Program Particulars: No More Taking Sides
Program Particulars
*Times indicated refer to web version of audio
Film still of Roni Hirshenzon and Robi Damelin of the Bereaved Families Forum)
(01:51) Encounter Point Documentary
Ali Abu Awwad and Robi Damelin appear in the documentary film Encounter Point. Produced by Just Vision, the documentary explores the lives of Israelis and Palestinians who are seeking a nonviolent end to the conflict in their land through grassroots solutions.
Just Vision was founded in 2003 to heighten public awareness of the Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts taking place but not being covered by the media. The organization provides a comprehensive set of resources for civilian-led groups trying to effect change among Israelis and Palestinians. They're developing curricula for civic leadership that teachers any place in the world can access online. Just Vision's Web site features in-depth interviews with Muslims, Jews, and Christians from Palestine and Israel, including Robi and Ali.
(02:57) Conference on Restorative Justice
Damelin and Awwad were invited speakers at a conference sponsored by the Marquette University Law School - Restorative Justice Initiative. The conference invited people who suffered from conflicts in Israel and Palestine, Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom, and South Africa to share their personal experiences and shed light on the healing process for victims of political violence.
The judicial system focuses on punishing the perpetrator. The theory of restorative justice strives to bring healing to the victim and the affected community. Oftentimes a mediator will work with the victim and the perpetrator before meeting face to face. Most often, these meetings involve the victim being able to share his or her story and the pain they've experienced because of the perpetrator's actions. "Restorative justice" results from a process in which both victim and offender recognize each other as human beings beyond the judgments of the courts and the criminal penalties delivered.
(03:20) Arafat's Fatah Movement
Al Fatah — a reverse acronym for Harekat at-Tahrir al-Wataniyyeh al-Falastiniyyeh, the Movement for the National Liberation of Palestine — was founded in the early 1960s by Yasser Arafat and others. Al Fatah initially opposed the founding of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), but eventually joined and assumed control of the PLO in 1969. The BBC reports that Al Fatah carried out 2,432 guerrilla attacks on Israel in that year alone. In 1993, Arafat signed the Declaration of Principles — better known as the Oslo Accords — renouncing terrorism and recognizing the right of Israel to exist. Guerrilla attacks continued, and critics point to known members of Al Fatah leading militant brigades against Israel and the failure of Al Fatah to amend its constitution, which calls for the "complete liberation of Palestine, and eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence."
In January 2006, the fundamentalist Islamic movement, Hamas, won a majority of seats on the legislative council and unseated Fatah as the ruling party of Palestine. Many pundits attribute Hamas' victory to the corruption within the Fatah party and its failure to help the Palestinian people with their basic social needs.
(03:30) First and Second Intifadas
The term intifada literally means "shaking off" in Arabic. In the SOF program, "Two Narratives: Reflections on the Israeli-Palestinian Present," scholar Mohammed Abu-Nimer compares it to "shaking something off your shoulder." The first Palestinian Intifada began in 1987. It brought men, women, and children onto the streets in the Palestinian territories in protest against the Israeli military presence in their midst. Their protests generally took the form of civil disobedience — strikes, boycotts, graffiti, and barricades. But stone-throwing demonstrations against heavily armed Israeli troops captured international attention. Israeli forces responded violently against demonstrators, and Palestinian civilians died. This spiral of events led many Israelis to reexamine their attitudes and government policies towards Palestinians. It strongly contributed to the momentum that led to the Oslo peace process from 1993 to 2000.
By contrast, the Second Intifada from 2000 to 2005 targeted civilians inside Israel with suicide bombs. The Islamist movement Hamas, which won a government majority in recent Palestinian elections, was a key architect of that campaign. This intifada helped bring the already beleaguered Oslo peace process to a bitter end.
(03:40) Oslo Peace Process
After many years of failed attempts at Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, a series of secret negotiations were orchestrated under the guise of an academic exercise in Oslo, Norway, which began in January 1993. In order to proceed toward mutual discussions, negotiators from both sides agreed to ignore long-standing grievances and focus on areas where agreement was a distinct possibility. The Norwegian organizers emphasized the social aspects of personal relationships between the two sides and stressed an informal arrangement for the meetings.
In August 1993, the chief Palestinian negotiator, Abu Ala, and his Israeli counterpart, Uri Savir, initialed the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements (pdf), commonly referred to as the Oslo Peace Accord, in a private ceremony. The Accord provided a framework for establishing peace between Israelis and the Palestinians by creating a timetable for general outcomes to be met. A month later, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Chairman Yasser Arafat signed the formal agreement and shook hands on the White House lawn.
Two important tenets of the Accord were the right of recognition and troop withdrawal. Israel recognized the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) as the official representative of the Palestinian people and the PLO recognized the right of the state of Israel to exist. Israeli forces would withdraw from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and a Palestinian government would be transitionally installed within five years. Issues such as the status of Jerusalem, water, transportation, and Jewish settlers in occupied territory intentionally remained ambiguous but were acknowledged as areas requiring cooperation. The failure of the process has left bitterness and uncertainty on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide.
Members of the joint Arab-Jewish partnership, Ta'ayush, work together in the fields of a settlement safety zone on the outskirts of Beit Ommar. (Source: Palestine Monitor)
(03:52) Crossing from My Town to Village Next to Us in West Bank
Ali Abu Awwad lives in the village of Beit Ommar, just north of Hebron, in the West Bank. The village is primarily an agricultural community of 16,000 Palestinians that is bookended by a concrete separation wall to the north and an Israeli settlement to the south. But, like the Bereaved Families Forum, other Arab-Jewish partnerships are finding spaces for understanding through uniting causes.
(7:51–8:42) Music Element
"Ederlezi" from East Meets East, performed by Nigel Kennedy and the Kroke Band
(08:07) Parents Circle - Bereaved Families Forum
Yitzhak Frankenthal founded The Parents Circle - Bereaved Families Forum for Peace, Reconcilliation, and Tolerance after his 19-year-old son, Arik, was kidnapped and killed by members of the Palestinian Hamas movement. Frankenthal writes about his son's death and its affect on him in an essay, "My Son Who Has Gone Made Me Who I Am," and a 2002 speech titled "The Ethics of Revenge."
The organization represents more than 500 Israeli and Palestinian families who have lost loved ones during the ongoing hostilities. Family members participate in building relationships with the bereaved on the other side. The Parents Circle - Bereaved Families Forum shares a common goal: "We have chosen to convert the feelings of anger and revenge, helplessness and despair, into energies of hope and action, as messengers of a process of reconciliation. We who have paid the highest price possible, believe that empathy for the pain and needs of the other can generate a change in Israeli and Palestinian awareness and public opinion."
Outreach efforts include talking to students, visiting conferences, bringing awareness to the media, writing reconciliation blogs, and conducting summer camps for children of bereaved families. In 2002, the Bereaved Families Forum started a toll-free telephone service aimed at opening new lines of communication and dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians. They've accepted nearly a million calls since its inception.
The enlarged map (PDF) shows the locations of various types of settlements, military bases, and roads within the context of the 1949 Armistice Line, known as the Green Line.
(09:17) Israeli Soldiers and Settlers
Jewish Israelis living in isolated communities in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are commonly referred to as settlers. These settlements were established following the 1967 Six-Day War in areas that violate international law according to article 49 of The Fourth Geneva Convention and resolutions passed by the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council. Most of the international community supports this position, including the European Union, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the Russian Federation.
As of August 2005, the Israeli interior ministry estimated that approximately 250,000 settlers live in Palestinian territories, which does not account for the 200,000 Israeli Jews living in East Jerusalem. In 2005, the Israeli Likud Party withdrew over 9,000 settlers from Gaza and selected settlements in the West Bank.
(11:07) Walls and Checkpoints
After years of discussion, the Israeli government decided to erect a separation barrier in June 2002, after an unprecedented number of suicide bombings launched from the West Bank in the spring and early summer of that year. Currently, 97 percent of the barrier is chain link fence and razor wire, with prefabricated concrete walls measuring up to 25 feet high placed at strategic points within some cities, including Jerusalem and Bethlehem.
Palestinians object to the barrier for many reasons. For some, it inhibits daily passage from home to work and schools. Others condemn the wall being built on Palestinian land east of the pre-1967 Green Line border. President Bush has called the route of the barrier "a problem" and urged Israel to change it because the barrier lies several hundred yards within the West Bank. Many Palestinians view it as a land grab by the Israelis. PBS' Online NewsHour provides a clean, interactive map of the controversial wall between the West Bank and Israel.
Ted Conover's report in the March 2006 issue of The Atlantic Monthly gives an up close and personal view of Israeli checkpoints. Conover shows the dull and stressful daily life of Israeli guards and the dehumanizing and frustrating experiences of Palestinians trying to cross.
(11:47) History of the Holocausts
Two On Being programs touch on the meaning and the suffering of the Holocaust. In "The Tragedy of the Believer," Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel describes how he wrestles with his Jewish faith and his God after surviving the horrors of the concentration camps and the mass execution of his people. And, in "Ethics and the Will of God," the film documentarian Martin Doblmeier discusses the legacy of the Christian theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose life spanned the rise and fall of Hitler's Germany — and ultimately led to his execution.
(20:03–20:50) Music Element
"Ederlezi" from East Meets East, performed by Nigel Kennedy and the Kroke Band
(20:55) Hummus and Hibukim
Robi uses the expression "hummus and hibukim" — "hummus and hugs." She explains what she means in an interview:
"Instead of channeling it into revenge, the people in our group have chosen another direction for their pain. The pain breaks down barriers very quickly between Palestinians and Israelis in the group. There's a sense of trust. It's not hummus and hugs — it's much deeper than that; it's acknowledgement and empathy, which happen much faster than in a normal meeting between a Palestinian and an Israeli because we recognize each other immediately through the pain."
The director of Parents Circle says that Israelis often ignore the inner tensions of the conflict. Understanding the other is not something that's nice and easy, like going once a week to an Arab market or an Arab restaurant to have hummus.
(21:33) Story of Yaacov Guterman
Yaacov Guterman is a Holocaust survivor who was imprisoned at Auschwitz during World War II. He's also a painter, book illustrator, and poet. Guterman wrote a moving letter to The Jerusalem Post in 1982. His son, Raz, served in the Israeli army in Lebanon until his death. Guterman challenges the approach of both sides in the conflict:
My son Raz, my beloved son, and his friends were sent with their unit, in great haste and frenzied irresponsibility, to bloody battle to take the Beaufort. He was the first one to break through the trenches leading to the fortress. He fought valiantly and there he found his death. Thus was severed the chain of unending Jewish generations, ancient and full of heroism and suffering, and thus was cut off the flowering of a life that was just beginning to blossom. And thus they caused the destruction of my whole world. How many years would it have taken the Palestinian terrorists to kill and injure so many Israeli soldiers as these people did in the course of one week of this damnable war? How much loss and mourning have they caused? Even before the blood was dry on the rocks of the mountain of Beaufort, Begin and Sharon hurried into their helicopters, surrounded by photographers, motion picture cameras, and microphones, to declare and sound forth with vanity. They did not even ask forgiveness for the mistakes or the dark devices of their nationalistic schemes and their adventurous irresponsibility. And the voice of our sons' blood cries from the ground!
(21:50) Kibbutz in Israel
Kibbutzim are communities established by and for Jews based on communal property. Community members don't own private property. They share the work and the profits of collective enterprises, which are most often agricultural.
(21:53–25:02) Music Element
"Time 4 Time" from East Meets East, performed by Nigel Kennedy and the Kroke Band
(25:52) Parents Circle Telephone Line
More than a million calls have been made since the chat line was established in October 2002. Parents Circle created a media campaign for Israelis and Palestinians to register in the system. Callers record a brief message describing who they are and the person "from the other side" they'd like to speak with — an Israeli or Palestinian, a person living in a certain area, of a certain age, gender, etc.
The caller is then asked a short list of questions and connected with a voice box that matches the caller's request. The caller can choose to speak directly with the other person or leave a message with a contact number.
An Israeli contractor's Caterpillar hydraulic excavator and bulldozer clear the path of Israel's separation fence on Palestinian land in the West Bank village of Az-Zawiya. (Photo: David Silverman/Getty Images)
(26:34) Boycott of Caterpillar Corporation
The Israeli military and contractors purchase bulldozers — in particular, its D9 bulldozer — and other heavy equipment from the Caterpillar Corporation that are especially made to destroy buildings. Some groups have protested Caterpillar for their role in the Israelis' use of this equipment to raze Palestinian homes, create Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, and build separation walls and fences.
The New York Presbytery, a governing body of ministers and elders, created a task force to respond to their members who asked to reexamine their decision to divest of global corporations that they viewed as profiting from violence carried out by Israel. A member of Rutgers Presbyterian Church writes a compelling letter describing how the Presbyterian Church is struggling to find peace with taking sides — and why they invited Robi Damelin and Nadwa Saranda to speak to their members.
(26:47) Divestment in South Africa
Translated from the Afrikaans meaning apartness, apartheid was the ideology supported by the National Party government and was introduced in South Africa in the early 1940s and implemented in 1948. In English, it has come to mean the legally sanctioned system of ethnic segregation existing in South Africa between 1948 and 1990.
The purpose of apartheid was the separation of the races: whites from nonwhites, nonwhites from each other, and, among the Africans (called Bantu in South Africa), one group from another. In addition to the Africans, who constitute about 75 percent of the total population, people regarded as nonwhites include those known in South Africa as "Coloureds"—people of mixed black, Malayan, and white descent—and Asian—mainly of Indian ancestry.
Initial emphasis was on restoring the separation of races within the urban areas. A large segment of the Asian and "Coloured" populations was forced to relocate out of so-called white areas. African townships that had been overtaken by (white) urban sprawl were demolished and their occupants removed to new townships well beyond city limits. Between the passage of the Group Areas Acts of 1950 and 1986, about 1.5 million Africans were forcibly removed from cities to rural reservations.
Many Western governments and institutions put pressure on the South African government to end its policy of apartheid by reducing their investments in South African companies and corporations that sold goods to the South African government. Nobel Peace Prize recipient Archbishop Desmond Tutu writes about the impact of divestment in South Africa and how this moral pressure might be applied in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
(28:03) Uncle Defended Mandela
Robi's uncle, Israel Aaron Maisels, was the primary defense attorney for Nelson Mandela and other ANC members during the famous treason trials from 1958 to 1961. Upon his death in December 1994, Mandela said, "Democrats in South Africa and Southern Africa shall sorely miss this outstanding son of our people. Our nation is the poorer without him."
(28:37) Jews as a Light Unto Nations
Robi cites a passage from the book of Isaiah 42:6 in the Jewish Tanakh:
I the Lord, in My grace, have summoned you, And I have grasped you by the hand. I created you, and appointed you A covenant people, a light of nations Opening eyes deprived of light, Rescuing prisoners from confinement, From the dungeon those who sit in darkness.
(29:10) Home for Russian and Ethiopian Jews
CBC News reported that more than one million Russians have immigrated to Israel since 1990. Russian immigrants were looking to escape anti-Semitism and find a more prosperous life in Israel.
(35:06–35:40) Music Element
"Abadai" from The Rough Guide to the Music of Israel, performed by Bustan Abraham
(36:28) Clip from Encounter Point
The edited clip of Robi Damelin reading portions of the letter [read the unedited letter] she wrote to the family of the Palestinian sniper who killed her son was taken from the documentary film, Encounter Point.
This for me is one of the most difficult letters I will ever have to write. … After your son was captured, I spent many sleepless nights thinking about what to do, should I ignore the whole thing, or will I be true to my integrity and to the work that I am doing and try to find a way for closure and reconciliation. This is not easy for anyone and I am just an ordinary person not a saint. … I do not know what your reaction will be, it is a risk for me, but I believe that you will understand, as it comes from the most honest part of me.
(37:40) Families for Peaceful Tomorrows
September Eleventh Families Peaceful Tomorrows was founded in 2002 by family members of those killed on 9/11 in the United States who have united to turn their grief into action for peace. On September 11, 2006 the Peaceful Tomorrows co-hosted a screening of Encounter Point in New York City at which Robi was present. She has also participated in international events organized by the group.
(41:12) Damelin's Article on Lebanese-Israeli War
In response to the escalating violence between the Lebanese group Hezbollah and the Israeli army, Robi Damelin wrote a letter [read the complete letter] to the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz on August 20, 2006. Here, she likens it to a sports tournament:
Listening to the rhetoric of this war reminds me of a sports tournament. We beat them by however many points, or they beat us by however many points. But it is not points we are talking about and there is no trophy. The points are human beings with families and loved ones fleeing their daily lives, sometimes succeeding and sometimes not. Whose side shall we take in the tournament? After all, we feel very good about ourselves when we have a side to back. Will we pick the green in Lebanon — they are the underdogs — or shall we pick the blue in Israel? We would perhaps feel better about the blue if they lost more men. Is this how the world looks at a conflict, as a glorified tournament?
(46:36–47:18) Music Element
"Ederlezi" from East Meets East, performed by Nigel Kennedy and the Kroke Band
