A better solution to the showdown with Iran

By Johan Galtung Reprint | | Print |

VERSONNEX, France, May 28 2012 (IPS) - Conflict is a relation between parties with incompatible goals. It is not the property of one party. While it risks escalating into violence, it also offers an opportunity to create new realities.

To understand the shoa, the accounts of unspeakable German atrocities and infinite Jewish suffering are indispensable. But so is an understanding of German-Jewish relations, and Germans’ and Jews’ relations to others. If there is conflict in the relation, then the solution is in a new relation.

Genocide has typically occurred when a minority, through its talents and skills, occupied leading positions in the economy and culture but lacked military and political power. This was the case of the Armenians in Turkey (1915), the Chinese in Indonesia (1965), the Tutsis among the Hutus in Rwanda (1994), and also the Jews in Germany in the early 20th century. Added to this were the humiliating Versailles Treaty, Hitler’s demagogy, and willing executioners.

To analyse the cause of violence is in no way to blame the victim. Rather, it can point the way towards a solution, like the one former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad crafted: positive discrimination, lifting the Malay majority to the level of the Chinese minority in economic and cultural terms, without lowering the level of the Chinese. This may well have prevented a massacre of Chinese in Malaysia and shows how similar dangers can be averted elsewhere. Israel would gain by correcting the divergence in Arabs’ (lower) social rank.

If the Versailles Treaty had been cancelled in 1924 and the German majority had been lifted, through education and employment, to a condition of equality, we might have avoided World War II in Europe.

After September 11, 2001, I was part of a discussion on Austrian television, which included the U.S. ambassador. When I observed that we must try to understand why this terrorist act occurred, he was furious and asked, “So you are trying to justify what happened?” I explained that nothing can justify such an atrocity, but if we fail to understand why it happened, we cannot prevent a future recurrence.

It is in our own interest to understand the causes of violence so we can prevent it in the future. In no way does this justify violence.

Critiques of Israel’s disastrous current foreign policy, which advocates an attack on Iran that would plunge the whole region into a mutually destructive war, have been labelled “anti-Semitism”. But who is a better friend to a person walking blindfolded towards an abyss: the one who says, “Go right ahead” or the one who says, “Stop, turn around, you are in grave danger!”

Israeli writer Uri Avnery writes in his recent article ‘A Putsch Against War’: “…in our country we are now seeing a verbal uprising against the elected politicians by a group of current and former army generals, the former chiefs of foreign intelligence (Meir Dagan, Mossad) and internal security (Yuval Diskin) who condemn the government’s threat to start a war against Iran, and some of them condemning the government’s failure to negotiate with the Palestinians for peace.”

Diskin stated: “Israel is now led by two incompetent politicians with messianic delusions and a poor grasp of reality. Their plan to attack Iran will lead to a worldwide catastrophe. Not only will it fail to prevent the production of an Iranian atom bomb, it will hasten this effort with the support of the world community.”

Avnery, on the not exactly dialogical, talmudic response to Dagan and Diskin: “They did what Israelis almost always do when faced with serious problems or serious arguments: they don’t get to grips with the matter itself but select some minor detail and belabour it endlessly. Practically speaking, no one tried to disprove the assertions of the officers… They focused on the speakers, not on what was said: Dagan and Diskin are embittered because their terms of office were not extended. They felt humiliated, venting personal frustration”.

Diskin sees prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “a Holocaust-obsessed fantasist, out of contact with reality, distrusting all Goyim (non-Jews), trying to follow in the footsteps of a rigid and extremist father
–altogether a dangerous person to lead a nation in real crisis”.

What is the solution? A Middle East nuclear-free zone: 64 percent of Israelis are in favour, the same in Iran, provided Israel participates. This could also be a model for the Korean peninsula. If they negotiated towards such an agreement, both countries would be embraced, with a sigh of relief.

There are a few problems that would arise: Under whose auspices would such negotiations take place and who would monitor the agreement? How about Pakistan and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s “Islamic bomb”? Pakistan would insist India be in the no-nuke zone, and India would demand superpower denuclearisation as a condition.

There are answers, all worth discussing, in depth and seriously.

Meanwhile Israel is wasting time. A wonderful talmudic tradition, freedom of expression, is now misused for personal abuse instead of solutions to very real crises, such as those described in Peter Beinart’s “The Crisis of Zionism” and Gershom Gorenberg’s “The Unmaking of Israel” (2011).

What can prevent the use of the horrors of the past to define the discourse? Just as some Iraqis use the Baghdad massacre in 1258, some Israelis use the holocaust as a framework for world events. Many let this pass to avoid hurting Israeli-Jewish feelings or for fear of being labelled anti-Semites. Fortunately, this is not the case with Dagan, Diskin, certain generals, and other real friends of Israel searching for solutions. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

NOTE: This article is based on a public lecture given at the World Peace Academy in Basel, Switzerland, on May 9, 2012. Some recent statements of mine, quoted out of context, have hurt some feelings. I apologise most sincerely for this, which was entirely unintended. One such context was the Anders Breivik case in Norway with its many ramifications. The conflicts addressed in this presentation provide a deeper context for my comments.

* Johan Galtung, a Professor of Peace Studies, is Rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University. He is author of many books on peace and related issues, including “50 Years – 100 Peace and Conflict Perspectives” published by the TRANSCEND University Press.