PEACE LINES MESSAGERIES DE LA PAIX www.peacelines.org peacelines@gmail.com

 

Newsletter n° 123

December 30, 2023

Argumentaire for the Nobel Call of December 2023 Gaza/Israel

 

We started circulating a Nobel Call for the release of hostages and for a durable cessation of hostilities on December 22, 2023, worldwide. The bottom line, loud and clear, being precisely the core of our last Call, « Human beings are not bargaining chips », supported by 77 Nobel laureates and 414 Members of the European Parliament (the majority), in 2015. Among the signatories then : Peace laureates – the Dalai Lama, Pdt Carter, Bishop Belo, John Hume, Archbishop Tutu… ; Literature laureates – John Coetzee, Dario Fo, Toni Morrison, Elfriede Jelinek… ; Chemistry laureates – Robert Huber, Sir Aaron Klug, Sir Harold Kroto, Elias Corey, Yuan T. Lee, J-M Lehn…

Medicine laureates – Christian de Duve, Günter Blobel, Roger Guillemin, Torsten Wiesel…

Physics laureates – Zhores Alferov, Brian Josephson, Jack Steinberger, Leon Lederman, Tsui… Economics – George Akerlof, Daniel Kahneman, Sir James Mirrlee. Among the non-Nobel signatories were the Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra, the Israeli writers David Grossman and Amos Oz, the film director Jean-Luc Godard, the British bluesman John Mayall. For them, we had to go, find them – John Mayall before a concert in Folkestone, Godard in his Rolle home in Switzerland, Khadra, Grossman and Oz in Paris. There was joy in such support, and I shall always remember how long it took Amos to read the text of the Call, weigh each of its 100 words, a pencil in his hand, a serious frown in his gaze, until he decided there was nothing wrong in it, and to add his name.

 

http://www.peacelines.org/open-the-doors-campaign-2015-2019-c25456496

There is gravity in joining a campaign, when the quest for peace means thousands of lives are at stake. We suspended the Open the Doors ! Campaign in 2019, upon admitting that Israel alone was not the only cause of the Gaza blockade. Egypt also played its crucial part. We had to keep objective, impartial, to avoid taking sides. As a humanitarian n.g.o. we are strictly non-partisan, our only stand is for the weaker side, the most threatened, suffering people.

On October 7, 2023, we were horrified to learn of the barbaric attack from Gaza on the twenty communities surrounding it. It sent us back to the worst days of the Black Decade in Algeria, with a toll of 150,000 killed, and to our Nobel Call for Algeria, supported by 68 Nobel laureates. Among them, Peace laureates – Norman Borlaug, Pdt Gorbachev, Elie Wiesel…

Literature laureates - Saul Bellow, Claude Simon ; Chemisry laureates – Sir John W. Cornforth, Ilya Prigogine, Arthur Kornberg,  Richard Ernst, Stanley Cohen, Ernst Otto Fischer..

Medicine laureates – Baruj Benacerraf, Jean Dausset, François Jacob, Cesar Milstein, Maurice Wilkins… Physics laureates – Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Jerome Friedman, Arno Penzias…

Economics – Gérard Debreu, Franco Modigliani, Herbert Simon.

This Call for Algeria was not coined in some cozy office in the Northern lands, but debated upon, and worded, in Algiers, with endangered journalists, and some priests who had devoted their life to the Algerian people. At the time (1997), there was a death order on any European foreigner’s head in Algeria, journalists, intellectuals, simple people, had been slaughtered by the thousands, and seven monks had been kidnapped, most of them old, in March 1996. Their heads alone were found, two months later, hanging from trees.

The Call for Algeria was 158 words long, and started thus :

We are human beings.

Horrified by the slaughters in the name of fundamentalism, we express our ultimate and universal reprobation concerning all acts of bloody savagery committed by the armed groups which terrorize Algeria. No political or religious speech, whatsoever, can ever legitimate the massacre of innocents, the murder of a child, the rape of a woman.

Some signatories were closer to us than others, somehow, and their support was impressive, thus Saul Bellow, François Jacob, Maurice Wilkins, Ilya Prigogine, Arthur Kornberg, but one formula, handwritten by Bellow, sticks out, through time : « It is sure to intidimidate those nasty bastards ».

 

I first was uncertain how he meant it, but it became clear after analyzing the way terror groups survive. Around the hard core of leaders, whose names are known (half a dozen or a dozen at most), you find their armed escorts and militias (hundreds to thousands), who terrorize people. That alone, however, is not enough to last. Their long-time strength is found in the « non-committed » people who sympathize with their stand, and support them in speech and money. The core battle against terror groups is won on this level.

http://www.peacelines.org/algeria-1997-1998-c24712112

In his 1970 Nobel speech, Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it simply :

« Some will say : what can literature [words] do against the savage onslaught of violence ? Let us not forget that violence does not live on its own, it is incapable of living on its own : it is intimately associated, through the tightest natural bonds, to lies. Violence finds its only shelter in lies. […] But violence ages fast. Add a few more years, and it loses it self-assurance ; to maintain itself, to pretend it is good-looking, it has to look for the support of lies.

 

And that is precisely here you can find, neglected by ourselves, but so simple, easy to access, the key to our liberation : The refusal to participate personally in lies ! […] For when men turn away from lies, lies cease to exist, plain and simple. Like a contagious disease, lies can only exist through a collective of people.»

October-November-December 2023 : the lies we are exposed to speak of « armed resistance » as a sacred duty, in the context of a « war of liberation ». But even the Algerian gunmen did not commit such horrendous crimes as what happened from Kfar Aza to Nir Oz on October 7. Can slaughtering helpless civilians en masse (the Re’im revelers), raping women, kidnapping infants, children, and elderly men and women, be attributed to nationalists ? They are the signature of terror groups. Hostage takers belong to the family of the Islamic State in Syria and Irak, the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria, and Boko Haram in Nigeria.

Terror is terror is terror.

Is it only a matter of means ? Tactical errors ? Was October 7 a tactical error ?

Check the DNA behind it then, and the five articles (20, 23, 25, 26 , 30) of the new Hamas Covenant (2017), as explicit as can be. What is the aim, the end ?

Art. 20 : Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.

Art. 23 : Resistance and jihad for the liberation of Palestine will remain a legitimate right, a duty and an honour…

Art.  25 : Resisting the occupation with all means and methods is a legitimate right (...) At the heart of these lies armed resistance…

Art.  26 : Hamas rejects any attempt to undermine the resistance and its arms.

Try as we could, in our years of presence in Gaza, with our Experimental Bilingual Programme (English-Arabic), to be implemented in schools (after written encouragement by then Minister of Education Nasereddine Al Shaer, in the name of 2006 PM Haniyeh’s government), the stumbling block always remained their « legitimate right » of « resisting the occupation with all means and methods », and our tools (« The spirit of Luther King » in 55 paragraphs, crowned by « The main principles of non-violence »), were seen as « an attempt to undermine the resistance and its arms. »

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These pictures were taken in Shejaiya, in a school, where a small part of our attempts took place. You look at these kids : do you see any difference with those in your schools, studying and playing with your children ? On the wall you see the identity :  Directorate of Education  Gaza.

 

Where are they now ? In tents in the cold winter wind and the rain ? Under rubble ?

The place was the El Yarmouk School, in the heart of Gaza City, between Rimal and Tuffah, a few hundred yards from Jabalia. Visibly financed by the European Union.

Think again. On October 6, all was quiet in El Yarmouk, Rimal, Jabalia, and further South-East, in Shejaiya, Nahal Oz, Kfar Aza, further South in Be’eri, Re’im, Nir Oz…

What was this decision to breach through the fence and attack twenty peaceful communities, slaughter a thousand civilians, and kidnap over two hundred more ?

Among them, Haim Peri, 80, Yoram Metzger, 80, Amiram Cooper, 84. Through the Telegram grapevine, it’s been posted that the three of them died in an Israeli bombing.

Likewise, it has been reported by the abductors that the Bibas family, with baby Kfir who was ten months old when he was kidnapped, and his brother Ariel, 4, perished under bombing.

They talk of « indiscriminate bombing ». How can bombing be so discriminate in urban warfare ? A young Israeli deserter, Tal Mitnick, who’s been jailed for a month, states that he believes in negotiations « at the end of the day ». The harder question is How could you negotiate with the Islamic Armed Group and the Islamic Front in Algeria in the nineties (after they had won elections in 1992)? The choice of the Algerian authorities was to eradicate the terrorists, with the end result that Algeria has remained stable, in peace, since.

How did the Egyptian authorities negotiate with the Muslim Brothers (of which Hamas is an offshoot) in 2013, after the latter had ousted President Mubarak in 2011 ? The Muslim Brotherhood was banned, the islamist President, Mohamed Morsi, was removed by his successor, General el-Sisi, and jailed (he died in jail in June 2019). In Rabaa, on August 14, 2013, the Egyptian police « cleared » two squares by killing over a thousand pro-Morsi protesters, and that brought the « Egyptian revolution » to an end.

We could go on like this, back to Black September in 1970, and its toll of 3,400 Palestinians killed by the royal Jordanian army, that expelled the survivors to Lebanon (hence the ensuing Lebanese Civil War, from 1975 to 1990), or to the way Syrian President Hafez el-Assad sent 12,000 troops to Lebanon in 1976, against Palestinian militias…

In Davos, Switzerland, in January 2006, after Hamas had won the last Palestinian elections Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel made this declaration : « Forgiveness will be, I think, the next step… « First they must renounce the policy and ideology of destroying a neighbor state… What worries me is that, after all, it shows that the overwhelming majority of the Palestinians voted for Hamas, whose main principle is the destruction of Israel. »

 

Back to square one : how and when will Hamas revise its Covenant, as the PLO did in 1989, when President Arafat declared in Paris, on May 2, that its charter was obsolete, caducous. He said it in French, « c’est caduc ». In Geneva, in December, Arafat clearly « recognized the right for Israel to live in peace and security », and « renounced terrorism » - thus opening the door to the first talks between sworn enemies in Madrid, in 1991, gateway to the Oslo Accords in 1991.

Landmarks for similar terror organizations : after a first « temporary cessation of hostilities » in April 1994, and the « Good Friday » Belfast Agreement in 1998, the IRA issued a final statement in April 2005, to use « exclusively peaceful means ». Gerry Adams, the political leader of the IRA, demanded that all militants lay down their weapons, and concluded :

« All IRA units have been ordered to dump arms.   To complete the process to verifiably put its arms beyond use in a way which will further enhance public confidence and to conclude this as quickly as possible.    We are conscious that many people suffered in the conflict. There is a compelling imperative on all sides to build a just and lasting peace. » 2007 spelled the end of The Troubles between Ireland and the United Kingdom.

In the same spirit, after a forty-year terror campaign, the Basque ETA pledged for a « full dissolution and apologizing to its victims and their families ».

« ETA has decided to declare an end to its historical cycle and its role, thereby bringing its path to an end. ETA has completely dissolved all its structures.

This decision does not bring an end to the conflict between the Basque homeland and Spain and France (…) Let’s not repeat our mistakes. Let’s not let our problems fester. Doing so would only give rise to new problems. »

Looking for an opening, an alternative to blind violence and terror, we start hearing other voices. On December 27, « senior member » of the Hamas leadership Mashal, declared to the French media that « his group would consider recognizing Israel when the time comes to establish a Palestinian state ». Another « senior member », member of the Palestinian National Council, in an interview with a  UAE-based news outlet, conceded that « Here in Gaza, a massacre took place; it's not something that happened randomly. »

 « It means that October 7 is considered a mistake. Hamas says 'we won,' and Israel says 'we won.' So, tell me, who was defeated? Everyone won; the Palestinian people are the ones who were defeated, Palestine was defeated, families in Gaza were defeated, millions of infants were defeated. »

« Those who caused this made a mistake, and they should be held accountable and answer for their mistakes since the day of the coup [2007]. We feared reaching this day. We were afraid that Hamas would lead Gaza to what it has become today. »

In this spirit, precisely, and for a « durable cessation of hostilities », according to the formula coined at the United Nations Security Council, on December 22, in a resolution upon which all agreed ((13 votes pro, 0 against), « we support a permanent end to all attack tunnels and the demilitarization of the Gaza Strip ».

What has been achieved in Ireland and the Basque homeland has opened the way to a practical way to stop the endless bloodshed, what Pope Francis called the « aimless voyage » of war, « a defeat without victors » in his Christmas message.

This Newsletter started with a picture of Gaza kids, taken on a beach, in the summertime, flying kites, aiming at a world record of a maximum of kites flying, under the guidance of young UNRWA monitors. It echoes the parallel symbolic action taken by Women Wage Peace before the Gaza Wall, in 2017, on the other side of Shejaiya. The woman on the left, in purple trousers, is Vivian Silver. She was burned alive in her home, in Kfar Aza, on October 7. Her last words, to friends, through WhatsApp, was that she promised she would keep a knife in her shelter if she survived.

 

Would you believe this was the last vow of a devoted pacifist, in the morning of October 7 ?

Let Lao Tsu answer, on arms at large : « Those sharp weapons are instruments of evil omen, and not the instruments of the higher beings ; the higher beings uses them only on the compulsion of necessity. Calm and repose are what they prize ; victory by force of arms is to them undesirable. To consider this desirable would be to delight in the slaughter of men ; and he who delights in the slaughter of men cannot get his will in the kingdom. »

When used without the damnable desire and delight, but « only on the compulsion of necessity », « a skilful commander strikes a decisive blow, and stops. He does not dare, by pursuing his operations, to assert and complete his domination. He will strike the blow, but will be on his guard against being boastful or arrogant in its aftermath. He strikes it as a matter of sheer necessity ; he strikes it, but not from a desire of domination. »