Visitors to Israel, Palestinians: Prospect for peace doesn't look good

Jews were out on the streets of Jerusalem on Friday buying food for Shabbat, the weekly day of rest, in a land rocked by renewed violence between Israel and the neighboring Palestinian enclave in the Gaza Strip.

“Life is pretty much as usual here,” Rabbi George Gittleman of Santa Rosa said in an email. “I was just out getting food for Shabbat and the streets were busy with people doing the same.”

Gittleman, the leader of Santa Rosa’s Congregation Shomrei Torah, is combining studies at an international rabbinical seminar with a family vacation in Israel, where he has briefly lived and repeatedly visited since 1983.

Air raid sirens have sounded as Gaza militants have fired more than 550 rockets into Israel and the Jewish state’s air force has struck more than 1,100 targets in the Hamas-governed territory wedged between Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea.

At least 95 people, including some civilians, have been killed in Gaza, while the rockets - many intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system - wounded several people, the first significant Israeli casualties, at a gas station in southern Israel on Friday.

Two days earlier, Gittleman reported that Jerusalem, in a hilly area similar to Sonoma County, was “bustling and full of commerce and tourism. Lots of restaurants, sites to see.”

“But the air is thick with the threat of a widening conflict, which no one I talk to wants,” Gittleman said, noting that Israel has a “citizens army” in which almost everyone serves.

Israel has mobilized more than 30,000 reservists for a possible ground invasion of Gaza, a prospect that troubles Therese Mughannam-Walrath of Santa Rosa, a Palestinian-American activist who visited the area, including the West Bank and Israel, in June.

“It is an outrage, a total outrage what the Israeli government is doing,” Mughannam-Walrath said.

The world’s third most powerful military is attacking Gaza’s 1.6 million Palestinians, whom she described as “a group of indigenous people who are caged and have no place to go.”

Asked why Hamas continues firing rockets into Israel, Mughannam-Walrath said that “desperate people will do desperate things.”

Earlier in his visit, Gittleman made his way to the Western Wall, a 2,000-year-old remnant of the Second Temple located in the Old City of Jerusalem. In the typically crowded, noisy courtyard, Gittleman leaned his head against the pitted limestone wall and prayed for peace.

“Where there is prayer there is hope, and where there is hope there is always the possibility of a better tomorrow,” he wrote in blog posted on the Shomrei Torah website.

But there’s little immediate hope of his prayer being answered.

In a commentary on the Al Jazeera America website, Lisa Goldman, director of the Israel-Palestine Initiative at the New America Foundation, said the breakdown of Secretary of State John Kerry’s Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in April closed the door on a diplomatic resolution, leaving “a complete vacuum in which hopelessness, frustration, rage, intolerance and extremism are festering.”

The tension ramped up with the kidnap and murder of three Israeli teenagers, whose bodies were found June 30, and the subsequent slaying of a Palestinian teen in an apparent act of revenge attributed to six Jewish suspects.

Gittleman said he was dining out when news of the first killing broke. “Everything stopped. People around me started to cry. A heaviness descended upon us, a sense of communal grief which was compounded by the revenge murder of the Palestinian boy.”

About 350 Israelis, including many born and raised in the United States, personally offered condolences Tuesday to the family of the Palestinian teen, USA Today reported. “It gives us a good feeling to see that there are Israelis who reject this murder,” the boy’s cousin said.

Mughannam-Walrath’s visit in June occurred while the Israeli boys still were missing, and Israeli forces had ransacked West Bank schools and homes in a search for them, she said. The West Bank and Gaza Strip, which flank Israel to the east and west, respectively, are collectively home to 3.9 million Palestinians, who consider the area their home for 2,000 years.

Mughannam-Walrath has relatives living in Ramallah, the West Bank city she said was founded in 1550 by her father’s ancestors.

Speaking in Arabic with Palestinians, Mughannam-Walrath said she found they “are all convinced that Israel is adamant about not giving an inch” of land in reaching a peace agreement. The Israeli government’s approval of new settlements in the West Bank is provocation, she said.

“The bottom line is Israel does not want peace,” Mughannam-Walrath said, citing the Zionist faction of Israelis as the opposition to any concession to the Palestinians. “Israel wants all of Palestine without the Palestinians,” she said.

Gittleman said the conflict boils down to two peoples - Palestinians and Jews - occupying one land. The “only solution that has a chance of working” is the creation of two separate states, he said, a prospect that “doesn’t look good at the moment.”

Polls consistently show that a majority of Israelis would give up most, but not all, of the West Bank settlements for peace, Gittleman said. But some of them, he said, are cities of 30,000 to 40,000 people, and land swaps need to be part of the two-state negotiations.

But the “real impediment” to peace, he said, is that Palestinian militants do not recognize Israel’s legitimacy. “Their true goal is to do away with Israel as a Jewish state altogether,” he said.

You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com.