Ethics meeting strategy, Israel’s future has to be based on peace building, reconciliation and atonement, not on increasing isolation and unilateralism, playing into the hands of people like Mr Ahmadinejad and pushing the world towards new conflicts. A task for an alliance of a new generation of righteous among nations and of righteous within Israel?

On April 21st, Reuters reported that ‘President Ahmadinejad had used his speech at the conference on racism in Geneva to describe Israel as “the most cruel and repressive racist regime” because of its treatment of the Palestinians. His comments prompted a walk-out by some 20 Western delegations and drew criticism from rights groups and Western governments.’

The whole process was an easy victory for the radical Iranian President. It is a well-known fact that Mr Ahmadinejad wants to drive a wedge between the western democracies and the Muslim world, in the hope of creating an increasingly confrontational atmosphere and to unite Muslim nations behind the leadership of Iran, an aggressive strategy showing little sensitivity for the recent and costly war experience of his own country.

This predictable provocation a triggered much debate: whether granting the Iranian president the keynote address – as sole head of State present – was the best way for the UN General Secretary to handle the UN conference on racism, whether the USA, the UK and other western nations chose the best option by leaving the whole limelight to the always provocative Iranian.

These tactical details offered Mr Ahmadinejad an easy victory in a battle he may be poised to win on strategic ground. Let’s not forget that while the Western powers either shunned or walked, quite a few delegations in the conference hall applauded and cheered at Mr Ahmadinejad.

The defective strategy of the West rests on the combination of repeated profession of faith in international Law and repeated denials of its application in the Middle East. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had admitted it in a speech in Cairo in 2005: ‘For 60 years, the United States pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the Middle East — and we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.'

Deemed to be clear-sighted and innovative, the new American administration needs to act along the lines of this analysis. All that is needed is to reaffirm the right of Israel to live in peace within its internationally recognised boundaries AND signal clearly that nobody can accept any settlement on any occupied territory or any building of fences on someone else’s territory. A fence is perfectly legitimate as long it is built on your own territory. Try and build one in your neighbours’ gardens!

Mr Ahmadinejad may be gross but to Middle-East inhabitants, he doesn’t feel much grosser than Israel. By tolerating the one provocateur and not the other, Western nations are at risk of losing their credibility and of harming their influence in a large share of the world, and they also are at risk of losing their soul.

French writer Jean-Moïse Braitberg expressed this movingly during the relentless Israeli bombardment of the Gaza strip in January. He published an open letter to the Israeli president entitled Erase my Grandfather’s Name from Yad Vashem. (Yad Vashem is a memorial to the victims of Nazism in Tel Aviv, where all known victims have their name engraved and where a tree is planted for each ‘righteous among the nations’, those non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.)

Braitberg first tells about his childhood amidst death camps survivors, seeing the tattooed numbers on their forearms, hearing their stories of tortures, feeling their pain and being taught that such crimes should never happen again - and more specifically that no man should ever again be allowed to despise another one because of race or religion and deny him his most basic rights. He goes on to quote the ‘violence, bloodletting, imprisonment, colonisation and spoliations’ brought as a response to the numerous of resolutions passed by UN, ‘in spite of the glaring injustice dealt to the Palestinian People since 1948, in spite of the hopes born in Oslo and of the repeated affirmation by the Palestinian Authority of the right of Israeli Jews to live in peace and security’.

He concludes: ‘Mr President, by keeping the names of my kin in Yad Vashem at the heart of the Jewish state, your state keeps my family’s memory prisoner behind the barbed wires of Zionism, taken hostage by a self-proclaimed moral authority that everyday commits the abomination of denying justice to fellow human beings. So please Mr President remove the name of my grand father from this sanctuary dedicated to the cruel treatment inflicted to the Jews so that it may not be used it to justify the same done to the Palestinians.’

As one with family there, I felt questioned. I don’t think I’d like to see my cousin who voluntarily went into deportation with his Jewish pupils or the memory of the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon removed from the memorial. But like Mr Braitberg, I’d like to feel that his memory and those of countless others is not being used to justify injustice. Conversely I’d also like to see that the participation of nations in past crimes isn’t being exploited to foster alignment with otherwise unjustifiable policies. Ethics meeting strategy, Israel must understand that for the Zionist project itself to succeed, Israel’s future has to be based on peace building, restitution of illegally seized territory, reconciliation and atonement, not on increasing isolation and unilateralism, playing into the hands of people like Mr Ahmadinejad and pushing the world towards new conflicts. A task for an alliance of a new generation of righteous among nations and of righteous within Israel?

Antoine Jaulmes has been an engineer with PSA Peugeot Citroën since 1983, holding various positions in production and R&D. He is currently serving on the boards of the French Initiatives of Change, the Swiss Foundation Caux-Initiatives of Change and the Executive of the International Initiatives of Change Association. He is the publisher of the French language magazine Changer.

NOTE: Individuals of many cultures, nationalities, religions, and beliefs are actively involved with Initiatives of Change. These commentaries represent the views of the writer and not necessarily those of Initiatives of Change as a whole