Peace & Justice

Fear: 20th Annual Peace Essay Contest

Reaching beyond our fears and taking action can go a long way to preventing conflict and creating an atmosphere of trust and hope in our communities and the world.

The 2006 Peace Essay Contest topic is fear.

Students, grades 5 through 12 in Stanislaus County, are invited to reflect on how giving in to fear can get in the way of efforts to create understanding and peace in our homes, our communities, and our world.

Fear can be a powerful force in our lives. In a positive way, fear can warn us of danger and motivate us to act, thrill us with a rush of excitement, or push us to work harder to overcome obstacles. In a negative way fear can dominate the decisions we make and the actions we take. Being afraid can immobilize us when we need to act or drive us to react in a way that makes a situation worse.

In addition, others may play on our fears to lure us toward choices that may result in mistrust and the escalation of conflict. The natural human hesitation in relating to people and situations that are unfamiliar to us can be magnified out of proportion to become a weapon for those who want to create contention for their own purposes.

Contest flyers are now available.  To download the flyer (rules and application form) now, click here (these are pdf files, you will need Adobe Acrobat, a free download, to read and print them).

The Peace Essay Contest is a project of the Modesto Peace/Life Center.

The Harvest Supper, a benefit to the Peace Essay Contest will be on Saturday, October 15th.

Tuesday afternoon at Modesto Peace/Life Center

Connections fundraiser a success

A small but lively group raised approximately $2688.00 at our recent fundraiser at the home of Tom and Alfa Broderick in Waterford.

Disengagement viewed via Road Map and 14 Reservations

By EHUD APPEL

I attended a presentation by Israeli Deputy Consul General Omer Caspi at Congregation Beth Shalom in Modesto August 18, a talk which was open to the community and was ostensibly an informational session about Israel evacuation of the Gaza settlements taking place that week.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s unilateral “disengagement” from the Gaza Strip has been a politically risky move, and he has alienated many of his former allies, while gaining the support of many of his former opponents. This complication of the Israeli political landscape certainly beckoned a lucid speaker to sort things out; Caspi was indeed slick. Caspi, however, is a spokesman for his government, and the spokespeople for all governments tend to inform only within the parameters of their countries official positions.

Caspi needed to accomplish two things: First, to convince those to the right of Sharon that disengaging from Gaza would not be a form of national suicide; second, to convince those to the left of Sharon that Sharon, like all Israeli governments before him, has tirelessly and courageously sought peace in a sea of Arab intransigence.

In the first instance, Caspi “sold” the plan itself; in the second instance, he pitched his government’s official interpretation of the recent past. I will allow those who did not (or still do not) recognize the face-value benefits of the disengagement to assess his effectiveness on that track. On the second matter, however, I found his summary of the past twelve years of peace processes and violence to be simplistic, one-sided, and full of rhetorical obfuscations and sleights-of-hand designed to cartoonishly exonerate his government of any wrongdoings.

One reason why the disengagement has sparked so much excitement in the international arena is its perceived potential to revive the Roadmap to Peace, which Sharon and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas have pledged to follow. Caspi played up this aspect, but failed to mention Sharon's fourteen reservations to the road maps original text, some of which force into question his intentions for peace (www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Peace/road1.html).

The first reservation requires the Palestinian Authority to stop all violence and incitement against Israel as a prerequisite to progress on the Roadmap. At face value, this is a legitimate concern, but it goes on to stipulate that, “as in other mutual frameworks, the Roadmap will not state that Israel must cease violence and incitement against the Palestinians.”

Certainly, violence and incitement come from both sides; even Caspi was quick to mention and condemn the Jewish terror attacks committed by fanatical Kahanist militants prior to and during the disengagement. Why this stipulation, then? For the same reason that Caspi peppered his speech with clichés about “our” children versus “theirs.”

Israeli children, he said, dream of Michael Jordan, while Palestinian children dream of death. Disturbing accounts of Hamas summer camps, well-circulated videos of incendiary Palestinian Television, and the increasing involvement of young people in suicide attacks make it easy for Caspi to paint a huge moral gulf between “us” and “them,” but essentially he is using a very easy device advocating for children to generalize, to demonize, and to reap the political benefit.

The preservation of a moral high ground, deserved or otherwise, is important to all governments, and Caspi’s is no exception. This is why the Roadmap must not equate incitement.

Caspi also referred repeatedly to Ehud Barak's Generous Offer in the summer of 2000. His chronology, however, was misleading. He did not mention that there were two negotiation sessions in 2000, the second of which started in December. It was in December when Bill Clinton, not Barak, drafted certain “parameters” which were basically what Caspi portrayed as being proposed by Barak in July.

The actual offer made in July is disputed; Barak and Arafat gave differing accounts, as did one of the U.S. participants, Robert Malley. The Clinton Parameters, which ceded about 95% of the West Bank, divided Jerusalem, resettled refugees in Palestine, not in Israel, and gave them an internationally funded aid package, is widely thought to be what Barak offered and from what Arafat walked away. If it is true that Arafat walked away without a counter-offer at Camp David, then that was indeed a mistake; but the relevance of that mistake is now rather small, despite the vast importance placed on it by Barak, Sharon, and Caspi to portray one side as totally of good faith and the other side as totally intransigent.

The Clinton Parameters actually blossomed into the Taba negotiations in January 2001, where soon-to-be-defeated-by-Sharon, Barak's negotiators reportedly came the closest ever to a final status agreement with the Palestinians. While the formal talks were broken off, they continued informally and eventually produced the Geneva Initiative in 2003: a model final-status agreement agreed upon by the same people who were entrusted to negotiate during the formal peace process. That is, there existed Palestinian Partners for Peace which, for the past five years, Sharon and Barak, and now Caspi, claim have been nonexistent.

When the Geneva Initiative was announced, Sharon did not contact the Palestinian negotiators to renew formal negotiations based on the Taba/Geneva progress. Rather, the Yossi Beilins and the Avraham Burgs and the other Israeli Geneva drafters were vilified by the Israeli establishment, accused of treason, and worse. Caspi mentioned none of this.

Caspi is an able speaker who is good at his job, but I suggest that those interested in the disengagement and in the general political landscape of Israel and Palestine seek out information that is not provided by either of the governments party to the conflict. If an ambassador from the Palestinian Authority came to speak about the conflict, I'm sure that some who found Caspi reliable would have questioned the P.A. official’s credibility; and I would have too: but this is not because there is a credibility gap between the P.A. and the Israeli government. It is because there is a credibility gap between information which flows freely from independent sources and that which passes through government of corporate funnels.

Cross the line: November 2005

BY ROY BOURGEOIS MM, KATHLEEN DESAUTELS SP, JUDITH KELLY, JOEL KILGOUR

For almost 60 years, the School of the Americas (SOA/ WHINSEC) has trained over 60,000 Latin American soldiers in tactics that are used to wage war against their own people. Courses taught at the school include counterinsurgency techniques, sniper training, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence and interrogation tactics. Among those targeted by SOA/ WHINSEC graduates are educators, union organizers, religious workers, student leaders and others who work for human rights.

Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been tortured, raped, assassinated, disappeared, massacred and forced to become refugees by those trained at the SOA/ WHINSEC.

In the face of this training, large social movements throughout Latin America fight for justice and have brought popular change to their countries. For 15 years, thousands of people in the United States have worked in solidarity to close the SOA/ WHINSEC through a variety of means.

One important tool we use is non-violent civil disobedience. During the November 1999 Vigil, over 4000 activists disobeyed military authorities, processed onto the grounds of Ft Benning GA -home of the SOA- and overwhelmed the authorities in a solemn funeral procession.

More than 15,000 thousand of us will again gather in front of the gates of Ft Benning over the weekend of November 18th-20th, 2005.

We will move our government to change and make it difficult for it to isolate and prosecute those who engage in nonviolent civil disobedience by crossing in large numbers onto the base. When large numbers cross onto the base it is more difficult for the government to prosecute everyone. Even in a large-scale action though, be advised that the maximum sentence for trespass is 6 months in prison and a $5,000 fine. More legal information is available at www.soaw.org.

We invite you to participate in this action at the gates of Fort Benning and pledge to cross the line. Your participation may be conditional on how many others will join you. We ask that everyone who signs the commitment form reflect on the risks involved in crossing the line and prepare for nonviolent action that will create a world where all live in dignity.

If your group wants assistance with discernment and nonviolence training, former Prisoners of Conscience can visit your group. Contact Judith Kelly at silverdove@verizon.net