Dear Friends,

I wish to share with you this open, trusting, and rare dialogue, a fruit of our work and training. On the 28th of February 2009, we convened at Open House, a group of young adult Arabs and Jews, with whom we have been working with for some time. Most of these young adults had participated in a Youth Delegation to Padova Italy, in 2007 and were hosted there by the Italian Friends of Open House. We wished to know how they felt during and after the Gaza war. They agreed to share their discussion with you.

by Dalia Landau

Knowing how bitter and defensive Jewish-Arab dialogue can become, we agreed on certain ground rules for our discussion, which I moderated.

Here are some fragments of our sharing:

“On the one hand, I have family in Gaza”, Jacob said, “and on the other hand, I have a friend who is a soldier in the South{of Israel} and the rockets from Gaza fell near his base. I am in pain, I am torn from inside..”

Shay, who is a soldier {and a student} felt that Israel tried to preserve some kind of war ethic under impossible circumstances. “I don’t think that our leaders hate Humanity, hate Arabs.. I think that our leaders were facing very difficult dilemmas..,” he said.

Michal, who as a soldier is a teacher to soldiers, was ashamed to call her Arab friends during the war “what could I say? That the destruction was disproportionate? How could the destruction of the Unrwa schools be in the least justifiable?”

Khader felt that “nothing substantial was acheived–the war did not stop the rockets, Gilad Shalit is not back and more than a thousand people were killed..”

One of our participants was trying to put herself in the place of the leaders of Israel with the primary responsibility of protecting the citizens in the South and facing “a hard core fundamentalist leadership in Hamas” … She asked the others to help her find another way..

“How can we help create a change? Where shall we draw our hope from?” was the question.

Jacob:

“In Ireland there was a very long conflict, much longer than ours.. and after long and challenging negotiations there is peace there, an agreed on peace. There is hope for us too..May be we have a chance to transcend ourselves…”

Khader:

“We need to free ourselves from the prevalent mentality that the use of force is going to create submission and solve our problems. It is not true that we have no other choice. We do have another choice. We can create another situation with words of peace, with words of dialogue, with words that will bring to the opening of the passages to Gaza..

How can we create a change? I say we need to begin with ourselves, with education towards forgiveness, to look the other in the eye as an equal and see through the eyes of the other. I want more people to know about our togetherness. Maybe people like us are a bridge to peace.”

Shay:

“Speaking of education, for many years now we have ignored Humanistic education and put our efforts in technology, computers, physics, weakening our humanistic sensibilities. That is why I am studying International Relations, because i want to be part of the momentum for change”

Kasem:

“Even though I am Palestinian, I wish to make a plea for Israel. This is not natural for me to do but it is the right thing for me to do. I would like our Italian friends to know that when i was in Italy, after our visit to Padova, looking for a medical school to continue my studies{ this was before the Gaza war}, and i said I was israeli, people assumed that meant Jewish Israeli and they were very cold to me, so i was advised to say that I was Palestinian, and then their attitude changed. I did not like that attitude. I remind myself that Israel has very serious existential dilemmas and that there is massive propaganda in the Arab world too.”

Michal:

“How is optimism possible at this time, or at any other time? What is hope going to be based on?

I talk with my Jewish friends. They are not certain where they want to live. Today we cannot take it for granted that people, especially young people, will want to continue living in this country. In order to feel hope, the most important step for me is to decide that i am here. No matter what is happening, I am here. I am part of this. These roots, this is the basis for creating a future here…”

Anna:

“We all know that we are all human beings, yet it is with such ease that in a conflict situation we turn ‘the other’ into an abstraction – a frightening mythological abstraction. This is for me very sad also to see the abstractions that I can create when the person is not right there in front of me..how the split happens in the mind, in the heart…the blindness of humanity, our blindness, my blindness….

How shall I find my hope?..Out of this darkness hope needs to emerge, hope needs to grow from within us, from within me. My hope will grow through action..the kind of action, the kind of interaction we are having here now.”

On rereading this dialogue, I am again amazed at the depth of insight, lack of defensiveness and empathy for each other’s situation. The latter aspect is very unusual in a situation of conflict, let alone war, where each side is pushing to justify its own positions. I was asked what were the ground rules that the participants agreed to respect. We lit a candle in the middle to evoke in ourselves a sense of the sacred, a reminder that our words were a gift entrusted to each other. We agreed to speak subjectively about our own feelings and perceptions and we allowed for a few moments of silence between each other’s words…

Dalia