A school making history: Jewish-Arab integrated education

Student artwork at a Jewish-Arab integrated school

Volunteering at a Jewish-Arab integrated school was my most joy-filled time in Jerusalem. I feel that, despite all the dehumanization of both Jews and Arabs in the Holy Land, one can wash away prejudice by interacting with the children of ‘the other side.’ I probably couldn’t have engaged with this land in certain meaningful ways without also having been inside the walls of this school. For example, away from the godforsaken ‘adult’ world of strife outside, I saw how kids made real bonds across the divide: through the shared experience of classroom games, soccer during breaks, and together earning the teacher’s ire and together facing her chastisement.

It didn’t take long for questions to emerge in my mind, though: namely, the predominance of Hebrew despite the intended bilingualism, and the limits to sharing both the Israeli and Palestinian narratives.

I sat down with one of the teachers to hear more:

“If the school were perfect, Hebrew and Arabic would be fifty-fifty,” she said, lamenting how if one kid speaks Hebrew, then all the children cascade into speaking Hebrew. Similarly, when staff at a meeting are mixed, then that meeting by necessity is conducted in Hebrew. She didn’t think the Palestinian staff had negative feelings about this, but she couldn’t be sure if this was always the case.

We talked about how most Jewish Israeli students don’t manage to learn Arabic well enough to have natural conversations in the language. I surmised it might take more structured opportunities for them to apply their Arabic as a living language. Moreover, more Jewish Israeli adults who speak Arabic must be sorely needed as role models for the pupils to gain the self-confidence to hone their ability.

We later talked about how the school handles national days of commemoration. How on Yom Hazikaron, or the Israeli Memorial Day for fallen soldiers, Palestinian staff and students do not stand for the siren marking the nationwide minute of solemn silence. How, for a time, many Palestinian children stopped coming to school on this day of commemoration. (By contrast, they do stand in silence for Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day.)

“You haven’t seen a single person stand up for the siren, even by accident?” I asked.

“No. It’s like it’s ingrained in everybody. Even if people identify with the sadness, they simply can’t take part.”

In that moment, I contemplated what she was introducing to me, something perhaps ineffable. It was a capacity for people who have hurt each other to empathize, but short of crossing a line – a line Israelis and Palestinians drew together in blood and tears.

The teacher told me that last year, the school instituted a change to have its commemoration of the Nakba together with Yom Hazikaron. She described the undeniable change she sensed among the Palestinian children, a feeling that their presence mattered and was being validated on Yom Hazikaron.

“I think the commemoration allowed them to be seen and allowed their self-esteem to be recognized. You know, I think recognizing each other’s self-esteem is half the battle.”

I also thought about the act of accepting Israelis as they all stood up to honor their fallen brothers and sisters. This, too, is making room for the other’s self-esteem. In both directions, there can be room to acknowledge the uncompromiseable core of the other’s self-worth.

What a place, I thought to myself. In its walls, students are stretching their minds. They’re recognizing that mutual dignity is created not only by bilingualism and multiculturalism, but also by validating the other’s narrative of struggle. To survive, resist, and express one’s right to dignity.

I asked her how she’s changed after ten years at the school. Unassuming and ‘unproselytizing,’ she told me that the school simply opened her eyes. It allowed her to live her ideals. In the past, she’d believed in equality but “had never talked to an Arab kid.” Now, she knows she could never go back to teaching at her previous school. Despite having loved her job, she would not be able to go back to an atmosphere in which people believed Israel could supposedly do no wrong.

While believing in Israel as a state, she was yearning for her country to grow into the democratic and tolerant ideals it set for itself at independence.

Adrift between Learning and Voyeurism, Beauty and Neglect

 

The alleys of Al Amari,
Dirty whites, greys, browns, and beiges
Surround our ‘tour group’ like a dreary maze.

Vibrant colors emanate only from
The beautiful women’s dresses
And the cheap tee shirts and shorts of playing children.

‘Cause homes, streets, neighborhoods of color
Come only with the day-by-day care
Of folks able to invest.

Still, their undying energy can be felt
Every time children exclaim: How are you!
As I shake their little hands.
Every time young men greet us: Welcome!
Like it’s the best days of their lives.

Their hospitable spirit is comforting,
Even life giving!
In a place where my footing is so unsure.

Somehow, I feel so funny
In a ‘study tour’ through other people’s stagnation,
Passing through, wondering
About the right words to say,
In a situation that should be
About the right actions to take.

  

This unease lingers,
Until once again I walked the dusty hills of Susiya,
Part of a protest against its demolition.

Until I saw those small but brave Susiya children
Marching, almost surfing on their excitement
That the world was waking up!

Until I felt myself giving —
Not on a tour for my self-enrichment,
Not one-time waves and handshakes,
— but simple continuity, ready to be nurtured.

A search for the universal lessons of the Holocaust

I’ve visited Yad Vashem quite a few times. It’s a place where I contemplate humanity, loss, resilience, and intolerance. With a deeper knowledge of Israel and Palestine than before, I decided to revisit the museum and ponder history, perhaps with new eyes. Questions swirled in my mind. How should memory be constructed? How do young minds absorb history? Is Yad Vashem curated and arranged in the best way possible for Israelis to stay vigilant but not paranoid?

What I’d heard, but not studied, was that Holocaust education tends to reinforce Israeli distrust of its enemies rather than encourage the humanistic lessons of the tragedy. I’ve thought of possible manifestations of such an approach. For instance, Israel has not yet recognized the Armenian genocide, in order not to rock the boat with Turkey—for the Arab world is supposedly too large and hostile. It also trades arms with Azerbaijan, which threatens impoverished Armenia with all-out war over disputed land. And what of Israeli responses to the genocides in Srebrenica and Rwanda?

Admittedly, I haven’t observed Holocaust education in-action in Israeli classrooms, on trips to Auschwitz, or on tours through Yad Vashem. Walking through the museum, however, I couldn’t help but receive the message of a huge machine of persecuting and killing Jews wherever they may be. I got no prominent information about the mass psychosis of the German people or the banality of evil among Nazi soldiers. I felt as if anti-Semitism was the one paramount force over so many other factors, such as the brokenness of the German people after WWI leading to their desire for a scapegoat. Where was there any real reflection of how human beings could have done all this? Does Yad Vashem treat anti-Semitism as a truer force than humanity’s flaws of apathy, fear, and narrow self-preservation?

Confirming my feelings about the exhibit, I found that Tom Segev writes the following in The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (page 464):

“The effort to rehabilitate the image of the Holocaust’s victims and survivors, to support the ideological struggle of the state, and to shape the memorial culture deterred Israeli historians from trying to understand Nazism. They feared, perhaps, that such an attempt would be interpreted as a justification of it or as a challenge to its abstract, almost mystic status as the symbol of absolute evil. This fear inhibited research and explains why the most important books on Nazism and the extermination of the Jews were not written in Israel.”

At the same time, where Yad Vashem has fallen short, there have been Israelis who have examined the Holocaust to glean more universal lessons:

If the Holocaust is telling us that genocide could happen to anyone in any place, then why shy away from the question of how Israel may eventually engage in unprecedented persecution or violence against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories? If human beings in ‘enlightened’ Germany could do what they did, then fearful Israelis could do something terrible on a smaller scale, right? Below, I contemplated some factors that can make future Gaza Wars worse. More Israelis can study the dynamics of mass intolerance and dehumanization that can potentially be unleashed against their Palestinian neighbors. With the proper finesse, and refraining from over-comparison, the universal lessons of the Holocaust can provide rich food for thought for such introspection.

• Knowledge that more tunnels are being built in Gaza to attack Israel, which may invite more Israelis to think the IDF needs to ‘finish the job’ during the next operation… a mechanical decision from thinking Israel has no other choice
• A large-scale attack of terror by Hamas-linked individuals inside the West Bank or Israel, in which children or an unprecedented number of individuals die… lighting the fuse to Israeli fears of another genocide
• The media becoming more saturated with images and footage of Gaza’s children being taught to hate
• The media showing more images and footage of Gaza’s refugee population demanding their right of return to what is now Israel… deepening the impression of a desire to extinguish Israel by their demographic weight
• Israeli Arab politicians and thought leaders making more statements that can be interpreted as delegitimization of Israel and Jewish self-determination in the Middle East… perhaps in conjunction with more Israeli Arabs turning out to vote their ethnic leaders into office… stoking Israeli Jewish fears of losing control over their Jewish state

There may be scenarios in which the IDF uses unprecedented firepower to deter men and boys in Gaza from picking up arms again. Such would probably coincide with Israel perceiving a loss of control—international isolation, boycott and sanctions, a lack of diplomatic solidarity when Israel suffers acts of terrorism.

I can’t aptly predict how Israel may be led to massive persecution or violence against Palestinians as have not been seen before. But then again, scholars still can’t fully grasp how the Holocaust happened even with the luxury of hindsight. If more Israelis don’t get more used to deconstructing the Holocaust and other historical conflagrations, then how can they be vigilant toward their own society? After all, when a ‘student’ must juggle so many pressures, she may fail a difficult test without properly studying and training her mind.

Reactions to a vigorous and deeply perceptive anti-Zionist Israeli

I recently read a book by Michel Warschawski, entitled On the Border. A middle-aged Japanese activist who’s lived in Israel for many years recommended it to me. We had found much in common, as like me her children are half Moroccan-Israeli. As my suspicion had it, On the Border turned out to be a work written by quite a radical. My friend is a writer on a radical newspaper operating in Japan, and her Facebook updates would sometimes raise my eyebrows for want of ‘objectivity.’ (Though maybe my objectivity is in part because I haven’t seen as much suffering as she…)

Nevertheless, I reckon it was about time for me to read literature by a prominent anti-Zionist Israeli. Here are some of my reflections:

• Regardless of my own politics, it was invigorating to read about Michel’s youthful days as a Matzpen activist. I wondered whether my own youth would amount to anywhere close to his frenetic buzz disseminating leaflets and demonstrating on streets all over Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Reading about Michel, I felt respect for his deep hope and trust in international solidarity against oppression the world over. I wouldn’t say I’m on board with his ways, but I don’t need to agree in order to respect.

• I was troubled that Matzpen activists already faced ostracism in the 1970s. Some even decided not to have children to spare them a life of social exclusion. Though I tend to associate suffocation of political thought in Israel with recent years, maybe it’s an occurrence universal to all places and ages. Or maybe it was greater in Israel then than now, coinciding with the anti-Marxism sweeping the ‘Free World.’

• I learned to refrain from reflexively thinking most leftists are disconnected from the Israeli mainstream. How would I know this to be true with just hearsay and popular opinion? Throughout his life, Michel seems to have thought deeply about how to engage the larger Israeli society. Moreover, his concern for Israel felt strong and genuine to me. For example, it seems his heart yearned to find those Palestinians who, though few, wanted reconciliation and coexistence with Israelis from the bottom of their heart—that is, not just as pragmatism, as accepting a ‘necessary evil,’ or for gaining the world’s sympathy. He opined that Feisal Husseini was one such person.

• I appreciated how Michel endeavored hard to have more Palestinians comprehend Israel: how not everyone is a soldier obstructing Palestinian liberation; how most Israelis have nowhere to go than Israel, unlike those of classical colonialist states; how they’d never accept the refusal of their rights to sovereignty and self-defense as a people that survived Auschwitz.

• I reflected on the line between understanding and sympathizing with those committing terrorism, whether the DFLP, PFLP, or Hezbollah. I felt Michel was much too ready to support DFLP and PFLP fighters, and he described Hezbollah as having fought bravely against Israel during the Lebanon War. If Michel was intending his work for a broad readership, why did he leave out thorough explanations about how his moral compass pointed him to his opinions? How are we from outside his fold supposed to understand?

o For example, why does he make it sound like the DFLP’s murder of twenty-four child hostages at Ma’alot was Israel’s fault?

• With very little respect for Prime Minister Rabin, Michel contends that Rabin didn’t actually try hard to dismantle settlements. Why, then, was he assassinated? Again, while challenging mainstream beliefs, he does not help us understand the information unfamiliar for us “untrained folk.”

• I thank Michel for alerting me to secular Israelis’ lack of understanding for the religious and ‘traditional’ Jewish communities of Israel—the Mizrahim and Haredim. He characterizes the division as becoming an Iron Curtain. On one side, secular Jews (mostly Ashkenazim) desire a modern and secular state as the early Zionists did, as well as participation in a neoliberal world economy. On the other side, there are mostly Mizrahim who still live in developing towns and villages in the country’s periphery or in poorer areas of Tel Aviv. Skeptical of the free market and cosmopolitanism, they desire a return to their Jewish roots and to family values.

In all this, it seems extremely unlikely that Israel will make peace with the Palestinians without first making peace with itself. How will Israelis of different sectors join forces in pursuit of peace, if they have disdain and distrust toward each other? I thank Michel for opening up my eyes to criticize those who don’t dare to bridge this yawning chasm, and for giving me a sense of urgency that, without such bridging, Israel will increasingly suffer collisions between its neoliberalism and its messianic Jewish fundamentalism and nationalism.

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I am appreciative that my friend urged me to read On the Border because it did for me two things at once. First, it gave me the inspiration to be more dynamic and connect with more people on the ground. In parallel, it gave me increased clarity about how a society (in this case Israel) can be analyzed from a distance, and about how one’s activism should be strategic in making an impact within a larger context. I worry deeply for Israel and Palestine, so I’m glad Michel Warschawski’s work helped afford words to my feelings about this place.

Fragmentation as a Force to be Reckoned with

In the divided city of Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina, there is a memorial park for the Yugoslav partisans who fought the fascists during the Second World War. Once the most impressive of its kind in Yugoslavia, it has not been maintained since before the Bosnian War, beaten by the elements, overgrown with vegetation, and strewn with trash. I was amazed by how such a vast complex, perhaps too large for little Mostar, was in such total abandonment.

Though hoping to refrain from over-comparison, I can use the Mostar memorial to bring the patchy development I am seeing in Israel-Palestine into focus. While some only cry Jewish neglect in the underdevelopment of Arab locales in Israel and Jerusalem, I affix on my camera the lens of fragmentation. In Mostar, war tore apart the ethnically mixed city and turned it into two stunted fragments, one Croat and one Bosniak. The partisan memorial lies inside the Croat side, which I surmise would make it difficult for a Bosniak politician to campaign for its rehabilitation (an unlikely event to begin with, given the corruption and wrangling of Mostar’s politicians). Those among the Bosniak citizenry who would push to see the memorial revived probably believe others on their side of the city don’t see the point: why help the people who we fought a bloody war with? And for their part, Croat politicians and civil society also cannot muster the public momentum to save the memorial.

Unlike Yugoslavia, Israel and Palestine may have long only had more narrowly defined projects, whether Zionism, pan-Arabism, or Islamism. From the 1910s, Jews cobbled together trappings of a state in a context of being perceived acutely as outsiders by the local population. An insufficiently inclusive proto-polity descended into war with the indigenous people in a worldwide trend of decolonization. After the dust of war settled, the two continued to see each other as enemies. Arabs who remained within the Israeli-controlled side of ceasefire lines lived under martial law until 1966. Even socialist Zionists had had real war to deal with, and even Bedouins were viewed with suspicion. There was likely no room for nuance or idealism.

Suspicion and sociopolitical life not reaching all in the land have led to lopsided development. The Jews used the know-how and capital they brought with them from abroad for their own growth. We thus see the emergence of a landscape plagued with unequal infrastructure, schools, and social, political, and economic life. The power centers are largely an Old Boys’ Club, with military success a strong currency. And successive wars only cemented all of this!

Israel’s security buildup and advances in military technology make the occupation easier to maintain. Settlements in ’67 lands, once bastions for security and pragmatism, have become a formidable part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict landscape. And even now in 2015, one can see how Israel-Palestine is an unequally developed space. Some of the segregation and underdevelopment is self-driven by Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the Triangle, etc.… Some sure isn’t.

With some thought, it’s not so surprising that, given a thick history of unilateralism, there isn’t a culture of engagement and compromise here in Israel-Palestine, let alone making overtures. All issues are on the table and yet nonnegotiable. The deep gulf between leaders comes partly from them simply being accountable to their constituencies—Jewish and Arab communities that truly misunderstand each other because of long-running fragmentation and fear.

And one can see strong tendencies of delegitimizing the other side turning inward. Take how anti-normalization is sometimes a raging force hurting Palestinians themselves. Similarly, many Israelis brand their leftwing compatriots as traitors, self-hating Jews, or out-of-touch. On both sides, people misperceive the other as not being a real partner, when in fact they themselves have given pitifully little thought and effort into genuinely cooperating. No one seems to realize that a partner isn’t found after long awaiting – that partners are made.

Gaza rockets, Israeli airstrikes, unequal development everywhere, claims of “apartheid,” and Israeli actions that indeed realize that lurking apartheid – all are surface-manifestations of a larger context of blaming, fighting, and delegitimizing rather than engaging. The fragmentation is omnipresent… it’s a debilitating force unto itself.

Whether in Bosnia-Herzegovina or Israel-Palestine, few are deluded to demand full integration and cooperation in the short-term. But who outside of society’s margins are taking those baby steps? Are those cautious steps gaining courage, creativity, and vision everyday? In such small countries, perhaps no one can be exempt from trying harder, smarter, and kinder everyday.

The Israeli and the Nakba

I spoke with a mixed Ashkenazi-Mizrahi Israeli as he worked through his thoughts of the past and present, about Israel and the Nakba. I tried to capture the depth of his introspection with some poetry.

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The conversations that don’t happen, as if dead on arrival,
Traveling in circles through the markings of a past reality.
The climate of taboo, turning knowers into self-censorers,
Hearts racing at ghosts, who linger because unseen.

He gets it, acknowledges the central question:
How does one explore another’s suffering when they don’t wish you well?
When your acceptance could fan fires of demonization?

He walks the streets of Haifa and Jaffa, nostalgic
About the what-could’ve-been, Jewish peoplehood integrated in a wider Semitic world,
Beirut, Damascus vitally interconnected with Jewish-Palestinian streets,
With a Tel Aviv that never rotted Jaffa away, but rather loved and married it.

A yellowing phonebook shows him vibrant shops of Levantine merchants, far and wide.
It’s but an artifact now, ever-eroding into sand and urban, industrial dust.

He ponders:
Does the suffocation of his tiny country have century-old roots?
To kibbutzniks who toiled for egalitarian utopias,
For something more progressive than Europe herself, at the interest-bearing cost
Of connecting not with the indigenes, sewing the seeds of a War of Independence?

The flow of this history perhaps so inexorable
That even his Eastern grandmother stowed away her name,
Which if cherished could’ve instilled in his father a curiosity to know his neighbor.
A project that washed away the bridges to Iraq, Yemen, and Palestine itself,
Ensuring the apple falls not so distant from the tree.

Engaging Palestinian youth in Israel

Below, I write about Mohammed, who is responsible for the programs and projects of the Hanoar Haoved VeHalomed movement in Tamra, a Palestinian city in Israel. He is also the head of civil service volunteers in the Arab sector of the movement. 

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At age 27, Mohammed’s energy and drive are contagious. Perhaps the many years he has spent educating and inspiring Arab Israeli youth and engaging with Jewish Israelis have blown away any of his shyness about who he is and what he is trying to do.

It’s fascinating that he’s come to possess such a surety, given how his family was forced from their villages in 1948, barred from returning, and settled in Tamra – a city that would become part of Israel and fifty to sixty percent refugee-descended.

He told me how growing up, his father often educated him about his family’s past. During the Lebanese Civil War, his father funneled weapons from Jordan and Iraq, through the West Bank, to Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Clearly, he had no shortage of being told about the Nakba, resistance, and other elements of the Palestinian narrative.

With his father in jail during his childhood, he was much like many youth in Tamra, hanging out on the streets, smoking, and throwing stones. He told me, not so shamefully, that he had thrown stones at Jewish-driven cars, too. Upon this trajectory, one day he got into a fistfight with two Arab youth in which he was overpowered. Luckily, they withdrew their blows on the condition that he would give their movement, Hanoar Haoved VeHalomed, a chance. This street encounter would change the course of his life.

Eleven to twelve years later, he organizes the Hanoar movement in Tamra, which now counts 1,200 Arab youth in its ranks from having been three to four hundred when he joined. He recounted how his father was furious he would ever participate in a movement affiliated with the Jewish Labor Party in Israel. His father even chased him around the house brandishing his shoe, a show of deep disdain in Arab culture. Eventually, his father permitted him to continue on the condition that he would never come back saying he had made a mistake.

Since then, he has come to respect the path Mohammed chose for himself. He saw how Mohammed became a new person, his commitment day in and week out, truly helping society over the long haul. Mohammed told me about deriving meaning from connecting youth with each other, allowing them to stimulate each other’s drive for success. Seeing such tangible results from Mohammed, his father now directs youth to him, encouraging them to check out his son’s movement!

Mohammed now nurtures the identity of Palestinians in Tamra – as members of society not more Israeli than Palestinian, and vice versa. They are striving to become Palestinian-Israelis committed to both the Israeli state structure and the Palestinian identity.

I was impressed by the transformation of both Mohammed and his father – and also by Mohammed’s unwavering belief in change as process. People in armed resistance can come to believe in coexistence and a shared future with ‘the enemy’, like his father did. The youth on Tamra’s streets can one day lead and build movements, like Mohammed did. His conviction of change as long-term process seems to sustain two of his traits: calm patience and a “march on!” resilience. In a country where narratives are clashing in a small space, he still has the patience to remind Jews and Palestinians that knowing each other’s collective traumas actually facilitates communication. Similarly, he sees Bibi Netanyahu’s new government as a time not to despair, but to redouble efforts for furthering Jewish-Arab cooperation and keeping youth focused on their futures.

Mohammed’s conviction that people and society can change will remain imprinted in my mind for a long time.

Jerusalem Day March: Jewish nationalism coursing through the Muslim Quarter

Immediately after I arrived at Damascus Gate, I felt swallowed up by the situation. A Palestinian crowd was cheering wildly for young men who managed to sneak and dash through Israeli police lines, before they were grabbed and lugged away. An older Palestinian man tried to negotiate his entry with a cop, who shouted with more fury than I’d ever seen and shoved him away with the barricade, which landed on his toes.

I never anticipated my heart would sink multiple times in a few minutes like that.

Thus protected by police, Jewish teenagers joined shoulders and danced in an aggressive, ecstatic circle. They danced while enveloped in a Palestinian atmosphere of tension and protest. Allahu Akbar and Am Israel chants collided like tidal waves of opposed oceans.

I headed into the Old City to find a location to record potential racist slogans or vandalization, to help collect evidence of incitement and violence in order to reroute the nationalistic Jerusalem Day march for coming years. I saw how a policeman, speaking in Arabic, guided Palestinian youth into side alleys. It almost felt gentle, this same-time protective measure for and civil rights violation of Old City Palestinians.

After some time, the Jewish marchers entered through the Damascus Gate, let in by the police in groups. I stood by a passage roofed like a tunnel, which was eventually filled with a large group of teenagers led by their rabbis. In turn they swelled the tunnel with prayer and song. A beautiful brotherhood reigned in that tunnel, though a suspect chauvinism still floated around them, produced by those same boys moments before.

The masses continued to stream in, making that ancient Old City artery brim; spectators like me had to paste their backs against the walls to avoid collision.

I recorded. Felt numb by the onslaught of noise and bullish power. Maneuvered to not be stepped on. Repeated.

Like that, I pondered the deeper, saddening truth of that spectacle for more than two hours. Regardless of overt racism being in check during this year’s Jerusalem Day march, the structural violence was palpable. That day, a heavy mob invaded another community’s space and sense of self. And it may continue to do so for years if not decades.

I continually contemplated, where does such force come from? I suspect it has to do with the march’s sheer blindness. The intoxication of having each other, together forming the eternal people now vindicated.

The pride of ‘48 and ‘67 being perpetuated with little awareness of the harm befalling the other.

Why does this energy have to swell every inch of the Old City like that, pulsating against the doorsteps of the people who live there? I long to meet people who can help me answer such questions.

Grieving alone and together: Memorial Day Ceremony in Israel

A part of me wants to embrace Israel’s Memorial Day and Independence Day wholeheartedly… After all, the narrative of Jewish freedom through self-defense has a basis in reality. After all, my family has dear ones who have fallen in uniform.

And yes, I do feel the “never again” toward killing and pillaging made possible by statelessness… and the “never again” toward attack from all sides.

But what about the Palestinians? Being stripped, killed, and encircled applies to them in another way. While not equating, I can certainly compare where it’s due.

And so, given my unease about how the two holidays may be used wrongly or without proper nuance, I felt drawn by the Israeli-Palestinian Memorial Day Ceremony by Combatants for Peace.

The event was a powerful assortment of speech, music, and video. It was uplifting to be part of an audience of thousands in Israel who chose to attend a memorial ceremony grieving and wishing peace for both “sides.”

“Sides” is a funny word to use, as the ceremony traveled untold miles in weaving us together. Truly, hats off to the brave people who participated in the program. They chose to attach their name and face to the “enemy” even while many in their own community would never forgive them for it.

Hats off to those who had the vision to connect all of us in the Holy Land. First, we saw footage from Beit Jala of two young men, Israeli and Palestinian. The Israeli man’s presence there seemed to shout, Yes, we Israelis can come here! It’s not as scary as you think! And the Palestinian man seemed to exclaim, We exist right here! Through this video beamed into Tel Aviv from the West Bank, I am looking at you all straight in the eye to tell you of my desire for peace.

Then later, footage from Gaza — of men, women, and children one after another wishing peace for both themselves and Israelis. It was something indescribable, a power that just sweeps one up, to see these people who still live in the human and infrastructural destruction wrought only last July. We killed hundreds of your innocents and set your community back decades, but you can still send us an unadulterated call for peace?

In these times of deep polarization, it is incredible that these eight or so individuals beamed themselves into Tel Aviv from Gaza like that. I don’t care if the people in this footage were cherry-picked or found only after countless pleas to film. They exist nonetheless. They’re right there in Gaza.

To avoid another war, we must continually replicate the ceremony’s technique: to focus on good people on the other side and never let go. Humanize them and never yield…

The next morning, the sirens called for Israel to grind to a halt. I overlooked a street in Tel Aviv from a balcony. I saw someone standing still on another balcony. A waitress and guests, stopped mid-order. A braked car, with the driver stepped out. A young guy under a tree, my age.

When the sirens finally ended, an old man who was standing still took a little while longer to emerge from his thoughts. He was likely many leagues deep, through the wars of ’48, ’67, ’73… on and on. And perhaps mourning, too, the rubble and dead of Gaza 2014.

Indian Reservations and Indios: an Ongoing Unknown

Recently, I read a poignant, powerful book called The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, written by Sherman Alexie. It blew me away. It possesses a blend of both gravity and true-to-life humor, and that’s good! because one does not get closest to life’s truth (whatever that is) by just being serious all the time.

The book is about Junior, a Native American high school boy who makes a hard decision to leave his reservation to commute to an all-white school. His immediate family is happy and cautiously hopeful for him, but his community and best friend scorn and ostracize him for the “betrayal.” Over time, he finds acceptance among several white friends in his new school, but for him the differences in living standards and the amount of internal hope and ambition for the future between people in his two worlds are stark.