Fratricide in the Holy Land: A Psychoanalytic View of the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Conclusion: Can the Conflict Be Resolved?

Conclusion Can the Conflict Be Resolved? Most experts on the Arab-Israeli conflict have concluded their studies with bleak prognoses of its future. One Israeli Jewish scholar, Meron Benvenisti, believed that the two-state solution of separate Israeli and Palestinian states would never work and thought that the only good solution was that of a binational confederation of Israel and Palestine on the whole territory of the Holy Land (Benvenisti 1995). An American Jewish journalist has called this Israeli expert “an oasis of knowledge in the intellectual deserts of the Middle East—deserts where charlatans and ideologues, hucksters and holy men, regularly opine and divine, unencumbered by facts, history, or statistics” (Friedman 1995, p. vii). Unfortunately, however, very few Israeli Jews or Palestinian Arabs accept the idea of an Israeli-Palestinian confederation, and the chances of it becoming a political reality seem very slim indeed. Historically, however, there have long been small groups of Arabs and Jews working to promote peaceful coexistence between their two communities. In the spring of 1925, during the early years of the British mandate over Palestine, a group of bright-eyed Palestinian Jewish intellectuals gathered in Jerusalem to establish a new association to promote what Martin Buber called Wirklichkeitszionismus (Reality Zionism ), a Zionism attuned to the reality of the “Land of Israel,” which first and foremost included the Palestinian Arabs. This association was called Brith Shalom, a Hebrew phrase meaning Covenant of Peace. Its founders and leaders were such luminaries as Arthur Ruppin (1876– 1943), the German-born Zionist in charge of Jewish settlement in Palestine , Judah Leon Magnes (1877–1948), the American-born president of 180 the just-founded Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Martin Buber (1878–1965), the renowned German-born Jewish philosopher. The members of Brith Shalom included veteran Jewish residents of Palestine, academics , and socialist, religious and liberal Zionists. They believed in creating an independent binational Jewish-Arab state in Palestine and worked passionately for Jewish-Arab peace. The bloody conflicts that erupted between Palestinian Jews and Arabs in 1929, then in 1936–1939, and throughout the British mandate, however, turned this group into a very small minority among the Palestinian Jews that had no effect on Palestinian Jewish politics and was increasingly isolated from the Palestinian Jewish mainstream. Some Palestinian Jews regarded Brith Shalom’s members as traitors to Jewish nationalism and Zionism (Ratzabi 2002). After the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, a few Israeli Jews continued to pursue peace with the Arabs in the face of their implacable hostility. They were pacifists or peace seekers in a nation of military fighters, and were often treated with hostility. Among the Israeli Jewish pacifists of the 1950s and 1960s were Shimon Schereschewsky, Amnon Zichroni, Uri Davis, Joseph Abileah, and Abie Nathan, a flamboyant Iranian-Indian Jewish immigrant to Israel who ran the popular California restaurant in Tel Aviv before flying his light plane to Egypt to seek peace (and publicity). He was prosecuted and jailed by the Israeli authorities but became a popular figure, and later set up a pirate radio station named The Voice of Peace on a ship outside Israel’s territorial waters. Uri Avnery, the German-born Israeli Jewish editor of the Hebrew weekly Ha’Olam HaZeh and later a member of the Israeli Knesset, had been a young Israeli soldier in the traumatic 1948 war. Without endorsing militant pacifism, he single-handedly sought peace with the Arabs. Avnery met with prominent Palestinian Arabs at a time when such meetings were considered treason in Israel (Avnery 1985). The handful of Israeli Jews who refused to serve in the army as conscientious objectors were either jailed or dishonorably discharged on psychiatric grounds. While pacifism may be an unconscious defense against rage, violence, and sadism (Glover 1933), some of the Israeli peace seekers had a more mature and realistic vision of the Arab-Israeli conflict than their militaristic countrymen. However, the attitude of most Israeli Jews toward those early pacifists was represented by the title of a recent article, “Pacifism: A Recipe for Suicide” (Plaut 2004). Today there are many Israeli Jewish conscientious objectors and they are no longer rejected and ostracized by the majority. Some of them Conclusion: Can the Conflict Be Resolved? 181 have even become folk heroes and there are frequent demonstrations protesting their treatment by the government. There are also...