Jerusalem Post writer Lauren Gelfond (LGelfond@zahav.net.il) once again unveils
the humanity of people in the Middle East who make a difference.
Read about the reflections of excitement then pain of
Palestinian biology student, Tariq Adwan, and Israeli medical student, Yuval
Landau, who put their cooperative experiment aboard Columbia to make history
then share their despair.
Then there is Tariq's father, Professor Sami Adwan
(SAdwan@bethlehem.edu) in Bethlehem, and his own story of turning from
adversary to relationship builder with Israelis.
---------------------------
"'I wasn't surprised to
meet an open-minded Palestinian,' says Landau. 'I understood that most of the
problems probably derive from a minority of people, and that is the saddest
part, because they have the primary influence. I knew there is a silent
majority that thinks and behaves differently.'
"Still, he says meeting Adwan did affect him. 'It
is a different kind of learning to get to know a person as a human
being.'"
---------------------------
Tariq's father, Sami, says he's long "realized
that the only way is for Palestinians and Israelis to see each other as humans
and to have sympathy for each other's disasters."
Tariq communicated to us that his father is "an
exceptional man. I am very proud of him and I wish I become a man like
him."
Done!
Photos of Yuval and Tariq are on the Web at:
http://www.planetary.org/gobbss/
http://www.planetary.org/gobbss/bios.html
http://www.planetary.org/gobbss/images.html
Published in The Jerusalem Post -- Magazine section --
Friday, February 7, 2003
On the Web at:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/A/JPArticle/ShowFull%26cid=1044420013314
Cosmic indifference
By LAUREN GELFOND
A Palestinian and an Israeli student find that
politics pale compared to the workings of the cosmos
Tariq Adwan clapped his hands and jumped into the passenger
seat of the rented car, smiling. It had been a long day and he was anxious to
resume the search for kosher food. As the sun was setting, he buckled up and
ran his index finger over the map of Cape Canaveral.
The 19-year-old Palestinian Muslim from Bethlehem does
not keep kosher, but his Israeli science partner does, and he was hungry. The
two had spent hours driving around that week, and when no kosher restaurants
were to be found, they had followed the few Jewish stars on the map to synagogues
for advice. The two looked at each other knowingly and burst out laughing. It
wasn't a typical Israeli-Palestinian adventure.
Adwan first met Yuval Landau, 29, in mid-January,
after the Planetary Society accepted their independent biology proposals on
condition that they join forces to load a joint project on the Columbia space
shuttle.
After they were flown to Florida on January 14, two
days before the shuttle's launch, Adwan identified Landau in the bustling
airport from the only telltale sign he could find: Landau was wearing a kippa.
"Yuval?" he asked, raising his eyebrows.
Grinning, they shook hands and embraced. Later they would describe each other
as nice guys and brilliant scientists.
"Both are interested citizens of the cosmos, and
that goes way beyond politics," says a principle investigator on their
experiment, Dr. David Warmflash of NASA's National Astrobiology Institute.
"We were looking for the principles of life, and
if you put political issues in this context they seem so small."
Landau, an MD-PhD student in Tel Aviv University's
Excellence Program, had never had a Palestinian work or study partner before,
or even a Palestinian friend. But the two hit it off from their first telephone
and e-mail contacts, speaking to each other in English, primarily about
biology. Their experiment would take bacteria into space to see how such
microorganisms grow, and how stresses such as cosmic radiation, dryness, and
weightlessness affect them. The two wanted to find out if thin layers of
microbial cells, known as "biofilms," would form. Bacteria can
survive extreme environments by forming biofilms. Since the 1996 discovery of
what some scientists believe are fossilized microorganisms embedded in a
Martian rock that landed in Antarctica, it has been an open question whether
microorganisms can survive interplanetary travel, perhaps as a biofilm.
The Planetary Society's less-than-subtle mandate
required that the two work together to choose and lose aspects from their original
proposals to create a joint one. Echoing a kind of peace plan, the final
project would include concessions, agreed-upon goals and a sharing and division
of labor. The fact that their project was studying relationships between
foreign organisms was the first coincidence.
"I wasn't surprised to meet an open-minded
Palestinian," says Landau. "I understood that most of the problems
probably derive from a minority of people, and that is the saddest part,
because they have the primary influence. I knew there is a silent majority that
thinks and behaves differently."
Still, he says meeting Adwan did affect him. "It
is a different kind of learning to get to know a person as a human being."
Adwan had previously been in programs with Jewish Israelis.
"When they told me I was to work with an Israeli,
I felt the same as I would have if they had told me I was working with an Arab
or an American," he says. "We look at each other as scientists who
are curious and enthusiastic about research."
But there was a political aspect, he admits.
"This made it more interesting. You could even
say it gave it a beautiful flavor."
Adwan comes from a Bethlehem family that was once
involved in Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction. Today the father, with the family's
blessing, works on joint Israeli-Palestinian education projects - a change in
attitude that dates back to a 1991 stay in an Israeli prison.
When Bethlehem University history professor Sami Adwan
was arrested that year, three days after the birth of his other son, he was
held in military detention for nearly six months without trial or official
charges, he says.
Adwan sat day after day in his cell, depressed, until
one afternoon a soldier appeared with a form for him to sign. Because it was
written in Hebrew, which Adwan can neither read nor speak, he refused to sign.
When a second soldier saw the altercation, he looked at the form, and spoke
harshly to the first officer.
Though Adwan couldn't understand the words spoken, he
experienced a revelation, even before a Hebrew-speaking Arab translated.
"I used to see all Israelis as [the same],"
he said. "But I saw this message: two soldiers of the same rank, same
uniform, same language, but with totally different points of view about what
was appropriate."
Later, alone in his cell, he started to realize that
not only were the Palestinians there imprisoned, but so were the Israelis.
"The Israeli guards couldn't leave the prison
either. In a way, we were both caged, and I asked myself, who is jailing whom?
Maybe we were jailing each other."
When Adwan was released, he went home changed. "I
wasn't treated badly, but it was very painful for me to be put in jail on an
assumption of suspicion," he said. "But I had a lot of time to
contemplate the future, and realized that the only way is for Palestinians and
Israelis to see each other as humans and to have sympathy for each other's
disasters."
It was Shabbat afternoon, and Landau, now back in
Israel, was not answering his phone.
Adwan knew not to phone him on Shabbat but it was an
emergency, he figured. From his dormitory room at Misericordia College in the
US, he had just heard the news: The shuttle had broken up.
Adwan paced the square room and tried to stop
trembling. He stood up and sat down. He flipped between the news stations. He
ran to the bathroom a few times, thinking he was going to throw up.
"I was glued to the news for the 16 days of the
mission. I was in touch daily with Yuval and with the principle investigators
[from NASA and the Israeli Aerospace Institute]," he says. "This
relationship to the shuttle became part of my life. The seven astronauts were
our heroes, and our hands up in space. I just don't know how to accept that they
and all this have just disappeared from the world."
As his hometown of Bethlehem was suffering under
military curfew, Adwan was also mourning the death of Israel's first astronaut,
a military hero.
"I see him as a scientist, and as scientists our
collaborations go beyond political differences," he says. "I am very
sad about all the astronauts, but especially about Ramon."
Finally Landau phoned. Sitting down in a chair Adwan
pressed the receiver between his head and shoulder, and tapped his stockinged
feet quickly on the floor. "Did you hear?" he said before hello.
"If it were possible to give up this experiment
and bring Ilan Ramon back to life I would," said Landau, crushed.
"We were both devastated, and shared condolences.
It's a very difficult time, but it was good to talk to each other," Adwan
says the next day.
"It was emotional and interesting. We came to the
conclusion that even though the science part failed, the symbolic part, a
result of our collaborative work, still existed." Soon after, Dr. Eran
Schenker, director of the Israel Aerospace Medical Institute, reported that the
Israeli-Palestinian experiment had just been discovered among the crash debris.
Now both students are hoping for a miracle - that the container holding the
experiment was not damaged. If so, they will be sent back to help NASA
investigators analyze the results.
But if the experiment remains only a memory, all
parties involved say they are still connected by shared experiences: grief, the
taste of being participants in history, and the goal of changing the world
through science.
Cooperation was easy, Landau and Adwan admit, compared
to finding kosher food near NASA headquarters, making sense of the cosmos - and
dealing with an unthinkable tragedy.