Reframing Security for Israel-Palestine - Gila Svirsky

In Israel, the concept of “security” is a powerful one. It is used to justify all military activity, including the occupation of Palestinian territories and the vast budgets applied to it. Indeed, a mystique has developed around security – “national security” is a phrase invoked not just to increase military budgets, but also to silence criticism and prevent transparency. Recent efforts to prevent the publication of testimony about the Second Lebanon War were pursued on the grounds of “security”. “Security risks” can be used as a rationale to prevent defendants from seeing the evidence against them in court. Only the highest officials are privy to full information about security related matters, and they prevent this information from seeing the light of public scrutiny and debate. Security, however, once meant something much broader than its military definition. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that older use of “security”, but efforts to revive it have been made in recent years. It is called “human security” and includes areas of activity such as: * economic security (having a job, a roof over one’s head, access to health care); * personal security (safety from gender-related violence, protection from crime, having one’s children safe from drugs); and * environmental security (knowing that one’s tap water is clean and pure, having access to clean beaches, having clean air to breathe). For several generations, however, neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis have had security, not in its narrow nor in its broader sense. Both societies have lived in an ongoing state of fear and insecurity for many years. And although Palestinians have paid a higher price than Israelis for this conflict, it is quite clear that Israelis also live in a perpetual state of fear and insecurity. Yet if you talk to Israelis about the occupation, they will tell you that Israel cannot leave the occupied territories because of “security”. Security, they will say, is best served by remaining in the West Bank and the Golan Heights, constructing a huge “security fence”, and laying siege to the Gaza Strip. Oddly, few Israelis stop to think if these military measures are providing the long-sought security…or in fact have been counterproductive, only deepening the fear and insecurity. The women’s peace movement in Israel has begun to work on this problem. We call it a campaign to “reframe security” – to broaden our conception of it. We seek to demonstrate to Israelis that security is not the end-result of having a strong, aggressive army, but rather the product of a broad range of activity, which includes living in a society that cares for its poor, reduces violence, protects its natural resources, and co-exists in peace with its neighbors. Indeed, this campaign seeks to instill the understanding that “peace is the best way to promote security”. As part of this campaign, we take Israelis on “reality tours” to show them the Separation Wall. We bring them into the homes of Palestinians who are cut off from their land, jobs, and schools by the Wall, and we give Palestinians an opportunity to tell about their lives and how the Wall has changed them. For most Israelis, this is the very first time they have ever spoken to a Palestinian. We bring the Israelis to checkpoints, and have them observe the soldiers’ treatment of Palestinians trying to cross. We also take them to see parts of Israel that have been neglected by the political leaders – the slums, the shelters for battered women, the untreated garbage, the trafficking in women, the inadequate health care centers, the poorly equipped schools. Each participant goes on a number of tours to see several aspects of the problem. We help Israelis draw the connection between a society that is pouring its resources into occupation and settlements, and failing to address the social problems that exist within it. These tours are powerful experiences. They reach beyond what Israelis see in the media, showing them a slice of reality they have never seen before. And then we ask: Do you think that the policies of our government have enhanced your security? Or have they actually compromised it? We are hoping that the old conceptions will gradually give way to a new understanding: that Israel will never be able to address the needs of our population until a just agreement has been reached with our neighbors. That security – whether in the narrow or broader sense – is compromised by failing to achieve a political accommodation with the Palestinians. For years, women have focused on human security issues – better schools, health services, poverty programs, violence issues, etc. – but not named it “security”. Now, instead of fighting the concept, we are working to reframe it so that it will promote the kind of society that we want to live in. This campaign is more than a strategy. It is a fundamental belief that all these forms of security are critical – and that it will never be possible to realize a common zone of peace, prosperity and progress – not for Israel and not for Palestine – until a just and lasting settlement of the conflict is in place.

Published by Common Ground News Service, written by Gila Svirsky

Elias Chacour

"You.. if you are pro-Israel, on behalf of Palestinian children I ask you, give further friendship to Israel. They need your friendship. But don't interpret that friendship as antipathy against me, the Palestinian, who is paying the price for what others have done to my beloved Jewish brothers and sisters in the holocaust, in Auschwitz and elsewhere. And if you sympathize with the Palestinians - bless your hearts, - but if your sympathies are one-sided against my Jewish brothers and sisters, I must tell you - we do not need such friendship. We need rather a common friend. We do not need one more enemy, for God's sake!"

Excerpt, Commencement Address, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, 2001

Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Excerpts keynote address, Conference on Ending the Occupation, April 13, 2002

Thank you for how you cared for us in South Africa during the apartheid regime. You showed solidarity with us, supporting us and supporting sanctions against the regime. You know we are free in South Africa because of people like yourselves, who cared. ..even when it looked impossible. I want to thank you for that, and for being here.

God is weeping over what He sees in Middle East. God has no one except ourselves, no one. God does not dispatch lightening bolts to remove tyrants, as we might hope sometimes he would. God waits for you, for you to act. You are his Partner.

..We are bearers of hope. God's people, Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, we want to say our hearts go out to all who have suffered the violence of suicide bombers and of military incursions. I want to say to all, peace is possible. These two peoples are God's chosen and beloved, with a common ancestor in Abraham. I give thanks for what the Jews have given us. During Apartheid we told our people God has heard their crying.. God will deliver us as God delivered Israel from bondage in days of old.. God never abandoned us through tribulation and suffering.

In our struggle against Apartheid, the great supporters were the Jews. Jews almost instinctively had to be on the side of the disenfranchised, of the voiceless ones, fighting injustice, oppression and evil. I have continued to feel strongly with the Jews. I am patron of holocaust center in South Africa. I believe Israel has a right to feel secure. What is not so understandable, not justified, is what it did to another people to guarantee its existence. I've been deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us blacks in SA. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks suffer like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about. They seemed to derive so much joy from our humiliation.

Collective punishment. We know of the horrific attacks on refugee camps, towns, villages, and Palestinian institutions. We don't know the exact truth because Israelis won't let the media in. What are they hiding? Perhaps more sinister, why is there no outcry in this country about the Israeli siege in the West Bank. You do see the harrowing images of what suicide bombers have done, something we all condemn, but we see no scenes of what the tanks are doing to Palestinian homes and people.

On one of my visits to the Holy Land I drove to a church with the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem. I could hear tears in his voice as he pointed to Jewish settlements. I thought of the desire of Israelis for security. But what of the Palestinians who have lost their land and homes. Desperation. I have experienced Palestinians pointing to what were their homes, now occupied by Israeli Jews. I was walking with Canon Naim Ateek (Head of Sabeel). In Jerusalem as he pointed in a direction and said "Our home was over there." We were driven out of our home; now occupied by Israeli Jews. My heart aches. I say why are our memories so short. Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective punishment, home demolitions, and their own history so soon. Have they turned their backs on their profound and noble religious traditions. Have they forgotten that God cares deeply about the downtrodden. Israel will never get true security and safety through oppressing another people. A true peace can ultimately be built only on justice. We condemn the violence of suicide bombers, and we condemn the corruption of young minds taught hatred, but we also condemn the violence of military incursions in the occupied lands and the inhumanity that won't let ambulances reach the injured.

The military action of recent days, I predict with certainty, will not provide the security and peace Israelis want; it will only intensify the hatred. Israel has three options: revert to the previous stalemated situation; exterminate all Palestinians; or, and I hope this will be the road taken, to strive for peace based on justice, based on withdrawal from all the occupied territories, and the establishment of a viable Palestinian State on those territories side by side, both with secure borders.

We in South Africa had a relatively peaceful transition. If our madness could end as it did, it must be possible to do the same everywhere else in the world. South Africa is a beacon of hope for the rest of the world. If peace could come to South Africa, surely it can come to the Holy Land. My brother Naim Ateek has said what we used to say. "I am not pro- this or that, I am pro-justice, pro-freedom, I am anti-injustice, anti-oppression."

But you know as well as I do that somehow the Israeli government is placed on a pedestal, and to criticize it is immediately dubbed anti-Semitic as if the Palestinians were not Semitic.. People are scared in this country [USA], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful, very powerful. Well, so what? This is God's world. For goodness sake, this is God's world. We live in a moral universe. The Apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosovik, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end, they bit the dust.

Injustice and oppression will never prevail. Those who are powerful have to remember the litmus test that God gives to the powerful. What is your treatment of the poor, the hungry? the voiceless? And on the basis of that, God passes God's judgment. We should put out a clarion call to the government of the people of Israel, to the Palestinian people and say: peace is possible, peace based on justice is possible, and we are meeting today, and we will continue. And we will do all we can to assist you to achieve this peace, because it is God's dream and you will be able to live amicably together as sisters and brothers.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu is a 1984 Nobel Prize Laureate, Former General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches, Leader of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission 1996-1998.