2024-03-20: Thought Mail No. 41

“We refuse to be enemies”

Dear MSKv Interested Parties,

Imagine this:
From two ethnic groups in a confined space, after more than a century of fighting as enemies over
land and recognition, “connected” by growing hatred, women and men
approach each other, shake hands, bury the hatchet, make friends!
In the Israeli-Palestinian organization Combatants for Peace, you will find these
people:
Former IDF soldiers together with Palestinian fighters – both sides with blood on their
hands – exchange views on their own history and that of their respective cultures, which
taught them to hate the others.
Exemplary here are the co-founders of Combatants for Peace: Rami Elhanan, a Jewish
Israeli, and Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian fighter. Both have lost their daughters through
acts of violence by the opponent: Rami’s 14-year-old daughter was killed in a suicide bombing
by Hamas – an act of retaliation against a new settlement in East Jerusalem – in 1993;
Bassam’s 10-year-old daughter Abir was fatally hit by a
rubber bullet fired by the Israeli border police on her way to school in 1997.
What helped the two men to change direction, to find the path to peace?
Bassam had time in prison – for throwing stones at Israeli tanks – to understand
Israeli society and realized that the shooter himself was “a victim of his
education, his society, the Israeli occupation regime” and that acts of revenge
never alleviate the pain.
For Rami, who had only served as a tank mechanic in the IDF, his
basic attitude towards humanity and justice had already prepared the ground on which an energy of powerful resistance could grow through
anger and pain and be used against the hostile
trend of leading political circles in Israel. He, too, does not see
retaliation, but conversation, the sharing of fear and grief as a path to peace.
In the group, they have learned to listen to each other, to see themselves reflected in the other, to feel the other’s pain
.
And they have realized:
Only by being open to the other side, by being willing to understand the other, can the
vicious cycle of retaliation be broken.
How about inviting the Combatants for Peace to the Munich Security Conference?

With kind regards,
Mechthild Schreiber
Member of the Board of the Project Group
“Changing the Munich Security Conference” e.V.