OBITUARY:
Professor Dan Bar-On
Champion
of both Palestinian, Jewish narratives
Monday, 15
September 2008
A death and a birth came
before us last Friday, 12 September 2008.
They both point us toward a new existence on Earth.
Died
Friday we read of the passing of Israeli Professor
Dan Bar-On.
SEE his last video interview at http://www.vimeo.com/12311292.
This inspired, open-minded academic had a genius
for helping "enemies" engage, listen, and pursue and understand their
conflicting narratives and equal humanity.
In 2006, his last book was:
Dan's obituary was written by a Palestinian
professor Saliba Sarsar ( Sarsar@monmouth.edu ) in an Israeli newspaper.
Bar-on would have wanted it that way - the highest
tribute to his exemplary life of bridging to the "other."
With other bold Jewish and Palestinian educators, Dan
and his dear Palestinian colleague, Dr. Sami Adwan ( SAdwan@bethlehem.edu ), invented a new prototype history
textbook in Arabic and Hebrew that told both people's stories side by side.
In May, 2007, Dan and Sami were to appear in San
Francisco for a large public presentation about their partnership and
educational masterpiece.
Dan was too ill to travel with his brain cancer.
Instead, the eager audience met Sami and absorbed
Dan's filmed interview of 30 March 2007, at Monmouth University where he and
Sami were visiting Fulbright Scholars together.
HEAR Dan's 14-minute in-depth, inspiring 2007
interview:
And, thanks to JustVision, WATCH
four Bar-On video interviews in Hebrew:
Born
The same day as Dan Bar-On's
obituary was the theatrical premier in Los Angeles of the new film, DAVID
& FATIMA.
It is the single-best movie to take
global audiences deeply into Muslim, Jewish, and Christian homes, hearts, and
stories - some from antiquity - to view the forces that both bind us
together and keep us tragically apart.
DAVID & FATIMA brings Romeo and Juliet forward in
time to remind us of the power and importance of engagement and love to
transcend what divides us unnecessarily in these new times that call for
unprecedented compassion and cooperation.
The script, actors, and cinematography evoke awe,
joy, shock, tears, pride, grief, courage and so much more of our rather-same
humanity.
Sitting that night among Jews, Palestinians,
Persians, and diverse other Christians, Muslims, and Jews, whom you'd expect in
Los Angeles, together we experienced human tragedy and triumph that kept us together
talking like family for several hours afterward.
DAVID & FATIMA is not a quick-fix for today's
problems.
But the script, Iranian director, and heartfelt
cast are exemplary in telling both people's narratives - shadow and high side -
rather equally.
And giving viewers - hopefully
mixed audiences - a shared experience that can make us more human together.
We'd encourage you to help bring theatrical
screenings to your cities and campuses.
Generously, the film is available in voice-over in 12
languages - English, Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, French, Russian, Chinese,
Turkish, Spanish, German Japanese, and Korean.
The TRAILER is at http://youtube.com/watch?v=LDoD-ZwjmdM
.
The WRITER-PRODUCER, Karim
Bian, can be contacted at 310-488-0403 and MalibuTV@aol.com .
DAVID & FATIMA can help you decide what YOUR life
is going to be about.
As can Palestinian Saliba Sarsar's epitath (below) about
the life-lived of Jewish Dan Bar-On.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Published in Ha'aretz - Friday, 12 September 2008
http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1020491.html
Overcoming our
whirlwinds
By Saliba Sarsar
Dan Bar-On had a story about how he learned to see
things through Palestinian eyes. An Israeli Jew, born in Haifa to refugees who
had left Nazi Germany in 1933, Dan was a psychology professor at Ben-Gurion
University of the Negev, and he had long been interested in seeing his nation
live in peace with its Palestinian neighbors. At a certain point back in the
mid-1990s, however, he realized, as he told me in a formal interview I conducted
with him last year, that "I could not live my life in this region without
seeing Palestinians, without feeling their pain."
Unable to tolerate such a situation, he began to watch
the interactions of Jewish and Palestinian Israeli students as they participated
in dialogue workshops under the auspices of BGU's behavioral sciences
department. Over a three-year period, Bar-On observed their encounters through
a one-way mirror. "That was a painful study for me," he told me. But
he felt compelled "to test my own stereotypes about Palestinians."
Bar-On had already made a name for himself with his
studies of the intergenerational after-effects of the Holocaust on the children
and grandchildren of both survivors and Nazi perpetrators. Now, by watching the
Jewish-Palestinian groups, he explained, he saw how it was easier to do
Holocaust-related studies, "because I come from the victim side ... the
good side." When it came to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, "I was
much more involved [and] under the pressure that I belong to the side that
occupies the Palestinians, who prevents them from having their own state, and it was difficult morally for me to be in that
role." While he had no doubt that the Jews had a right to their national
home, he realized that it was essential to find a way to also "accept the
Palestinian need for such a right, and it was not an easy task for me to
understand."
But Dan Bar-On, who died on September 4, at age 69,
did not shrink from the task. And as a consequence of combining his
professional pursuits with his political convictions, he was not only a
psychologist but a peace builder, someone who used his voice and his touch to
help change Israeli society in support of social justice, for both his own
people and the Palestinians.
I first met Dan in 1999, when I invited him to speak
to a New Jersey group of Arab Americans and American Jews working for dialogue
and peaceful coexistence. As a Jerusalemite raised in
Palestinian culture, I was impressed by his empathy, his capacity to listen,
and the depth of his knowledge, not only of history, but also of how to go
beyond victimhood. He always maintained his professional composure, but, as he
explained in his book "Tell Your Life Story," he sometimes felt
"overpowered by unpredictable whirlwinds ... [and had] to work my own way
through in spite of them." In reality, Dan sometimes felt politically
estranged in Israel, "due to the growing political animosity in Israel
toward the Palestinians and toward my own work with them."
Our relationship evolved into joint publications and
co-teaching. In one of our articles, we suggested that, for Israeli Jews and
Palestinians to conduct dialogue, "each national community must
acknowledge and respect the other's painful memory, whether or not it was party
to its creation." Sometimes, in their pain, both peoples have a tendency
to see only their own victimization, a blindness that only serves to perpetuate
the conflict. But we were convinced that "an inclusive act of communication
and faith [would] prepare the way for reconciling the past and for building a
better future, one to which our children and grandchildren are entitled."
To this end, Dan and Palestinian educator Sami Adwan, his co-director in the Peace Research Institute in the
Middle East (PRIME), with the help of Israeli and Palestinian teachers, put
together three sets of booklets in Arabic, Hebrew and English for high school
students. The booklets, published between 2002 and 2007, presented the
narratives of both sides, one next to the other, with a space in between the
two narratives for students to write their own comments. In describing it to
me, he observed that initially, students from one group, in encountering the
story of the other, "usually see it as propaganda. They delegitimize it, they say that their narrative is morally superior."
Being presented with both narratives at the same time, however, "they are
faced with both narratives in a way where they can read both of them, can
compare them, and have to learn to respect the narrative of the other side just
as they respect their own."
In the current political environment, where
expediency, narrow self-interest, and cynicism reign, it behooves Israelis and
Palestinians to find the inner strength, as Dan did, to cross the border and
find a workable solution to what is ailing them. Like it or not, they are
destined to be neighbors forever. The quicker they realize it, the better their
relationship will become. Bottom-up peace builders, leading without power, are urged
to maintain their struggle for peace and to synchronize their plans with
top-down peacemakers. Toward that end, today, hope may mean, as Dan concluded
in "Tell Your Life Story," "giving up the romantic, monolithic
desires of the idealized past in favor of a less perfect but more complex
understanding of the world and ourselves, an understanding that can create new
possibilities for dialogue within our selves, among ourselves within a
collective, and with the Other."
Dr. Saliba Sarsar is
professor of political science and associate vice president for academic
program initiatives at Monmouth University in New Jersey.