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Out of sight of the international press
pack, a bid to resolve the Gaza crisis, involving a dialogue
between a Jewish religious leader and Hamas representatives,
is ongoing and well advanced.
"I'm talking to Hamas
representatives every day," a weary sounding Menachem Froman
told me by telephone from the West Bank settlement of Tekoa,
where he lives and works as a rabbi. "We have had a lot
of meetings and I have just spoken to an aide of my prime minister
about this."
But Tel Aviv's interest in
a negotiated end to the standoff is far from assured.
The day before the tanks rolled
into Gaza, Froman had been due to launch an extraordinary peace
initiative at a news conference in Jerusalem with Muhamed Abu
Tir, the Hamas MP, Khaled Abu Arafa, the Palestinian minister
for Jerusalem, and three Israeli rabbis.
The panel was to have made
a collective call for the release of Corporal Gilad Shalit, the
beginning of a process to release all Palestinian prisoners and
the immediate start of negotiations with Hamas on the framework
for a peace deal based on 1967 borders.
They would also have announced
that Jewish and Muslim religious leaders could achieve peace
where Israel's politicians had failed.
But the response from Israel's
security establishment was crushing.
Hours before the meeting was
due to start, the Shin Bet detained Abu Tir and Abu Arafa and
warned them not to attend the meeting. The news conference,s
organisers were forced to contact the other rabbis - who were
already on the road to Jerusalem - and tell them not to come.
Instead of a triumphant statement
of mutual respect and dialogue, a subdued and gently defiant
three-man panel fended off aggressive questioning from an unruly
Israeli press pack.
As Yitzhak Frankenthal, whose
son was killed by Hamas in 1994, said that the Palestinians had
been pushed into the kidnapping by an inhuman occupation, one
journalist jumped up and down shouting: "Should someone
who murdered your son be freed?"
Frankenthal responded with
dignity. "It would be the easiest thing in the world for
me to say that they are terrorists and we must fight them.
"But in the eyes of the
Palestinians, they are liberators. We need to understand that
it is the obligation of the Palestinians, as it is the obligation
of every other nation, to fight for their liberation. The time
has come for reconciliation, and the only way to achieve that
is to talk."
Talking, however, requires
a partner.
Two days after the news conference,
Abu Tir and Abu Arafa were kidnapped by Israeli forces, along
with a third of the Hamas cabinet. Four days later, Israel revoked
both men's citizenship and residency rights in Jerusalem. As
the Jerusalem Post headline put it: 'Shin Bet foils Hamas-Jewish
meeting'.
An even more accurate headline
might have been the one Israel National Radio's Arutz Sheva website
ran a few days later, pertaining to another story: 'The peace
process is a bigger danger than Hamas'.
In this opinion piece, Ted
Belman argued that "the threat of rockets raining down on
Israel from Gaza isn't nearly the threat that the peace process
was and is" because peace talks would require Israeli concessions.
"To avoid this fate, the
violence in the territories would have to continue at tolerable
levels, but that doesn't solve the problem" Belman wrote.
His conclusion was that the Palestinians needed to be provoked.
Some believe that Israel's
re-invasion of Gaza was a similar provocation aimed at bringing
down the Hamas government and preventing a unified Palestinian
negotiating stance based on the prisoners' document.
Having ruled out the only possible
solutions that could have bought a temporary peace, Olmert and
Peretz are now the proud owners of a Sharonist policy which,
almost by definition, strengthens Hamas in the occupied territories
and far-right forces at home. American and British support for
it traps them further within a dynamic that heats the pot of
bloodshed, even as they dishonestly promise their people disengagement,
convergence and peace.
The daring raid on Kerem Shalom
by Palestinian guerillas has shone a spotlight on the Israeli
government's Scylla and Charybdis. But could Froman's efforts
offer them a way out?
Precedent suggests it would
be foolish to hold out hopes. But try telling that to Froman.
The rabbi is currently "neither eating nor sleeping"
as he engages in round-the-clock talks with Hamas representatives,
building on his meetings with Mahmoud al-Zahar earlier this year.
Froman may be an eccentric,
but he has a formidable track record. A co-founder of the messianic
Gush Khatif settlers movement, Froman split from the group after
Baruch Goldstein's Hebron massacre.
He became a religious adviser
to the Knesset and brokered the release from prison of Hamas's
spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. He also brokered Yassin's
subsequent announcement of a ceasefire, which Israel refused
to accept and Yassin subsequently withdrew.
Yasser Arafat considered him
a brother. A peace plan the two men were working on was reaching
a culmination point in Arafat's final days. It involved Arafat
signing off on an independent Palestinian state and permanent
religious ceasefire, the latter with the support of key Israeli
civic and religious leaders.
It was scuppered by an inconvenient
phone call from the then-interior minister, Gideon Ezra, and
a deterioration in Arafat's health which, by the following day,
had rendered him unable to take visitors.
Ironies abound in the history
of Froman's peace efforts. His uncle was killed in the 1930s
by Ezzedine al-Qassam, the militant Palestinian cleric whose
name was later adopted by Hamas's armed wing. Yet Froman is on
record as saying he has more in common with "my brothers
and sisters in Hamas" than with secular Israelis.
His motivations stem from a
deep commitment to the once-integral universal tradition in Jewish
thought, best summarised by Rabbi Hillel's "do unto others"
maxim. He believes that while the land of Israel is holy, sovereignty
over it is not and so aspires to live as a Palestinian Jew in
a Palestinian state. For the past two years, however, he has
been living under police protection because of death threats
from other settlers.
Should his peace efforts bear
fruit, perhaps his national-religious neighbours will be reminded
that in the messianic age, according to Isaiah, the wolf is supposed
to lie down with the lamb.
CounterPunch
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