Yehuda Ha Kohen - Alternative Peace Efforts

Alternative Peace Efforts

In 2010, HaKohen became a visible member of the Semitic Action movement for grassroots dialogue between Jewish settlers and Palestinian Arabs. At a November 2011 meeting between the two groups, HaKohen was quoted as saying:

“The first step towards achieving peace is for both populations to learn to be good neighbors. And this is less relevant to people in Tel Aviv than it is to ethnic Jews living here in Samaria... Both populations need to learn to see and accept the other as indigenous and belonging here. The closest people in the world to the Jewish people are the Arabs. Any hostility between our two peoples is completely unnatural and the result of foreign powers exploiting both populations... If we examine the last two decades, we see that thousands of people have been killed on both sides and that our two populations have been forcibly segregated... Both peoples have also suffered several other injustices. Thousands of Jews have been forcibly expelled from their homes and turned into refugees. Entire towns and villages have been destroyed. And Arabs have their freedom of movement restricted by a military bureaucracy every day of their lives... Before Oslo there were no checkpoints or walls here and everyone could travel wherever they liked. Peoples lived together in a situation that may not have been perfect but was still much better than the situation we see today."

Following several organized encounters between Zionist and Palestinian activists, HaKohen became a vocal advocate for a one-state solution and has argued the need for a larger narrative capable of encompassing both the rival Zionist and Palestinian narratives.

When interviewed about the controversial Levy Report in July 2012, HaKohen called it “a perfect example of competing narratives simultaneously coexisting.”

“On the one hand, the committee’s findings are correct in that the Jewish nation has a legitimate claim to sovereignty over the Judea and Samaria regions, which from a legal and historic perspective are not only intrinsic parts of the Jewish homeland but also the cradle of Jewish civilization. It would therefore be grossly inaccurate to refer to an Israeli presence in these regions as an ‘occupation’ as that term implies these territories to lie beyond Israel’s legitimate borders. Yet at the same time, its true that there are millions of Palestinians living in these territories under a military bureaucracy that forces them to endure humiliating checkpoints and intrusive walls while severely limiting their freedom of movement on a daily basis. From this perspective, an ‘occupation’ very much exists and those claiming – based on the Jewish people’s legal and historic right to the territories – that there is no ‘occupation’ sound foolish at best.”

HaKohen argued that “both narratives are equally valid and so long as they seek to negate or eclipse one another, both peoples will continue to suffer.”

“Even if one narrative were to finally win out over the other, it would lead to injustice for at least one of us. The sad truth is that Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank actually undermines the Jewish people’s legitimate right to Judea and Samaria. The Jews in Judea are not the Americans in Afghanistan. We don’t occupy some foreign people’s homeland. The problem is that many of our political and military leaders behave like the Americans in Afghanistan, bestowing credibility on claims we don’t belong in our own country... The bottom line is that in order for both peoples to achieve justice without creating any new injustices for either of us, we need to collectively arrive at a larger narrative big enough to encompass both seemingly rival narratives.”