Posts by PaulUsiskin:
Clean Hands?
November 19th, 2013
By Paul Usiskin.
Ofira Kunis, MK and Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister’s office has a point. Israel released 26 prisoners, she said this morning, who committed acts of terror against innocent women and children, and the murder of a reservist, while the PA is seen handing out prizes for their terrorism.
Yediot Ahronot, the widest read paper in Israel, in its English language edition, details the amounts paid and describes them as “severance packages”, and if this report is to be believed these payments are generous indeed.
There’s a sliding scale determined by number of years service, in an Israeli jail. The longer the term, the bigger both the award, $50-60000, and the monthly stipend, $2500-4000, and either deputy Ministerial status or army General. Bearing in mind the parlous state of PA finances, you’ve got to wonder how these large amounts can be justified.
OK, so Kunis has a valid question. But that isn’t her only point. She says the PA is inciting if not promoting terror against Israel and the results of that are plain to see in the last few days. And then she adds that this is all proof that the Palestinians are not coming to the negotiating table with clean hands.
Oh dear. Let’s take a few steps back.
On negotiating tactics, wasn’t it the government she serves which announced last week that it was going to build 20,000 new housing units across the West Bank settlements in Occupied territory, and build a new neighbourhood linking Maalei Adumim, south of Jerusalem, to the Capitol. Never mind the claimed lack of knowledge for this by the Prime Minister.
And whilst there is no question that the Occupation is part of Israel’s ongoing conflict with Palestine, in such a conflict there are casualties, and in the main because of the asymmetry of the conflict, innocent Palestinian civilians lose their lives, and that leads to Palestinians taking innocent Israeli lives. The numbers game always produces asymmetrical results and because of it, those Palestinians killed by Israel are always more than this Israelis killed by Palestinians.
But it is the idea that in this conflict, one side has clean hands and the other does not. War is another word for conflict and no one fighting a war has clean hands. And in seeking to resolve a conflict and stop a war, each side seeks advantage, whether real or imagined, psychological or actual. It’s a way to even out the field. For more on negotiations see Haaretz’s excellent interview with Moty Cristal of 7th November. That reveals how obtuse negotiations really are, what give and take really comes down to.
For me it was Kunis’ “clean hands” comment that set me thinking. And I was quickly reminded of words on the grave stone of Baruch Goldstein, a settler doctor from Kiryat Arba next door to Hebron:
“Clean of hand and pure of heart.”
Goldstein entered the main Muslim prayer hall in the Cave of the Patriarchs complex in 1994 and killed 29 men at prayer and injured over 100 more. I made a BBC TV documentary about it and cam across the grave and the words. They disgusted me so much that when my late father died, and he was a much respected doctor I had those words put on his stone. I wanted to somehow rebalance the dreadful taint that Goldstein had cast on Israel and its Jewish citizens, by having them inscribed in memory of another Jewish doctor who deserved them.
Will the talks resume? Will there be peace between Israel and Palestine? I can’t say. But another Haaretz piece about the will of the two Palestinians, amongst those recently released,who killed the reservist, for peace with the nation that occupies them provides an odd note of optimism.
That and the understanding of those few Israelis who have seen the light and know the consequences for Israel if the talks fail. Amongst them are the Prime Minister’s former national security advisor, and the current Justice Minister who leads the Israeli negotiating team.
The rest of Israel it seems is happy to live in the splendid isolation of Them-Not Us, and believe that the Palestinians do not have clean hands whilst theirs are pristine.