U.S. also should address root causes of terrorism.
BY JOHN WALLACH | The United States needs more than a military response to terrorism. It needs a humane response as well, one that signals that we, as the greatest and richest nation on earth, care about the suffering of the hundreds of millions of less fortunate people throughout the world.
In other words, we must attack not merely the symptoms of terror, the Osama bin Ladens and their terrorist networks, but the root causes that create a climate that is conducive to such despicable acts.
We need to mount a parallel campaign to attack the roots of terror, the hatreds that are lodged within the hearts of millions of people who have been deprived of our wealth and opportunity and are easy prey for regimes that spew vicious anti-American propaganda.
We can and hopefully will rid the world of Osama bin Laden but he is like a multi-headed hydra. Whether we like it or not, and regardless of whether it is true, we are perceived by much of the rest of the world as rich and complacent.
We can no longer afford to be seen as callous and uncaring. We need a concerted, new effort with all the diplomatic and economic means at our disposal to help resolve the disputes in the Middle East and elsewhere that doom hundreds of millions of people to unspeakable poverty.
Unless we mount such a parallel attack, there will be more bin Ladens who will see the United States not as the most beneficent nation on earth but as callous and indifferent to the daily suffering that drive people to terrorism.
I founded Seeds of Peace after the first World Trade Center bombing in February 1993. I did so because I realized that the aim of all terrorists is to instill fear. Their aim is to immobilize the vast majority of Americans. Of course, they want us to pay a price for, among other things, the billions of dollars in military and financial support we provide to Israel and to moderate Arab nations such as Egypt and Jordan.
There was, and continues to be, only one answer – a program that does the opposite; that instead of instilling fear inspires hope by bringing together the next generation of youngsters before they have been poisoned by the prejudices, fears and hatreds that otherwise might culminate in acts of terror. We must mobilize the majority to attack the roots of hatred and violence.
That is what we have tried to accomplish at Seeds of Peace. For the last decade we have brought diverse populations together from regions of conflict. Almost two thousand youngsters – Arabs and Israelis, Moslems and Jews, Bosnians and Serbs, Indians and Pakistanis, Albanians and Serbs from Kosovo, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots and Greeks and Turks – have graduated from our unique program in conflict resolution.
They spend several weeks together at our summer camp in Maine, bunking together, eating and playing sports with “the enemy.” Most importantly, they also spend several hours a day engaged in small discussion groups. We call them “coexistence” groups.
In these secure, off-the-record sessions, led by trained facilitators, each of the teenagers has a chance to rail against the “other side,” to shout and scream (or cry) if they like; in short, to unburden themselves of their own sense of victimization. An Indian girl, who emerged from one such meeting with her Pakistani peers exclaimed, “I never knew I was capable of such hatred.”
These group therapy sessions are a kind of “detox” program, allowing the participants’ deep-seated emotions to surface so that they become more aware of them – and can deal with them. Once they have discovered that they, and their people, are not the only victim — that the enemy has also suffered egregious losses – they can begin to acquire the listening and other skills that allow them to start to care about the other side.
I believe this is humanizing a process that is often deliberately dehumanized by governments at war in order to perpetuate the conflict. It is far easier to kill someone in a drab olive uniform or whose face is wrapped in a kaffiah or headscarf than someone whose features we see clearly and sympathetically.
If we are serious about combating terror, we as a nation must get off the sidelines in the Middle East and elsewhere. While there is no direct connection between the terrorism that brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the largely indifferent attitude of the Bush administration to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, our seeming unwillingness to get involved unless both sides stop fighting has helped create a vacuum in which terrorism thrives.
It is not coincidental that there was virtually no Palestinian terrorism during the two-and-a-half years that Ehud Barak was prime minister of Israel. I believe that is due to the fact that throughout his tenure, there was ongoing negotiations that culminated in the sadly unsuccessful talks at Camp David and Taba.
Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, had an incentive to clamp down on Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, the DFLP and PFLP (the Democratic and Popular Fronts for the Liberation of Palestine) and to prevent these terror groups from creeping out of their bunkers. Arafat sat on them because he believed he had more to gain from the peace talks than from using terror as an instrument against Israel.
When the talks collapsed, there was no longer any reason to discourage these groups; in fact, Arafat probably encouraged them to begin the “Al-Aqsa intifada” against Israel. The American response paralleled the Israeli response: “We will not help you make peace until you two guys stop fighting.”
It seemed to much of the world that we were giving Israel a blank check.
In his public statements, President Bush seemed to be far more sympathetic to Israel. The unilateral U.S. walkout from the Durban anti-racism conference, together with Israel, dangerously reinforced the belief among millions of Palestinians that we didn’t care about their suffering.
Instead of an attitude of “we refuse to help you make peace until you stop fighting,” our response should have been “we will help you stop fighting so that you can make peace.”
It is not too late. In tandem with our military moves to strike at the heart of the terrorist network, President Bush should immediately appoint a high-level envoy to work with both the Israeli and Palestinian leadership to defuse the current fighting. George Mitchell and Jim Baker, the former secretary of state, are two who are more than qualified for this role.
A new diplomatic offensive would not be rewarding the terrorists. It would help deprive them of an atmosphere in which such acts thrive – and will continue to do so – until we realize and accept our own responsibilities for attacking the root causes of such violence and hatred.