Open Letters of Concerned Individuals

The Middle East has experienced some very involving intermittent upheavals for quite some time. On almost all sides are people who feel their course of actions (usually involving some form of violence) are justified. However, it's interesting to note that a few individuals are taking other approaches to the issue by making appeals to all stake-holders to seek a peacful resolve. Here are some open letters from individuals who view the troubles in the Middle East differently:

Majid Tehranian

More powerful force
Open letter to Palestinians and Israelis

October 25, 2000
The Iranian

Like millions of others, I have shared your pains and sufferings from a distance and over a long period of time. I am a Muslim by birth, but I have a Jewish son and therefore emotional ties to both sides. I am also a proud disciple of Buddha, Jesus, Rumi, Gandhi, Buber, King, and Hosseini.

Following the seven years of the slow Oslo peace process and the breakout of the new Intifada of October 2000, I feel that the time has come for you to seriously consider a new mass strategy towards peace, namely a strategy of non-violence.

A new PBS documentary on the history of non-violence during the 20th century, "A Force More Powerful," makes it abundantly clear that time and time again the struggles for justice have best succeeded through carefully planned strategies of non-violent and active resistance. In order to take its moral and practical lessons to heart, this excellent documentary must be viewed by all of you.

We now know how in India, the United States, the Philippines, South Africa, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, non-violent struggles for independence, civil rights, and freedom from the tyrannies of apartheid and dictatorial rules have succeeded.

This is not a romantic appeal to abstract moral principles. Non-violence is both moral and practical. It takes the highest possible moral grounds, but it also works. It requires commitment, courage, discipline, and persistent hard work. These are qualities that are not lacking among the Israelis and Palestinians.

First of all, it takes for two small groups of Israelis and Palestinians to come together and pledge themselves to a joint non-violent struggle for peace and justice in the Holy Lands. Second, the group would have to go through a period of careful training in non-violent philosophy, strategies, and tactics. Third, the group needs to set out its long, medium, and short-term objectives.

The short-term is easy to define. All acts of violence on both sides must unconditionally stop before a process of confidence building can start. The medium term is more difficult, but considerable progress has already been made on that front by the peace process.

An independent Palestine must be part of the plan, but an end to terrorism against Israelis must be its quid pro quo. The long-term objectives are the most difficult on which to agree.

The Israeli and Palestinian economies have already become so interdependent that the basis for long-term cooperation between the two states and an eventual federation is not impossible to imagine. Wars and violence are failures of human imagination.

We must have the courage to imagine the impossible in order to achieve what is within our grasp in the short run. An Israel at peace with its Arab neighbors is such a dream.

Exchanging Israeli scientific and technological know-how with the enormous Arab human and financial power presents an unmatched complementary.

Last but not least, a non-violent active resistance for peace and justice requires leadership. Credible leadership for non-violent struggles emerges only out of traditions of civility and in the trenches of the struggle itself.

Authentic Jews, Christians, and Muslims are second to none in their profound commitment to peace and justice. The greetings in both Hebrew and Arabic convey Peace (Shalom, Salam) upon the recipients. For Christians who also consider the Holy Lands as their sacred grounds, Jesus of Nazareth was a Prince of Peace. Pious wishes, however, are not enough. It is in the process of the non-violent struggle itself that Gandhis, Kings, and Mandelas are made.

Some Israelis and Palestinians have tried violence for sometime to achieve their objectives. It has brought them and innocent by-standers nothing but pain, suffering, misery, and death.

I appeal to you, dear bothers and sisters, to give peace a chance.

Majid Tehranian

Kyoto, Japan
October 22, 2000.


Source: http://www.iranian.com/MajidTehranian/2000/October/Letter/

An Open Letter To Palestinians
- By Youssef M. Ibrahim
Jewish World Review

With Israel entering its fourth week of an incursion into the same Gaza Strip it voluntarily evacuated a few months ago, a sense of reality among Arabs is spreading through commentary by Arab pundits, letters to the editor, and political talk shows on Arabic-language TV networks. The new views are stunning both in their maturity and in their realism. The best way I can think of to convey them is in the form of a letter to the Palestinian Arabs from their Arab friends:

Dear Palestinian Arab brethren:

The war with Israel is over.

You have lost. Surrender and negotiate to secure a future for your children.

We, your Arab brothers, may say until we are blue in the face that we stand by you, but the wise among you and most of us know that we are moving on, away from the tired old idea of the Palestinian Arab cause and the "eternal struggle" with Israel.

Dear friends, you and your leaders have wasted three generations trying to fight for Palestine, but the truth is the Palestine you could have had in 1948 is much bigger than the one you could have had in 1967, which in turn is much bigger than what you may have to settle for now or in another 10 years. Struggle means less land and more misery and utter loneliness.

At the moment, brothers, you would be lucky to secure a semblance of a state in that Gaza Strip into which you have all crowded, and a small part of the West Bank of the Jordan. It isn't going to get better. Time is running out even for this much land, so here are some facts, figures, and sound advice, friends.

You hold keys, which you drag out for television interviews, to houses that do not exist or are inhabited by Israelis who have no intention of leaving Jaffa, Haifa, Tel Aviv, or West Jerusalem. You shoot old guns at modern Israeli tanks and American-made fighter jets, doing virtually no harm to Israel while bringing the wrath of its mighty army down upon you. You fire ridiculously inept Kassam rockets that cause little destruction and delude yourselves into thinking this is a war of liberation. Your government, your social institutions, your schools, and your economy are all in ruins.

Your young people are growing up illiterate, ill, and bent on rites of death and suicide, while you, in effect, are living on the kindness of foreigners, including America and the United Nations. Every day your officials must beg for your daily bread, dependent on relief trucks that carry food and medicine into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, while your criminal Muslim fundamentalist Hamas government continues to fan the flames of a war it can neither fight nor hope to win.

In other words, brothers, you are down, out, and alone in a burnt-out landscape that is shrinking by the day.

What kind of struggle is this? Is it worth waging at all? More important, what kind of miserable future does it portend for your children, the fourth or fifth generation of the Arab world's have-nots?

We, your Arab brothers, have moved on.

Those of us who have oil money are busy accumulating wealth and building housing, luxury developments, state-of-the-art universities and schools, and new highways and byways. Those of us who share borders with Israel, such as Egypt and Jordan, have signed a peace treaty with it and are not going to war for you any time soon. Those of us who are far away, in places like North Africa and Iraq, frankly could not care less about what happens to you.

Only Syria continues to feed your fantasies that someday it will join you in liberating Palestine, even though a huge chunk of its territory, the entire Golan Heights, was taken by Israel in 1967 and annexed. The Syrians, my friends, will gladly fight down to the last Palestinian Arab.

Before you got stuck with this Hamas crowd, another cheating, conniving, leader of yours, Yasser Arafat, sold you a rotten bill of goods — more pain, greater corruption, and millions stolen by his relatives — while your children played in the sewers of Gaza.

The war is over. Why not let a new future begin?



Source: http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0706/ibrahim.php3?printer_friendly

Who gives a damn?!Let them all kill themselves jo!

There are more people that care for peace in the world than we realise.

yeah people like peace

I honestly do pray the Palestinian situation is resolved quickly,the words of the kids interviewed from that region recently are heart wrenching.
They just want to live in peace like everybody else.

Injustice is wrong,hezbollah was wrong for being the aggressor here but the ordinary people are now suffering.
Israel should now back out despite the provocation.War is never a good thing.
The women and children are suffering.