The Foreign Service Journal, December 2012

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2012 17 n 1985 I was the first USAID officer to be assigned responsibility for manag- ing and monitoring foreign assistance NGO programs in the West Bank and Gaza. In that capacity, I was the author and negotiator of the first U.S.-funded Palestinian-Israeli Cooperation Program. The process involved a large number of people and organizations: the Israeli government, the State Department, the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv, the U.S. consul- ate in East Jerusalem, USAID, the Pales- tinian leadership, various nongovern- mental organizations in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel, and Jewish and Arab- American NGOs in the United States. After two years of difficult nego- tiations, work finally began on the first activity, revising history textbooks for kindergarten through grade 12. Teams of Israeli and Palestinian academics, teach- ers and parents began development of mutually acceptable content for history textbooks. Sticks and Stones… About the same time, in 1987, the first intifada (Arabic for shaking off) com- menced. Best known for boys throw- ing stones, the campaign also involved general strikes, boycotts, tax strikes, Molotov cocktails and, eventually, armed attacks against the harsh and inhumane Reasons for Hope in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict BY KR I ST I N K . LOKEN I Kristin K. Loken was a Foreign Service officer with the U.S. Agency for International Devel- opment from 1979 to 2001. Since retiring from the Service, she has worked for the Center for Development and Population Activities, an American nongovernmental organization that promotes women’s health and sustainable development, and writes from her home in Falling Waters, W. Va. SPEAKING OUT conditions of the Israeli occupation and the campaign by the Israelis to make life intolerable in the West Bank and Gaza so as to drive out the Palestinian population. In August 1988, the level of vio- lence within Israel escalated with the first suicide bomb attack on a crowded bus in West Jerusalem. Twenty-three Israelis were killed and more than 130 were wounded, many of them chil- dren. The Israeli forces responded with beatings (often breaking bones), home demolitions, extrajudicial killings, mass detentions (sometimes of thousands of Palestinians at a time), deportations, curfews and torture. Whatever the tactic, the Israeli strategy was always to hit back harder than they had been hit. During my visits throughout Gaza and the West Bank to monitor USAID programs during this difficult period, I witnessed many encounters between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians. I once came upon a group of young boys (maybe 7 or 8 years old) throwing stones at Israel Defense Force members. The soldiers started to chase them and all got away except one boy, who was taken to a group of soldiers. One of the soldiers seemed to be in charge and gave an order. The soldier holding the boy straightened out his arm; then another soldier raised his leg and brought his boot down against the back of the elbow of the boy’s arm with a force strong enough to break the bone. The boy screamed, broke free and ran. The soldier who performed this act was young; I guessed maybe 17 or 18, with bright red hair. All these years later I still recall thinking about what trauma that boy would suffer—and the young sol- dier would suffer, too. For in this conflict, there were no winners: everyone lost, and all, including witnesses like me, were traumatized. It was years before I stopped seeing scenes like this in my dreams. Though I kept trying to get our coop- eration program going, I eventually came to question the value of our efforts in the Israeli-Palestinian context. Perhaps the power differential between the two sides was too great to expect that dialogue and cooperative efforts would have beneficial effects. There were some committed individu- als on both sides who worked very hard on cooperative efforts. But they seemed to burn out because over the years, on any level of analysis, they were seeing such meager positive results. And all the while the conflict became more intrac- table, violence on both sides increased, and living conditions for the Palestinians deteriorated. Eventually, the violence became so horrible and pervasive that I saw little or no possibility for positive impact. I moved on to Foreign Service assignments in other parts of the world. When I did return to the region two decades later as a private citizen on a peace delegation