Supporter: Landrum Bolling

Dr. Landrum Bolling. Photo: Joni Kabana for Mercy Corps

I've been involved in efforts to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict for 35 years — as a scholar, as a diplomat, and as president of a Bethlehem institute that promoted interfaith dialogue among Christians, Muslims and Jews. And I can tell you that over those many years, there have been few days in the Middle East as dark as the ones we are now experiencing.

What the Palestinians and the Israelis could have done to deserve such misguided leaders is beyond me. Counterproductive decisions have led to catastrophic consequences for all.

Both sets of leaders seem to believe they can prove the other side is wholly to blame; that they have a right to defend themselves in a way that means killing as many as possible regardless of culpability; and that when they have killed enough, the other side will simply give up, and this long and bloody conflict will be solved.

There is little you or I can do to change this foolish thinking. But what we can and must do is address the humanitarian life-and-death needs of 1.5 million people of Gaza — who are in a most desperate state.

I write you today to ask you to support the vital, desperately needed humanitarian assistance to Gaza. Mercy Corps is one of a handful of the American relief and development agencies still brave enough and stubborn enough to stay on in the midst of chaos. As a senior advisor on programs and policies for Mercy Corps, I can assure you that despite the challenges facing us, we are getting things done.

Our Jerusalem-based staff successfully delivered a truckload of food into Gaza today after many delays. Our team in Gaza has procured blankets, powdered milk and other relief items to distribute to dozens of newly displaced families. And we are helping the voices of Gaza's youth — hundreds of whom participate in our Internet-based cross-cultural exchange program with American teens — be heard on our web site.

Please join me in helping those who desperately need our help. Thank you.

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Almost exactly 24 years ago, at the beginning of August 1982, I was trapped in West Beirut trying (successfully, thank God) to avoid getting killed by the Israeli military or Yasser Arafat's PLO fighters who were intent on killing each other.

I had been staying at the Hotel Ambassadeur in Christian East Beirut, which was under the control of Sharon's troops and their Christian Falange puppet-allies. At least in that part of Beirut, the Arab-Israeli war of that year was over and the Israelis had won.

However, although the Israelis were dropping bombs from the air, lobbing shells from their gunboats off the coast, and blasting away from their tanks on the surrounding hills, something like 7,000 PLO fighters and their automatic rifles were holed up in various parts of West Beirut, refusing to give up. And the Israelis, for all their overwhelming military power, were unwilling to pay the cost of digging them out block by block.

During a daytime lull in the shooting I got this crazy idea that I would cross over the lines and go see if I could talk some sense to Arafat, get him to make some statement, give some signal that he would cut a deal to put a stop to the murderous madness.

I got through to Arafat's headquarters on the phone. Right away, I was told, a car would be sent to the "Museum Crossing" to pick me up.

With my traveling companion and co-conspirator, Merle Thorpe, a Washington lawyer much interested in the Middle East, we took a taxi to the corner of the Lebanese National Museum and walked up the street toward a high dirt wall that blocked the way. Soon a driver emerged from behind the mound of dirt and beckoned us into West Beirut.

We wound our way through the wreckage from weeks of siege warfare to the Fakani district, the stronghold of the PLO. It was the strangest ride I ever took. Absolute silence. No soul to be seen. No car moved. Burnt-out vehicular skeletons cluttered the streets. Crumbling buildings hung limp next to high rises that seemed untouched, but empty.

In a doorway across from Arafat's headquarters, an aide waited for us. He signaled us to follow him quickly down a stairwell from the ground floor while the sounds of explosion reverberated through the silent streets.

But soon he rushed us to a "safer place" in a sub-sub basement bunker where we waited most of the afternoon.

Finally, as the shelling apparently ended, we were driven to a seaside apartment house in an area not greatly damaged, a few miles northeast of the Beirut International Airport, long shut down by Israeli attack

There, from the fifth-floor balcony of an Arab Christian family I had known for several years, we watched the Israeli planes, American fighter-bombers, make their bombing runs over the Bur el Barajni Palestinian refugee camp.

Gracefully they drifted in from over the Mediterranean and carried out their assignments, never to know who or what they had hit. Nor could I know; nor did I want to know.

It was not possible to get back that night to the safety of our Israeli-protected hotel in East Beirut, so we stayed at the Bristol, the elegant old hotel up the hill from the American University in Beirut (AUB) campus.

At 4 a.m. we were awakened by the sound of shelling. A bit later all guests in the hotel, including a couple of journalists and a future prime minister of Lebanon, all 12 of us, huddled in the basement café while white-jacketed waiters served us coffee and croissants from silver trays.

Eventually, a hospital a mere block away was hit by a shell. And the roof of our hotel was set on fire. We evacuated. That night we slept on the floor of the computer room of the American University Medical School Hospital. And glad to.

After that fateful day, President Reagan telephoned Prime Minister Begin and told him to stop his Air Force from bombing refugee camps.

And he did. After more fateful days, American intermediaries got moving on the arranging of a cease-fire that stopped the killing in and the destruction of the city of Beirut.

A quarter of a century later, we are talking again about the atrocities of killing hundreds of innocent civilians, about hundreds of thousands of people driven from their homes, about the destruction, all over again, of a beautiful city.

This time American officials are refusing to support the idea of a cease fire until the Israelis can "finish off the terrorists once and for all."

That is exactly the same argument Sharon put forward to justify the war he waged in Lebanon, with disastrous results, a quarter of a century ago, He greatly strengthened terrorism then and greatly intensified Arab hatred of Israel.

And that is exactly what is happening again -- now. The support of Hamas and Hezbollah has been made stronger than ever before.

And never have Israel and the United States been so widely hated, around the world, as they are today.

This article originally appeared in the Richmond Palladium-Item.

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JERUSALEM -- The political climate in this tense capital of the divided so-called Holy Land, as I have known it over the past 40 years, has never been worse than it is today.
The Israelis are suspicious, hostile, hate-filled toward the Palestinians -- and contemptuously self-righteous. "Everything that has gone wrong is the fault of the Palestinians. We can't make peace because the Palestinians don't want peace; they only want to drive the Jews into the sea." So say many angry, cynical Israelis.

The Palestinians are bitter, angry, hate-filled toward the Israelis -- and contemptuously self-righteous. "Everything that has gone wrong is the fault of the Israelis. They don't want peace with us. They don't even want to talk with us or negotiate. They only want to keep us imprisoned under a harsh military occupation that makes our daily lives more unbearably miserable than they have ever been since the State of Israel was created." So say many despairing, cynical Palestinians.

Such deep-seated feelings, nourished and passionately held by many people on both sides, make it difficult to get any serious discussion of peacemaking under way these days. Each side can put forth strong arguments for their pessimism -- and for fixing blame on their adversaries.

The Israelis point to the horrors of suicide bombings and other attacks that have killed more than a thousand Israelis, including many women and children, over the past five years. The Palestinians point to the Israeli artillery shelling and helicopter gunship attacks that, during the same period, have killed more than three times as many Palestinians, including many women and children.

Each side justifies its murderous actions as proper, necessary and morally appropriate retaliation for the murderous actions committed the day before, or a week ago, by the other side. This cycle of tit-for-tat reprisals has no ending. Each side can go on forever claiming that it is only acting in "self-defense." Each side can insist, as they like to do, that "force, violence, is the only language they understand."

Yet in the midst of this seemingly hopeless madness, there are courageous, independent-thinking individuals: Palestinians and Israelis, who are saying "Enough of this craziness. There is another way."
In the last few days I have met with representatives of three different joint Israeli-Palestinian groups that are trying to make a difference in the relationships of their two peoples.

One group calls itself IPNP (Israeli-Palestinian Negotiating Partners). They have been holding joint seminars on the processes of conflict analysis and negotiation for about five years. Somewhat academic in nature, these meetings have brought together young technicians, from the fields of diplomacy, politics, security services, and business to discuss the various ways of dealing with disputes. Specialists developed under the Harvard Negotiation Program at Harvard Law School have guided these training seminars. But now IPNP members are organizing their own training programs. A new objective they have just set for themselves: to do "scenario planning" on practical options for dealing with the big unresolved issues in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, such as refugees, settlements, boundaries, the future of Jerusalem.

A second group is the Israeli-Palestinian Circle of Bereaved Families: parents of children who have been killed by the weapons used by the other side. Their principal activity is to go in joint teams to Israeli and Palestinian high schools and make speeches and stimulate discussion about dialogue and understanding between the two sides and to create hope for reconciliation. They say their visits stir up a lot of emotion, but clearly "open up the hearts, open up the minds."

The third group calls itself Combatants for Peace. These are young ex-fighters, both Palestinians and Israelis, mostly in their 20s, who have engaged in violence against the other side and have become convinced that "warfare is not the way." Some of them had become horrified at what they had done and are now searching in partnership with their presumed enemies to find the path to accommodation and peace.

Will any of these groups succeed? Only time can tell. Already, their very existence is a hopeful sign that changes at the grass roots can come in individual lives, even in the midst of a time of violence.

Editor's Note: Mercy Corps' Conflict Management Group, based in Cambridge, Mass., has provided process assistance to the Israeli-Palestinian Negotiating Partners since 2001. This article originally appeared in the Richmond Palladium-Item.

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Amman, Jordan - Recently, a diverse group of government officials from Shiite provinces in south-central Iraq came together here for an intensive weeklong workshop in conflict negotiation and problem-solving.

There were no live reports on CNN. No banner headlines or congratulatory editorials. No discussion of the implications for President Bush's poll numbers. The quiet, down-to-earth deliberations we saw in conference rooms here could never compete with suicide bombings for public attention and media coverage. But they may just be a signal of better times to come in that tortured land.

None of the participants had to attend, and no U.S. military or government officers were present. The words "nation building" or "spreading democracy" were never spoken, and there was no discussion of American policies and activities in the Middle East, for or against.

For the 25 Iraqis and four American trainers who participated in this Mercy Corps training, it was a businesslike exploration of a broad range of practical management issues: how to negotiate oil-pricing contracts, how to cope with disputes between neighboring villages over access to scarce water supplies, how to calm angry enemies fighting over supposedly "non-negotiable" demands.

The overarching theme of the workshop was learning how to analyze administrative difficulties; how to understand the nature of disputes; how to contain, manage and resolve conflicts.

The trainers -- two lawyers, a Christian minister and a former college president -- had all worked closely with Roger Fisher, the Harvard professor and negotiation guru who is author of the best-selling guide to productive negotiations "Getting to Yes."

There was a minimum of lecturing or moralizing or political speculation. Actual and theoretical cases of conflict were put on the table for dissection and "negotiation." Simulated games were played out, often with emotional intensity. Discussions were lively and free-wheeling.

While the American facilitators tried deliberately to avoid discussion of the immediate conflicts within Iraq, the Iraqi participants inevitably kept coming up with references to their own difficulties -- and the relevance of the procedures under discussion.

In the end, there was a unanimous request from the group for a longer follow-up workshop with explicit application of Fisher's methodology to real Iraqi problems.

Just the other day, word came to me from two of the participants that some of the workshop techniques they had learned were tried out, with the agreement of a higher level government official who had asked for help in dealing with an inter-clan conflict that had already produced bloodshed.

Representatives of the two sides were persuaded to sit down together and talk. Methodically, they went through the joint exercise of analyzing the problem, each side listening to the other, both seeking to understand the other's underlying interests, and searching for a mutually satisfactory deal both sides could live with. It worked.

Not a massive breakthrough for peace, but surely an important lesson, a reason to have hope.

The real question in Iraq today is whether the many unheralded efforts to build honest, capable administrative structures and authentic citizen participation can eventually replace violence and mayhem. There is still time -- but not much.

[Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in The Oregonian]

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Over the past forty years, Afghanistan has experienced tempestuous political and social upheavals. Its history since the beginning of the 19th Century is a grim record of being subjugated by Russia and Britain, and monarchical control by a succession of Muslim emirs—the last of whom was an economic partner of the Soviet Union. That regime was followed by failed experiments to create a Marxist state, followed by ten years of Soviet domination after a military invasion (at the invitation of Afghan politicians) in December 1979.

Since then, the Afghans have hardly known a day of real peace. The Soviet forces were never able to stop the attacks of Afghan guerilla fighters, who launched a holy war to drive out the foreign invaders. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United States poured so much money and sophisticated weaponry into the hands of the rebels, that Moscow decided to cut their loses and pull out in February 1989.

Victorious Afghan factions promptly fell to quarreling among themselves, leading to full-scale civil war. By September 1996 the Islamic Taliban movement had clearly established its supremacy, capturing the capital city of Kabul, and proclaiming itself the legitimate government of Afghanistan. This regime is the most rigidly controlled Islamic state in modern times.

The prolonged fighting and recent drought has seriously disrupted the economic and social life of the Afghan people. Moreover, devastating drought has afflicted much of the country, compounding the human misery. Consequently, more than two million Afghan refugees have fled across the borders into neighboring Pakistan and Iran. Providing essential supplies and long-term rebuilding efforts are Pax and Mercy Corps' central missions in this region.

The humanitarian needs are immense. People of conscience want to help. Pax and Mercy Corps, with over a decade of work in this region, are an experienced and conscientious instrument for delivering that assistance.

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