Peace forum's flaws

Editorial

The World Peace Forum has come and gone: a series of pleasant concerts, well-intentioned workshops and a few challenging debates.

The potential that some in the Jewish community had feared – that the event would devolve into an anti-Zionist (or anti-Semitic) debacle along the lines of the Durban conference of 2001 – did not come to pass. But it was not without its worrying lessons.

The Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) and the Canada-Israel Committee (CIC) were singled out for a form of loyalty oath – something no other participant was apparently required to undergo – in order to meet the ideological criteria for participation. In the end, their programming proposals – a range of constructive and relatively non-controversial topics – were rejected.

As it turned out, there were numerous Jewish participants in the various activities of the forum. ("Progressive" activists go to great lengths to publicize individual Jews within their ranks who share their core beliefs – and we are all entitled to our opinions.) There were no reports of particularly egregious breaches of civil discourse, but the entire experience is worth a review.

Foremost, the narrative that is almost universally accepted by people on the left, among others, is that Israel is a war-seeking military entity with no regard for civil rights, human dignity or individual Palestinians. In other words, Israel = war.

The sort of worldview that ensured the rejection of CJC's and CIC's participation in the World Peace Forum is one that sees six decades of Palestinian statelessness as directly caused by Zionism, which is a deeply flawed, simplistic and wilfully ignorant analysis. Never more than in the last six years have Abba Eban's words proved more true: "The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity." The increasingly sweet offers made to the Palestinians since the 1980s have been rejected repeatedly because they failed to offer the one core demand that mainstream Palestinian and larger Arab public opinion demands: an end to the Jewish presence in the Middle East. By refusing to self-destruct, and by insisting on protecting the right of its people to live free from terrorist attack, Israel is condemned as the very embodiment of war.

This narrative, childlike though it may be, presented obvious challenges to the participation in the World Peace Forum of Zionist organizations. And, since Zionism – the national movement for Jewish self-determination – is a core pillar of Judaism, it probably placed on any and all Jews who wished to participate varying degrees of moral challenge.

In the end, for all the good and bad in the World Peace Forum, the core conundrum was this: Many of the people in the forum, including some of its core organizers, adhere to a mythological perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that places all guilt on one party. This refusal to acknowledge the generations of effort and massive compromises that Israel has expended trying to secure a lasting peace is a slap in the face to Israel, Jews and reason.

The failure to acknowledge and celebrate Israel's six-decade quest for peaceful co-existence with its neighbors is evidence that forum organizers could not discern genuine sustained effort toward peace from the ideological parody of Israel to which they adhere. This, ultimately, was the failure of the forum.

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