Israel and Palestine

A million tiny ripples of hope

I was one of 23 South Africans that recently formed part of a human rights delegation to Israel and Palestine. It included judges, politicians, academics, lawyers, religious leaders, journalists, editors and human rights activists. The group was made up largely of people who had been in the struggle against apartheid and included Jews, Muslims, Christians and atheists. We listened to each other and could find common ground, perhaps not on the solutions but certainly on the process and on our commitment to working together.

The tour was only five days and we have been criticised for not seeing both sides. That is true, but the suicide bombs and suffering from rockets from Gaza are well reported and the victims deserve our sympathy and compassion. We went to see what is not well reported and what most Israelis do not experience, except as an armed occupying military force.

I did not go there with solutions in mind or to make peace but to listen and observe and pledge our solidarity for those who are suffering and those on both sides who are working together for peace. It was encouraging to see and experience what these peacemakers were doing. It is important to underline that our hosts were all grassroots civil society organisations that are actively working together with organisations on the other side.

'Breaking the Silence' is an organisation of veteran Israeli Defence Force (IDF) soldiers that works with Palestinian activists resisting the settlements in Hebron. They organise visits to Hebron to see the effects of the occupation and settlements on the life of the people in Hebron. 'Combatants for Peace' are ex-soldiers from both sides who work together for peace and highlight injustice. Any solutions that they propose would evolve from joint struggle. This is an incredibly valuable asset for peace in a conflict where the dominant tendency is to polarise and separate people from the two sides.

We visited Nablus, passing through one of the many checkpoints within the occupied territory which Palestinians have to pass through each time they enter or leave town as they go about their daily life. They have to disembark, unload their goods and get transport on the other side. We saw separate networks of roads in Palestinian territory for use by Palestinians and Israelis, who have different coloured number plates. I was shocked to see a sick man carried across the checkpoint on a stretcher because the car in which he was being ferried was not allowed through the checkpoint.

We visited the Balata Refugee Camp in Nablus where I met a man whose mother had been in the Balata camp for 60 years and still had the key to her home in Haifa, unable to return. The camp started as small plots with a tent but through building on the small space the buildings are now three or four stories high with extremely narrow streets, no more than one metre wide. The Israeli Defence Force frequently raids the camp. The daily exposure of the children to the violence and humiliation of these raids has left psychological scars on the children. They are angry, daring, and display anti-social tendencies. The violence of the one side feeds on the violence of the other. One of my colleagues commented that the refugee camps are a breeding ground for suicide bombers, when children are brought up surrounded by the violence they witness daily from the IDF.

Silwan is an Arab community in East Jerusalem just below the wall of the AlAksa mosque and the old temple. The settlers have renamed it the City of David.

One of the Palestinian residents of Silwan told us how the archeological excavations and settlements were driving out the local residents and making them feel unwelcome in their own community. He showed us where sections of the road have caved in and said many Palestinians feel insecure in their homes as a result of the excavations. While we were allowed to tour the site, he was not, and had to use a round-about route to meet us later.

In Hebron we visited a woman whose life is being made increasingly difficult in her own home by Israeli settlers who have settled nearby, damaging her home and making it difficult to leave her home to go to the doctor. We walked down a deserted street in what was the commercial centre of the city. Palestinians are not allowed to walk on that street and have to use the back doors of their houses to get out. We were harassed by settlers who continuously shouted at us through a megaphone, and when we objected to the police and asked them to do something they arrested our Israeli guides.

As we sang Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrica together in front of the police station outside the Tomb of the Patriarchs or the Ibrahimi Mosque, it brought back to me how the world did not turn away from our struggle, and that we should not turn away from the struggle for freedom, and justice, peace and security in Israel/Palestine.

In some ways I was reminded of the struggle in South Africa with two people looking for ways to live together in the same land. In many other ways it is different. The Palestinians refer to the 'separation barrier' as the apartheid wall. This is a wall eight metres high in towns and in the countryside cutting a swath through Palestinian land.

We saw how the settlements cut deep into Palestinian territory and how they are dividing the territory into separate blocks, isolating Palestinians from one another. We saw how the wall deviates from the internationally accepted 'green line' circling Israeli settlements built on Palestinian land and even being a land grab by enclosing Palestinian agricultural land on the Israeli side. The settlements can be seen as establishing facts on the ground which are making a two-state solution less and less possible.

There is a movement to equate the situation to apartheid. This would enable the international community to be more effectively mobilised. Discussions on this issue tend to get bogged down and lead to dead ends, diverting from the important issues. As a delegation we agreed that this was probably not a useful way to spend our time. The occupation is certainly bad enough to be able to make its own case. There are a number of United Nations resolutions on different aspects of the occupation.

The visit to Yad Vashem, a memorial to the holocaust, was very moving. A member of our delegation, Farid Isaac, wrote about it in an article published in a Muslim monthly newspaper: "I wept freely at the memory of the millions of Jews and others killed during the Holocaust, at the invective that I so often hear from other Muslims - 'The Jews! The Jews! Watch out for the Jews! - and the hatred I heard so liberally flung at 'the Jews' during my eight years of theological training in Pakistan, at the capacity of man -yes 'man' - to inflict suffering on humankind and for the tragedy of the Palestinian people whom Edward Said has so aptly described as the 'victims of the victims', who now have to endure dispossession because of the unspeakable crimes that some white people committed against other white people."

The most encouraging sign was our meeting with the Parents Circle, Palestinians and Israelis who have lost loved ones in the conflict but who work together addressing meetings saying "no more violence, there must be another way".

Some say that the complexity of the situation is such that outsiders should not get involved and peacemaking should be left to the experts. My understanding of complexity and my experience in South Africa is that everyone should get involved, that the situation is nonlinear and that sometimes a small initiative can have a large effect and a large initiative may have no effect. We should not leave peacemaking up to elites. Peace is everybody's business.

Having spent time with our creative and brave Palestinian and Israeli hosts I have hope. There is however a conversation which is not helpful, where either side not only demonises the other but actually wishes the other away: 'If only the Palestinians would leave then there would be no problems' and 'if only the Israelis went back to where they came from there would be no problems'.

The same was behind apartheid thinking, where if the blacks were moved away from the towns to the homelands, then there would be no problems, or if only we chased the whites into the sea there would be no problems. It was this sort of thinking that resulted in the terrible holocaust in Europe and is behind other genocides, such as that in Rwanda. Our hosts showed us that there is another way.

Listening to our Israeli and Palestinian hosts and hearing about how they work I came up with seven simple rules which I thought seemed to be guiding them and could also guide others who wish to work for peace in their way:

• Recognise the humanity in the other. Everyone is created in the image of God, or as Quakers would put it, answer to that of God in everyone.
• There are always partners for peace. Find them one by one. Ask yourself if what you are discussing can be discussed with someone from the 'other side'.
• Recognise the need for both freedom for the Palestinians and security for the Israelis, as well as justice for all.
• Harness the energy of anger in nonviolent action and transform the fear, pain and suffering into communication, healing and reconciliation.
• There is a special role for everyone. Peace is everybody's business, and solutions for peace will evolve from cooperation - Israelis with Palestinians, men with women, local with international, Muslim, Jew, Christian and secular.
• Work together to break the cycles of violence and build on the spirals of peace. There are no solutions. Peace is a process. Muddle along. Let the solutions emerge by building on the initiatives that work and eliminate those that don't.

When the late US Senator Robert Kennedy visited the University of Cape Town 40 years ago, he said: "Thousands of unknown men and women in Europe resisted the occupation of the Nazis and many died, but all added to the ultimate strength and freedom of their countries. It is from numberless and diverse acts of courage such as these that human history is shaped. Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he or she sends out a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centres of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."

** Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge is a member of the ANC National Executive Committee (NEC).

Race and rugby

The Springboks belong to all of us

It has been demonstrated the world over that sport is one activity that brings people together and unite nations in joy at a victory or sadness at a loss. Despite whatever reservations people may have about the composition of a team, when any team donning our national colours is in the field of play, the hope and anxiety is shared by everybody, even by those whose only association with the team is that it is South African.

That is why when any of our national team performs poorly the grief of losing and the silence of sadness is felt even at the remote rural homestead, and when it wins the excitement and the joy reverberates across the length and breadth of our country.

That is why Saturday's victory was so important to our country, following a series of disappointing performances in the Tri-Nations competition. Our nation's joy at the Springbok victory over the Australian Rugby Team, the Wallabies, was spoiled by reports of a racist attack on one of the spectators at the stadium, Ziningi Shibambo, by a small group of white rugby supporters.

So when those thugs cowardly attacked this spectator, which was a first time such a report has been launched, they were challenging a nation. Instead of promoting racial exclusivity, their actions have strengthened the country's resolve to transform rugby, and all other sporting codes.

It seems that this small group, quite unlike the majority of rugby supporters, are so convinced that rugby is a white sport that they are prepared to abuse, insult and physically threaten a black woman. This act is a slap in the face of all South Africans, black and white, who has worked hard to break down the barriers that had been erected by apartheid in the field of sport.

However persistent the practices of the past, we cannot accept the notion that is necessarily the case that whites go to rugby stadiums on a Saturday afternoon, while blacks head to soccer stadiums. Every South African must feel equally comfortable attending the matches of any national team.

Rugby, perhaps more than other sporting codes, has been an important place of change, both symbolically and in practice. For many South Africans, one of the defining moments of our transition from a society characterised by racial antagonism to one striving to build a non-racial future was the appearance of then President Nelson Mandela at the final of the 1995 Rugby World Cup wearing a Springbok jersey. That simple act made the bold statement that rugby was no longer the preserve of a few. It said that South Africans of all races had embraced rugby as a national sport, in which all could participate, and which all our people would support.

When Francois Pienaar led his team onto the field that highveld afternoon in 1995, he did so with the entire country behind him. That support has not diminished. In every Rugby World Cup, in every test match, even the ones South Africa didn't win, the country has united behind the team.

It is for this reason, among others, that we need to work even harder to ensure that our national teams are representative. All South African athletes, regardless of their race or social status, should have an equal opportunity to compete for a place in any national side.

This means that we must invest in sporting facilities and training in areas of the country that have previously been neglected. A child who attends school in a township or rural area should have the same sporting opportunities as a child who attends school in a formerly white suburb. Administrators in all sporting codes need to be nurturing talent from the grassroots, and need to identify those factors that may be hindering progress up the ladder to national representation. An athlete from a disadvantage community who demonstrated great potential at school level may, for a variety of social and economic reasons, not be able to sustain that performance through to higher levels. Administrators should examine such problems, and work to address them.

There are many elements in transformation. None can be pursued in isolation from the others. We cannot pursue greater representativity in national sides while ignoring grassroots development. Similarly, we cannot hope to motivate young players if they do not see progress in the representativity of national, provincial and other sides.

It is also important to challenge the false notion that an all-white team in a country where the majority of people are black can possibly be the result of selection on merit. If we were to accept that, we would be forced to accept that whites are genetically predisposed to play better rugby. That notion, fortunately, go the way of so many other racist apartheid myths.

What some people, particularly the conservative political opposition, call 'merit' is in fact the product of decades of racial privilege in access to sporting facilities, training and opportunity. The playing field is not flat. And for that reason, those with more resources and opportunities have a better chance of selection.

To insist that national sides be more representative is not to undermine merit as a selection criterion. It is to recognise that the legacy of our racist past continues to undermine merit. It is to recognise that even 14 years into democracy there are social and economic factors that prevent black players from rising through the ranks organically.

As we address these factors, we need to affirm those who are held back by such factors. For now, we need quotas in rugby to allow players with merit to rise above the constraints that would otherwise hold them back.

This approach has application in many other areas. In 1994, the ANC took a decision to establish a quota for women in its list of candidates for parliament. Other parties did not adopt this approach, arguing that they would prefer their candidates to be chosen on 'merit'.

The ANC's view was that women were under-represented in the political sphere not because they were less capable than men, but because there were ranges of political, social and economic constraints that limited their capacity to advance in politics. The experience of the last 14 years has shown the value of that approach, with women playing a leading role in the political life of the country. The strong representation of women in government has helped to erode some of the sexist attitudes about the capabilities of women. It has had an enabling effect, opening doors that would otherwise have remained closed.

We must draw on this experience as we strive to improve representativity in sport, particularly in codes like rugby. We must demonstrate in practice that indeed these sports do belong to all South Africans.

That is why every effort should be made to identify and isolate the perpetrators in Saturday's attack. The rugby administration must do all it can to identify these culprits and, working with our law enforcement agencies, must ensure that that such sad events never happen again.

The Springboks are a national treasure that belongs to all of us, to which all of us have an equal claim.

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