility of what words can do in a good way.

ABERNETHY: But it’s not all euphoria is it? I mean, isn’t there some skepticism, too?

Ms. MCDERMOTT: Well, I think we all have to, every once in a while, keep our feet on the ground and be reminded not only of the troubles ahead and the situation. And I think Obama has done a very good job at reminding us of this, that the reality is that we still have a long road. And I think what most people have appreciated from both sides – Democrats, Republicans, white and black, and hesitant about this presidency and euphoric over it – I think the sense that we can have reasonable discourse again, that we’re not angry at each other all the time, that we can acknowledge one to the other that we don’t agree on all this but there are some things we can agree on and we can speak about.

ABERNETHY: Rabbi Gopin, your special field is conflict resolution, international mainly, I think. You’re just back from Jerusalem?

Rabbi MARC GOPIN (Director, Center on Religion, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution, George Mason University): Yes.

ABERNETHY: What do you hear, what do you hear there about expectations?

Rabbi GOPIN: Well, as a matter of fact I gave a speech just three days ago in Jerusalem at a place that was a bipartisan center for meetings of Palestinians and Jews – a lot of wonderful people who are not on the news, who are relating to each other constantly. And I was amazed by one comment from a very religious young Jewish man who was looking to Obama as somebody who would be a spiritual savior for the Middle East because of his example of bipartisanship and his example of what Alice was talking about – the redemptive power of words to inspire and to make change, and also the call to responsibility.

ABERNETHY: So, we want this new president who’s going to be coming in, we want him to solve all the problems of the American economy, we want him to deal with global warming, we want him to solve a couple of wars, and now you’re saying that people in the Middle East want him to be their spiritual savior. Is that what you said?

Rabbi GOPIN: I’m amazed at the language, but I also have to say that one of the reasons why people see this as a prophetic voice – his as a prophetic voice – because his is a call to responsibility. I think one of the reasons why every time he speaks he practically makes me weep is because he reminds me for the first time in 40 years of my heroes from 40 years ago who died – Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, and others who didn’t just say I will take care of you. It was a call to responsibility. It was something that we would all do together. It was enormously empowering, so not only am I moved, but my 12-year-old daughter and my seven-year-old daughter were calling people all over the country – kids their age – to register their families to vote. I mean it was an amazing moment for America, and people around the world are sensing that.

ABERNETHY: But let me get back, Alice, let me get back to this skepticism or, you know, realism or whatever one might call it. The people that you write about, if they were real people, what would they be saying? Would they be saying that there’s this – would they be looking toward Obama for salvation?

Ms. MCDERMOTT: Well, you know, I think there’s two sides to change, and I think we have to recognize that there’s also a large portion of the population who are frightened by change, and for them this is a very big change. This is a huge change, not only the way we talk about ourselves and the way we talk about our government, but that we have come to this moment where a black man is taking the oath of office. And there’s a large segment of the population that says, “Wow, everything’s changed.” And that’s not always something that makes them feel comfortable, and I think that’s something that we have to acknowledge. But, again, I think Obama has done a good job at speaking to that.

Dr. FRANKLIN: Bob, you know, let me just play on this, because I think this is a time when the nation and the world can pivot from despair and tragedy, disappointment, economic downturn to possibility and imagining themselves behaving differently, feeling, responding to the call…

ABERNETHY: I think…

Dr. FRANKLIN: …both my colleagues have talked about…

ABERNETHY: I think some of us …

Dr. FRANKLIN: Dr. King…

ABERNETHY: I’m sorry, go ahead.

Dr. FRANKLIN: No, I just wanted to invoke Dr. King’s words in his last speech. You know, “we’ve got some difficult days ahead.” And think about that – the way he prepared his -and he would be dead the next day. “We’ve got some difficult days ahead, but I’ve been to the mountain top, and I’ve seen the Promised Land.” And I think it’s that legacy of King pivoting from despair and tragedy and conflict to there’s possibility. But you have to step up, as Rabbi Hillel in one of my favorite quotes, you know: “The world is equally balanced between good and evil. It’s your next act that will tip the scale.”

ABERNETHY: We have to stop there. I’m sorry. This is really fascinating. Many thanks to Marc Gopin, Alice McDermott, and Robert Franklin.

Akiva Eldar writes brilliantly as usual. Here is an excerpt:

What shared values did the black American liberal observe over the last few days as he watched the broadcasts of sites bombed by Israel in the heart of the world’s most densely populated region? Is it possible to expect that the memory of the horrors of the Holocaust will influence Obama’s relationship with Israel? Last week, a Jewish member of Britain’s parliament said his grandmother was not murdered by the Nazis in order to provide a pretext for Israeli soldiers to murder Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza.

The spokesman for the Israeli consulate in New York boasted of the masses who attended a solidarity demonstration with the children of Sderot. He did not mention the masses of Jews who do not know where to hide their shame at the sight of pictures of Palestinian men weeping bitterly over the families who perished under the ruins of their houses.

Israeli spokesmen try to cope with the values question by using the following question/argument: “Would the United States have restrained itself in the face of ongoing rocket fire from Mexico at its children, in its sovereign territory?” It is hard to believe that such a comparison will make any impression on an intelligent man like Obama. Mexico is not under an American aerial and naval blockade, nor is it considered occupied territory under international law. The U.S. Army and American settlers have not controlled parts of Mexico for the past 41 years (and the United States was a guarantor of the Oslo Accords, which stated that Gaza and the West Bank constitute a single political entity).

Akiva Eldar, senior Israeli analyst

Sometimes in the construction of a better world, it is necessary to go into the heart of darkness, to quote Conrad. Sometimes it is only in exploring our heart of darkness that we can figure out where we are, so that we know how to get beyond our current fallen state. I am drunk with blood these days, thoughts of blood, fear of blood, the rage of boiling blood, and so is anyone for whom  Palestine and Israel are a fixation.

This report of carnage in a Gaza hospital in all its horrifying details is typical of the innocents who are being cut to pieces. What stands out is the report of the impatient, smiling Islamic Jihad fighter who is just thrilled with the blood of his own people. New recruits to his cause. He sees around him a man with his brain spilling out, and his family wailing, other people cut to pieces, a girl screaming from shrapnel in her leg, a baby wounded and dazed. But this man is thrilled, and impatient to get a doctor to fix his minor leg wound so that he can go out and fight. He says, “They lost their loved ones as martyrs. They should be happy. I want to be a martyr, too.” I think of the ecstatic smile on his face, the eagerness for blood spilled, his people, his own, the Israelis, does not seem to matter, for the situation has created more recruits and that is all that matters, to continue the bloodfest.

I try to remember my spiritual discipline which calls upon me to sympathize with those who suffer, even with those who suffer due to their own sin. Mostly I fail to sympathize but I keep trying. Every day I am bombarded by propaganda from the anti-Palestinian side, from very clever PR firms and volunteers working for the so-called pro-Israel side, whose job it is to make me hate and fear the Arabs, with Hamas being a great pretext. They have recruited my own family to ensure that the peacemakers are completely isolated. It is so easy to look at this man in the hospital, bloodthirsty, so that I can ease my conscience and say to myself, “We had no choice but to attack. Such a man can only be killed.  That is the only thing his family will understand.” This is a powerful way that millions of people, including major global leaders, East and West, are easing their conscience about the carnage in Gaza. Apparently Israel convinced even the Palestinian leadership that they could ‘take out’ Hamas with minimal loss of civilian life, and because Hamas has created a war against fellow Palestinians as well, it was easy for the Palestinian leaders to be duped into this. Now they regret it, dazed by the Israel Defense Forces’ capacity for mass violence.

They remind me of we, the American people, who were duped by the Neoconservatives and the White House into making the destruction of Saddam Hussein into the final battle with extremism, and meanwhile we had given the green light to destroy an entire civilization, and to torture its men to death. This is our responsibility, for we were duped by people who were duping themselves with a failed and mad ideology.

The folly of war, the bizarre psychology of child-like obedience to authority, was alive and well when I was in Israel, and I knew it well from the post-911 period in the U.S. Good people really believed that this war would be the final blow to Hamas, then Fatah would return and we would have a good two state solution in the offing again. Good people believed this, I know them. Good people who have not seen with their hearts any of the carnage of Gaza, any of the piles of corpses of children cut in pieces, live in a world of their own self-righteousness. More ominous, they are making bedfellows with even more damaged people such as the tens of thousands of followers of Avigdor Lieberman who wants to send a nuclear bomb on Gaza, on Iran, and expel all the Arabs from Israel. His is the political party that will benefit most from this thirst for blood. Blood thirst is addictive, it is never satisfied. The Jewish people, unused to this thirst, are learning this the hard way, and I am finding more and more refugees from the organized Jewish community who no longer recognize their fellow Jews. My sympathies to their state of mind, to their sickness right now.

Other good people, absolutely outraged by those same dead bodies of Palestinian children, want to strike back. They too have become attached to and drunk with violence. They try to find the most hateful ways to injure Jews that they can possibly find. They reframe all tragedy, all loss of life in Gaza, all crimes of Israel, as Nazi crimes, as a holocaust, in order to hurt Jews the most, in order to deprive them of the legitimacy of their history as victims. We all know the motivation for this in terms of a political process of making Israel more and more of a pariah state.

I understand the logic, but it is the logic of total war and demonization. These people cannot stop obsessing with sending as many pictures of the dead around the internet as possible. It would be like Jews referring to every act of war against them as a Naqbeh, the Naqbeh of 2006 where thousands of Jews had to flee their homes in the North from Lebanese bombs and the Naqbeh of 2009 where so many thousands of residents in the South have to run from the bombs, traumatized by three years of unpredictable explosions. So what would be accomplished by this rhetorical disrespect of the Palestinian tragedy of 1948?

And so one who is in the middle, like I have been my whole life thanks to loving parents, is in constant reception of hate mail from both sides, designed to make me hate with as much venom as possible, in order to justify murder. My sympathies to all of them, for they are drunk with the hysteria of war, an hysteria that never produces the long term results that we all seek, safety, security, justice, peace.

Then I think back to a bus ride a few days ago. I took a bus from Jerusalem going south towards Eilat. I was going to meet wonderful Jews and Arabs who work and study together at the Arava Institute. On the bus in front of me were two young men, and one wanted to know who I was. As usual my work makes everyone want to give me their opinion on the war. His friend pipes in. His friend has an infectious smile, insists in Hebrew on knowing what kind of beer I drink (I don’t), and then gives me his opinion. With a crazy smile he says in Hebrew, “We have to kill all the Arabs, that is the solution.” As if I did not understand, he gets up and demonstrates while the bus tears down the narrow Dead Sea highway at 60 miles an hour. In a year he enters the IDF. So he shoots with his hands, and makes the sound, ‘tat-tat-tat-tat’, aiming in a broad arc, smiling, showing me how he would shoot a whole village.

I maintain my composure, weary but persistent in doing my job. So I thought about it and asked earnestly, “Why do you like to kill peopIe so much?” He has no reply, just smiles. I ask him if he is religious and does he think it is right to kill. He says he is not Jewish. “What are you?” “Christian,” he says. My mouth drops a little. Where do you live, “Kiryat Arba”, a central enclave of radical settlers. Nothing surprises me here anymore. Not missing a beat, I ask him if he thinks Jesus would want him to kill a whole village. So he says, “Yes!” with a big smile. So I start quoting from the New Testament. I say in Hebrew, “What do you think of the verse in the Sermon on the Mount, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called sons of God’”, quoting from Mathew. So here I am, a rabbi, quoting Jesus, to a Christian, who is a settler, with murder on his mind and a twinkle in his eyes.

After the bus ride I managed to go to the Arava Institute in order to meet with wonderful peace seeking students, Jewish and Arab, all trying to cope with the madness around them. I went to my room that night, had a minor medical problem that made me bleed profusely. I could not get it to stop. I imagine I had to spill some blood in obedience to the world I was in.  Two days later the blood was gone, but the stain remained.

It is the smile on the bus that will stay with me, and it reminds me of its exact parallel to the smile of the jihadi in the Gaza hospital. I am thinking today that the fundamental mistake of policy makers is to think that you can bully someone into peace, with sanctions, with bombs, with threats, with hate. What these acts of violence really generate is not obedience or negotiated agreements but young people sucked into the madness of war.

The inescapable reality is that people have to really want peace. They have to work for it really hard, and if they are not ready to work really hard for it then it never comes, and no policy makers and no third party can accomplish anything if they do not lead people toward that desire. Diplomacy without people is folly, something Washington still does not understand. Of course, these two young men, ecstatic over murder, are not the norm, they are just casualties of worlds gone mad, men who act out, however, what so many others are feeling. What is more ominous is that Israeli news is completely focused on Israeli pain, victims of the rockets, soldiers’ families. That’s it. While on the internet I am bombarded by Palestinian pain, and the world will want to hear nothing anymore from Israelis and their story. I get the sense that even my closest friends view me with greater suspicion as a Jew since the Gaza war, whereas other Jews who support this war speak to me less and less. And this is the predictable course of war since the dawn of humankind, for we recognize the humanity in each other less and less with every drop of blood spilled in our name.

Then I think of the extraordinary women peacemakers who I filmed in Israel, trying to help the sons survive war and its madness, with their souls intact. I meet these women everywhere. I think of the few sons they created who are my fellow peacemaking men. I think of sanity as something as rare as a desert flower. I think of how much in history, in religious history, that men, theologians, political philosophers, tough men, associated women with irrationality, a paucity of reasoned thinking. And I am amused, and comforted.

Ibtisam Mahmeed and Elana Rozenman, Arab and Jewish Israeli peacemakers

Police Line at American Embassy in London

Radwan is one of the most passionate voices for Islam and democracy in the world today. He is an important force for change in Washington. He wrote this letter to me:

Dear Marc:

I just participated in a conference call, organized by the Council on Foreign Relations, with Shibley Telhami on the situation in Gaza. I took a lot of notes, and wanted to ask several questions, but unfortunately did not have an opportunity to ask them. So, I wanted to share my comments and questions with you in the hope that they may help us to find the right solution to this very dangerous situation in Gaza and in the Middle East.

First some important comments:

1. It is very dangerous and counter-productive for the US to be always siding “unconditionally” with Israel. Yes, of course, Israel has “the right to respond”. To be fair and balanced, and therefore help bring peace to the middle east, the US must also acknowledge that the Palestinians also have “the right to respond”, and that the blockade, the embargo, the targeted killings and bombings, and incursions that Israel has been imposing on Gaza for the past two years are also “acts of war”. So the question is “who has been provoking whom?”.

2. Israel also has the duty to be responsible in its response. The rockets launched by Hamas have killed 3 people in the past seven years. They are illegal but also highly ineffective. The response of Israel has killed over 700 people and injured over 3,000 people in the past 12 days alone, most of them innocent civilians, women, children, and bystanders. This has become a humanitarian tragedy of monumental proportions and means that a cease-fire must be imposed immediately if the international community expects to have any legitimacy in the 21st century.

3. Israel has always resorted to a policy of “deterrence by force”, and in most cases by overwhelming force. While this policy may work against states and regular armies, it does not work against non-state actors who can easily hide between the civilians. A policy of overwhelming force against them inevitably means huge civilian losses, which in turn will create more hatred against the people who are killing the civilians. Israel is hoping that the Palestinians will blame Hamas and turn against them, but this is simply wishful thinking and it has never worked this way. In the short and even long run, this will only encourage more violence, extremism, and terrorism, and will not solve the problems of the Middle East or of Israel.

4. The media coverage of this humanitarian tragedy has been disproportionate too. While the Arab public has been bombarded by 24 hour coverage of the mayhem in Gaza, and not just by al-Jazeera but by over 30 Arab news and religious channels, the western public and especially the American public has been treated to extensive coverage of the damage caused by the rockets in southern Israel. This will only help to increase the schism and the hatred between the Arab and Muslim publics and the western public in general.

5. Finally, we are witnessing some of the largest mass demonstrations in the Arab and Muslim worlds that we have seen in the past 30 years. In Morocco and Turkey, for example, demonstrators have numbered into the millions. These huge demonstrations have occurred not just in the capitals but also in every city and small town. Again with very little coverage in the western media, these demonstrations clearly illustrate the exploding anger and frustration of the Arab and Muslim public, and increase the risk that they will turn against the West and also against their own regimes at any moment.

My main question, which I never got to ask, is: How do you think this war will impact future relations between the US and the Arab and Muslim world?

The answer is self-evident in my opinion, but must be asked before it is too late!
Radwan A. Masmoudi
President

Center for the Study of Islam & Democracy (CSID)

Radwan Masmoudi, Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy