Acceptance speech for Eliav-Sartawi Award by Marie Medina

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Acceptance speech for Eliav-Sartawi Award

by Marie Medina

13 November 2008

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JERUSALEM – Today is the 11th of November. Every year in France on this date we celebrate the Armistice, the end of the First World War.

When we signed the Armistice, we thought that the Big War, as we had come to call it, would be La Der des Ders, the last of the last ones. But it wasn’t. It really wasn’t, and this is in part due to the way we negotiated peace. The Allies, and especially France, tried to take revenge on Germany. They humiliated the Germans.

The Treaty of Versailles returned to France the territories which the country had lost in the Prussian war. Fair enough.

But the financial settlements of the treaty put the German economy on its knees. By doing this, France fuelled resentment among the German population for whom the Versailles document was not a treaty but a diktat. It also created a disastrous economic situation, and when Germany was later hit by the Great Depression, it was unable to recover from it. In a way, the manner in which the allies imposed their peace brought together all the ingredients for the rise of Nazism and for the next conflict, the Second World War.

To me, this shows the huge responsibility that peace negotiators have. Not only do they have to settle a past conflict but they also have to avoid the next one. A peace that is unilaterally imposed cannot last. An unfair peace cannot last. I don’t want to draw irrelevant parallels and compare conflicts that cannot be compared. However, if there is one thing that this date – 11 November – highlights, it is, in my view, that one does not gain sustainable peace by humiliating or weakening their enemy.

It may sound paradoxical, but if Israel wants peace to come – and to last – it should aim to strengthen the Palestinian economy and society.

Thank you for your attention.

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* Marie Medina is a French journalist who lived and worked in Jerusalem. She started her career in 2000 as a reporter in Paris for an international news agency, and while in Jerusalem wrote for Babelmed, an online magazine focusing on Mediterranean cultures. Medina studied sociology at the University of Paris VIII, in Saint-Denis and hold a BA in English from the Sorbonne University (Paris IV). Medina is one of three recipients of the 2008 Eliav-Sartawi Award for Middle East Journalism. She may be reached at: cbrisson@ap.org. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).

Source: Common Ground News Service, 11 November 2008, www.commongroundnews.org.
Copyright permission is granted for publication.


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