Tikkun Interview

THIS IS A CONVERSATION WHICH TOOK PLACE IN TIKKUN'S office in California in May 2008. Sami Awad(SA) is the chair of Holy Land Trust, a not-for-profit Palestinian organization established in 1998 in the holy city of Bethlehem. Michael Lerner (ML) is editor of Tikkun magazine. Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives have been working with Holy Land Trust to support their campaign for nonviolence.

SA: The Palestinian community in the last three or four years has become more and more aware that engaging in armed resistance has not achieved anything on the strategic level as a pragmatic approach to ending the occupation. More and more Palestinians are seeing that engaging in armed resistance is not doing anything.

ML: I am going to ask a few of the questions that will pop into the minds of people who don't share Tikkun's perspective, thus "playing devil's advocate" in this interview. Here goes: "What do you mean, more people? Didn't they just vote Hamas into power, and Hamas says that the armed struggle is the way to go forward."

SA: Many Palestinians chose Hamas to protest the corrupted Palestinian Authority (PA) government dominated by Fatah. The PA government has existed for so many years and has not achieved anything since it was put in place in the mid-90s. The campaign that Hamas actually ran on was not a campaign that was dealing with the methods of organized resistance but rather a campaign of reform of the PA government. And people chose Hamas because they supported that focus. Another set of people chose Hamas as a protest vote against Fatah, but the biggest reason why Fatah was defeated and Hamas won was that there was a split within Fatah. Fatah had open primaries before the election, and in this primary the grassroots members of Fatah elected people who were on the ground and not part of the Fatah establishment. So when people were chosen to run who were not part of the establishment, the establishment declared a cancellation of the primary and put in place their own candidates, so now you have two sets of candidates from Fatah running against each other. Those chosen in the primaries did not step down, because they said they were chosen by the people, and the establishment said no, we want our people to run. And you can see the split voting that happened within Fatah in the elections. In Bethlehem for example, for every two candidates who ran for Hamas there were four candidates for Fatah. And that really split the vote. In terms of the numbers of votes that Hamas got it is assumed that they only got between 25 and 30 percent of the vote. This is the level of their popularity, and how it has been for many years. They have never been a majority in the Palestinian political environment.

ML: And how do you understand then why Hamas, if they didn't represent the majority, decided that they could and should take over Gaza?

SA: They did not take over Gaza. They did not represent the majority of the people, but they ended up with the majority of seats in the Parliament which gave them, in our constitution, the legal right and responsibility to form the government. They did form the government and it was made up of people from Hamas and outside Hamas. It was the first technocrat government in Palestine, with experts from different fields who were involved in forming the government. It wasn't just party people.

The world came down harshly on Hamas after this election, and said, "We will only allow you to operate and function as a government if you accept our conditions, which are the end to violence and terrorism and recognition of the State of Israel." Very similar to what had happened to Arafat a few years back. While I believe there was a real possibility and openness for Hamas to engage in a process that would lead it up to that, for it to jump into accepting those conditions immediately was something that it could not accept, because it would mean that it would have to renounce and deny all of its history. Which means it would have to show itself as a failed movement. There was a real openness to negotiate and to slowly bring them into that discussion, but the world pushed Hamas in a corner and said that if you don't do this in the next ten days we will boycott you. And when you push a cat into a corner, it starts crouching. That's what happened with Hamas.

Of course, the PA (meaning Fatah) did not help in that situation, they wanted an opportunity to get back into power. This was the first time they had been out of power for so many years. So they helped to create the pressure on Hamas that led to the explosion that we saw last year in Gaza. The situation in that area then totally collapsed and Hamas found itself in a position that it had actually declared that it did not want to be in, which was taking over the Gaza Strip.

ML: Well, if it doesn't want to be in it, why doesn't it cede back the power to Fatah?

SA: Hamas still won the election, so it isn't handing over the power to Fatah. They have been talking about and requesting negotiations with the PA about how to go back to the prerevolt period and to create a unified government with both parties in it and to move forward from there. Fatah is demanding that they would have to go back to the pre-election period, and just hold new elections.

ML: And why would that be bad?

SA: Well it is not an issue of bad or good, it is an issue of legitimacy. Hamas won power, and they should be given the chance to run the PA. One of the things that has happened throughout the whole process is growing sympathy for Hamas, so they would probably win new elections if they happen. But even if they knew they would win new elections, they feel that the process needs to continue and that it is up to the next elections when people can decide to go a new direction.

ML: Here we have Hamas and two factions in Fatah; are those two sides reconciled in any way? Have the old guard and the younger reformist elements reconciled, or are there still two different voices?

SA: Part of what Fatah has also done in the past year is to engage in a rebuilding process. I am from Bethlehem. There were party elections there in April 2008, and those who were elected to represent Fatah were very much part of the growing, new, younger movement of the party. In a very peaceful manner, the old guard of the Bethlehem district was asked to step aside and allow the new leadership to rise. So I think within Fatah there is a start of reform.

ML: In all the different factions, or in a reconciled Fatah and in Hamas, is there any significant organized group that is saying "we would be better off going with nonviolence"?

SA: The big problem we have now, there has been very little attention paid to the resistance movement by the political parties. They are so entrenched in this political struggle between the parties that they have both ignored the real big problem, which is the occupation and land confiscation and settlement building by Israel. You will find rhetorical language, but on the ground the parties are more concerned about elections or how to gain power again. Meanwhile, nonviolence activity is emerging within the grass roots movements, with some involvement from the political parties, including Hamas. Hamas is not denouncing nonviolence. There are Hamas people who see nonviolence as a useful tool. But there are plenty of Palestinians involved in the grassroots movements who are not involved in the party establishments.

ML: How much of an impact are they able to have?

SA: I want to be realistic. There is not a significant nonviolent movement happening now against the occupation. What we are seeing are growing communities who view nonviolence as the option to solve the problems they are facing, and most of them are communities that are dealing directly with land being confiscated and settlements and the wall that Israel has been constructing. There are villages today that are engaging in nonviolence while a few years ago many of them couldn't imagine how to resist the Israeli confiscations of land and the construction of the Wall and so just surrendered to that reality. In the Palestinian community in general, there has been less criticism of nonviolence, and there has been more acceptance of the terms of nonviolence. It is not perceived as it was before, as treason or collaboration, as non-resistance. The term "nonviolence" can be used on the streets and people will understand it. There is now a theoretical understanding of it, but that has not grown into a practical popular movement yet.

ML: Could you have a public meeting on nonviolence as a strategy in Gaza?

SA: Yes, anywhere, on nonviolence as a strategy.

ML: And Hamas wouldn't attack it?

SA: Actually, Hamas has been the least critical of nonviolence as a strategy. Not that they have endorsed it, or that they are engaging in it, but they are the least critical because for them they see it as a failed strategy; not a strategy that is opposing the aspirations but one that just doesn't work.

ML: They don't feel the need to prove their commitment against the occupation, while Fatah does?

SA: There is often a misrepresentation of nonviolence, and this is something we have tried to address: the linking of nonviolence to negotiation. Fatah has not chosen nonviolence. They say "nonviolence" when they talk about negotiations so everyone assumes that they are inherently linked. And the negotiations that Fatah has done have not produced the ends desired. What we are trying to show is that there are three ways of dealing with Occupation. There is the way of violence, the way of negotiations, and there is the third way, which is the way of nonviolence. This is part of the challenge for us, presenting nonviolence as resisting the occupation, not just engaging in dialogues and negotiations. These are some of the misrepresentations that we are trying to address.

ML: Let's go to your work for a second. Do you oppose negotiations?

SA: I oppose negotiations as they are being conducted right now, under the current frame and conditions put on the Palestinians. I believe that it will ultimately come down to negotiations, but there is a big gap right now in the relative power of each side and hence in how negotiations are being conducted. Negotiations will only work when the Palestinians are welcomed to the table as equals. Right now the Palestinians are being forced to give compensation and there is very little returned, even as a sign of good faith, like a freeze on the building of settlements. There is a big imbalance. I am not for these types of negotiations because we will fall into the same trap as Oslo. It isn't going to produce anything positive.

ML: And the trap of Oslo was?

SA: The trap of Oslo was that the occupation continued and intensified. The Palestinian movement was more restricted and the economic situation became more difficult. The corrupt Palestinian Authority was allowed to be corrupt by the international community because of the possible benefits for the peace process. And at the end of the day we Palestinians ended up with a worse situation than when we were living under direct occupation. If we just talk about the number of settlements and settlers, it more than doubled during the years of Oslo. So where are the signs of peace?

ML: Now specifically what is it that Palestinians are giving up when they are engaged in the negotiations with Israel? What would they be giving up that they wouldn't be giving up if they didn't negotiate?

SA: I don't know what more can be given up. There are many things that the Israeli government has refused to talk about, from the right of return to the status of Jerusalem. I think this is the point where we should pull out of negotiations because the Palestinians are getting nothing from them. One thing that we have given up is credibility, and within the Palestinian community people are becoming more and more afraid to be openly critical because of the structures that have been created.

The Palestinian Authority urges us to not have conversations about resistance because they think that will endanger the negotiations with Israel. Israel says "Oh, there isn't a real partner to make a deal with on the other side," so the PA feels that it has to crack down on militant discourse to prove itself.

ML: Now let's go back to the issue of the parties not having much focus on the national struggle. There is a slow starvation of Gaza, and how could the two major parties not be focused on that?

SA: I use the term "surplus powerlessness" a lot, after having read your (Rabbi Lerner's) book on this topic, because that is what is happening. [Ed. note: People feel more powerless than they actually are, and then out of that sense of their own powerlessness they take actions that are self-defeating and make them even more powerless than they were objectively.] You feel so powerless against all the problems, so you have to always prove yourself within the community and that is by engaging in this "well, at least we are doing more than them" or "we are shooting more rockets than they are." I will tell you that if you actually talk to the people shooting the rockets and ask them if they really think this is for liberation and that it is for resistance, they honestly will tell you that it is mostly for internal struggles between the militant factions, not even the political factions. They talk about how many more rockets they have shot than this other group, and it is this manifestation of surplus powerlessness that leads to these acts of violence. I believe that when there is unity to address these bigger issues then all of this factionalism would fall by the wayside. But right now too many groups are involved in positioning themselves within the militant community and not in the struggles dealing with hunger and starvation and land occupation.

ML: How are you going to get out of this situation?

SA: Nonviolence, for me is the only solution to get out of this mess. Nonviolence is the way to empower the Palestinian community to get out of this mentality of hopelessness and perceiving ourselves always as the powerless victim. Nonviolent struggle is a powerful way to take charge of your situation and make a difference in your community.

The difficulty in building support for a nonviolent form of struggle comes not only from the problems in the Palestinian consciousness, but also from the Israeli government and military who do not want a nonviolent movement to evolve. That is not to say that they want us to engage in violence, but they also don't want us to engage in nonviolence. Even now with the little nonviolent actions taking place, we are seeing a harsher response from the Israeli military. Even when we do complete nonviolence, there is still a violent response from the military. And this is where there needs to be more discussion and meetings with Israeli groups that are supporting the nonviolent movement: how we can link with them even more, and involve the international community to show that Palestinians are engaging in nonviolence--especially in the Western press which suppresses any news of the Palestinians doing nonviolence.

Part of being realistic about this is realizing that the U.S. media is not interested in providing honest reporting about Palestinian nonviolence. But once a nonviolent movement grows, then people will start to understand that it is powerful and get involved, and the political party leadership will get involved and the media will not have the option to ignore us, and they will have to report on us and discuss it. I would say we are still in the early stages of something evolving. But finally we have been able to face the big opposition to nonviolence within the community, so that weight has gone. Now the challenge is to build a movement.

ML: My experience here in the United States is that Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives are perceived as apologists for Zionism and pushed away by Palestinians living in the United States when we try to build any joint activity, conference or teach-in. So is there any group that you see of U.S. Palestinians who might align with the nonviolent position?

SA: For many Palestinians living in the United States, most Palestinian groups who come out of the region direct their efforts toward charity and supporting families and children of Palestinians there. There is a fear of becoming too politically involved and not knowing how the U.S. government is going to deal with the political involvement. So most are worried that offering resistance, or even using the word resistance, violence or nonviolence, would be too risky, so they concentrate on helping those in need.

ML: We have a small but vocal group of people identified with the Palestinian cause that says "Israel has to be wiped off the face of the earth" and "Israel is evil."

SA: Those people would probably give me, as a Palestinian, as difficult a time as any other person who talks about nonviolence. You probably get flak from the Jewish community more than others. It is the story of what they know, how they grew up; most of them are refugees who did not come from Palestinian areas, probably born in refugee camps and moved to wherever they are now. The narrative is very deep for them, the agony from that history of losing everything sets their minds. But for many of the Palestinians who live in the Occupied Territories and understand the dynamics of the conflict, I would think they would have a different narrative, not to say one is right or wrong, just a different narrative.

ML: So your strategy now, in Palestine, is to just do more of what you are doing, which is training people in nonviolence?

SA: To do more of what we are doing, and to go deeper than that. This is the new thinking that we are developing. It is not just about engaging in resistance, it is about creating real understanding and deep analysis of what is causing the Israeli community and society to act in the way it acts, to allow their government and their military to engage in these acts of violence. If they knew better, or understood better, or were open to the situation more, they would not allow things to happen in their name that are happening quite frequently.

We need to build strategies to address this, and for me, this is where nonviolence has great success. In negotiations and political discussions you only have certain languages to use, certain diplomatic lingo that you have to engage in, and certain issues that you look at, such as border issues, land, and water rights--these are the kind of things you negotiate. With nonviolence it opens you up to engaging in a new language that the politicians will refuse to talk about.

For example, the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that you, Rabbi Lerner, defined in the May/June 2008 issue of Tikkun, as manifested in the fear that is embedded in the Israeli community. You've correctly pointed out how we as Palestinians need to learn and understand that it is this fear that allows the Jewish population to give the green light to their government to commit acts of oppression and suppression of Palestinians.

How do we as Palestinians, even though we are not responsible for causing the initial inherited fear within the Jewish communities which happened in Europe, which was committed by white Christians, not Palestinians from the Middle East, how do we address our actions to be involved in the process of healing the fear that exists in the Jewish community?

Our Palestinian community needs to realize that every act of violence done against Israel is not isolated, not an act done against one military checkpoint or some civilians. There is a uniqueness in the Jewish perspective that we need to understand and take into account when acts of violence are done. These acts are misinterpreted and understood as a violent attack against an entire nation, an act of destroying an entire people. This is also part of the strategy that we are developing, trying to create language and tactics that will avert creating that feeling among the Jewish population.

ML: I have tried many times on the Israeli side to convince people to try to understand and deal with the psychodynamics in the Palestinian world. At one point, when I met with Rabin right after Oslo, I tried to convince him to say, "Ok, if you want to help the peace process here, I want my fellow Israelis to (1): learn Arabic, and speak Arabic to people. And (2): get to know Palestinians and invite them to your home. And (3): I want to apologize to the Palestinian people for all of the death, hurt, and violence that has happened because now we are on a path toward peace. I know that we hurt a lot of people."

I would love to see that same thing happening in the other direction. Of course, on an ethical level, it is totally unfair to ask the oppressed to deal with the psychology of the oppressor, but I try to make a distinction between what is fair and what is smart. There is a big difference there. It is not fair to ask Palestinians to worry about the psychology of Israelis, but on the other hand it is very smart to worry about that. So one such thing that I want you to think about is to have people who are part of that nonviolent movement writing letters to the families and communities of people who have been hurt by acts of Palestinian violence. To say "We are Palestinians who support nonviolence and we want you to know that most Palestinians here do not want to wipe you out and that we are deeply sorry at the death and the hurt caused by such and such act of violence. We don't support that, we don't think that that is an action that is part of our struggle, and we think it is a mistake. We want to apologize for that on the part of a whole lot of Palestinians who don't agree with it. But we can't control random people."

SA: I understand, but we do not want to be seen as the apologists for the Palestinian violence. Instead we need to create new tactics and strategies to prove to the Israelis, through action, that we are not out to hurt them, to destroy them.

ML: Can you tell me, are there such roots in Palestinian culture, of nonviolence? Or is it something that you are creating? Because a lot of people will say, "Oh, the Awads are Christians, they are mostly drawing on Christianity, but most of the people in the armed struggle are Muslims. And there is nothing in Muslim culture that is for nonviolence." So you are really trying to interpret the suppressed Christian voices as being the authentic articulation of Palestinian culture?

SA: Well, yeah, that is how many people try to present it, as interpreted. But knowing how small the Christian population is, which is 55,000 in total, and knowing that the vast majority of them are not involved in anything, no resistance, I conclude that all the nonviolent actions happening now in 2008 are conducted and led by Muslim leaders in the community, fully committed to nonviolence, fully understanding nonviolence in Islam, and as part of the Palestinian culture. And the Palestinian culture and Islam are both rich with examples--from as far back as the Prophet Mohammed up to modern culture, Palestinians have engaged in nonviolence. Maybe it wasn't talked about much, or directly referred to by the term nonviolence, but the term you used earlier, "smart resistance," smart actions, not this reactionary violence, these are terms that many Palestinians actually use to represent Islam. But for the majority of Palestinians, it really does go against the teachings of Islam. So, if the movement is going to evolve, it has to be led by the Muslim community, and will be. Are there any roots on the other side?

ML: I don't see any roots in Judaism for nonviolence. I mean, I create those roots by reading the text in a particular way, but it is not like the presence of an explicit nonviolent discourse is knocking me over the head. I am not overwhelmed by how much the Jewish tradition has nonviolence in it. I am not hearing it when I go to my Orthodox synagogue here in Berkeley. There are a lot of Jews who talk about peace who are actually primarily about revenge. There are some quotes that I can pull out of the tradition and say "hey look at this," but the majority tendency in the Bible is not nonviolence. It is the same as Christianity, there are some quotes from Jesus supporting nonviolence, but for the past 2000 years they haven't been practicing nonviolence. In fact, Christianity has been very violent. It all depends on the culture of the people practicing a given religion, on what aspects of that religon they emphasize. But back to what to do. So, let me ask you this: How can we help you? We have no money, as you know.

SA: I have always known that. I think part of it is creating knowledge and understanding. The American Jewish public needs to know that it is not just a simple black and white story over there, there are people on both sides who are working very hard trying to end the cycle of violence, and they need to start understanding that if they support and love Israel, they need to do the right things for Israel to survive. And everything that is being done now, this absolute blind support for Israel and the illness that the Israeli political establishment has, is destroying Israel in the long-term. I could even say, as a Palestinian, that it is to my benefit, I am now saying things that would be pro-Israel's survival, if they were to adopt them. The situation is getting more difficult, more people are now saying that the two-state option is a non-option. I see this in the walls and the land confiscation.

ML: And the one-state is not an option either. There are enough people that would see it as losing sovereignty.

SA: We really need to engage in deep thinking that would make Israeli society and Jewish society feel the security they need. If we were to propose a one-state plan, we would have to think of how to make the Jewish people feel secure enough to accept it. They don't have security now, and they would need to feel like a plan will make them more secure if they are going to go along with it.

ML: Israelis would need to be convinced it was a better deal.

SA: It has to be proven to be a better deal for them. And it's not just about some border that would make it geographically workable, it has to address the deep-rooted concerns of the Jewish community.

ML: It's not like we have no historical basis for fear in that regard. You just look at the Balkans and see the one state solution that was attempted, called Yugoslavia, didn't end up providing safety for those different groups. So there is some historical precedent that makes people feel like it would be even worse if they were all together.

SA: This is part of what Israel has to address. I always use the analogy of marriages and divorces: just don't leave us hanging in the middle like this. Marriage is the one-state and divorce is two-state. In the two-state plan, both states need viability, opportunity and equality, so that one state is not subordinate to the other. Subordinating one group to the other will not lead to a solution, it will still feel like an occupation. I mean, we saw Israel pull out of Gaza completely, so the land was liberated, but the occupation continues.

ML: What do you think about the idea of Palestinians campaigning for the right to vote in Israel as a way of provoking Israel to move toward a two-state solution? By saying, it's a fact that it is a one-state now, so give us the vote.

SA: Well, there is a step before that, a step that needs to be taken by the Palestinian leadership and establishment, which is to demand that the PA be dissolved. And that is the first step in the struggle against the Israeli government. By dissolving it, we remove the veil of responsibility from the Palestinian people, represented by the PA, and let it rest in the hands of the occupying forces who have the actual control right now anyway. And say, as occupiers, it is your responsibility. And there are many voices in the PA calling for the PA to give the authority back to the Israelis in the areas that are under occupation by the military.

And then from there you can say that we are living under one country, and demand the vote. Equality. It is all about equality, at the end of the day. For me, the struggle is about equality. One-state or ten-state, it does not matter. It is about every citizen in that society having equal rights, equal opportunities, equal possibilities. Of course everyone has access to a school, but it is more than that, it is equality at every level. Have good schooling for every child, and have good opportunity for every individual. If there is no sense of equality than whatever plan is implemented will not last.

ML: What do you make of Sabeel? [Ed. Note: Sabeel is an ecumenical grassroots liberation theology movement among Palestinian Christians.]

SA: I have a lot of respect for what they do, but I feel that they are too much of a niche group, that they are too focused on one thing, too focused on the Christian groups and the traditional groups that have been very supportive of peace and justice issues. So they have not been able to break through into other churches in the United States

ML: I heard from the kinds of people that Sabeel invites to its conferences a much more aggressive language than you use. There is much more anger at Israel coming from them than from you. There doesn't seem to be any comprehension of the need to deal with the psychology of Israel.

SA: Yes, and I think we are probably the only ones who are developing this language. But hopefully as we talk to more people about it, they will begin to understand. I don't want to be excusing and justifying the actions of Israel, saying we can't do this, we can't do that. I want to be saying what we can do that can really create change within Israeli society.

ML: Blessings to all who are committed in principle and practice to nonviolence.