Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (52 page)

Religious values are particularly open-textured in this way, however much people believe their own interpretation to be the only literal or right one.
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In Judaism, the religious commandment to “keep the Sabbath holy,” whose violation in biblical times was punishable by death, continues to undergo radical reinterpretation: In today’s Jerusalem, a chief dispute between Orthodox and Reform Jews entails whether Sabbath observance allows for driving on Saturdays. Or take the biblical commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” Many U.S. conservatives believe it warrants both an anti-abortion agenda and capital punishment, whereas many U.S. liberals consider this commandment to warrant abolition of capital punishment and a pro-choice agenda. American leaders who seek election or to govern from the center must learn to finesse seemingly contrary interpretations of sacred values in creative ways.

For both Israelis and Palestinians, “the Land” is sacred, with Jerusalem at its center. Israelis simply refer to their country as “the Land”
(ha-aretz),
whereas for Palestinians “Land and Honor” (
‘ard wal ard)
are one. Israeli political leaders creatively reinterpreted the historical scope of “the Land,” first to justify claims on Gaza and then to justify leaving it. If Palestinians, who simply refer to Jerusalem as “the Holy” (Al Quds), can reframe their idea of the city to include only its Arab neighborhoods and part of the Temple Mount (Haram Al-Sharif), then Israel might be willing to accept the Palestinian capital there. Reframing the issue in this way need not call into question “the strength of attachment” to the sacred value of Jerusalem.

For Muslims, the meaning of jihad, or holy war, can be interpretedin radically different ways, whether as an inner mental struggle for the preservation of faith or as physical combat against external enemies who threaten Islam. For supporters of militant Islamist groups whom we have surveyed, including members of Hamas, jihad is the “Sixth Pillar” of Islam, which trumps four of the five traditional pillars (almsgiving, pilgrimage, fasting, and prayer); only the pillar expressing faith in God stands up to jihad. For many other Muslims, there is no such Sixth Pillar, and professed belief in it may be heretical and blasphemous. Given the popular and political division of Palestinian society today, Palestinian leaders must carefully navigate meanings of jihad without alienating major segments of Palestinian society or the outside world.

This issue of reframing jihad is currently an important consideration in Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism efforts. As one senior Saudi official recently said to me:

During the Afghanistan war [with the Soviets] we daily praised the mujahedin and Bin Laden in our newspapers. He was the leader of the Arab heroes. Mujahedin entered our vocabulary in a positive frame. Then we said he was bad. The people were confused. Before a hero and overnight a bad man. We had to reframe jihad to distinguish “moral jihad” from the Takfiri ideology. The mujahedin had been heroes for us, and for you [America] in Afghanistan, and now they were terrorists … and we had to have a way of reframing jihad in order to show that the Takfiri way of jihad was different, their training, ideology, tactics.
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SHIFT THE CONTEXT

One way leaders can navigate through the muddle of meanings that attend sacred values is to shift the context so that one sacred value becomes more relevant than others in a specific context. At West Point, for example, cadets acculturate to two competing “honorcodes.” There is a formal one, which requires telling the truth and obeying the orders of superiors, and an informal one, which entails loyalty to peers. Army leaders understand that at times they must carefully balance vertical loyalty to commanders with horizontal loyalties to comrades, for example, by not punishing cadets who refuse to snitch on their buddies.

When I spoke about suicide bombers with Sheikh Hassan Yusef, a West Bank Hamas leader detained in Israel’s Ketziot Prison, he told me, “God created people to live, not to die…. We have to find an exit.” In a similar vein, then–Palestinian prime minister Ismail Haniya said, “We need a dialogue of civilizations, not a clash of civilizations.”
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These Hamas leaders clearly mean here to appeal to our common understanding of humanity as being equal to, or greater than, Islamist calls for martyrdom. Of course, on other occasions and in other circumstances these same leaders may reverse priorities, for example, when they feel that possible windows of opportunity for a breakthrough to the outside, such as international recognition or aid, are closed to them. Such changing appeals do not necessarily represent either flip-flops in thinking or hypocrisy, but a fluid appreciation of values according to how circumstances can be framed in terms of them. That is part of the paradoxical nature of sacred values, “eternal” and morally absolute, yet widely open to interpretation.

One way to shift context is to change a value’s scope from the here and now to an indefinite time in the future. In the 1920s, for example, the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin moved the goal of a world victory for communism to an indefinite future when he declared communism in one country to have priority, contradicting Lenin’s views that the world’s imperial powers were imminently about to destroy themselves.

Ami Ayalon, former head of Shin Bet, Israel’s counterterrorism and internal security agency, expressed to us his view that Hamas’s proposals for a
hudna,
or provisional armistice, could be movingin this direction.
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Consider that the first
hudna
was the eighth-century Treaty of Hudaibiyyah, a nonaggression pact between Mohammed and the Quraish tribe. The founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, originally offered a ten-year
hudna
in return for complete withdrawal from all territories captured in the Six-Day War and the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. At various times, Yasin offered terms for
hudnas
that were potentially renewable for thirty, forty, or one hundred years, although it would never signal recognition of Israel.

Ahmed Yusef, political adviser to the Hamas government in Gaza, told us that there is no limit in principle to how many times a
hudna
might be renewed. He compared Hamas’s practical willingness to live alongside Israel to the willingness of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to accept a permanent armistice with Great Britain while still refusing to recognize British sovereignty over Northern Ireland. Of course, the IRA never refused to recognize Britain’s existence, and many Israelis believe that Hamas’s refusal of recognition and permanent peace indicates that any
hudna
will just be a smoke screen to allow military preparation for an eventual attack on Israel.

PROVISIONALLY PRIORITIZE VALUES

Fulfilling one sacred value may require the delay of achieving others. At the start of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln was willing to postpone emancipation to save the Union. Similarly, Israeli leader David Ben-Gurion was willing to accept a partition of Palestine that left Israel without control over historical Judea or Jerusalem in order to attain statehood.
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Lincoln and Ben-Gurion both wanted the delay to be only provisional. Nevertheless, later in life Ben-Gurion argued against settlement in the West Bank and Gaza. This example suggests that prioritization of current values may allow for a change in the scope of values over time.

Yasser Arafat, who headed the Palestine Liberation Organization(PLO), steered that organization to officially recognize Israel. But Fateh, the PLO’s largest contingent and also headed by Arafat, has never renounced its guiding principles and goals, which include, in Article 12 of Fateh’s constitution, the “complete liberation of Palestine, and eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence.”
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Israeli governments were never entirely convinced that Arafat’s commitment to the PLO position on recognition of Israel trumped the Fateh constitution’s prohibition of recognition. Successive Israeli governments have rejected the idea that any Palestinian government that included Hamas would possibly “allow” recognition of Israel, considering this idea a Hamas ploy to mask its real intentions to destroy Israel. But several senior members of the present Israeli government and opposition to whom we spoke consider Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, to be sincere in recognizing Israel’s right to exist and in wanting peace, despite the persistence of nonrecognition clauses in Fateh’s constitution. This suggests, again, that pragmatic prioritization of one value over another, however provisional to begin with, may facilitate a more permanent realignment of values.

REFINE SACRED VALUES TO EXCLUDE OUTMODED CLAIMS

Article 32 of the Hamas Covenant (1988) highlights “Zionist scheming … laid out in
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
This is a notorious anti-Semitic tract forged by Russian tsarist police. In private, Hamas leaders grant that it may not be a statement of fact. By explicitly renouncing its endorsement of the
Protocols,
Hamas could demonstrate that it no longer wants others to see it as anti-Semitic. Likewise, Israel could distance itself from the old Zionist slogan that Palestine was “A land without people for a people without land.”
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Our talks with leaders on both sides indicate awareness that their current positions involve outmoded and historically inaccurate claims. They also acknowledge that, were the other side torenounce such blatant falsehoods, this could lead to a psychological breakthrough. Overcoming historical precedents and emotional barriers to renouncing even patently false claims, however, may require neutral mediation by those who understand both sides. Even then, it takes time. According to Lord John Alderdice, a principal mediator in the Northern Ireland conflict, it took nine years of back-and-forth for this to happen in Northern Ireland.
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USE ONE SIDE’S SACRED VALUES TO AMPLIFY THE IMPORTANCE OF THE OTHER SIDE’S CONCESSIONS

Another relatively low-cost way to show respect for others’ values is to find things that mean much to the other side but little to one’s own. Consider the case of “Ping-Pong diplomacy” between the United States and China. As expected, the Chinese won match after match against the visiting American table-tennis team in 1971. In the United States Ping-Pong is considered a “basement sport,” so there was little at stake. In contrast, table tennis is a sport of national prestige to China.
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At little cost to itself, the United States was able to provide something of great symbolic value for the other side. America demonstrated respect for Chinese sensitivity about receiving equal treatment on the world stage. This was done by demonstrating that America does not always have to better China in matters that the Chinese care for.

An example of a relatively small symbolic step that may have big implications is the recent approval by the Israeli education ministry of a textbook for Arab third-graders in Israel that for the first time describes Israel’s 1948 War of Independence as a “catastrophe” for many Palestinians and their society. Rami Khouri, director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut and editor at large of the Beirut-based
Daily Star,
opined, “This may be the first tangible sign that the Zionist Israeli establishment is prepared to move in the direction of acknowledging what happened to Palestinians in 1948, which is a vital Palestiniandemand for any serious peace-making effort to succeed. Israelis in turn would expect a reciprocal Palestinian acknowledgment of Israel’s core narrative.”
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It is noteworthy that the revised textbooks are only for Arab children, not Jewish children, which is why, above, we characterized this symbolic step as “relatively small.” Exposing Jewish children to a more balanced history carries increased risk for undermining part of Zionism’s moral narrative among the next generation. Undertaking the added risk may require an offsetting symbolic gesture from the other side. As Netanyahu said, a change in Palestinian textbooks that omitted reference to Jewish perfidy since the time of Mohammed could reciprocally signal a sincere change of heart. (Unfortunately, when Mr. Netanyahu became prime minister again in 2009, his minister of education reversed course and expunged all references to the so-called Palestinian catastrophe, or
Naqba’,
from Israeli textbooks for Arab children.)

THE ART OF APOLOGY

A closer look at apologies in political conflicts indicates that they may not be so much deal makers in themselves as means of facilitating political compromise that may also involve significant material transactions. This was the gist of Abu Marzook’s remarks about a sincere apology being only “the beginning” of negotiations over land and compensation.

A telling example concerns the Federal Government of Germany’s apology to the Jewish people.
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In 1948, the newly established State of Israel was in dire economic straits. But Israel and the World Jewish Congress refused compensation from Germany for the property of murdered European Jews. Israel insisted that before any amount of money could be considered, Germany must publicly declare contrition for the murder and suffering of Jews at German hands.