{"id":252569,"date":"2024-01-22T12:00:36","date_gmt":"2024-01-22T12:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=252569"},"modified":"2024-11-26T21:25:23","modified_gmt":"2024-11-26T21:25:23","slug":"preventing-the-expansion-of-the-gaza-conflict-are-peace-brigades-a-possibility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/01\/preventing-the-expansion-of-the-gaza-conflict-are-peace-brigades-a-possibility\/","title":{"rendered":"Preventing the Expansion of the Gaza Conflict: Are Peace Brigades a Possibility?"},"content":{"rendered":"

12 Jan 2024<\/em> – Antony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State, has been again in the Middle East working to prevent the violence of the Gaza Strip of spreading to much of the area.\u00a0 The Gaza Strip conflict has already spread to the West Bank with increased violence between Jewish settlers and Palestinian inhabitants.\u00a0 There is increased violence along the frontier of Lebanon with the activities of the armed faction Hezbollah and the displacement of Israeli villages.\u00a0 Negotiations in good faith seem far off, and political speeches grow more conflictual.\u00a0 Could there be a role for unarmed, non-governmental peace brigades to monitor frontiers and lessen tensions?<\/p>\n

One possibility, inspired by the efforts of Shanti Sena (Peace Army) developed by followers of Mahatma Gandhi in India to deal with Hindu-Muslim violence, is to place some nongovernmental teams on the frontier between antagonists in order to provide an opportunity for all parties to “cool off” and negotiate.<\/p>\n

One such effort in which I was directly involved was an effort to place a peace team on the Nicaraguan-Honduras frontier in 1981. At the time, it was thought that the 400 strong U.S. troops stationed in Honduras might cross the frontier to attack the Saddinista-leftest government in Nicaragua or to help actively the anti-Sandinista “Contras” to do so.\u00a0 A group of persons associated with the Santa Cruz Resouce Center for Nonviolence in California and affiliated to the organization Peace Brigades International were able to put a team together and move to the Nicaragua-Honduras frontier on short notice.\u00a0 The group called itself “The Jalapa Brigade” after the small Nicaraguan city near the Honduran frontier where it was posted.<\/p>\n

When the Jalapa Brigade was being put into place, the Ambassador of Nicaragua to the United Nations in Geneva was a former student of mine, and his brother, also a former student of mine, was the legal advisor to the President of Nicaragua.\u00a0 In fact, when the team arrived, Daniel Ortega, the President, introduced the team as<\/p>\n

“Friends of Humanity.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Through the Ambassador, I was able to inform all the Central American Missions to the U.N. as to the aims and role of the Peace Brigade.\u00a0 In the end, the U.S. military did not cross the frontier.\u00a0 Perhaps it never intended to do so. It may also have been that the interposition of U.S. citizens with good organizational contacts helped to weigh in the U.S. military decision-making process.\u00a0 When the team left, the leader of the Protestant “Evangelical Committee for Development Aid” said “The proof of your triumph lies in the fact that no attacks were made while you were in the Jalapa area.”<\/p>\n

There have been other such interposition efforts.\u00a0 One was the Gulf Peace Team created at the time of the 1990 Iraqi annexation of Kuwait.\u00a0 The aim of the 73-member Peace Team was to be an “international multicultural team working for peace and opposing any form of armed aggression by setting up one or more international peace camps between the opposing armed forces.\u00a0 Our object will be to withstand nonviolently any armed aggression by any party to the present Gulf dispute.”\u00a0 However, on 27 January 1991, the peace camp was closed by Iraq because the authorities had “decided that the continued presence of the camp was a security risk.”<\/p>\n

Likewise a January 2022 proposal of the Association of World Citizens “Ukraine-Donbas-Russian Frontier: Is a Nongovernmental Interposition Peace Team a Possibility?” was followed three weeks later by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Thus, the creation of interposition peace teams in the Israel-Palestine conflict would not be easy to create for political and logistic reasons.\u00a0 There are economic and logistic resources required and, more importantly, there is the need to raise enough volunteers who are mature, culturally sensitive, and analytically-minded to achieve a critical mass that would make a difference in the decision-making of the conflicting parties.\u00a0 There is also the need to keep the unity of purpose within the teams if they have not worked together before. However, the current situation is very dangerous.\u00a0 The dangers are widely recognized.\u00a0 Therefore, all forms of conflict reduction need to be explored.<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Ren\u00e9 Wadlow is a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>. He <\/em>is President of the Association of World Citizens, an international peace organization with consultative status with ECOSOC, the United Nations organ facilitating international cooperation and problem-solving in economic and social issues, and editor of <\/em>Transnational Perspectives.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One possibility, developed by followers of Mahatma Gandhi in India to deal with Hindu-Muslim violence, is to place some nongovernmental teams on the frontier between antagonists in order to provide an opportunity for all parties to negotiate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":244689,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[303,2628,524,87,865,2884,88,2552,767,335,338,444,1243,1779,427,2433,602,124,886],"class_list":["post-252569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-christianity","tag-conflict-mediation","tag-gandhi","tag-gaza","tag-genocide","tag-hindus","tag-israel","tag-jews","tag-middle-east","tag-muslims","tag-negotiation","tag-nonviolence","tag-nonviolent-action","tag-nonviolent-communication","tag-palestine","tag-peacebuilding","tag-satyagraha","tag-united-nations","tag-zionism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252569"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252569\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":252570,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252569\/revisions\/252570"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/244689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}