Michael Weiner Weiner is a fourth-year history and political science student. His column analyzing issues of interest to the UCLA community runs on Mondays. E-mail mweiner@media.





When Jewish and Arab student groups launched the UCLA Coalition for Coexistence in the Middle East with a “peace tent” on Bruin Walk last week, the most striking aspect of the event was the visual.



The notion of Israeli and Palestinian flags flying side by side would be unthinkable almost anywhere in the world. This is especially true of American college campuses, which sadly have become forums for some of the coarsest public expressions of Arab-Jewish antipathy in the United States today. But there they were: symbols that have exacted such passionate responses from two peoples in bitter conflict, quietly displayed next to each other.

Organizers of the coalition – which germinated during a sociology course taught last quarter titled “Voices of Peace: Perspectives on Confrontation and Reconciliation in the Arab-Israeli Conflict” – understand that the conflict isn’t going to be solved at UCLA. But they hope they can provide a forum for respectful and serious dialogue between the opposing sides.

If they succeed in sustaining the coalition, whose main components are the United Arab Society, Jewish Student Union and Hillel Jewish Students Center, it will be a first for UCLA, and perhaps for any university in the country. And it will provide a dignified contrast to the noise pollution that passes for dialogue on the issue on most college campuses.

Until recently, UCLA was no exception.

It has become an annual tradition for members of the Muslim Students Association to parlay their legitimate anger over Israel’s continued oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip into a counterproductive display of self-important rabble-rousing that sometimes verges on xenophobia and ethnocentrism.

The most salient example of such took place at an MSA-sponsored “anti-Zionism” program two years ago when an invited speaker accused Jews of harboring undue influence on the NAACP during the 1960s, a claim that hearkens to traditional Jewish stereotypes and has little to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict. Similarly hateful rhetoric was used during an anti-Israel protest at UC Berkeley last week.

This year, MSA’s silent protest at Thursday’s Israeli Independence Day celebration remained dignified, though the group has not joined the coalition.

For many students, the conflict has had a polarizing effect, such that normally reasonable people retreat to positions of conventional ethnic solidarity whenever they are asked about the issue. The coalition seeks to create a safe space in which individuals, including those with no preexisting bias, can discuss the complex problems at hand and come to their own conclusions, free of the defensiveness that is cultivated by extremism.

While previous events were clearly on the minds of the coalition’s founders, they downplay the influence of campus politics in their decision to start the group. In fact, they were prompted most by the recent devolution of the peace process, which has resulted in some of the worst violence in years.

The coalition wants to counteract the idea that the conflict is primordial, rooted so deeply in history that both peoples are somehow destined to fight with each other for eternity. This is a widely held misconception, pandered to quite effectively by campus groups that seek to promote extremism and tunnel-vision rather than dialogue and reconciliation.

To label the Arab-Israeli conflict “complex” is to make a grand understatement. I would not attempt to put forward a coherent position on it in this column. But I want to make clear that the it isn’t the result of some divine ploy that dooms Jews and Arabs to combat each other forever.

This is a modern political conflict, borne of extremely complicated social, historical, cultural and religious factors. As we have seen with tragic poignancy over the past seven months, it will not be solved once and for all by a “cold peace,” but with a historic reconciliation between the two peoples. Clearly, we are years away from such a turn of events.

Nonetheless, there is no reason for young Arab and Jewish Americans to act out the conflict at our universities. Better that we talk about it, feel each other out and try to see things from the perspective of the other side. That is exactly what the coalition aims for, and it deserves to be supported by all students who believe that true peace cannot be dictated from the top down, but must gain a foothold in the instruments of civil society.

In the interest of full disclosure, I want readers to know that I am not a detached observer on this issue. I am Jewish and I consider myself a Zionist. I also believe that many of the policies and actions of the State of Israel over the last half century have not been in line with the best principles of Judaism or Zionism.

It took a long time for me to admit that to myself. It is my sincere hope that the coalition will help other students do away with their own prejudices and understand the Arab-Israeli conflict for what it is – a tragedy that both peoples deserve to be rid of.