For the third consecutive year, a group of Israeli and Palestinian educators has come to visit Italy at "Confronti's" invitation. Objective: to facilitate dialogue "at the grass roots." Here is the story of Dalia Landau, founder of "Open House" of Ramle, and Rana Khoury of the International Center of Bethlehem.
"I ask your forgiveness for the suffering that we have inflicted upon you; I ask your forgiveness, Mustafa, and yours Rana, for what happened to you and the Palestinian people in 1948 and 1967. I ask your forgiveness, aware that this is not an indemnification for what you have lost; but equally convinced that this admission of responsibility can bring us closer and encourage the peace between our people." Dalia Landau, a Jewish woman a little more than fifty years old, said this during a panel discussion held at the end of January at the "Pitigliani" Jewish Cultural Center of Rome.
In front of Dalia there were about a hundred people but above all were Mustafa Qossoqsi, a young psychologist resident of Nazareth, and Rana Khoury, less than thirty years old, vice director of the International Center of Bethlehem. With Dalia was another Israeli Jew, Yehuda Stolov, director of the Israeli Interfaith Association. For years Yehuda has organized dialogue encounters at the local, national and regional levels, promoted along with similar associations active in Egypt, Jordan and Cyprus. "I am a practicing Orthodox Jew. I am here because I believe in the value of dialogue and am convinced that it is much more fruitful to involve people tied to the deep values of their faith and tradition," he explains.
Mustafa's reasons are different, more secular. "I decided to accept Confronti's invitation because I believe it is a duty I owe to Yassin, a friend of mine from Nazareth. He was a creative and enthusiastic young person, that some years ago participated in a similar program sponsored by an important American organization, also called "Seeds of Peace." Yassin died this last autumn, killed by Israeli soldiers. He was wearing a "Seeds of Peace" T-shirt that sang the praises of coexistence and dialogue. That is why I am here."
Two Israelis and two Palestinians (two Jews, one Muslim and one Christian): that was the make up of the group of educators invited by Confronti for the program "Seeds of Peace" (see the insert), now in its third edition.
Dalia spoke like a flooding torrent, almost without taking a breath, forcing the interpreter to perform real oral acrobatics in order not to lose anybody with her words. Very heavy words to say and to hear. In the audience there was a lot of emotion, restlessness and some were even upset.
Dalia's history is closely tied to the "Arab house" of Ramle, a city a few kilometers from Tel Aviv, in the heart of the state of Israel. Dalia, daughter of Bulgarian refugees who were survivors of the Shoà, had lived serenely in that house until 1967. Some months after the Six Day War, at which time the Israeli army occupied the West Bank and Gaza, three men knocked at her door asking to visit "their" house. The question upset the young woman who had grown up in a house that she legitimately felt was hers: after their persecution, that house had received and protected them; in addition they had assumed the debt, paying for it, with the National Jewish Fund which assisted them when they arrived in the newborn state of Israel. But unexpectedly, the request from the three men who knocked at the door of the "Arab house" revealed to Dalia another suffering, different but nevertheless tied to the one endured by her family and her people. That visit marked the beginning of a crisis in the certainties of the Landau family that, after long and not always easy discussions with the Arab family that had possessed the building until 1948, concluded with the inauguration of an "open house." Open House is a place in which Israeli and Palestinian children, Jews, Christians and Muslims, meet in order to get to know each other, study and work together.
But what does Open House actually symbolize? A metaphor for the Palestinian-Israeli issue? A reassuring example of pacifist goodness? An instrument of peace and dialogue? There are many answers but nothing upon which everyone can agree. There are also those, like Mario Pirani (who served as the moderator of the meeting at the Pitigliani Center and wrote an article about it for La Republica - 29 Jan.,2001), and admonished Open House, saying, "to make of 'open house' a generalized symbol of conciliation and repair, simply means to make peace conditional on the passing of the Jewish state." In short a danger, politically and culturally incorrect.
"No," replied Dalia, "our 'open house' does not express a strategy to solve the conflict; it is the symbol of a complexity, of diverse suffering that has been interlaced and fueled in turn; it is also a laboratory where we learn about others, to understand their reasons, which does not necessarily mean to share them. But without knowledge of this complexity, of this interlacing of rights and wrongs, of myths and truths we will never reach peace."
Rana Khoury agrees. For many years in her center, Palestinian girls and boys have met together along with Israelis and others from the rest of the world. The guiding idea is that these "person to person" encounters and dialogue are an indispensable premise for peace. "For months we Palestinians of the Territories have lived in an unacceptable situation. For months, living in Bethlehem, they have forced me into a small cage of one square kilometer without any chance of visiting my relatives who live in other towns in the West Bank and without being able to maintain contact with my friends in Jerusalem. The conflict does not only kill the persons. It also kills the relationships," she says.
The key words of the International Center are "training" and "art": decidedly eccentric and against the grain regarding the daily images of Palestinian young people armed and masked who attack Israeli military and civil objectives. Rana explains, "We have a challenge in front of us, which is to construct the civil society, the cultural and social fabric of the Palestinian state. We live in an area lacking in a lot of resources: one of the few sources of income for our economy is tourism, but people arrive in Bethlehem by bus, stay for a few hours and then leave again without ever seeing the city or visiting anything other than the Basilica of the Nativity. Also the guides are nearly all Israelis: for this reason we have instituted a training course, turned in particular to women and also to the Palestinian young people, which will result in a tourist guide license. We are hoping that this can also contribute to modify the routes and the amount of time that groups spend in Bethlehem."
And the art? "That is another subject. It helps to educate us about aesthetic values, to appreciate and defend beautiful things and to search for a universal language that puts us creatively in contact with young people from the rest of the world. For this reason we have ceramic, blown glass and mosaic workshops. Indeed, we try to find young artists who come voluntarily to give us a hand in order to lead our workshops."
The politics, those of Barak, Sharon and Arafat, remain in the background of the words of Dalia and Rana. They know well that the destiny of peace or conflict is in the hands of their leaders but they are also convinced that their role is another. It is the promotion of dialogue at the grassroots and the training of Israeli and Palestinian young people that know how to look their "enemies" in the face in order to try together to find the road to coexistence and good neighborliness. Dalia and Rana are surely minority voices in their societies: but what they produce at Open House and the International Center are those seeds of peace without which the desert, produced from fifty years of conflict, will never be able to bloom.
Paolo Naso
To speak, as we do in this article, about "Seeds of Peace" in the Middle East, while the situation between Israel and the Palestinian Territories is about to go into a dramatic tailspin, can appear foolish or insensitive. Nevertheless, we too are obstinate enough to value even small segments of the walk that brings about peace, hoping that they will grow and help create the soil without which even an eventual agreement written on paper would be nothing but a bad check. With that premise, we must add that we are more than ever aware of the extreme and growing difficulty of the situation. And, like everyone, we wonder: how will it turn out? The happenings of the last month forecast only more storms. On the 6th of February, in the direct elections for the premiership (in this case distinct from those for the renewal of the Knesset, the mono-cameral parliament of 120 deputies), of 4.5 million constituents only 2.8 voted, which is 62.28%: a "desertion" that is without precedence in Israel, and a sign of a devastating disengagement. However, the outgoing premier, (from the labor party) Ehud Barak, only took 37.61%, while the "hawk" of the Likud (party-mainstay of the right), Ariel Sharon, took a triumphant 62,39%. But at least the newly elected does not have the majority in the Knesset, and therefore must form a government of national unity with the labor party. In the meantime, however, he has declared that the proposals of Barak to the PLO of Yasser Arafat have "lapsed"; he wants to start the peace process on a "new basis"; he has made it known that he will never deal with a division, or sharing of Jerusalem with the Palestinians; and he has not spoken to anyone about an Israeli withdrawal from the Territories still occupied, where the clashes continue and the Israeli army shoots at demonstrators causing a continuous stream of victims.
Against this horizon without hope the radical Muslim movement Hamas has strengthened the political and military choice of terrorism. Eight died in the attack of 14 February in Tel Aviv alone, which was done in order to increase the insecurity and fear among the Israelis, to render the situation irresolvable and to further destabilize the leadership of Yasser Arafat.
The leadership of the PLO maintains that it is the persistent violence of the Israeli soldiers in the Territories which causes the exasperation of the Palestinians; Sharon answers that he will never deal while being blackmailed by terrorism. And, while the Territories are hermetically sealed, the supplies don't get through and above all in the Gaza Strip people are hungry.
In this picture, the "seeds of peace" are indeed little things; but, from another point of view, quite a lot.
We are in the third edition. For the last three years Confronti, thanks to a contribution from The Waldensian Board (the 8 per thousand fund) and the support of several local groups, has invited teams of Israeli and Palestinian educators engaged in cultural projects for peace, dialogue and coexistence to come to Italy. This year the project has had a particular relevance because of the gravity of the political situation that started in September, when the "second intifada" broke out. It has in fact, foiled every relationship between Israelis and the Palestinians of the Territories and has put the coexistence between the Jewish and Arab members of the state of Israel at risk (a significant minority of approximately one million citizens out of a little more than six million inhabitants total). Therefore, the only way to get around the physical, political and psychological barriers that have frozen dialogue "at its roots" was for the "Seeds of Peace" educators to leave their places of conflict, otherwise every negotiation was destined to be shipwrecked by the waves of violence, fear and mutual distrust.
Outside Rome, the participants of the program were engaged in a laborious tour de force which took them to Bergamo, Udine, Ascoli Piceno, Cividale del Friuli (Ud), Spilimbergo (Pn), Piombino (Li), Follonica (Gr), Modena, Reggio Emilia, Bagnolo in piano (Re) and Novellara (Re). Beyond their several institutional encounters (they had meetings at the Campidoglio [Capitol Hill] with the Chamber of Deputies and with the president of the Defense Commission, Valdo Spini), they participated in several public debates. They also had many meetings with school students.
Lucia Cuocci
When there is a conflict situation, especially violent conflict, the meaning of gestures can be misunderstood by some. Therefore it is interesting that not even a single person thought that the walk of Arial Sharon (elected Prime Minister this past month on the 29th of September 2000), was just pleasant physical exercise and the emphatic nature of it became the element that triggered the "second intifada," an occasion that exacerbated the occupation. Their words succeed in describing the events only in a linear relationship (for which one fact is perceived as the cause of the successive one) and they do not make the circularity of the process adequately clear. But it is instead indispensable for just that circularity to emerge, in order to break the paralysis that is born from the contrasts of pain and fear, oppression and anger and to allow small openings in the dialogue and the necessary compromise.
In this way it is possible to overcome the militarized vision of the conflict, that imposes the ruinous binomial of victory and defeat, and to consider instead all the aspects that daily life interlaces in that civil society that alone can give, because it is the victim, the tools to break the circle and to again make sense of a possible future. In this context we can consider the words of Rana, Dalia, Mustafa and Yehuda offered during the "Seeds of Peace." They are persons who have been proven able to transform the differences that each personality brought with them (starting with the differences between the sexes...) into a plurality of resources: for them "Seeds of Peace" has given spaces for dialogue, and for those who heard them, a chance to gain intimate knowledge.
Those who assisted their encounters in Rome and in their gasping race through various Italian cities have been able to pick up from them in debates, and in the most precious "lessons" in the schools, an unusual intensity of reactions.
An element always present is an intense silence, signaled by commotion, from surprise (a few words are enough to explain the current bad information) and also from the irritation caused by having to talk about their own, often nagging, identification with one of the responsible sides.
The four speakers in fact, know and communicate the wisdom of doubt and are able to recognize themselves in each other's common suffering, but it has nothing to do with the pain that everyone wishes on their enemy, when you entrust yourself to this destructive level. Confronti has offered them the possibility to talk about themselves and to give presentations.
Those who listen to them can act in the search for encounters on concrete objectives, turning aside from misleading common beliefs, and can with them disseminate the only culture which can prevent the arranged peace treaties from being humiliatingly reduced to pieces of paper.
Augusta De Piero
(Translated by Terry Finseth)