But can Mideast peace ever be more than a piece of paper? As the next phase gets going–a six-month period of Israeli withdrawal followed by Palestinian elections–the two peoples will be rubbing up against each other as never before. The West Bank will be divided into three zones: one controlled by Israel, another by the Palestinians and a third by security forces of both sides. Bombers and rioters will grab headlines. Quiet efforts to bridge gaps probably won’t. If the slowly unfolding process is to succeed, however, the idea of “translating the agreement into reality” will have to attract a wider following. A look at four pairs of peacemakers reveals the promise–and the pitfalls–that lies ahead.
Maj. Gen. Oren Shahor is a war veteran, a former intelligence officer and, most recently, a top Israeli peace negotiator. His counterpart across the negotiating table was Jamil Tarifi, a Palestinian lawyer who owns a West Bank construction firm. During months of all-night talks in cramped hotel rooms, the two men became . . . friends. “Something happened,” says Shahor, and not just progress in negotiations. “It’s something you can’t touch, something that belongs to the spirit,” he says.
One high point was Tarifi’s 48th birthday on Aug. 15. At the time, the two sides were wrangling over which powers the Palestinians would get in the West Bank. Shahor beckoned Tariff to his room to sign some documents, but Tariff found instead a cake and birthday revelers from both delegations. “It was a very human thing,” says Tariff, “very [much] appreciated.”
Of course, the negotiations themselves were not often pleasant. “We had to put our nerves in the freezer,” Tariff recalls. “Some of the Israelis, you hate them because they deal with you as if they are still the occupier.” But Tariff came to admire Shahor–even if he didn’t agree with him. “He has to defend his people’s interests,” Tarifi says. “Even if he insists on his view, you respect him in the end, because he does it in a respectful way.” Shahor, who once was wounded by Palestinian guerrillas, came to empathize with his former enemies, too. “I’m not naive,” he says. “I know that a pessimist is an optimist with some experience. But I believe in this peace.” Was it hard to change his outlook? “Sometimes it’s easier for a soldier to change,” he says, “because you’ve been on the battlefield and know the smell of blood.”
Yehuda Wachsman and Sheik Yasin Hamed Badr didn’t smell the blood of their sons, but they felt the loss as deeply as any soldier. A year ago, Badr’s son Abdel Karim was part of an armed squad from the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) that kidnapped Wachsman’s son, Nachshon, a 19-year-old corporal in the Israeli Army. The Hamas gunmen threatened to kill Nachshon if their demands for the release of Palestinian prisoners weren’t met. Israeli soldiers stormed the hideout where Nachshon was held, but didn’t reach him in time. Nachshon was killed, and so were his captors. Last month, at the invitation of a Palestinian journalist working for an Israeli newspaper, the two fathers met. “We shared sympathy for each other,” says the sheik, who condemned his son’s actions prior to the meeting. “I didn’t expect him to be so nice, so gentle, so kind.”
But why meet at all? Wachsman wanted to enlist Badr’s support for a campaign to apply the death penalty to convicted killers, whether Palestinian or Israeli. (The two men agreed, on both Islamic and Jewish grounds, that murderers should face the gallows.) Wachsman also sought Badr’s backing to establish a center in Jerusalem to promote religious tolerance. Badr liked the idea, but added that he was only the owner of a kiosk that sells cigarettes and sweets in Jerusalem’s Old City. Wachsman reminded Badr that the prophet Muhammad was a merchant, and that Abraham was a simple shepherd. “Plain men can change the world,” Wachsman says.
Good intentions aside, the relationship between the two fathers is already tainted by suspicion. After the kidnap-killing of Nachshon, Israeli security forces sealed the doors of Badr’s apartment, forbidding him from using it–a common form of punishment for the families of terrorists. Badr wants Wachsman to persuade the government to reopen his apartment. “If he thinks he is going to gain something personally because he met me, he is wrong,” says Wachsman. He says his aims are “much, much broader.”
Zehava Ben and Samir Joubran do more than talk: they make wonderful music together. She’s a Jewish-Israeli singer whose family has roots in Morocco; he’s an Arab Israeli from Nazareth who plays the ode, a stringed instrument that predates the lute. The two hope to perform a concert together in Gaza, where Ben has many Palestinian fans, to celebrate the latest peace agreement. “I’m not afraid,” says the singer, 26. “The Palestinian police are involved, and so is the Mossad.”
Ben’s Gaza show will be in Arabic, including songs by the legendary Egyptian singer Om Kathoum. Joubran, a 28-year-old Christian, has been helping her to improve her accent, and to master the quarter tones that are essential to Middle Eastern music. After several rehearsals, Joubran was pleased: “She started to really feel what she was singing–not to pretend to feel, but to really feel.” Does politics ever intrude on their relationship? “When you meet someone who is talented, you can forget anything,” says Joubran. “The most important thing in our relationship is music.”
As an Israeli Arab, Joubran knows firsthand the difficulties of peacemaking. When he applied in 1991 to study at a prestigious college for music in Cairo, he was turned down–because he holds an Israeli passport. (Nearly two decades after Egypt and Israel made peace, Egyptian intellectuals still boycott the Jewish state.) One of Egypt’s prominent conductors interceded on Joubran’s behalf, and also arranged for him to perform at Cairo’s opera house. But when Joubran suggested that the maestro visit Israel, his response was hostile. The conductor is a Palestinian refugee from the 1948 war. “He said, ‘Do you think I’m going to ask the Jewish people for a visa to visit my own home?’” Joubran recalls.
In Gaza, rumors about the Zehava Ben concert sent eager Palestinian fans scrambling to find tickets. “She can shake the ground you stand on,” says 19-year-old Hamada Shorab, who once saw her sing while working as a cleaner in Tel Aviv. “She has a beautiful voice, better than some Arab singers.” But the show still may not come off. Officials of the Palestinian Authority complain that Palestinian musicians from the West Bank don’t have free access to Gaza due to rigid Israeli security measures, and that Gaza itself is like a prison, its borders tightly controlled by Israel. Why, they ask, should an Israeli musician get a special welcome? Joubran hopes the obstacles can be overcome. Arabs “should not look at Zehava as a Jew,” he says. “Hear her voice, her music. She sings lovely music. Let’s not see everything as political.”
Most of the violence against the PLO-Israeli peace pact comes from zealots, Muslim and Jewish. But can religious figures also be a force for reconciliation? Sheik Rajai Abdo and Rabbi Jeremy Milgrom think so. The two men met this year at one of many “interfaith” meetings that take place in Israel. Joined by a Palestinian priest, they later traveled to Sweden to address community groups on the peace process. On what do the rabbi and the sheik agree? “The oneness of the Almighty,” says Abdo. He adds: “I’ve felt a very humanistic side to the Jewish people. Both peoples have experienced similar tragedy and shared the same experience of diaspora.”
Abdo feels a particular affinity for Sephardic Jews, who came to Israel from Arab countries. The Sephardim tend to be more right-wing than their counterparts from Europe, yet many still speak Arabic, eat Arab-style food and listen to Middle Eastern strains of music. “He who speaks Arabic is an Arab,” he says. Yet Abdo, who spent 24 years in the United States, is a marginal personality among Palestinians. (Some Islamic figures have objected to his views and opposed his contacts with Israelis, but there’s been “nothing threatening,” he says.) And Milgrom, who grew up in California, concedes freely that he’s considered naive and foolish by many fellow Israelis. Can such a dialogue really make a difference? “I don’t want to seem presumptuous,” says Milgrom, “but maybe we’re ahead of our time.”
Rabin himself predicts that it will take 10 to 30 years before peace between the two peoples becomes a reality. Progress, if it comes at all, will be measured in small increments. In Gaza, a popular Hamas band called the Martyrs opposes the Zehava Ben concert. “It’s like a Jew coming to kill me with an Arab knife,” says Nabil al-Khatib, the band-leader. But even Khatib recognizes that times are changing. Whereas most of the Martyrs’ music used to glorify attacks on Israelis, now such songs are only a small part of their repertoire. “It’s peaceful in Gaza,” he says. “I can’t stand on the stage and sing only about stabbing the soldiers or killing the Israelis.” That may not seem like much, but it counts for progress in a country where Arabs and Israelis alike have mostly pounded the drums of war.
