Category Archives: Conceptions of peace

Exodus to Alberta

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Tea break during olive picking in Jayyous

This is a guest blog written by Ariel Katz, a Jewish American currently living in England.  She has a degree from Cornell University in Middle Eastern Studies, and has worked in Israel for Interns for Peace. She has a passion for Middle East peace, and writes fiction and non-fiction on the topic for outlets such as CGNews.  

 

This is a story of Exodus and diaspora.  Rema was looking for a doctoral programme in Canada, because Canada has a loose immigration policy.  She didn’t want England, she said.  Or America. Too difficult to get in.   She would have to learn English she realised.  She had a two year plan.  In two years, when her now 16 year old son turned adult, she would be free of her mothering duties. Free to start a new life.  Israel was a difficult place to live for anyone.  Even more so for a Palestinian Muslim woman.  Years ago she would have been called and have called herself an Arab. Times have changed. Identities have morphed.  “Arab” no longer means much.  It never had really.  Not more than a person whose mother tongue was Arabic.  “Palestinian” has a connection to a people who share a story.

Enat told the guy picking olives with her in the West Bank village that she was moving to Canada.  “It’s game over here now,” she told him.  People who want peace in Israel have nowhere to move but out and away.  It’s now illegal to talk about boycotting products from the West Bank settlements.  It’s akin to being a traitor.  She had always advocated peace with the Arab population in Israel.  She had always been active.  Recently she had given up, burnt out, and she was here picking olives.  Helping a Palestinian family harvest from their olive trees.  Permits were needed for the West Bank family members to get to their own groves.  Many olives fell to the ground and rotted due to lack of permits.

A bus load of Israeli volunteers form the Tel Aviv area came to help, to spend the day with the trees, picking.  There were no instructions, no “Pick this size not that size”. Just “Pick them all, we are not coming back.”  And pick she did.  She spent her Saturday, her Sabbath, picking olives for a family she had never met.  Mr and Mrs Ali, that was all she knew.  As she explained to a fellow Jewish peace activist that she had given up, she was raising her arms towards olive branches laden with ripe olives, reaching for them, picking them, lightening the burden on those gnarled branches which seemed wrinkled like old people.  She filled sacks with olives of all sizes.  It felt good to be outside, to be with nature, to be doing something useful, talking, working with like-minded people.  It was invigorating.  She had given up she said.  There was no way forward. She would leave soon.  Yet she was here.

And so it went.  Israeli citizens became disillusioned with the possibility of peace.  The government had taken more and more actions that incited anger and threatened the rights of the Palestinian population. What was the point of advocating peace when government actions were actively unravelling more good will than the peace groups could generate?  There comes a point when enough is enough.  Jews decided to leave because they were ashamed to live in a place that treated the Palestinian population with such contempt.  Palestinians were leaving because peace was elsewhere.  And where could they go once they had decided that staying wasn’t an option?  Somehow, they all decided on Alberta.

There was an exodus from Israel/Paelstine following the intolerable situation.  Some left because they wanted to, some left because they were too scared to stay.  And a large group of expats, both Jewish and Palestinian, ended up in Alberta.  They set up falafel stands with freshly made hummus.  They bumped into each other in shops selling olive oil from their homeland. They spoke together in Hebrew with Arabic slang thrown in – and in Arabic peppered with Hebrew.  You could hear the children of Abraham calling each other, “Ya uchi (O my brother).”   There were no borders in Alberta.  There were no segregated neighbourhoods.  The Jewish Israelis and Palestinians filled the gaps left by their missing family members by opening their homes to each other.  The smell of cumin was acceptable.  The situation was similar to that in other cities around the world, where the Hebrew and Arabic speakers feel closer to each other than to the other nationalities in the area.  They share roots.  They share stories and experiences.  They share nostalgia for the homeland that until now, they hadn’t found a way to share.

 

Within the Eye of the Storm

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Poster for Within the Eye of the Storm

It was International Peace Day on Friday 21 September, a day marked by several events in Israel, including the screening of a remarkable documentary, Within the Eye of the Storm, directed and produced by Shelley Hermon. The synopsis of the film on the website reads:

Bassam and Rami, a Palestinian and Israeli, were once dedicated fighters willing to kill and be killed by one another for the sake of their nations. Yet each one of them came face to face with the price of war when their daughters were killed in the conflict. Left with the excruciating pain of bereavement, they chose to do the unexpected. They set out on a joint journey to humanize the very enemy, which took the dearest thing from them and prevent the vicious cycle of retaliation in themselves and their societies. Along the way they reveal the friendship and humor that keeps them alive. The film follows their two parallel stories and the moments where they converge, both in their personal experiences and peace work as they face their shattered families, confused communities and opposing society. This is a critical junction in both their lives, as their life mission and personal agenda clash and they stand the biggest test to their friendship.

The film itself is an image of peace, or rather a set of images of peace. The key image is the friendship that is displayed between the two fathers, the Israeli Rami Elhanan, whose 14-year old daughter Smadar was killed by two Palestinian suicide bombers in Jerusalem in 1997, and the Palestinian Bassam Aramin, whose 10-year old daughter Abir was shot in the head with a rubber-coated bullet by an Israeli soldier in Anata, East Jerusalem in 2007. Bassam had already been politically active in founding the bi-national Israeli-Palestinian peace group Combatants for Peace in 2005, whereas Rami was roused to activism in the wake of his daughter’s death. Their friendship is highlighted in the public conversations the two fathers had with each other in weekly broadcasts on All for Peace Radio, in which Rami takes the lead. But the friendship is perhaps most evident at one point, after Bassam has had good news about the civil case he brought against the State of Israel for being responsible for Abir’s death, when Rami hugs him and tells him “You know I love you” in the same way that he hugs his son and his deceased daughter’s friend Danielle, who was badly injured in the same bomb attack as Smadar.

Another image or meaning of peace in the film is that Bassam does win his civil case against the State in 2011, although he’s still pursuing his criminal case against the soldier who shot his daughter in violation of military procedures. No justice, no peace, and although Bassam’s court victory is but one very small piece of justice, and such victories are very rare in Israeli courts, so is the friendship between Bassam and Rami but one small piece of peace.

Within the Eye of the Storm is a moving film, as demonstrated by the audience’s response, thanks in part to the intimate camera work that puts viewers inside the homes of Rami and Abbas, making us feel closely connected to their lives. The music also plays a significant role.  Yet, the main affective power of the documentary consists in its composition as an act of mourning for Smadar and Abir. For the most part, these are separate moments for the two characters and families. Bassam’s wife weeps as she holds up a younger daughter to compare her to Abir’s picture, and towards to the end of the film Bassam prays next to a poster size image of Abir in their temporary house in Bradford, England (where Bassam studied for an MA in Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution). There are also photographs of Smadar on display in Rami’s home, but his mourning is most evident in his visit to and embrace of Danielle, his daughter’s friend who survived the attack. When Shelley Hermon described the film as a memorial to the two girls in her comments after the screening, she choked up, almost unable to continue. The sense of loss was palpable throughout the cinema hall.

The screening event itself was another image of peace, though more problematically so. The depth of feeling among the audience of about 400 people, of simple empathy, of shared grief, cannot be denied. As Bassam was called to the stage to speak, he received a standing ovation. One woman in the audience remarked that this film was the first time she felt that ‘her side’ had been listened to along with the Palestinians’, and so she said to Bassam and Shelley from now ‘I’m with you’. Other questions revealed more scepticism: how were Bassam’s activities and the film received by his extended family and community? Would the film get the same reception in the West Bank? Yes, he said, catching the implicit racism (and common assumption that ‘we Israelis want peace; it’s those Arabs who don’t) but responding cleverly with humour: they’d applaud it just as loudly in Ramallah, even though it’s full of Arabs. The film was screened on a Friday afternoon at Tel Aviv’s Cinematheque (and other Cinametheques across Israel), thus marking it as a ritual for a secular, bourgeois, Ashkenazi audience, who mingled and chatted as they would at any cultural event. Participation in such a ritual of spectatorship can easily displace any felt need to act to prevent the grounds for further acts of mourning. The film also leaves largely untold the stories of the two mothers, who are not seen to participate in the blood bond of shared mourning that prompts the men’s friendship.

Within the Eye of the Storm is not, however, a naïve documentary, certainly less naïve than my spontaneous feeling as an audience member that if there are such caring and sensitive people, surely Israel can find a way to make peace with Palestinians. In the film, there are several scenes of Rami failing to persuade Israelis that reconciliation and dialogue are the best way forward. Danielle’s boyfriend expresses a common view when says he can’t understand why Rami is helping those who murdered his daughter. Rami himself breaks off a discussion with a member of the public at a rally for the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit who was then being held by Hamas, at the point when the man says he’s prepared to pay any price to keep a Jewish state. Rami has already paid the price, and even though he is distributing stickers saying ‘It won’t stop until we talk’ (a slogan of the Israeli-Palestinian Bereaved Families for Peace Circle), he cannot continue to speak to another Israeli who would have him pay the price again. And why should he? Why should we? Because we prefer to mourn?