In 2000, Miko Peled, back in San Diego, joined a group of Jews and Palestinians who were meeting to talk and broaden each other's horizons. Peled's wife was concerned at first that he might be killed, and Miko himself was far from sure he wouldn't. Such was the novelty for this Israeli in meeting with Palestinians, and such was the fear and misunderstanding. But Peled thrived in these dialogue groups, made friends, and encountered surprising perspectives.
A Palestinian friend mentioned during one meeting that back in 1948 the Palestinians had gone to battle with 10,000 fighters, while the Jews had had triple that number, or more. Peled was outraged, as he had always believed the Jews to have been the smaller force, the underdogs, the Davids up against Goliaths. But he held his tongue because he respected his friend's opinion. He researched, and learned. He discovered that the Jewish militias had in fact used superior strength to destroy Palestine and forcibly exile its people.
The distrust and misunderstanding went both ways. A Palestinian man named Nader Elbanna, on first meeting Peled, assumed he must be working for Mossad, the Israeli spy agency. But Nader and Peled became friends and began speaking together at Rotary clubs, as well as raising funds to provide both Palestinians and Israelis with wheel chairs.
The more Peled learned, the more he wanted to know. He began traveling to Palestine. He found the people, of whom he was initially frightened, wonderfully open and generous. He found that they knew his father and called his father Abu Salam, meaning Father of Peace. Peled himself had not been aware that his father had been given that name by Palestinians. Peled met with nonviolent activists in Bil'in and elsewhere in Palestine. He learned that, contrary to media depictions, the bulk of Palestinian resistance was and had always been nonviolent.
The Israeli occupation, on the other hand, was and had always been more brutal than Peled had known. He learned from an Israeli naval special forces officer of tactics used in patrolling the coast of Gaza:
"They would come upon Gazan fishing boats and from time to time they would single out a particular boat, order the fishermen to jump in the water and blow up the boat. Then under gunpoint, they told the fishermen to count from one to a hundred and then when they were done to start over again. They would make them count over and over again until one by one the fishermen could no longer tread water, and they drowned."
A Palestinian friend named Bassam Aramin, two years after Peled met him, on January 16, 2007, lost his daughter. His two daughters, aged 10 and 12 were walking home from school, holding hands, when an Israeli soldier took aim and shot the younger one in the head.
Peled increasingly dedicated himself to the Palestinian peace movement, in which he worked with those who had been imprisoned and tortured by Israel. In doing so, he learned the history of Israel and Palestine, and the history of his own family. He learned of an Israeli massacre of civilians in Gaza in 1967, and that his father had investigated it and that his father's views had likely been changed by it. The elder Peled had not only been prophesying brutal occupation for the future in 1967 but also acknowledging its existence already in place.
The younger Peled also came to abandon the idea of a two-state solution, as his father had favored. Miko Peled has seen Israelis and Palestinians live together as the closest of friends. His belief is that only a single state, a secular state, a democratic state, in which all are welcome and respected, will put the violence and suffering to rest.
The people of Israel and Palestine are highly educated. They are perfectly capable of living in peace. To do so, they will have to learn what Peled's book helps teach so well: Never, under any circumstance, no matter the context, no matter the poetic justice, no matter past histories of victimization, no matter the intention or desire, never ever ever is war an acceptable instrument of public policy. In fact, we are lucky if the best of wars don't doom us to a century or more of ongoing bloodshed and resentment.
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