From Zionist to champion of Palestine
If his narrative was a film, the back story would open with him watching TV in his adopted home of San Diego in 1997 and looking at a CNN news report of yet another suicide bombing in his native Jerusalem.
The phone rings.
It is his mother in Israel, saying his sister Nurit’s 13-year-old daughter, Smadar, is missing. His gut instinct tells him it was her he saw on the news bulletin lying on a stretcher and covered in blood.
His instinct is right.
Smadar’s death shocks a nation almost inured from horror. There is a state funeral for the granddaughter of General Matti Peled, the War of Independence hero who later became a far-left politician. Attending it is Israel’s current prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a childhood friend of Miko’s sister.
As part of the Israeli elite, his family had for decades enjoyed close ties with political and military leaders ever since the establishment of the state in 1948. Miko’s grandfather, Avraham Katsnelson was a Zionist leader and a signatory of Israel’s Declaration of Independence. The prime minister lived around the corner from the family home and anyone who mattered in Israel was only a phone call away.
His father, Matti Peled, was a young officer in the war of 1948 and a general in the war of 1967 when Israel conquered the West Bank, Gaza, Golan Heights, and the Sinai.
Among the mourners at Smadar’s funeral is Ehud Barak, the newly elected leader of the opposition — and future prime minister — who tells him that, to win votes, he must disguise his real intentions to make peace with the Palestinians.
Torn between grief and despair, Peled retorts: “Why not tell the truth — that this and similar tragedies are taking place because we are occupying another nation and that to save lives the right thing to do is to end the occupation and negotiate a just peace with our Palestinian partners?”
That outburst took everyone within earshot by surprise. After Smadar’s killing, everything pointed to Miko and his sister becoming more entrenched in their distrust of Palestinians and their cause.
In fact, the opposite happened.
It pushed Peled to re-examine many of the beliefs he had grown up with, as the son and grandson of leading figures in Israel’s political and military elite, and transformed him into a passionate advocate in the struggle for human rights and a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
The tragic event became, if not a Road to Damascus moment, at least a catalyst to help change the world both he and his sister had inherited.
Israel’s occasional peace overtures belie a history of trenchant militarism spurred on by the 1967 war.
A British ambassador to Israel warned in 1980 that Israel would detonate a nuclear bomb in case of a new war, according to state documents released in London on Thursday.
Peled’s sister placed the blame for her daughter’s death on the Israeli state, a position that took him some time to understand. “My sister’s reaction was to oppose retaliation. She said: ‘No real mother would want to see this happen to any other mother,’ Peled recalls. “That crystallised how morally unjustifiable retaliation is.”
But Peled, who addressed seminars in Dublin and Cork hosted by the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign over the weekend, is more than a passive humanitarian.
He believes in activism, which is why he supports the recent call by the Teachers Union of Ireland for an academic boycott of Israeli institutions. “This is an historic breakthrough for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement,” he says.
“I welcome the TUI’s support for the academic boycott of Israel — the first such support from a European academic union. I hope it’s followed by others, and by action.”
Peled is a strong supporter of calls for sanctions against Israel. The campaign has been gathering international support, and Peled rejects the idea that it is an unacceptable restriction on academic and cultural freedom.
All across the West, Peled says, “people believe they are really doing the right thing, even though they are clearly supporting the wrong side. People believe they are helping Jewish people by supporting Israel. In fact, all the evidence points to the opposite”.
The BDS movement is aimed at shifting world opinion away from blind acceptance’s of Israel’s position towards a recognition of the right of Palestinians to an equal share of the bounty of the Holy Land.
“Sanctions are a very effective tool,” he insists. “It is the way the international community responds to states like Israel that are committing crimes against other people. We can’t just sit and wait for Israelis to change. That won’t happen. Sanctions have proved very effective in the past. If we had waited for all the whites in South Africa to agree to be nice to the blacks there would still be apartheid.”
He sees change as not only necessary but inevitable. “At the moment, you have 6m people governed by 6.5m in a small country. A UN report last August said there would be 500,000 more people in Gaza alone by 2020. Are they all to be kept under siege? The idea is absurd. The only solution is for all people to enjoy equal rights as citizens. The current situation is simply not sustainable.”
IT HAS been a long and tortuous journey from Zionist to Palestinian activist that has so far taken Peled 16 years of transformation.
At first, he joined a Jewish/Arab discussion group in San Diego, and found the Jewish Americans he met more foreign than the hummus and hospitality of his Palestinian friends.
He decided to confront his own fears and experience life in the West Bank so he started to divide his time between California and Palestine.
In the process, he befriended Palestinian activists, some of whom had spent years in Israeli jails. The fear that seized him on his first trip to the West Bank disappeared with the realisation that Palestinians are not all that different to Jews.
Peled’s journey eventually lead him to the realisation that there is only one just solution — a secular single state with equal rights for all.
He feels there are many longstanding misunderstandings that need to be corrected. He refers back to the day — Nov 29, 1947 — when the UN accepted a resolution to partition Palestine into two countries and create two states. “You have the Jewish Zionist community, which numbered less than a half a million people, and you have the Palestinian community that numbered close to a million and a half people,” Peled says.
“The United Nations, in their infinite wisdom, gave the smaller portion of the country to the larger Palestinian community,” he writes in his book, The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine.
“Even today people say it’s all the Palestinians’ fault because they didn’t accept the partitioner’s ruling. But why would anybody accept this? Why would anybody accept that the United Nations would cut off the larger portion of their own country and give it to a small community of immigrants. Why did anybody expect this to work? It’s an absurd proposition.”
According to Susan Abulhawa, a Palestinian-American writer and author of the 2010 best-selling novel, Mornings in Jenin, Peled’s contribution lies in his ability to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Palestinian cause.
“It didn’t matter that Peled overcame a racist ideology,” she writes in a review of his book. “That’s his own personal journey of growth.
“Nor did it matter that he went so far past his fears that he befriended and came to love certain Palestinian individuals. It didn’t matter that he embarked on humanitarian projects to help. Or that he participated in protests that got him arrested by the Israeli occupation forces.
“In the end, what truly mattered was setting the record straight and acknowledging that Palestinians are native sons and daughters who have been cruelly dispossessed of home, history, heritage and story. What mattered was the acknowledgement.
“Uttering the truth, no matter how painful, is what I needed to hear. Because it was in that admission that Miko Peled became a man I could embrace as a brother.”
Peled remains hopeful. “There is no doubt in my mind that there will be peace in my lifetime,” he says. “Without hope, what’s the point of trying to move forward and actually do something?”
* Miko Peled’s memoir, The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine is out now.
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