Palestinians,
Jews called to
creatively
"share space, defy the wall"
Thursday, 04 December 2008
Today's
"impossible" challenges require our unprecedented compassion and
creativity.
Problems are opportunities to be creative.
"There are two ways of being creative.
"One can sing and dance.
"Or one can create an environment in which
singers and dancers flourish."
Warren G. Bennis
Citizens
are creating theater.
Playback Theater builds bridges for Jews, Arabs
Published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - 25 October 2008
http://postgazette.com/pg/08299/922644-42.stm
A dozen young Israeli Jews and
Arabs have worked on interfaith coexistence through theater.
The participants, who ranged in age
from 22 to 35, were students or professionals in the fields of acting,
photography, law, visual art, music and stand-up comedy.
Among them were seven Jews, three
Muslims and two Christians.
Citizens
are inventing comedy.
Comedy helps highlight peace issues
Published in CM Life - 13 February 2008 - Central Michigan
University
Stand Up for Peace, an event held
in Hotung on Sunday night, was a stand-up comedy show which featured Scott
Blakeman, a Jewish-American comedian, and Dean Obediallah, a Palestinian-American
comedian.
Both used comedy in order to bring
together Jews and Arabs and discuss solutions for peace in the Middle East by
promoting conversation.
More about Standup For Peace
is at http://standupforpeace.com/ .
And there
is film, and this call for global creativity.
SHARE YOUR STORY: My Culture + Your Culture
Online Video Contest
http://connectcontest.state.gov/
WHO: Age 14+ years international citizens
WHEN: Dec. 1, 2008 - Jan. 26, 2009
WHAT: Submit you original video (up to 3 min - 100 MB
or less)
SUBJECT: Personal stories, thoughts, or creative
themes about cross-cultural communication leading to new connections,
understanding, creativity, and community.
PRIZES: Top winners receive free trip to 2-week
international exchange program.
SPONSOR:
ExchangesConnect of the U.S. Department of State.
Also, creativity
and innovation with language - words we use every day - can matter.
About the Holy Land, we automatically - nearly without
thinking - begin speaking about "the conflict" or "the
solution."
What if we began talking about "the
relationship" instead?
How can new language help change our perceptions,
even our visions?
What if we spoke and acted "as if"?
Turning single events into sustained relationships
and creativity is what life asks of us now.
For the Middle East public peace process, CNN's
senior staff discovered an example of real-life engagement and creativity,
wishing to "post the proof."
Jews, Palestinians engaging and creating
Anderson Cooper 360 blog (AC360) - 16 October 2008
http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2008/10/16/palestinians-jews-engaging-and-creating/
Today, Common Ground News Service -
of Search for Common Ground in the Middle - has just posted perhaps the most
definitive-yet writing to implore citizen face-to-face engagement to
transcend physical and psychological walls that keep us apart and inhibit us
from coming together as the long-lost relatives that we are.
Bound by DNA.
So similar under the skin, in our souls.
Longing, not only as cousins or siblings, but with
the passion of twins to rediscover the other with unspeakable joy.
Thank you, Professor Mohammed Abu-Nimer (
AbuNimer@american.edu ) at American University, for fastening into the
literature and academia at its highest our shared destiny.
-
L&L
"I am always doing that which I can not do,
in order that I may learn how to do it."
Pablo
Picasso
Share space, defy the wall
by Mohammed Abu-Nimer
Published 04 December 2008 - Common Ground News Service
http://www.commongroundnews.org/article.php?id=24478&lan=en&sid=0&sp=0&isNew=1
WASHINGTON Arabs and Jews were separated for decades before the separation wall
was built in the West Bank and around Gaza. When former Egyptian president
Anwar Sadat travelled to Israel in 1977, he declared before the Knesset
(parliament) that such separation can only bring devastation and alienation to
Arabs and Jews alike. He came to meet the Israelis in their homes to challenge
their fears.
The physical wall between the West Bank and Israel
reflects how current political leaders and ideologies have deepened the
Israeli-Palestinian moral, mental, physical, economic, and psychological
divides. However, history shows that such divides between enemies in
neighbouring and interdependent geographical areas fail to bring about genuine
peace or stability (e.g. Northern Ireland, South Africa, or Germany).
There are many strategies for reducing the adverse
effects of the wall. In my view, the most important approaches will address
separation by creating more shared Israeli and Palestinian space.
The wall is tragic for Arab-Jewish relations because
it promotes apathy, alienation, detachment, and ignorance in relation to what
is happening on the other sidewhich together form one's own sense of
responsibility to the conflict. The wall opens the door for socialising agents
like politicians, preachers and teachers to sustain images of the enemy as
"other," while ignoring the suffering resulting from the physical and
mental separation.
The short and long-term remedy to separation imposed
by the wall is to mitigate its impacts by meeting face-to-face and constructing
more spaces to encounter the other. It is worth investing in shared spaces for
meetings, as long as the relationships are symmetrical and balanced, and the
participants empowered. Productive shared spaces, such as youth encounters,
economic ventures, environmental initiatives, non-violent advocacy and
protests, should increase people's capacity to be self-critical and perceive
any wrongdoing on their own side, and provide tools and opportunities for
participants to apply the lessons learned, and explore alternatives for a
shared future (for example, a joint youth project that focuses on the negative
impact of the wall with a possibility to engage their respective communities by
arranging visits, sculpturing the wall in their own towns; artists displaying
their work against the wall and against separation in schools, etc.)
New shared spaces from peace encounters and joint
development projects, to farmer exchanges and clergy meetings are a precious
opportunity - a resource that needs to be professionally constructed and
managed to ensure that its participants are nurtured by the encounter, and
empowered to spread the humanising messages within their respective
communities. A summer camp for Palestinian and Israeli high school students
should be treated as a rare and almost sacred space; the various Arab-Jewish
initiatives for peace and dialogue have an historic role to play in creatively
constructing more spaces for shared meetings in which the realities of the
separation wall are challenged and not perpetuated.
The various walls that politicians have erected
between Israelis and Palestinians (symbolic and actual) have forced many into a
siege mentality. For Israelis, the siege mentality takes hold when they feel
they must calculate every move they make when travelling overseas. It does not
help that they are restricted from travelling beyond their immediate borders to
neighbouring countries and it prevents them from knowing how Palestinian
counterparts think and live.
The Palestinian siege mentality is reinforced by their
physical imprisonment by a wall in their own towns, by military checkpoints,
and by limited access to the Israeli narrative. In fact, the siege mentality is
so strong that many Palestinians are surprised by the acts of solidarity groups
in Israel.
These shared spaces are able to demystify the
monstrous image of the other, offering the only guarantee that future
Palestinian and Israeli generations will not grow in a reality of avoidance and
denial, but will instead have the opportunity to re-humanise each other.
Israeli youth will no longer be able to say we did not know; and Palestinian
youth will no longer be able to say we can't do anything. They will both say,
we are trying.
The walls around Gaza should serve as an example of what
Palestinians and Israelis can expect in the West Bank if they don't actively
seek to transcend their separation: escalating violence and dehumanisation of
Gazans and Hamas by the outside world, more internal Palestinian fighting, and
continuous threats to Israel's southern borders.
The more Israelis and Palestinians create shared
spaces and meetings, the less likely people on both sides will flock behind
leaders who propagate radical solutions and preach superiority of one side over
the other. Arabs and Jews who are fighting the walls and social separations
need to creatively break the fear of living side-by-side by sending a
consistent message to their communities. The message should explain that a
genuine mutual recognition and implementation of each others rights for a
sovereign, equal, and independent state are the only security guarantees for
both peoples.
* Mohammed Abu-Nimer is the Director of the Peacebuilding and Development
Institute at American University. He is an expert on conflict resolution and
dialogue for peace, focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.