By David K.
Shipler
Making
America Cruel Again: Part 3 of an Occasional Series
The more militant end of the
Palestinian spectrum, which has grown in recent years, will surely be delighted
by the Trump Administration’s latest deletion of aid. It cuts off $10
million for peacebuilding programs that
have brought together Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs, and Palestinians from the
West Bank and East Jerusalem for professional workshops, school visits, and
joint projects designed to disarm the arsenal of suspicion and fear.
These get-togethers have been
denounced by Palestinian activists as efforts to “normalize” Israel’s dominance
over the West Bank by “showing that everything is okay,” according to Nava Sonnenschein,
an Israeli who runs such programs. The “anti-normalization movement” argues
that cooperative projects acquiesce to Israeli control of the area and thereby
subvert the goal of independent Palestinian statehood.
Some Palestinian participants have been
threatened. Several years ago, women journalists on the West Bank were warned
that if they joined a workshop for Jewish and Arab female journalists from
Israel, they would be expelled from the Palestinian journalists’ union. “Some
of them came nevertheless,” Sonnenschein said. “So they risked themselves
because they believed it was a way to change the other side.”
Indeed, creating “change agents” is a goal
of Sonnenschein’s School for Peace at Neve Shalom, a mixed Arab-Jewish village
in the hills between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. When professionals—architects,
land-use planners, engineers, environmentalists, physicians, and other
influential adults from across the lines—are thrown together on the common
ground of their skills and interests, she believes, they return to their own
sides with a more open appreciation of the humanity and mutual concerns that
can bridge the divide. Some change agents have maintained contacts with those
in the other camp.
But in the latest episode of wizardry, Trump
and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, want to punish Palestinians’ failure to
negotiate for some nebulous notion of peace by cutting off programs that
promote peaceful connections. The School for Peace and other private
organizations have thrived on grants from the United States Agency for
International Development, as well as from the European Union. The American
funds will now support only projects that exclude Palestinians from the West
Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, although Arab citizens of Israel may
participate.
