The reality of playing Peacemaker

By Debbie Israel

September 12, 2008

I am a life member of Hadassah. One of the perks of being a life member is that I get the Hadassah monthly magazine. This month, Hadassah Magazine had an article about a video game called Peacemaker. This is a game that was designed to give people who play it a better understanding of the conflicts that exist in the Middle East.

The game gives players the opportunity to play as the Israeli Prime Minister and make decisions that they think will lead to both sides sitting down and discussing a two-state solution to the conflict. You win the game if you get the sides to sit down and negotiate.

While I don't totally agree with the end-game goal (in my opinion, a two-state solution is just a hop, skip, and a jump from Israel being wiped off the map altogether), I do see the wisdom of this game. The article in Hadassah Magazine tells of two Palestinian girls who were sure they could win this game by having Israel make all the concessions (evict the "settlers" from Judea and Samaria, eliminate the Israeli soldiers on patrol and allow all the Palestinian refugees to move into Israel). But they were baffled by the results. After each compromise, after each step they took toward what they thought would be the resolution of the game's objective, the homicide bombings continued. The Palestinians made no conciliations, no moves toward establishing an understanding of what the other side wants or needs.

The Peres Center for Peace in Tel Aviv has handed out approximately 80,000 free copies of this game since its introduction in early 2007. Peacemaker is also available in 60 countries worldwide. It has won gaming awards, including an award from Southern California's Center on Public Diplomacy in Los Angeles.

It's interesting that this just came up because my rabbi spoke this Shabbat about what he called the biggest enemy of the Jewish people -- ignorance. He was mostly talking about the ignorance that the average Jew (even many Orthodox and Yeshiva educated Jews) have about our own heritage. But I would take it a step further. The biggest enemy, not just of the Jewish people, but also of the United States, the "West," and the entire world, is ignorance of our own history and our own present.

I'll give you a few examples. First of all, many people in this country (and other places in the world) are woefully ignorant of the causes of World War II and just how it got started. They don't know about Neville Chamberlain trying to appease Hitler and the Nazis by negotiating a turnover of the Sudetenland, a German-speaking section of what was then Czechoslovakia, to Germany. They don't know how Chamberlain proclaimed this negotiation to be "peace in our times" -- that he believed that handing over a piece of land to Hitler would prevent war. Needless to say, he was mistaken. This bloodless land turnover only served to whet Hitler's appetite for land and power and led directly to his attempted takeover of Poland. 

People in this country are also woefully ignorant of what it means to be an American. Patriotism, in a land that was founded on freedom of speech, does not mean agreeing with everything your leaders do. It doesn't mean standing by when you see injustice. It means writing letters to your congressional representatives, writing to your president, writing articles, protesting, signing petitions, and, most importantly, voting your conscience. It means paying attention to what the candidates stand for, voting for issues, not personalities.

People are also woefully ignorant of the history of the Middle East. They don't understand that Palestine was the name the British used for that area we now call Israel. By calling themselves "Palestinians", the Arab residents of Israel are pretending that they are an ancient people who lived in an ancient land for centuries and the Jews took their land in 1948 and kicked them out of their homes. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The "Palestinian" people are a recent creation of Yasser Arafat and his cronies. The PLO, which was founded in 1964, stands for the "Palestine Liberation Organization" (not Palestinian). It was their way of saying they wanted to take Israel from the Jews for themselves. This was not a return to ancient borders. This was an attempt to remove the Jews from Israel. This is still their goal. They have no interest in a two-state solution (Arafat proved this when he answered Ehud Barak's offer of a Palestinian state with the first Intifada).

It is unfortunate that the only way to defeat people like Yasser Arafat and Adolph Hitler is through a bloody, costly (in both money and lives) war. But this is the reality of our world as it is. The only way to defeat despots is through war. It's not my preferred method, but I'd also prefer it if I could lose weight by eating ice cream and watching TV all day. But I can't. And the world can't defeat the terrorists of this world, the al-Qaeda cells and the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, for example, by "turning the other cheek." "Turning the other cheek" gives your enemies a chance to blacken both your eyes.

The only times that the terrorists stop is when we attack them and leave them without resources to attack us. And until we do this, we will never have peace. People only negotiate if they have something to gain. Hamas has nothing to gain -- they are currently getting everything they want without any real world concessions. Until the Palestinian Authority has something to gain from peace they will never truly negotiate with Israel. And they will never have something to gain unless they know we can attack them and defeat them whenever we want. We need to prove this to them before we can ever have true peace.

Debbie Israel is a graphic artist (see https://www.cafepress.com/compugraphd2 for some of her work) and tutor living in Highland Park.