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The World Is
Wept In March 2008. a group of
mediators from Philadelphia traveled to Israel and Palestine to JUST Listen
to individuals from a range of social, cultural, and political backgrounds.
Sponsored by the Association for Conflict Resolution, Philadelphia’s Good
Shepherd Mediation Center, and JUST Listening, the group sought to gain a
deeper understanding of the entrenched conflict there, and then to bring the
stories home and share them through presentations to interested groups in the
United States. This article describes some of what we heard on the journey. JUST Listening is an effort to foster social change by
practicing, promoting and teaching other-centered, compassionate, and
non-judgmental listening skills. As highly skilled listeners, the mediators
thought that a JUST Listening trip was an ideal use of their talents; the
training for the trip therefore built upon their considerable expertise. But even these seasoned mediators were challenged daily to
maintain their equilibrium and neutrality in the volatile, highly-charged
milieu of the Holy Land; every person found it difficult to listen with
compassion, openness, and curiosity, and without judgment or ego. Daily
debriefing sessions were needed to process the
experience and manage our own intense, often-conflicted emotions. The Holy Land, Israel and Palestine, is an achingly
beautiful place: the stark, barren beauty of the Judean and Negev Deserts,
the perfect orchards and fields of that land flowing with milk and honey, the
Galilee, the Hula Valley, the buoyant waters of the Dead Sea, the
breath-taking blue of the Mediterranean. There are mountains, valleys,
deserts, rivers, seas, an amazing topographical
cornucopia echoing the diversity of the denizens: Jews, Muslims, Christians, Ba’Hai, Druze, Bedouin. There is an
energy of the Sacred that permeates the landscape. On the evening of our arrival at a Jerusalem hotel
following a long flight and a sleepless 24 hours, sirens alerted us to a
heartbreaking event: a man had entered a nearby yeshiva and slaughtered eight
young students. And so, with tensions even higher
than usual, we plummeted into ten days of intense JUST listening, listening
through the lens of justice to individuals on all sides of the conflict. Some listening sound bytes ►
The grieving, angry father of a murdered Jewish boy describes his son’s
grisly death at the hands of a group of Palestinian thugs; they crushed his
head with a rock. Of his child’s murderers he says, “I don’t see them as
human beings. I don’t plan to relate to them as human beings.” ►
Another father, this time Palestinian, describes a sleepless night with
his children, listening to screams and shouts in the dark as a gigantic
Israeli bulldozer levels a house in his Bethlehem neighborhood, home to
relatives of a suspected terrorist. Speaking of both Israelis and
Palestinians, he says, “All of our children are traumatized. . . . And all of
us are hostages to fear.” ►
Jewish residents of the prosperous settlement of Gush Etzion,
describe their anguish and grief: one of the eight students killed in the
yeshiva was a neighbor. ►
As her father speaks of his struggles, the small child of the leader of a
Palestinian nonviolence movement guilelessly hands out rubber bullets to
guests; souvenirs of her father’s encounters with
Israeli soldiers enforcing the expansion of settlements in their town. ►
A young mother in one of the Israeli settlements reports that she has
purchased an M-16 rifle and registered for shooting lessons “for protection”
from their Palestinian neighbors. ►
A doctor in Nablus, West Bank, takes us to see Refugee Camp #1, where
displaced Palestinians have lived since 1967, waiting to return to the homes
from which they were expelled. We see unimaginably
narrow, dirty streets, corrugated tin roofs, dim, dark squalor, appalling
conditions. “This,” he says, “is where the Intifada starts.” ►
Tamar, an Israeli settler who engages in her own personal brand of bridge
building by, for example, assisting a Palestinian neighbor in obtaining
healthcare for a desperately sick child, tells us: “Person to person we could
be fine. But we are so afraid. No
hate here. No hate. Only fear.” ►
Zhoughbi Zhoughbi, Director of
the Wi’Am Palestinian Center for Conflict
Resolution in Bethlehem tells us, “There is no future in this context without
restorative justice. By this I mean addressing the injustices, not avenging
them, empowering the weak and bringing the strong to
their senses, not to their knees.” On one day we would hear
Palestinian stories of brutal treatment at the hands of Israeli soldiers, the
humiliation and impossibility of a normal life in the shadow of checkpoints
and the separation wall built on the Green Line1, economic
hardship, water uncertainties and rivalries, the steady loss of land and
access to what remains, occasioned by the steady encroachment of Israeli
settlements.
The next day would bring tales of displacement and fear, living in the path
of Hamas rockets which rain down random violence in
residential Israeli neighborhoods; memories of being in a cafeteria when a
suicide bomber drove his car into it, killing people eating their lunch. It
is easy to lose one’s way in the conflicting claims, righteous anger, and,
permeating everything, the deep, abiding and unhealed grief over past losses
and injustices on all sides. If visitors without a personal stake in the issues had
such difficulty, how much harder is it to be a participant in the struggle
and maintain an open heart, a compassionate stance, a willingness to seek and
make peace? And yet, we found people throughout the land doing precisely
that―the co-existence groups building bridges through music, art,
circuses; after-school programs, language lessons; Israeli Jews and
Palestinian non-violent activists together resisting the spread of
settlements; mediation groups on both sides of the Green Line; former Israeli
soldiers and Palestinian combatants working together to forge strong, binding
links of peace. Time and again, we were reminded by those to whom we
listened of all that Palestinians and Israelis share. Many of those who spoke
of their lives and visions draw on these commonalities as inspiration both
for mutual projects and for a sustaining vision of a healed society. These are the bridges that will build peace, they insisted.
Their lists include hospitals; universities; sports; the deep intertwining
religious roots of the Abrahamic traditions; cultural and customary
similarities, such as food, dance, and a love of Turkish coffee; a belief in
the importance of resisting oppression and injustice; a propensity for
talking one’s way out of problems. All of these similarities are being
celebrated, emphasized, and utilized creatively in a plethora of projects and
programs aimed at unifying those who seem so utterly divided. Despite intense suffering, deep divisions, and the
seeming intractability of the conflict, we were heartened
by the courageous efforts of so many to make and sustain peace. We found hope
where you can always find hope—in the hearts of people who still dream of
peace and hunger for justice. And we encountered
those people everywhere we went, on both sides of the Green Line, among those
trapped inside barbed wire and those trapped outside of it. We heard of
common struggles, common values, a shared culture, a shared love of land and
family, of justice and peace. As Elias, an ancient man in Nablus told us with
great heart and passion, “Everywhere” he said. “Everywhere people long for
peace.” Almost everyone agreed that it will
take a very long time, and maybe even a miracle, for peace to come to this
hauntingly beautiful, spirit-filled Holy Land. But
the good news is that miracles are simply what happens when we remain open to
surprise, when suffering hearts get cracked open and let compassion in, and
when our ears are willing to listen. Israelis and Palestinians are ripe for a
miracle. On the plane home, one of the mediators handed me a
poem. Taken from the Truth and Reconciliation documents in
South Africa, it seemed a fitting final commentary on all we had heard and
experienced.
Many, many people on all sides are working actively to
unshackle the ghosts, know each others’
sorrows, do the work of healing. As-Salamu
Alaykum. Shalom. Peace.
Sharon
Browning A video of the trip is now
available. |