In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, peace requires moral courage | Opinion

Across spiritual traditions, the winter holiday season is usually meant to invoke a spirit of peace and new hope. This past year, however, the war in Gaza seemed to be casting an especially long shadow. The divisiveness behind the war crept into holiday conversations, with many folks relaying to me that they had never felt such tension around the table as when the topic of the war was broached.

Each side seems to come to the table with talking points, curated by corporate media personalities whose primary strategy is to peddle outrage until they corral enough eyes for enough time to hope for profitability. The result is that my Palestinian-supporting friends are likely to tell me, “Did you hear that the Israeli defense minister called Palestinians animals?!?” My Israeli-supporting friends then retort: “Did you hear that Hamas officials quote the Antisemitic diatribe, ‘Protocols of Zion’?!?” It is a rhetorical duel to paint the other side in the most extreme colors possible, all the while ignoring more moderate and reasonable statements.

If we can agree that the goal should be to foster peace, this competition to identify the worst in the other side is not productive; in fact, it is probably one of the biggest obstacles to the meaningful dialogue required to find lasting peace. How can we have productive conversations when the complexity of the debate is stripped away and the whole other side becomes defined by their worst example?

The reality is that it is no act of moral courage to condemn the extremes of the other side. But where are the people willing to challenge the extremes on their own side? Who is willing to stand up, look in the mirror, and see the more sinister figures behind them? So many people want to call for other people to change, but who is willing to change themselves and their allies?

We need to appreciate that when we repeat the rhetoric about the worst of the other side, we do the bidding of the extremists whose goal it is to scuttle the peace most of us claim to want.

In fact, the sad story of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the past two decades can be summarized by the triumph of such extremists on both sides. We should remember that in the afterglow of the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, Palestinians shook hands with Israeli soldiers and Israeli shopkeepers opened their doors to Palestinians. There was cautious optimism among the Semitic cousins who shared a common land.

What happened?

In any debate among competing factions, there seems to be absolutist idealists, who would rather hold out for everything rather than get something, and practical realists, who would rather get something rather than nothing. For the former, compromise is a dirty word; for the latter, compromise is the nature of progress.

Every longstanding conflict is marked by both camps — absolute idealists and practical realists — and both sides can call upon historical examples where their approach yielded results. However, in a contested land struggle such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the absolute idealists usually quickly became extremists, whose goal was to ensure that no lasting peace grounded in compromise could ever take hold. Israel would be all of ancient Israel! Palestine would have no Jews! The goals of absolute idealists on each side were mirror opposites of each other, and the result was tit-for-tat tragedy that leaves everyone scarred.

Political scientists call this phenomenon “the extremist veto,” which occurs when extremists do their best to shift the middling masses to their edge by staging spectacular attacks which lead people to retrench to their corner, thereby scuttling any momentum toward peace.

On the Israeli side, a Jewish extremist killed the author of the Oslo peace accords, Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin. The settler movement then increasingly encroached into the West Bank, claiming sovereignty over land that Israel had previously pledged to give to a future Palestinian state. And, all the while, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has staked his career on fostering fear among Israelis and preventing peaceful movements that could lessen that fear.

On the Palestinian side, the militant groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have created whole movement grounded in Antisemitism and resistance to Israel’s very existence. They justified targeting bar mitzvahs and music festivals, as they claim there are no innocent Israelis. Any counter narratives they dismiss as Zionist propaganda, thereby controlling the flow of information to their people.

Without attempting to conflate the two sides or suggest moral equivalency, the reality is the extremists on both sides exist in a symbiotic relationship where they need each other. Netanyahu needed a strong Hamas so that the Palestinians would be divided and he could make the case that there was no real partner for peace. Hamas needed a bellicose Benjamin Netanyahu so their people would come to believe that the Israeli threat mattered more than their corrupt economy and failed services. When war has erupted in Gaza — as it has five times in the last two decades — it is precisely because it served both extremists’ agendas more than the status quo or peace.

The shift in rhetoric over the past two decades, whereby the grays of reality have slowly been overtaken by a lot of black and whites, is a sign of the effectiveness of the extremist veto. For too many people, the other side has become nothing more than a collection of their worst fears. The result is that most everyday Palestinians and Israelis may not want war, but they no longer seem to want peace.

How do we reverse a trajectory that has been defined by the normalization of extremism? It begins with shifting how we talk about the conflict. The loudest voices against extremists need to come from inside their own camp. Activists need to learn that criticizing one’s own is not a sign of betrayal but a sign of strength. The moral high ground is always lost when targeting civilians, raping women or killing children are swept under the rug to make some larger point; these need to be condemned, full stop.

Perhaps my hope is naive or Pollyannaish, but I look for a day when Palestinian rallies have signs condemning Hamas alongside those directed toward Israel and when Israelis stand with signs protesting settler disturbances alongside Hamas attacks. More than ever, the conflict really needs a renewed middle who loudly resist the extremists at the edge. We will only have peace in the Middle East—and around our holiday tables—when enough people muster the moral courage to condemn the extreme voices surrounding us.

Contributing columnist Stephen Lloyd-Moffett is a professor of religious studies at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.