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Peace Lessons from 'The General's Son'

Born of a family of fierce fighters for Israel, Miko Peled chooses a different mission in Palestine.

Tom Sandborn 12 Jan 2013TheTyee.ca

Tom Sandborn covers health policy and labour beats for the Tyee. He welcomes your feedback and story tips at [email protected].

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Peace activist and author of The General's Son Miko Peled speaks in Vancouver on Feb. 7.

Miko Peled has an impeccable Zionist pedigree. His father, Matti Peled, fought as a young officer in what Israelis call the War of Independence and Palestinians refer to as the Nakba ("the Catastrophe") in 1948. Later, the elder Peled, by then the "general" in this book's title, commanded Israeli troops in 1967's Six Day War and ruled Gaza as its military governor. He also served a term in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset. Miko Peled's grandfather, Dr. Avraham Kassnelson, a prominent Zionist, signed the nation's declaration of independence and served as one of its first ambassadors abroad. His great uncle, Zalman Shazar, served as Israel's third president. Like his father, he served in the Israeli army, qualifying for the elite unit red beret of the Special Forces. In 1997, his niece Smardar died in a Jerusalem suicide bombing attributed to Palestinian militants.

All this sounds like a resume perfectly designed to create a fierce advocate for Israeli state policy, a supporter of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories and an implacable foe of Palestinians. However, this remarkable book has a very different story to tell.

Peled has emerged as an active but non-violent champion of Palestinian rights, an organizer of humanitarian projects to benefit both Israelis and Palestinians, a critic of his nation's ongoing occupation of the territories his father helped to conquer in 1967, an opponent of the core Zionist project of creating an explicitly Jewish state on Palestinian lands, and a champion of the highly controversial proposal that a single secular state be created on all of the territory now held by Israel, a state in which citizens of all and of no religious affiliations stand as equals.

Perhaps most centrally, he has found ways to translate these heretical views into effective action. Peled now helps organize cross-community dialogue groups among Israelis and Palestinians in the U.S., participates in non-violent protests together with Palestinians and their allies in the occupied territories and teaches karate to Palestinian children.

The general's teachings

The General's Son is a crisp, well written account of the experiences that have turned Peled away from the Zionist commitment that has shaped his family's early history toward solidarity in grief and dialogue with Palestinian families who have, like his, lost members to the ongoing violence in Palestine/Israel.

In fact, Peled's empathy towards Palestinians is not as discontinuous with his family's traditions as a reader might at first assume. His father the general became a prominent peace activist in his later years, calling for an end to Israel's occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights and for a "two state solution" that would see a Zionist Israel co-exiting with a Palestinian state within the borders of pre-war Palestine.

The general, it becomes clear as his son learns more about him as the book's story unfolds, was disgusted by what he learned about Israeli massacres of Palestinian civilians and predicted that if Israel continued to implement policies of holding on to the occupied territories and creating new "facts on the ground" by subsidizing Zionist settlers and their new Jewish communities within those territories, the Israeli army, the IDF, would be corrupted and brutalized. While the general never adopted his son's current position of support for a single secular state, he was outspoken enough as an activist and as a newspaper columnist to be known among Palestinians as Abu Salaam, "the Father of Peace," and for his family to be shunned often by other Israelis.

For many years after he completed his military service, Peled withdrew from the kind of public engagement in Israeli politics that had filled his father's final decades. The son studied karate and traveled the world, finally settling into an apparently idyllic life operating a martial arts school in San Diego. He took no part in Israeli/Palestinian debates.

But the tragic death of Peled's niece made it impossible for him to remain distanced from the horrors that engulfed his homeland. He had to find some way, he decided, to reach out to Palestinians who had also lost loved ones and do what he could to foster dialogue across the gap of bitter silence that separates the two Abrahamic peoples who live together so uneasily on Palestinian soil. (Tellingly, he notes that at 39, when his niece was killed, he had never visited in a Palestinian home or known a Palestinian well enough to have a meaningful conversation.)

Journey towards peace

Since his niece's death, Peled has been on a journey that has demanded he confront his own fears of the unknown Other, the Palestinians he had never learned to know as human beings. He has had to critically examine many of his biased assumptions about those Palestinians and about Israel's history, and he has had to re-examine many of his assumptions about his father.

Peled's book takes the reader along on this painful travel from isolation to compassion, solidarity and constructive action. In a world that is convulsed on every side with ethnic tensions, communitarian violence and mind-numbing fear, he proposes a moral perspective based on non-violence and dignity for all, an inclusive and powerful point of view that may represent the only hope we have of learning how to live together on this ragged planet without destroying each other or our common home, not only in Israel/Palestine but around the world.

Few readers will approach this book without already settled opinions about the crisis in Palestine/Israel, but this is a book that rewards and enriches an open mind and open heart. No one who approaches this text with some openness will read it without being moved and changed. It should be required reading for policy makers on all sides and for anyone who wants to make human sense out of the tragedies that continue to convulse the region.

Miko Peled will be in Vancouver in early February, and will speak at the Vancouver Public Library's downtown branch in the Alice McKay Room, on Feb. 7, at 7 p.m.  [Tyee]

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