Tag Archives: Parents Circle – Families Forum

It won’t stop until we talk

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Parents' Circle slogan

Parents’ Circle slogan

Yesterday came the awful news of the breakdown of the 72 hour humanitarian ceasefire in the Gaza war known as Operation Protective Edge, and that an Israeli soldier (Hadar Goldin) was missing, perhaps abducted by Hamas, perhaps already dead. It seemed that there would be no end to the Israeli ground operation and continued attack on built-up areas in Gaza, with the terrible toll in Palestinian civilian casualties as well as the losses of Israel and Palestinian fighters. Today (August 2, 2014) it seems that there is some relief. As I write, the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Security Minister Ya’alon are completing a press conference in which they confirm earlier reports during the day that Israeli forces are withdrawing from built up areas in northern Gaza and that all the known tunnels crossing from Gaza into Israel will be destroyed within hours. The Israeli government is scaling back the war in Gaza unilaterally, rather than trying to arrange another ceasefire with Hamas and beginning negotiations for a longer term agreement through Egyptian (and other) mediation. They will rely on deterrence, the cost of the war for Hamas and Gaza, instead of coming to an arrangement to end the military violence. At the same time, they said that the Israeli government would continue to do whatever it takes to achieve “quiet” and security for Israeli citizens.

But it isn’t over. It’s not over not only for the reasons that the Israeli government gave, namely that the air bombardment or fighting on the ground would resume if it turns out that Hamas are not already deterred. Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri had already declared that Hamas won’t be bound by any Israeli unilateral measure: “They either stay in Gaza and pay the price, unilaterally retreat and pay, or negotiate and pay.” Probably, the Israeli government’s latest move has left the cards in the hands of Hamas, who can choose to drag Israeli forces back into full-scale war as they wish.

It’s not over not because nothing has changed. More than 1600 Palestinians have been killed, along with 66 Israelis, and thousands of homes and other buildings in Gaza have been destroyed. The death and destruction has been colossal and dreadful.

It’s not over because we didn’t talk. It’s not over because the underlying issues that led to the violence have not been addressed. It’s not over because there is still an occupation; there is still a siege on Gaza; there are still Israeli settlements throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territories; there is still one law for Israelis and another for Palestinians in Area C; there is still a separation barrier running through Palestinian land; there are still checkpoints restricting Palestinian movement; there are still Palestinian refugees. It’s not over because Hamas and Islamic Jihad use murderous military violence rather than nonviolent means to bring the Palestinians an independent state. It’s not over for all the reasons that a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority has not been reached yet.

At the root of all those reasons is the refusal to talk. To really talk. To speak and to listen. To hear what is painful and to say what you fear to say. To talk not only to those with whom one feels comfortable, but with those whom you don’t trust and don’t like. To talk to your enemies. There are many reasons why Israel’s government and its citizens distrust Hamas and also the Palestinian Authority, and why talking with them will be difficult, painful, infuriating. And vice versa.

It’s not over in part because the Israeli government has decided that as a matter of policy it will not talk. It will not talk, except by the most indirect means to Hamas at all, and it will not talk in good faith – really talk – to the Palestinian Authority. It will not talk about peace agreements other than as a way to keep talking but not talk at all. And it won’t talk to a Palestinian reconciliation government that includes Hamas. It won’t talk to Hamas other than through the coercive, violent language of Operation Brother’s Keeper and Operation Protective Edge. Hamas talks back with rockets and tunnel attacks. Helluva way to talk.

PCFC.logoIn the midst of the horrific, terrible violence there has been a quiet voice, a voice that talks, that really talks, because it also listens, because it talks for the sake of talking. Not empty talking, but talking for the sake of reconciliation, for the sake of practicing peace long before the politicians get around to talking earnestly about peace. The voice, and the ear, is the Parents Circle Families Forum whose slogan is “It won’t stop until we talk.” During this war, the group of bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families has made efforts, such as this video on social media, to keep talking, to turn people away from the violence that breeds bereavement, and to turn them towards the talk that also listens in their “Peace Tent.”  The tent has operated daily throughout the war, in Tel Aviv’s Cinematheque square, offering a space in their words, “to provide an alternative to the propaganda and hatred running rampant in Israel …. [and]  share their stories, their choice for reconciliation.” It’s not over yet, because not enough people are listening.

Mourning the fallen: working through bereavement

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As I begin to write this blog, there are three hours left of the twelve hour humanitarian truce in the military violence of Operation Protective Edge. It’s Shabbat, so there are no funerals in Israel today, but there have already been more than thirty funerals for fallen soldiers so far and there will be more. This morning the Israeli military announced the deaths of another two personnel, and then another three, bringing the total to fourty. Each death brings to an early end the story of an individual, a son, a brother, a young person with hopes and dreams. Each death brings immeasurable grief to families and friends, indescribable loss, unending mourning. For Hamas, for Gazans, these losses inflicted on “the Zionist enemy” are a cause for celebration, evidence of another “victory,” as they did when they claimed to have captured Oren Shaul. Certainly, that is how the Israeli media and much of the Israeli public perceive Palestinian response to their loss.

Israel wraps the families of its fallen in the solidarity of public mourning. Families do not mourn alone, as the dead are held to be everyone’s sons, everyone’s boys. A grass roots campaign to encourage people to attend the funeral of Max Steinberg, an American who came to Israel to serve in the army without his family, brought 30,000 to act as his surrogate family. The price paid is a collective price, mourned once at the funeral, during the week long shiva, and then again and again on each Memorial Day.

It is in the nature of the trauma brought on by bereavement to return to the loss. The mourning is repeated, as the loss becomes part of the identity, the very being, of the bereaved. Not to mourn, again and again, would mean to betray those who are lost. Not to be haunted by their death would mean to kill them again. If that is how an individual feels, what is it like when a whole nation feels it?

Yet, the repetition of mourning is destructive. Not only is mourning repeated, but so is the situation in which the mourning first occurred. If the memory of the fallen is to be honoured, then it must be given meaning. In the case of nationally felt loss, the meaning is the survival of the nation. The reason why the dead sons fell is so that the rest of the rest of the national family can live on. The dead fell to protect the family from an enemy, an Other, who must remain the enemy and the Other if the death of the sons is to have meaning, to have been for something, to not have been senseless. The situation of loss is one in which more sons will continue to fall to make sense of the deaths of the sons who have already fallen. Because senseless loss is truly unbearable.

To break the repetition of mourning , the return to the situation of loss, the mourning has to be worked through. A way has to be found to live, not without forgetting the lost, not without ceasing to mourn – as if bereavement could ever stop – but to live in a way so that the act of mourning does not make sense through more deaths. I have never had to mourn the loss of a parent, child or sibling in war. I do not know how it feels, and I never want to. Those who have found a way to work through mourning agree with me. They don’t want me to join them in bereavement. As the Parents Circle Family Forum say, repeatedly, in this video: they don’t want me with them, because they do know how that loss feels.

Each of them has worked through mourning to the point where they can also feel the pain of the Other, Israelis and Palestinians. Or maybe only by feeling the pain of the Other have they worked through mourning to live without the need for revenge, to revisit the situation of loss by seeing the enemy as implacable, incapable of mourning, glorifying and sanctifying their dead without feeling pain.  When the Bereaved Families mourn those who have fallen in conflict, they do so together, in a ceremony that takes place on the same day as the Israeli Memorial Day. In dialogue with the mourning of the Other, finding themselves in each other, they seek a reconciliation that will bring not only the bereaved, but those who are yet to be bereaved, out of the situation of loss which brings no security, only more loss. And that is why tonight, as the humanitarian truce has ended been (as I wrote) extended, the bereaved families will be in Rabin Square in a rally organized by Combatants for Peace with many others, Jews and Arabs, calling for an end to the deaths. There will be no end to human mourning and bereavement, but there can be an end to this senseless bereavement.