This post will contain lengthy quotes from someone else, because his quotes have inspired me and he has written his thoughts far better than I can articulate mine. Also, he is living, at this moment, in the Palestinian Occupied Territories. And he is a rabbi. A member of Rabbis for Human Rights, to be exact. I absolutely love those guys. They are one peace organization over there that we did NOT meet on our trip to Israel/Palestine, and I have always wished that we had. Feeling lost and adrift this morning, I went to their website and immersed myself in their views and writings.
This morning, driving home from Bethesda after dropping the girls off at Imagination Stage for the first day of their musical theater camp, I listened to my White Flag Project cd. White Flag Project is a group of Israeli and Palestinian musicians who came together in 1998 to form a band. For many years (during the second intifada) they could only perform outside of their countries. And after that one of their members was essentially locked inside Gaza and unable to perform live with the other members. They are wonderful. And listening to the cd of their music made me wonder what they were up to these days. I had the great privilege to see them perform live here in DC in 2009 -- minus the member stuck in Gaza -- which was when I picked up the cd. But searching for them online, I could find nothing about them after 2009. Their website had not been updated since 2009. and as far as I can tell, they just disappeared after 2009 (at least on the internet).
In my dismay over the apparent loss of this group (I had been hoping to find new cds of theirs I could purchase!), I turned to Rabbis for Human Rights. And there I found nurturing, inspiration, spiritual direction, and a renewal of purpose.
Here's my first quote from Yonatan Shefa in his essay "Feelings from the Front: Reflections by Yonatan Shefa":
"In the face of the current violence, I feel useless, powerless, naive, a little lost. But I'm not naive; it's just that I know we are capable of more, of being better than we are right now. I know that we are, I just don't know what to do in order to help move us from where we are to what we could be. Each step, every possible effort seems futile, insignificant in the face of the monstrous brutality we appear capable of. While I may be gazing towards the far horizon of our truest potential, it's also true that if I turn 180 degrees and look the other way, I will see children being burned alive n my backyard.
What do we do? What do I do in the face of this?
Mohammed Abu Khdeir was murdered, pretty much literally, in my backyard... So much hatred, so much darkness, so much enmity, rage and blind hostility came so close to home.
What do I do? I have been living in this country, now, for about five years, and I have spent most of this time striving to bring people together, Israelis and Palestinians, to encounter one another, to see each other, to listen and to share. It is, at times, magical work. Each time I stand with a pair of people who have never once in their lives had a conversation with someone from the "other" side, each time I bear witness to those first words, to that first shuddering destabilization of the scaffolding of fear, prejudice, preconception, I can literally feel lives shifting in their orbit. What was all mind, story, label, narrative, considered to be that, other, them...suddenly becomes flesh and blood, a name, a you."
Hello, it's me, Hilary again. So wow, aren't those some powerful words? It was in encountering people like that on my own trip over their that I felt my own life shift in its orbit. And I didn't witness first time encounters; I merely heard people's testimonies of their first encounters. But those were transformative enough. Rabbi Shefa goes on to recount a conversation with his sister about the Israeli government. Shefa explains that the government, while needing to guarantee security for its people, could and should be doing so by working to bring the two peoples together, through such things as the media, funding joint business ventures between Israelis and Palestinians, and through education (educating each group about the other) and facilitating opportunities for them to come together. But instead, it does all it can to separate them and feed the fear. But back to more of his own words...:
"But in the face of this dark act, perpetrated by members of my own people, carried out in my home, such small births of new lives seem just that -- samll, tiny, insignificant, drowned in an ocean of darkness, less than a drop in the sea of hatred.
So what do I do? Keep on meeting, one-by-one? Keep on gathering, group-by-group?
"There is no structural reason that this (the government supporting programs that bring them together rather than divide) could not happen. The only reason is fear and resistance, resistance which is itself ultimately rooted in fear. There is no reason that, instead of borders and the release of prisoners, the pre-conditions for resuming peace talks can't be the massive and dedicated education of and experimentation with co-existence.
We don't know how to live together. But the only we are going to bring about a halt to the disastrous acts of the minority of people who want hate and fear, who want to drive the other into the sea, on either side, is to deprive them of oxygen.
To deprive them of oxygen, we must make it infeasible for their views to sway and encourage. To deprive them of resources, people and energy, more and more of us must know, in our blood and in our bones, that we can actually do this, that we can actually live together without hating each other, and without doing our best to harm one another and deprive the other of basic needs and rights.
This, the government is not doing. Neither government. The governments of Israel and Palestine are not depriving these toxic minorities of their oxygen.
Right now, if I was to look to anyone for hope, it would be the people, one both sides. It would be to the hundreds of Israelis who have poured in on buses to Shu'afat to pay their respects to the Abu Khdeir family. It would be to the parents all across Palestine who felt horror and sadness for the loss of the Jewish parents of Eyal, Naftali and Gilad.
It would be to the people who know, in their hearts, that this is not the way, that enough is enough; who know that the killing, and the fear and enmity that underlay it, must stop. It is tho those of us who know that we must stop teaching our children to hate, so that, despite their differences, God willing in our backyards we will no longer turn to see children burning children, but laughing and at play."
I say Amen to that. I want to help deprive the voices of fear and hatred of their oxygen.
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