It was the Israelis vs. the Palestinians Sunday night at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center. It was also Americans vs. terrorists, Jews vs. Muslims, Israeli occupation vs. democracy, the real world vs. the Oslo accords and, very briefly, a roomful of local Jews against each other.
The forum was the annual Yitzak Rabin Memorial Lecture, “Israel in Dialogue,” featuring a meeting of the minds between two Israeli writers: Tom Segev, author of “One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the Brtish Mandate” and “The Seventh Million,” and Yossi Klein Halevi, author of “At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew’s Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land” and “Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist.”
The Berkeley event, sponsored by the BRJCC, Congregation Netivot Shalom and the Israel Center of the Jewish Federation of the Greater East Bay, helped open the 13th annual Contra Costa Jewish Book Festival.
Both authors, who have the reputation for being controversial, were greeted by a packed house. The general theme of the evening revolved around crossroads in the path toward modern-day Israel, and what, if anything, could have been done differently to foster a better relationship between the battling Jewish and Arab cultures.
Segev’s most recent book, “One Palestine, Complete,” recounts the British occupation between 1917 and 1948, and the decision-making process that eventually led to the formation of a Jewish state, rather than an Arab one. He tells the story of the British mandate from all three affected perspectives — Zionist, Arab and British — disputing popular Zionist beliefs that the British worked against the Jews, saying instead that they played a decisive role in the creation of an economically independent and politically viable Jewish homeland.
Here was an early crossroad. Why did the British support the Jews and not the Arabs? It had to do partially, said Segev, with the British notion that Jews “turned the wheels of history,” influencing everything from American participation in World War I to the Russian Revolution. He recounted a meeting between Chaim Weizmann, a then-unknown chemist, and British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour, who was so impressed by the future president of the World Zionist Organization that he produced the 1917 Balfour Declaration, paving the way for the creation of Israel 31 years later.
“In fact,” Segev writes in his book, “the Jewish people were helpless; they had nothing to offer, no influence other than this myth of clandestine power.”
By 1939, Britain had realized some of the flaws in its ideology and was already planning a withdrawal from Palestine. The result: Arabs in the region were dealt a blow from which the area is still trying to recover.
Halevi’s latest book, “At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden,” centers around his attempt to grasp a larger picture of what Israel truly encompasses and reconcile his Jewish identity by reaching out to other religions of the region. The New Republic correspondent accuses Judaism, Islam and Christianity of the same offense, which he called the monotheistic imperative: confusing faith in one God with a belief in one way of life. That notion, he said, must be overcome before these groups can live together with understanding.
Halevi, a senior writer with the Jerusalem Report and a regular commentator on Israeli affairs for the Los Angeles Times, spoke of his fear of the crosses and muezzin he would encounter daily in Israel, as he, like most Israelis, lived next to, but not among, those of differing faiths.
“The Zionists always said, ‘We are coming and we can live together,'” said Segev, about the formation of Israel. “‘We are bringing blessing to the land. We are developing the country for the good of everybody.’ They tried to bribe the Arabs. But you cannot buy a nation’s national feeling.”
To that end, the writers generally agreed that a separate Palestinian state was the best option for coexistence, as it was unrealistic to expect Jews and Arabs to coexist peaceably within the same system. Halevi pointed out that the occupation of another people precludes genuine democracy, calling it a political illusion.
“It is in Israelis’ interest for Israel to encourage Palestinian nationhood,” he said. “Let them learn and grow just as we did many years ago.”
Added Segev: “How do you have an Israel that is both religious and democratic? The challenge is how to move on once Zionist ideology has achieved its goals.”
Both writers agreed on the ineffectiveness of the 1993 Oslo accords, aimed at forming a Palestinian government in the territories. Halevi called it a “disaster, one of the worst self-inflicted wounds a country could create,” while Segev called it another “illusion,” a policy routinely ignored while Israel continued to build settlements throughout the disputed territories.
At one point in the discussion, spurred by an audience question about Hanan Ashrawi, senior adviser to Yasser Arafat, who was also speaking in Berkeley Sunday, the room briefly erupted into a chorus of arguments, precluding either of the lecturers from speaking for several minutes.
Summing up the tenor of the evening, Segev said, “I belong to those leftist Israelis who sometimes ask themselves, where did we go wrong?
“We look for mistakes. What could we have done differently? That we should have learned Arabic or we should have been nicer to the Arabs? On the basis of my research and my studies of Palestine under the British, I have concluded that the conflict was inevitable.”