Heritage and Peace

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, at heart, a battle of identities. We are not just two nations competing for land, but, more significantly, two competing narratives of national liberation. That is what makes compromise so excruciating and explains the zero-sum view that so many advocates worldwide take. It also helps explain why this relatively diminutive standoff, one of the smallest armed conflicts of the past 100 years, remains an emotional powder keg that demands handling with care.

The Netanyahu government announced that Rachel’s Tomb near Bethlehem, the traditional burial site of Judaism’s revered “Mother Rachel,” the matriarch who “weeps for her children” in exile (Jeremiah 31:14), and Hebron’s Machpelah Cave, where Jewish tradition locates the burial of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca and Leah, were on a list of Israeli heritage sites slated for preservation. This touched off a controversy that became another round in that feud about symbols and identity.

On the face of things, restoration of historical sites should not be controversial. The initiative grew out of the realization that at many of them, artifacts and documents could be endangered if they were not protected and restored. Eighty-one individuals and organizations, known for their contributions to Israeli culture, participated in the preparation of the heritage list, a key to receiving funding for restoration of buildings, digitizing precious documents of historic importance, and creating tourist “trails” of significant places in Jewish and Israeli history.

At the last minute, in response to pressure from pro-settler circles in the coalition and without appropriate staff-level consultation, the Prime Minister’s Office added the two controversial sites to the heritage list last week. Since the plan proposes no changes in the long-held prayer arrangements at the sites, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu apparently imagined the announcement would pass without incident. But coinciding with the 16th anniversary of the Goldstein massacre—when an extremist Jewish settler killed dozens of Arabs and wounded many more while they were praying at the Ibrahami mosque in the Cave—the move raised Palestinian suspicions that this was an assertion of sovereignty challenging the status quo.

The Hamas leadership set off violent disorders in Hebron. PA President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) and Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh shared a rare moment of agreement, each declaring that the Israeli decision could lead to war—although, in fairness, Abu Mazen said it out of anxiety, and Haniyeh out of grotesque hope.

PA Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad conveyed mixed messages. On Israeli television, he was seen participating in Muslim prayers at the Machpelah Cave, listening without protest as the preacher declared it exclusively a Muslim site. Fayyad went on to warn, falsely, that Israel’s initiative “amounted to taking over the site,” but he also issued a vaguely calming declaration that the Palestinians “… are determined to build a positive reality on the ground.” Thus, as in the past, Hamas called for open violence, while the PA left us pondering the familiar question: Was this veiled incitement or befuddled hysterics?

The U.S. State Department criticized the Israeli announcement as “provocative and unhelpful to the goal of getting the two sides back to the table,” pretty mild compared with some of the criticism Netanyahu faced within Israel for caving to settler pressure and acting without proper consultation.

For his part, Netanyahu quickly realized the misstep, telling the media: “This was a misunderstanding …. We have no intention of changing the status quo regarding Jewish or Muslim praying.”

If you are a regular follower of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as it lurches from crisis to crisis, none of this should come as a surprise. But one opinion expressed during the hubbub merits special consideration, that of Robert, Serry, UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East: “I’m concerned over the proclamation made over the sites in Bethlehem and Hebron … those sites are in Palestinian territory and bear an importance not only in Judaism but in Islam as well,” Haaretz quoted Serry.

You can learn a lot about the UN’s catastrophic political failures in this region from one short sentence uttered by this UN functionary. Unlike the U.S. State Department, Serry’s problem with the Israeli announcement was not timing or politics, but that “those sites are in Palestinian territory” and have significance in Islam. In other words, he favored one identity, the Muslim/Palestinian, over the other, the Jewish/Israeli. If the standards are location outside the pre-’67 cease-fire lines and significance to Islam, the Western Wall itself is out of bounds to the Jewish state’s preservation efforts.

There is nothing fundamentally wrong about the Israeli initiative. It is not unusual for a society to take an interest in the maintenance of sites that shape its identity and culture, even when they lie outside its own borders. Thus the British Commonwealth maintains a Commonwealth War Graves Commission that preserves 1.7 million graves and monuments worldwide.

The Jews have legitimate and profound interests in Rachel’s Tomb and the Machpelah Cave, even if they are on the West Bank and are significant to members of other faiths.
If the UN hopes to play a constructive role in resolving this conflict, it must learn to bridge the gap without falling into advocacy for one narrative over another. Surely, a UN official should know better than that. Then again, maybe not.

first published at http://bit.ly/1nFNCOq