Interfaith Peace Builders/AFSC Delegations “Misunderstanding the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”
The Interfaith Peace Builders (IPB) and American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) sponsor regular delegations to “observe” the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The claimed purpose of these trips is to “foster[] a network of informed and active individuals who understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the United States’ political, military, and economic role in it.” However, as detailed in the following summary, rather than creating a network of people who “understand” the conflict, IPB and AFSC are building a radical advocacy network with NGOs that promote the Palestinian rejectionist narrative and anti-Israel demonization through the “Durban Strategy”.Speakers to the visiting delegations include members of the most radical NGOs operating in the region, including Jeff Halper of the EU-funded ICAHD and representatives from Al-Haq, the Holy Land Trust, Christian Peacemaker Teams, and the “Stop the Wall” Coalition. Past delegations have met with Bi’ilin demonstrators who IPB claims “are leading a popular nonviolent struggle against land confiscation”; meeting with “Israelis who refuse to serve in the military”; meetings about “the fate of the Bedouins of the Negev desert”; and “two half-day tours of the ‘separation barrier’/'apartheid wall’” with ICAHD and “Stop the Wall”
Participants in the delegations record their “observations” in highly emotive and biased accounts repeating the anti-Israel themes of their NGO presenters. Some excerpts:
- “As I have traveled for the last few days it is apparently clear that the agenda for the power elite of Israel is to give an image of a WIJ - White Israeli Jew, not unlike their counterparts WAJ - White American Jew and WASP - White Anglo Saxon Protestant. There are Jews of other hues, but you wouldn’t know it if you relied on the American and Israeli media. Let’s go way back to the most famous Jew of all times, Jesus (pbuh).”
- “The founder and director of the Israel Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), Jeff Halper, joined us at dinner on Thursday May 31 . . . Jeff distributed several copies of a short book he has recently co-authored dismantling the various claims offered to justify Israeli government Zionist policies.”
- “Our travels have allowed us to observe the terrain from several perspectives. We’ve experienced the ever visible Israeli soldiers, checkpoints and a mall which is in Israel that is quite on the level of any upscale mall in the West. However, when you travel to many of the areas of the Palestinians the opportunities are not the same. The word apartheid has come up many times and when you see this mammoth and long wall that separates families, villages, cities and just practical living it’s almost unreal. . . . Palestinians in many areas are only allowed to use five liters of water while many Israelis can use an unlimited water supply.”
- “Lifta . . . had been continuously inhabited since Biblical times - until 1948 when a Zionist militia entered the village, shot six men in the central square and moved on to the next community. The villagers, in grief and anticipating future attacks, got the message and evacuated . . . But it did not work out that way. Israel claimed its statehood, defeated the Jordanians, and denied return access to the villagers of Lifta - as well as the residents of over 500 other Arab communities. They and their descendents remain as refugees to this day.”
One “informed” member of the May 28-June 9, 2007 IPB/AFSC Delegation is Cecilia Lucas. Lucas claims to be a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley and was active in the media during the 2006 Lebanon War after she penned a “love poem” to a Hezbollah fighter. Since returning from her visit, she has been spreading the IPB message in one-sided articles for radical publications.
On May 31, 2007, Lucas’ delegation visited Efrat to meet with two residents, and reported on the meeting in a highly distorted account. One of those residents, Ardie Geldman, responded:
On May 31st I hosted a group of 19 visitors in our town of Efrat that, I was informed by the local Guiding Star travel agency handling its logistics, was visiting the area under the auspices of the “Fellowship of Reconciliation.” As it turns out, the delegation belonged to “Interfaith Peace Builders,” which I only learned upon its arrival. A former elected member of the Efrat town council, I continue to be asked and, if my private schedule permits, regularly agree to speak to many similar peace or church groups. I have been doing so for many years. No matter that all of these groups and I, without exception, disagree on the fundamental nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. No matter that when I question each group about it’s interest in meeting with a single, private citizen of the town of Efrat, such as myself, and I receive the same rote answer, “We are interested in hearing both sides,” it is clear to me that these groups’ only interest in meeting with me, or someone like me, is to salve their political consciences by being able to boast that they also met with an authentic “settler” within an authentic “settlement.”
Over years I have also encountered a number of internationals, well trained pro-Palestinian activists, whose interest in meeting a “settler” in Efrat (or some other Jewish community in Judea and Samaria) has more to do with garnering from such a meeting information or, even better, selected, piquant quotations by the “settler” that can be used at a later time within some other forum to further a pro-Palestinian agenda.
Regardless of motive, this type of encounter can and should take place within a framework of mutual respect. That is the understanding and spirit in which I welcome visitors into our community, and sometimes into my own home. I have no illusions about these groups’ agenda.
One rare exception is the aforementioned group. I am sorry, hurt, and personally insulted by the report I read on your website (http://www.afsc.org/israel-palestine/production-of-violence.htm) by Cecilia Lucas. To the best of my knowledge I have never encountered her before. Since reading the report she posted, I have taken the time to learn more about Ms. Lucas. Now I’ve got her number. I now know about her “love poem” to Hezbollah, and her refusal to acknowledge their murder of Israeli civilians as terrorism. I have no intention of challenging her idiosyncratic sense of morality or trying to refute her many uninformed and incorrect statements about life in our region. To do so would be futile. Suffice it to say that the unbridled bias she reveals in her various writings disqualifies her as a legitimate member in any forum hoping to engage in good faith the most serious topic of peace and reconciliation. The following comments pertain only to the unwarranted statements she made in a public forum about me or my community.
Her ostensibly authoritative opening reference to the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem satellite images from the 1970s (!) is a sop. APIJ is a Palestinian political organization in the guise of a scientific institution. Its unabashed purpose is to castigate Israel for its purported theft and destruction of Palestinian land and environment resources. In this paragraph, without benefit of evidence, and using just the technique of inference (she couches my choice of words, “barren” and “just rocks,” in quotation marks to indicate to her readers that just the opposite was true), she falsely conjures the image of Efrat having been built upon fertile land from which Palestinian crops and trees were uprooted. I feel confident in assuming that Ms. Lucas was not a visitor in this area during those years. I was. I am a living eyewitness. The land upon which the homes and institutions of the city of Efrat have been built was indubitably barren and just rocks. Our structures were built on the hilltops that are inhospitable to agriculture of any kind. And to further undermine her specious claim, rather than being razed, Palestinian vineyards and other crops were purposely and carefully built around and continue to be cultivated by their owners to this day.
Neither I, nor the other resident of Efrat who addressed this group that morning, at any time during the discussion claimed, as Ms. Lucas contends through the use of quotation marks, that “all morality and ethics is on our side.” She fallaciously states that among the homes in Efrat, “many cost in the millions.” This is a ridiculous and baseless fabrication, the purpose of which, I can only assume, is to advance the image of Efrat as an extremely wealthy and overly materialistic community. Ms. Lucas knows nothing of the dozens of families living in Efrat who regularly receive social welfare assistance due to a myriad of reasons. She erroneously assigns to both speakers that morning the claim to never having been to Palestinian neighborhoods, when I explicitly stated that I, during the years before the Intifadas, frequented the shops of Bethlehem, Beit Jala, and Beit Sahur, as well as local villages, as a welcome consumer. The subtext of her misstatement suggests that I am out of touch with Palestinian reality. I state with confidence that I am more in touch with current Palestinian realities than she is with life in Efrat. Again, through the use of subtext, her revelation to readers about my unwillingness to “show up as an ally to Arabs when the actions he disagrees with are being implemented” implies a lack of personal conviction and weakness of character. She has listened to me speak before a visiting group of total strangers for approximately all of one hour. What does she know about my daily comings and going, including the personal relationships I have developed over the years with local Palestinians? How dare she even allude to any judgment of me!
What most upsets me about Ms. Lucas’ screed is the self-righteous arrogance and cynicism in her tone. Her report “sounds” different than the others written by members of the Interfaith Peace Builders. Her mean spirited and snide manner, when directed to statements she attributes to me or my colleague, impugns my integrity and sincerity. She makes supercilious claim to understanding my psyche, dulled as it has become by the material benefits of living in an “established settlement,” and overcome as I am by the feeling of “power” and “entitlement.” Ms. Lucas is entitled to arrive at any interpretation she chooses, however biased it may be, to support her personal political agenda. But her decision to editorialize on the Internet regarding my statements abrogates the spirit of mutual trust with which I welcomed her and her group.
The fact that Ms. Lucas, along with most of the peace activists I have met with over the years, demonstrate by their lack of attention (other than lip-service) to the thousands of Israelis who are both the physical and psychological victims of Palestinian terrorists, including the citizens of the southern town of Sderot who continue to suffer daily shelling by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, indicates the inappropriateness of any claim they make to “peace making.” Such individuals or groups are surely passionate regarding their convictions about what is wrong here and what needs to be done to fix it. They undoubtedly further their confidence by finding common cause among Israel’s far political left. The irony is that these same groups lack credibility and standing among those of us whom they see as the problem, the people to whom they need to speak. That is only to their detriment, if one of their objectives is, and I believe that it is, to get us to listen to them.
Her jaded report, including her jaundiced characterization of life in our community, has already been shared with others in Efrat and Gush Etzion. Rather than advance dialogue for peace in the area, she has only succeeded in furthering the animosity and mistrust between those on opposite sides of the dispute.
Celicia Lucas begins her report: “Our day today started with two people talking to us about peace and hate.” The only hate I associate with that meeting in Efrat emanates from her.
Ardie Geldman
Efrat
26 July 2007
The distortions and past activity of Lucas is just one example of how the IBP/AFSC and its delegation members do not “understand” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at all but rather seek to make their one-sided views and anti-Israel advocacy more widespread.
