Normalization sounds good but not here, in occupied Palestine where it implies accepting an oppressive status quo.
In America we tend to think that if we bring people on two sides of a conflict together to get to know each other, we will be promoting peace. It is hard to be violent toward the enemy you know. But what happens AFTER the encounter is key. Will the participants go home to work against the causes of the conflict ?
Here, normalization is a term applied to any activity that does not openly oppose the Israeli military occupation and its root cause – the colonization of Palestine. As one of my Palestinian friends says, “Any integration based on a false foundation (colonizer vs colonized),... is a call for both sides to neglect or overlook the genuine cause of the problem. It would be a call for the oppressed to accept the idea of living with oppression, humiliation and inequality. To accept to coexist with apartheid.” Normalization is giving the impression that life (i.e. under occupation) is normal, and there is no need to bring up the terms occupation, colonization, apartheid, etc. and not necessary to speak out against the occupation or the occupier.
So, for example, normalization includes sports activities that involve children on both sides on the theory that by interacting on the playing field, they will break down some of the barriers between them and carry that experience into a future reconciliation.
Some of us have heard of the Seeds of Peace camp in Maine, which each summer brings Israeli and Palestinian kids together for three weeks to help them to see each other as ordinary people, and to understand the point of view of the other side of the conflict. It sounds like a great idea. But it seems that the Israeli kids return home and join the obligatory armed services, and go to the checkpoints inside the West Bank or otherwise participate in the military that is occupying Palestine.
The Palestinian kids return to their enforced enclosure behind those same checkpoints and the apartheid wall that snakes through their territory and are not any better off for the camping experience. Even their connections with their new-found Israeli friends dissolves over time, unable to breach the barriers that separate them.
It saddens me to reject the goals of Seeds of Peace. But I listen to my Palestinian friends, and I respect their perspective. They are the ones suffering from the occupation, and if normalization doesn't work for them, then it doesn't work for me. Yes, one needs to humanize "the enemy" and there are ways to act that do not normalize. For example, Berieved Families Forum is a group that brings together Palestinian and Israeli parents who have lost children to the conflict, with the purpose of renouncing vengeful retaliation or any kind of military solution. However, the burden is on the Israeli families to work not only for nonviolent solutions but to recognize and work against the cause of the violence, which is, in the words of my friend, “Zionist colonization.”
Another "bilateral" group is the Combatants for Peace, Palestinians and Israelis who have laid down their arms to renounce violence as a tool. They go to schools on both sides to talk about the horrors of war, and they join Palestinian actions against the apartheid wall. And the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions brings international and Israeli volunteers to help Palestinian families rebuild homes demolished by Israeli bulldozers for lack of an un-obtainable permit. Rabbis for Human Rights, based in Israel, goes into Palestinian villages to protect farmers against settler attacks during the olive harvest and speaks out against the checkpoints, the wall, the daily humiliations of the occupying soldiers.
A more hidden manifestation of normalization is in the form of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that receive the bulk of their funding from foreign governments. They not only fulfill some of the functions that the occupying power is by law obligated to provide, but they pay high salaries that tend to lull their employees into thinking that life isn't so bad. On the other hand, there are Palestinian NGOs that are funded by individuals or charitable organizations and not by governments, and they provide essential services to people in need. These organizations don't need to talk about the occupation; they suffer its consequences like the people they serve.
Nine years ago, when I first came to Palestine, normalization was not an issue. For one thing, it was the height of the Second Intifada, which was open warfare, and no one even thought about socializing with the other side. Even if they had, there was no way to do it because of the border closings, curfews and severe restrictions on travel. But in the last few years, while the Israeli military has withdrawn from Palestinian cities and even opened some of the most onerous checkpoints, the occupation has become more insidious, undermining the entire economy so that Palestine hardly produces any of its own products, and creating corrupt systems of collaboration with Israel and cooptation at the governmental level. Many politicians are pocketing vasts amounts of international aid while they enter into endless negotiations that have resulted only in losing more land and resources to Israel.
We must also understand that pouring money into Palestine is not necessarily the answer. At present foreign aid goes mostly to construction of roads and public buildings (and NGos), not ever to building factories that could provide jobs, products and incomes that would free Palestine from dependence on Israel.
My friend, Amal, explains that Palestinians under colonization and occupation are like US. Blacks under structures of on-going racism – not so overt as slavery, but often successful at dulling the opposition to those systems that oppress them by asking them to co-exist with those systems.
Palestinian activists who have made ending the occupation their highest priority cannot tolerate efforts, however well-intentioned, that minimize or normalize a system of oppression born of Zionism's drive to possess all of historic Palestine, taking its land, livelihood and culture. When the occupation ends, my friends will be among the first to normalize relations with their equals on the other side.
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