The Road To Peace
It is 2006 …
After the artist gave me the sand-and-flesh-colored drawings in her bomb shelter studio (you can read more about that here), I brought them back home to NJ and began to build a Dialogue program between Palestinian, Israeli, and American high school teachers and students.
Six brave teachers – 3 Palestinian and 3 Israeli – created the program. This was before Zoom; every time the teachers met in person, the Palestinian teachers needed to get passes from the Israeli government to travel.
After six months of planning, 36 of us met for the first Dialogue among the teachers and students at Neve Shalom/Wahat as-Salam, Oasis of Peace, a cooperative farming village built in 1970 by Israeli Jews and Palestinians in the wild lands between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. A living, working peace school; fractious, ever-learning, ever-changing; this is my ideal of Us, then and now.
The first night I sat and watched the sunset with a young Palestinian teacher who was also a writer and journalist. She spoke slowly, choosing her words carefully.
She took off the necklace she was wearing under her hijab, gave it to me, and said, “My family does not know I am a writer.” I gave her my copy of Elias Khoury, Gate of the Sun, which we imagined all the high school students reading one day.
We were birthing something fragile and new, something thing that most people could not imagine – and many on all sides would not want if they knew about it. Fighting was easier; accepting your position and choosing words and actions from the past was easier.
Throughout 2007, it became harder and harder to get the Israeli government passes the Palestinian Israelis needed to travel for planning together.
As the Israeli government was, in effect, shutting down our peaceful meetings and dialogue with Palestinians living in Israel and the Occupied Territories, I took one last trip to Jerusalem and Ramallah to speak directly with students at progressive Israeli and Palestinian high schools.
I vividly remember the trip to a Christian high school in Ramallah.
These children had never seen a Jew who was not an Israeli, or an Israeli who was not armed against them, or an American who was both Jewish and pro-Israel and also committed to the process and work of peace.
I chose my words carefully, carving out those distinctions for them. And then, through a translator, I said, “ask me anything.” They were curious about what high school was like in the US, why I’d come to their school, what possibilities of peace I saw for them and their families.
These were high school students and they had so many raw emotions, including the fever of learning and possibility.
As the war between Hamas and Israel flared before my eyes, this past month, I’ve asked myself, “How could I have prevented this nihilistic war between Israel and Hamas?” The massacres of Israelis by Hamas are unthinkable; the bombing and massacres of Palestinians by the Israeli army – to me as a Jew – are even worse. It is antithetical to the Jewish ideal of every life being sacred and holy, and this drive to erase Hamas, even though their stated goal is to eliminate Israel and Jews, runs counter to a long-term solution that honors both Palestinians and Israelis, the majority of whom want peace.
How can we end this war and prevent it from happening again and again?
We must look in our own hearts first. The Jewish narrative of victimization and revenge – “in every generation,” survival at any cost – is hard to lose. And once it is tethered to the Israeli war machine, othering and dehumanization are used to justify massive numbers of civilian deaths and genocide.
The word “genocide” was created by the United Nations to refer to Nazi atrocities against Jews and Romani. How excruciating that the state that claims to be the voice of the Jewish people is doing something so similar to Palestinians today.
Israel wrongly and arrogantly imagined they could squeeze Palestinians out of basic freedoms. Jews’ remembered trauma – the existential dread of being annihilated – has allowed us to kill thousands of innocent Palestinians. This is morally wrong, humanly wrong, and risks inflaming the whole region – if not the world – in war.
Some people say, “It’s too soon to begin the work of peace. There will be time to do that work later.”
In response, I ask, “If we do not imagine both peace and liberation for everyone at the center of our work, how can we get past where we find ourselves raging right now?”
Calming our individual and collective nervous system is an essential tool of the nonviolent warrior.
A ceasefire is a collective pause, a moment to calm our fear and rage enough to uphold both our own experience and someone else’s as equally valid and true. That is the most important move right now. Again and again and again, until it becomes our shared, go-to community move.
Peace — inside each of us — replaces the vengeful angry father who would kill his own child in the name of his own god, with that father’s tender side, the one who washes the feet of strangers and takes them into his own tent for a meal.