Farewell Stephen P. Cohen, z"l
by Aliza Becker

AJPA Director Aliza Becker with Stephen P. Cohen on 9/07/2014


I first came to know Middle East peace mediator Dr. Stephen P. Cohen when he became an early supporter of Brit Tzedek v'Shalom, a national grassroots two-state peace initiative I helped found in 2002. Cohen, who passed away on January 25, 2017 at age 71, was an advisor and public speaker for the group throughout its nearly eight-year tenure.

Cohen was a professor and long time Track II diplomat. When I interviewed him for the American Jewish Peace Archive in 2014, I was impressed by his stories from the two summers he spent in Israel shortly after the 1967 War. Excerpts from these stories have been edited for readability and conciseness.

I n the summer of 1969 I was hired as a research assistant by a Harvard professor on a project about the interaction between the Israeli military and the Palestinians living in Jerusalem. I was responsible for going to places where the Israelis and Palestinians met to watch their interactions.

I learned that in meetings Palestinians did not feel satisfied if Israelis simply agreed with them right away. The Palestinians wanted there to be a serious conversation in which Israeli officials started to learn what the Palestinians were thinking about. It was not the answer that they were looking for, but rather the process of being taken seriously.

That summer there was a big crisis. While I was having breakfast in East Jerusalem with a prominent Palestinian judge, we heard on the radio that there was a fire in the Al-Aqsa Mosque. He was convinced right away that the fire had been set by the Jews, because they wanted the Al-Aqsa destroyed so they could rebuild a their temple. (We didn't know right away that the fire had been set by an Australian Christian fundamentalist.) That was the beginning of my realization that underneath all of these national conflicts was a much deeper-seated religious conflict.  

I asked the Palestinian judge if I could go with him to the Temple Mount. I'm not sure how much he really agreed to take me, but I went with him anyways.

When we got there, amidst explosive emotions, the Israelis were running after the Palestinians back and forth across the Temple Mount. The Palestinians did not trust the Israeli fire department was there to put out the fire, but rather to make it worse. Therefore, they waited until the fire engines came all the way from Ramallah. Of course, that wait produced much more fire damage.

The following summer I went back to the Middle East to understand what I could by myself. I was just walking around talking to people and asking questions. I would meet people and I was interested and open to listening. I didn't have any particular plan.

I began to realize that there were Palestinians who were being constantly watched and followed by the Israeli military. I got to know some of those people. There was one group of Palestinians in the West Bank who were beginning to talk about the idea of Palestinian separation from Jordan and becoming an independent entity. Some were actually part of the PLO.

I also met a young Israeli man who was a government specialist on Palestinian life. He was upset that instead of the period after the 1967 war being a period in which there could be some mutual understanding, it was becoming a period of greater and greater mutual hostility. He eventually walked into the Mediterranean and committed suicide.

I was not going to dismiss political and military leader Moshe Dayan like other people on the left. I was interested in Dayan's complex relationship with the Palestinian issue. And it was important for Dayan to teach me as a diaspora Jew who cared about these things to understand the complexity of the Israeli dilemma.

I was very fascinated by a speech that Dayan gave at the funeral of an Israeli soldier long before the 1967 war in which he said that if he had been a Palestinian at that time, he would have been part of the armed struggle against Israel. It was not sufficient to oppose the Palestinian military struggle. It was necessary to recognize that when nothing else was advancing their national goals, it was part of the modern historical process that they would turn to violence. He said, 'But we have to understand that we have only the choice of defending ourselves.'

I began to understand why the Palestinians had moved toward the idea of armed struggle against Israel: because it was very hard for them to find a mode of opposing Zionism which depended on their own efforts rather than being a tail wagged by the Arab dog [of Pan-Arabism].

I became close to the Nusseibeh family that lived in Jerusalem. The father had been an important minister in the Jordanian government in the West Bank. He didn't believe that there was a possibility of an agreement with the Palestinians who were now identified with the armed struggle against Israel. He thought they were stupid and self-destructive and was hoping that Israel would withdraw from the West Bank for the Jordanians to take over so that there would be a possibility of an agreement. His wife was far more extreme in her views. She wanted to make sure that the Palestinians sat strong and resisted Israel. Their son Sari Nusseibeh became very important to me.

I took a bus to the "non-border" between Egypt and southern Gaza. I saw lots of young Palestinian kids running back and forth. It became clear as I began to learn more that they had lost contact with their parents because their fathers had been killed in the battles in Gaza in the 1967 War. They basically had no access to regular food, or to shelter, or anything. I wanted to understand what it meant to be a Palestinian child after these wars and how they felt about life under Israeli occupation.  

By the end of that summer I understood that the Israeli view that the 1967 War would put Palestinians and the Arabs in the mood to make peace with Israel was totally wrong. The results of the fall 1967 Khartoum Conference where the Arabs said, "No negotiations, no peace, and no recognition" was not a shock to me by then.

The Arabs were not going to be brought by the humiliation of military defeat into the moral and psychological acceptance of Israel as a permanent entity in their midst. Their defeat was not enough to make them decide that they could make peace. They needed dignity if they were able to go forward in some new relationship with Israel, not just abject humiliation.  

By the end of the summer it was also clear to me that this was the field on which I was going to be doing battle intellectually and emotionally. I could not resist the tremendous force of the need to understand this Arab-Israeli problem and do something about it.



Stephen P. Cohen,
founder of the Institute for Middle East Peace and Development, secretly brokered peace talks between Arab and Israeli officials for three decades. He was a professor a t Harvard and New York University and a longtime Israel Policy Forum National Scholar.  Read an overview of his work in this New York Times obituary . AJPA interviews with Cohen were contributed to his recently published memoir " The Go-Between: Memoir of a Mideast Intermediary." 

 


The mission of the American Jewish Peace Archive is to document through oral history the accounts of Jews in the United States who have worked in support of Israeli-Palestinian peace and reconciliation since 1967, and in so doing, to facilitate dialogue and inquiry between the generations, to provide primary source material for scholars, and to provide guidance and inspire hope for the future.