Reconciliation, from Africa to the Middle East

Actually, the reason that I received a paper copy of the latest issue of the Palestine-Israel Journal, which I
have just written about on JWN here, is that
it has a review of my latest book, Amnesty
after Atrocity?: Healing Nations after Genocide and War Crimes. 
Since the book hasn’t actually received many reviews yet– though it
got some great pre-publication blurbs, that are printed on the back
cover– I wanted to write something here on JWN about this one… Okay,
I’ll admit: Especially, because this is a very favorable review! 
The reviewer, Sol Gittleman, seemed to really “get” what I was trying
to do with the book, which is always a good experience for any author
to have.

Gittleman is a former provost of Tufts University in Medford, Mass.,
and currently holds a University Chair there.  He twinned his
review of my book with another, of a book called Bridging the Divide: Peacebuilding in the
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, which is co-authored by my old
friend Edy Kaufman along with Walid Salem and Juliette Verhoeven..

Gittleman starts his review by writing: “It takes a very special kind
of courage to continue pressing toward reconciliation in the face of
overwhelming odds… ”  Then he writes appreciatively about
Kaufman et al’s book before he comes to my book.  Which is where he says
(okay, here is where I blush):

He gives more details about the topics  the book covers, and my
reflections on them there.  Then he concludes the review by
writing

So, a big thanks to you for that, Sol Gittleman… And here, by the way, is a nice, easy-to-download JPEG version of the
book’s cover:

Anyway, I’m really happy this review appeared where it did– that
is, in a journal that is seriously read and referred to by many people
in the Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking community– and in the way it
did: Namely, alongside consideration of a book on the challenges of
peacebuilding in the Israeli-Palestinian context.  When I launched
into the research that became this book, I knew I was venturing out
into some geographical terrain in sub-Saharan Africa that was almost
completely new to me.  But I found the topic of how people emerging from
very hard- (and roughly) fought conflict could ever possibly overcome
the many wounds from the past to be a riveting one, and it was one that I
had often wrestled with during my earlier engagement with various
citizen-diplomacy peacemaking efforts in the Middle East.

When the “flavor of the month” (okay, decade) in the international
human-rights movement increasingly, throughout the 1990s, became to
consider that every conflict that came to an end should be accompanied
by– or even, God help us, preceded by– some form of war-crimes
trials, I was already very skeptical.  How could that ever happen
in the context that I knew best, that of the Palestinian-Israeli context?  Goodness, when the
Palestinian and Israeli leadership do finally manage to get together
and conclude a final peace
agreement, as I sincerely hope they do before too many more years have passed, how would one ever start in the context of that, to unravel
the many long chains of responsibility for the very many
thousands of dead and harmed on either side of the national
divide?  And if one ever attempted to launch such a process– in
the accusatory way that criminal prosecutions always, of necessity,
assume– what effects would that have on the prospects of maintaining
and building the peace thus with such difficulty won?

I honestly couldn’t see it as being helpful.

In 2001, when my friend the Lebanese lawyer Chibli Mallat worked with
some survivors of the 1982 massacres in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila
refugee camps to bring a prosecution against Israeli PM Ariel Sharon–
and under Belgium’s extremely bizarre law allowing for “universal”
(i.e. completely extra-territorial) jurisdiction– a part of me
applauded the effort from the sidelines.  But an even larger part
of me asked, “How on earth is this
going to help bring Sharon to where he needs to be: Namely, sitting
down in an authoritative, final-peace negotiation with the Palestinian
leaders?”  I mean, really: How will it help the Palestinian and
Israeli people to escape from the yoke of war, occupation, pervasive
insecurity, death, and destruction if this one man, Ariel Sharon, ends
up in the dock as a defendant?

Later, as my research on the Africa book continued, I met and interviewed some people
in Mozambique who had committed and organized acts of anti-humane
terror that dwarfed many times over any of the bad actions that
Israelis have ever committed against Palestinians, or Palestinians
against Israelis.  (If you don’t believe me, go back and read some
of the reports on the kinds of tortures, mutilations, and other
terrioble abuses that the fighters from Renamo, in particular,
committed during the 15-year civil war there.)  But here’s the
thing: By the time I met these men, who had been the highest military leaders of Renamo, in Maputo in 2003, they had been
completely reintegrated into national society.  Very nearly all
Mozambicans had judged at the end of that terrible war that the only
way they could move forward
as a country was to put all the pain, ugliness, loss, grief, and
blame from the war era very firmly behind them…

So yes, I do still think that the big lessons that I learned from my
work on the book have huge relevance in the Middle East. 
Including, of course, in Iraq, where surely we have all now seen the
debacle and the horrendously peace-threatening tensions that resulted
from the knee-jerk application of the prosecutorial strategy in the
case of the Saddam trial.

Anyway, if you JWN readers have not yet read (and preferably also
bought!) my book, I hope you do so… I hope, too, that wherever you live
in the world and whatever parts of the world you are concerned about,
reading the book might help you to think more deeply about what it
really takes to make and build sustainable peace processes in
conflict-wracked parts of the world.  (My hint in this regard:
Western-based rights activists have not yet found all the answers…)