After a bullet felled Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin during a 1995 peace rally, Israeli journalist Ori Nir called a prominent Palestinian official to get his reaction.
As the pair spoke, tragic news came through on the radio: Rabin was dead. “We found ourselves weeping together,” Nir recalled.
Such little-seen and little-reported moments of Israeli-Palestinian unity give Nir — the S.F.-based West Coast correspondent for the daily newspaper Ha’aretz — glimmers of hope that peace can ultimately be achieved.
Nir shared such moments at a discussion titled “Where is the Hope for Achieving an Enduring Israeli-Palestinian Peace?” Thursday of last week at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco.
The former Ha’aretz Palestinian affairs correspondent spoke of Israelis and Palestinians breaking bread together during a joint patrol on the West Bank, and of Palestinian teenagers handing flowers to Israeli soldiers in jeeps as the soldiers evacuated Bethlehem.
Even if such gestures seem like exceptions to the rule today, they symbolize a crucial sense of possibility, said Nir, who covered events in the territories from 1986-1990 and then again from 1994-1996.
“The peace process is rooted in a yearning in both societies for a very mundane form of peace,” he said, “for a peace of mind, for a state of normalcy, for a resolution of the situation of being governed by the conflict.”
At last week’s event, which was co-sponsored by Emanu-El and Berkeley’s Kehilla Community Synagogue, Nir shared the stage with Marcia Freedman, a former member of Knesset and a founder of Israel’s feminist movement.
Freedman agreed with Nir that “the major hopes for peace are behind the scenes, not in the headlines of today, yesterday and tomorrow.”
Speaking to an audience of some 150, she added: “If you’re going to have some sort of a formal peace, you have to have an informal peace between peoples.”
Underlying Freedman’s fundamental hope that peace will be achieved is the fact that “there is no other solution. These two peoples cannot continue to war forever. The world will not allow it.”
Since Rabin’s assassination, the peace process has regressed “many, many years,” she contended. “We have backslid. We have not ended something.”
Nir pointed out that a recent poll showed more than 70 percent of Israelis believe a Palestinian state is inevitable.
Many may not like or support the idea. But their assumption that it will happen helps form what Nir called a “public opinion infrastructure” for originally embracing the Oslo Accords and continuing to do so despite deterioration of the peace process.
Freedman, too, believes most Israelis see the process as intractable.
While visiting the Jewish state earlier this year, she noticed that few cab drivers — generally barometers of public opinion in her view — saw the need to chat about peace. “One has the feeling this has already been solved,” Freedman said. “It’s just a question of where the borders are going to be.”
Freedman reminded the audience of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s assertion that by May 1999, when the process begun by the Oslo Accords officially comes to an end, the Palestinians will declare a state if significant progress has not been made.
“I’m sure that they will,” she said. “I think there will be recognition from around the world.”