Reconciliation Instead of Revenge (Part 10)

Courageous People Willing to Take Major Steps Toward a Saner Future

By Bill Dienst MD

Friday Afternoon, March 11, 2005 La Notre Dame Hotel, Jerusalem

We are now at the beginning of our final homestretch of this journey. A major winter cold virus, which I think we acquired on the plane going into Amsterdam, has moved in and made its way around the bus where we have commingled and inadvertently incubated the germ. It has now afflicted at least half of our delegation, including myself; but we all plug along in spite of illness and exhaustion as if there is no tomorrow . . . because in a sense, there isn't. Most of us fly back to Seattle in less than 40 hours.

Instead of traveling around Israel and Palestine to meet our speakers this afternoon, our speakers are coming to us: we, who are currently the walking wounded in the figurative sense. Some of today's speakers are themselves the walking wounded in the literal sense.

Today, we meet Professor Yigal Bronner who has served time in prison for being a Refusenik and is active in the civil rights group Ta'ayush, which means "Life Together" in Arabic. He is also a Professor of Far Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University. We also meet Dr. Yitzhak Mendelsohn and his group of friends. Eleven years ago, Yitzhak was seriously wounded and had to have major emergency surgery to save his life after a bomb attack.

And finally there is the Parent's Circle/Families' Forum, a group of bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families who have lost close family members due to violence in the current conflict. In stead of violence begetting more violence in an endless cycle of revenge and insanity, these people instead choose getting to know the opposite side through reconciliation. They choose to share their grief together, and see the humanity in the other side. They see this is the only way to build something positive out of their personal tragedy.

Ta'ayush

Yigal Bronner describes the organization called Ta'ayush as a Jewish/Arab encounter group. Peace oriented Israelis cooperate with Palestinians in civil non-violent resistance together, at a time when the current Israeli government actively tries to keep Israelis and Palestinians apart.

Professor Bronner goes back to his youth, "I never met an Arab child when I was a growing up in Jerusalem. I assumed that refugee camps were a fact of nature."

During the 1990's and the Oslo years, there was a lot more opening up of the two societies with opportunities for Israelis and Palestinians to get to know each other. Now with the second Intifada, and the building of the Wall, there are much fewer opportunities for human interactions between Israelis and Palestinians.

According to Professor Bronner, Palestinians know Israelis much better than Israelis know Palestinians. More Palestinians can speak Hebrew than Israelis can speak Arabic. Jewish kids have the stereotypic image of the suicide bomber. Palestinian children have images of checkpoint soldiers and settlers.

Going against the tide of this developing situation, Ta'ayush was founded in September, 2000, just weeks before the beginning of the second Intifada. Immediately after Sharon's marching on the Temple Mount and the killing of 4 Palestinian demonstrators there, police killed 13 demonstrators in Nazareth and wounded many more. A Pogrom situation developed, according to Prof. Bronner. Barriers and Bypass roads were set up all over the West Bank and Gaza, and there was a feeling of a vacuum among members of the Israeli Left. Warm relations between the two sides disintegrated.

In 2002, the government embarked on the building of a series of fences which isolate Palestinian villages from each other, turning the West Bank into many Gaza strips. In response, Ta'ayush developed food convoys to isolated villages that would pass flour, oil and rice, unloading trucks by hand and passing the goods over earth mounds constructed by the Israeli army to block traffic in and out of the villages. Given the magnitude of the hardships, these humanitarian efforts were only a drop in the bucket, though they were important nonetheless.

"We did our best in these humanitarian actions, and Ta'ayush became the largest activist group on the Israeli left," Prof. Bronner says. In the south Hebron hills, the Israeli military has been trying to destroy water wells which serve Palestinian villages. Ta'ayush has contributed to efforts to rebuild them, as it resists efforts to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population in the area. This water issue around Hebron has now made it to the Israeli Supreme Court. "This struggle has become a formative experience for our group," says Professor Bronner.

Unfortunately, as a general rule, Israelis are no longer allowed by the Israeli authorities to enter the Palestinian areas in Gaza. Ta'ayush has therefore focused its efforts toward resisting the separation wall in the West Bank.

Prof. Bronner describes the situation in Al Ram/Beit Hanina, just a few kilometers north of here. It has 60,000 people, and is in the process of becoming a full fledged ghetto, surrounded by wall on 3 sides cutting it off from agricultural lands that are being ceded to West Bank settlements. Al-Ram is also being cut off from its economic center in Jerusalem. This is splitting families from each other, splitting husbands from wives, who at times wind up with different resident ID cards that put them on opposite sides of The Wall.

A woman who grows up in a Jerusalem family marries a man from Ramallah. They have children and build a future in Al-Ram. Now, because of the different identity cards, the woman has to choose between forfeiting her Jerusalem identity card in order to be with her husband and children, or separating herself from her immediate family on the opposite side of the Wall in order to be with her parents and siblings. These realities are causing divorce and disintegration of Palestinian families.

A member of our delegation asked Yigal Bronner if people see parallels between the Separation Wall and the Warsaw Ghetto. He described making this comparison as, "A big no-no! There is bad, and there is Nazi. There is no comparison. When you do that, you loose your listener. Besides, the settlers label Sharon as a Nazi for pulling out of Gaza. They call Arab regimes Nazi, etc. This approach is tactfully wrong. It is better to explain the facts of The Wall as they are, and let people reach their own conclusions by themselves."

Professor Bronner says that in Israel, slowly, but surely, people know the name of Ta'ayush, which can be reached at the website: www.ta'ayush.org. There, you can follow a hotline on Palestinian human rights issues.

The Israeli media will respond at times to direct action. Big demonstrations become important over time. But many in the media turn a blind eye. "If they don't want to know, it is hard to tell them about it" says Prof. Bronner. Ta'ayush has developed a special team of people who work with the media. In this context, "Digital cameras become a very important weapon along with cell phones." They feed the media information that they can be used for news stories when adverse events are happening in the Occupied Territories.

Our delegation asked if there was much student activism in Israel. "Unfortunately, Israeli campuses are highly de-politicized," he said citing the apathy of most students, "who just want to get a good career and have a good life."

Still, there are exceptions in Tel-Aviv, Haifa, Jerusalem, and Beersheba, where there are professors, who are willing to take risks. But there is a lot of outside pressure from campus watch organizations who advocate withholding funds to universities who do not toe the line. There are pressures to ban books by professors who support the Refuseniks for example.

Mr. Bronner described the school where his children go in Jerusalem. It is called Hand-in-Hand, and its student body is composed of 270 students, about half are Jews and the other half Arabs. The school now runs from pre-kindergarten to 6th grade.

The school is completely bilingual. Half of the curriculum is taught in Hebrew and the other half in Arabic. It is a public school certified by the Israeli Ministry of Education, and it receives supplemental donations from private sources.

There are now 3 schools like this in Israel-Palestine. There is also the Jewish/Arab village of Neve Shalom. These are alternative vision for the future. Other than this, the Arab and Jewish schools are largely segregated in Israel, though occasionally, Arab families will send their kids to Jewish schools.

Plowing Personal Angst into Peace

Next, we meet Dr. Yitzhak Mendelsohn and his friends, Dani and Erella, who are husband and wife, and their friend Ehud, who all are involved in human rights activities in villages around Nablus in the West Bank.

Mr. Mendelsohn describes his life and personal philosophy since being the victim of a bomb attack in 1994 as being aligned with the Buddhist concept of "Transformation of Suffering", also reflected in the writings of Albert Camus, especially in his book, The Plague.

Every survivor of a violent attack goes through a process of grief. A person's daily routine after the attack is completely shattered. In Israel, there are survivors of attacks that go through group therapy. It is the direction of that therapy that determines what happens next.

"When you feel violated and weak, it is easy to resort to hatred. Hatred gives the impotent some potency, and can quickly become intoxicating. But if this goes on, the two societies caught up in this cycle of violence may die of an overdose." Today, both Israeli and Palestinian societies are suffering from a progressive form of this phenomenon.

Erella elaborates on the dynamics of this group psychology. "We all then get caught up in the 'Olympic Games of Suffering.' Which is worse, Qassam Rockets being fired into Israel from Gaza, or helicopter gunships hovering and shooting into crowds from over Rafah? A lot of money is being drained from all of our pockets to finance many disasters."

Polarized thinking then takes over. A circle forms around the victims and their families. First there are the victims of what are called "terrorist attacks". The attackers are categorized as cowardly murderers, as are those like the attackers' families who support them and associate with them. Then there are the healers who support the victims. Then there become the "innocent murderers": those who seek out retaliation and revenge. This rationalizes collective punishment, like targeted assassinations, in which many innocent bystanders are killed and injured, and house demolitions, which leave many homeless, or suicide bomb attacks. The similar processes repeats themselves on the opposite side in response to grief.

Then a complicity of silence develops, i.e., "You are either with us, or you're against us." The word "terrorist" is then used to stigmatize those on the other side and rationalize your own side's violence. People on all sides become exposed to death threats, which further feeds the desperation and paranoia. The name of the game then becomes killing the other side anonymously to avoid feelings of moral guilt the two societies become desensitized to violence. Now all sides become perpetuators and victims.

In the Occupied Territories, there are a mosaic of Jewish settlers who have compounded the situation. There are the religiously ideological, such as "Gush Emunim" and then there are the radical, who use violence to strengthen the notion that we need more violence. Suicide bombings give the settlers full justification to be even more violent. The society then assigns moral meanings to horrific acts.

"The Israeli Army gets sent out to protect you and winds up doing very immoral things in your name," according to Erella. "You then are left to defend yourself from the viruses that attack your morality." It is especially tragic when peace activists on the Israeli left, who are trying to protect Palestinians, become killed in random attacks, because the peace movement becomes weakened further, as the two societies go to their corners. "It is the common people on both sides who become physically, spiritually and emotionally damaged.

Yitzhak Mendelsohn continues, "The goal then becomes, 'How to avoid becoming a persecutor yourself.' You ask yourself, 'Why am I suffering the way I am? I didn't deserve this!' At this stage it is easy to pursue secondary gains, such as taking on a complete victim mentality, and becoming more of a victim than you really are."

Hence the Transformation of Suffering: Instead of feeding the violence further, which feels good in the short-run, one realizes that in the long run, it only makes the collective suffering of Israelis and Palestinians even worse. Yitzhak, Dani, Erella, and Ehud instead have chosen a more courageous path and a better way.

Parents' Circle and Family Forum

Next, we meet with Rami Elhanan, a 55 year old Israeli graphic designer, and Dr. Adel Misk, a Palestinian Neurologist.

In many ways, Rami is a typical Israeli. In October, 1973, he was in the Israeli Army and participated in the Yom Kippur War. He lost friends during conflict in the Sinai desert. But that was not the most tragic thing in his life. His beautiful gifted 14 year old daughter was killed by a suicide bomb attack while walking on Ben Yehuda Street here in Jerusalem. Rani describes feeling "surreal" during her funeral. But over time, Rami has followed the path for former Israeli General Matti Peled, and become a "warrior for peace."

For sure, his immediate reaction was extreme anger. But then he asked, "Will killing someone else ease my pain?" The other way which might reduce future killings is to ask, "What is the root cause? Then Rami found The Parents' Circle.

In 1994, 19 year old Arik Franenthal was kidnapped and killed by the Hamas. A year later in response to this tragedy, his father Yitzhak founded the Parents's Circle-An organization of bereaved parents who have lost children in the conflict. Calling for reconciliation and a peaceful end to the conflict, the organization soon expanded to include Palestinian bereaved families.

From the Parents' Circle/Family Forum brochure

This group has now grown to include 500 families. As Rami Elhanan says, "We are not doomed; we can change. It gives me a reason to get out of bed in the morning. But we have to get over the high walls of hatred and fear."

Dr. Adel Misk returned to Israel and Palestine in 1985 after completing his Neurology residency in Rome. He has since worked in both Israeli hospitals like Hadassah, as well as Palestinian. He has cared for hundreds of patients who have been injured on both the Palestinian and Israeli side. This reality became much more personal when his father was shot and killed by an Israeli settler near Jerusalem.

They found the killer of his father. He was arrested and held for only 2 days. At trial, the settler was sentenced for only 2 years. Dr. Adel Misk says that had the situation had been the reverse, i.e. a Palestinian randomly shooting at an Israeli, the sentence would have been life in prison.

"But would killing the killer of my father bring my father back?" Through Parents' Circle/Family Forum one understands that both peoples suffer the same. Dr. Adel and Rami both agree that today, the main source of their suffering is The Occupation.

Dr. Misk talks about doing clinical rounds one day. In the morning, he treated a young Israeli woman who had been injured in a suicide bombing, and in the afternoon in Beit Sahour, he treated a Palestinian paraplegic who had been shot by Israelis.

Dr. Misk describes a program whereby Palestinians donate blood to Israeli hospitals, and Israelis donate blood to Palestinians. "It is much easier to give your blood to the enemy than to spill your own blood for nothing," he says.

The two men then discuss Family Forum's Israel/Palestine talk line, whereby an Israeli who wants to talk to a Palestinian in the Occupied Territories can call in and be connected. A Palestinian in the territories who wants to chat with an Israeli can call in and do the same in reverse. It is a way to build bridges over the walls.

The two gentlemen finish up by showing us a film about a summer camp of bereaved Palestinian and Israeli children, which takes place in Neve Shalom.

Next, Part 11: Our final day . . . in Ramallah with Israeli journalist Amira Haas and Dr. Mustafa Bargouti, a physician of many talents, and former candidate for the Palestinian Authority President.