The Prospects for Peace

Dissident Heart · Posted: Tue Jul 25, 2006 2:56 pm Post subject: The Prospects for Peace

Since the title of our book is The Peace to End All Peace, I thought it worthwhile to explore the prospects for peace in the middle east. Does Fromkin's text describe the actual demise and impossiblity of peace in the middle east?What will it take for peace in the middle east?

Some may consider such a question to be naive and utopic, bereft of real politik and a distraction from the serious business of waging war on terror and securing markets for our ever expanding global economy. Peaceniks need not apply...what we need is sober realism tied to an overwhelming military force; our enemies do not want peace, but only to destroy us- and we must destroy them first.

I've assembled a few links to voices that see peace in the middle east as possible and necessary, and they have spent lifetimes of engaging politics, activism, intellectual energy, and bridge building across ethnic, religious, national and ideological borders.

Rabbi Michael Lerner's Healing Israel/Palestine: A Path to Peace and Reconciliation provides a carefully balanced approach to understanding both sides of this tragic problem, with an unabashed commitment to peace and trust in non-violence as the means. Lerner's book provides a very accessable history of the crisis, careful to hold all sides accountable for their abandonment of the peace process. He also catalogues many organizations in the region and around the world who are working together to turn swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks in that wartorn region.

Noam Chomsky's Middle East Illusions: Including Peace in the Middle East? Reflections on Justice and Nationhood is a crushing deconstruction of offical state policies from Europe, the Middle East, and most importantly, the United States. Chomsky's book highlights the illusions created by offical propaganda that talk of peace but wage constant war. Arab, Jew, American, European, secular or religious...Chomsky confronts all sides and challenges they hold themselves to the same standards they demand from their enemies. Even with his juggernaut of evidence exposing international malice and self-deception, Chomsky holds out for hope that peace is possible, and that all of us have a stake in it.

The Foundation for Middle East Peace has an excellent one-stop assortment of Peace Organizations in the region and around the world.

There are many other resources besides these, and maybe we can assemble and assess their worth in this thread?

Edited by: Dissident Heart at: 7/26/06 12:17 pm

Loricat · Posted: Tue Jul 25, 2006 3:10 pm Post subject: Re: The Prospects for Peace

Thanks for the book suggestions, DH. I arrived at BookTalk right after reading the updates on my Lebanese blogging friend's site, with this very question on my mind.

"All beings are the owners of their deeds, the heirs to their deeds."

Loricat's Book Nook
Celebrating the Absurd

Dissident Heart · Posted: Thu Jul 27, 2006 7:00 pm Post subject: The Leftists Speak

Chomsky, Pinter, Zinn, Vidal et al on Israel
Wednesday, 26 July 2006, 12:56 pm

Opinion:

A Letter

The latest chapter of the conflict between Israel and Palestine began when Israeli forces abducted two civilians, a doctor and his brother, from Gaza. An incident scarcely reported anywhere, except in the Turkish press. The following day the Palestinians took an Israeli soldier prisoner - and proposed a negotiated exchange against prisoners taken by the Israelis - there are approximately 10,000 in Israeli jails.

That this "kidnapping" was considered an outrage, whereas the illegal military occupation of the West Bank and the systematic appropriation of its natural resources - most particularly that of water - by the Israeli Defence (!) Forces is considered a regrettable but realistic fact of life, is typical of the double standards repeatedly employed by the West in face of what has befallen the Palestinians, on the land alloted to them by international agreements, during the last seventy years.

Today outrage follows outrag e; makeshift missiles cross sophisticated ones. The latter usually find their target situated where the disinherited and crowded poor live, waiting for what was once called Justice. Both categories of missile rip bodies apart horribly - who but field commanders can forget this for a moment?

Each provocation and counter-provocation is contested and preached over. But the subsequent arguments, accusations and vows, all serve as a distraction in order to divert world attention from a long-term military, economic and geographic practice whose political aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation.

This has to be said loud and clear for the practice, only half declared and often covert, is advancing fast these days, and, in our opinion, it must be unceasingly and eternally recognised for what it is and resisted.

John Berger
Noam Chomsky
Harold Pinter
José Saramago
Eduardo Galeano
Arundhati Roy
Naomi Klein
Howard Zinn
Tariq Ali
Charles Glass
W.J.T. Mitchell
Richard Falk
Gore Vidal
Russell Banks

Mieussy, France

PS: As Juliano Mer Khamis, director of the documentary film Arna's Children, asked: "Who is going to paint the 'Guernica' of Lebanon?"


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