Dancing
and lunching -- SIDE BY SIDE with your enemy
Wednesday, 13 June 2010
"It is the
future of the children that should spur both sides toward peace."
~ Izzeldin
Abuelaish
in I SHALL NOT HATE
"How can we
have peace if we dont build relationships?"
~ Ikenna Ezeibe - Abuja, Nigeria
in DIALOGUE IN NIGERIA: Muslims &
Christians Creating Their Future
"Life is not
about waiting for the storm to pass.
It's about
learning how to dance in the rain!"
~ Anonymous
Music
DANCING IN JAFFA -- http://www.dancinginjaffa.com
-- is a film that explores how Israeli Jews and Palestinians, living uneasily
side-by-side, learn to trust and dance with one another.
10-year-old students ascend from reluctant
participants toward learning to trust and dance in harmony with one another.
Reflecting real life, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian
youth learn to dance, adapt to their partners, handle the challenges of
competition, and begin to trust one another.
At the same time, they successfully cope with
daily inter-familial conflicts, mixed religious backgrounds, displacement,
gentrification, and their personal allegiances.
Dancing
in Jaffa
4 min trailer - January 2012
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEok-5KlAXY
The metaphor of music tells us that "now is a good time to start
thinking of the human enterprise as more like a symphony orchestra and less
like a perpetual battleground."
Thus writes Deb Reich, author of NO MORE ENEMIES --
http://www.nomoreenemies.net --
reminding us how much we can accomplish "by letting go of the enemies
paradigm and engaging everyone's creative energies ('ours' and 'theirs') to
pull together and move us forward."
Enemies
Lee Ziv, young Jewish Israeli thought-leader,
seeks to understand this "enemy" idea that separates us on Earth,
not only in her region.
"Why should I have enemy anyway? Does it give me
any pleasure?
She reflects on the thousands of Muslims, Christians,
and Jews she knows, with lives full of dramas and traumas.
"Many people living in this region of the
Middle East cannot live without the enemy figure.
"If they don't have the 'enemy,' they will
invent one to feel that there is an opposition, someone to blame and prove that
HE is wrong and I am right.
"But why do we need this enemy?
"Where does this quality come from?
"Why do we separate ourselves from the other?
"Does it come from our education, our families,
the media?"
MORE is online at:
We
refuse to be enemies
by Lee Ziv
Published in Other Reality
-- 02 June 2012
http://magazine.other-reality.org/en/2012/1/31/We-refuse-to-be-enemies.htm
Lee Ziv concludes: "I see it as a deep
separation from the source we all come from.
"We we all went through suffering yet carry the
same vision and goal of healing and peace."
"You may want to call me innocent, but this is
what I truly believe in.
"There are no sides, because we are one.
"I refuse to be an enemy."
"Enemy is a result of being I instead of WE.
"Every 'enemy' has a story that wants to be
heard.
"Tell your story and learn to listen to
others."
Stories
"An enemy is
one whose story we have not heard."
~ Ms. Gene Knudsen
Hoffman
Elizabeth Lesser describes a simple way to begin the real dialogue of
hearing all the stories.
Lesser goes to lunch with people who don't agree with
her, and asks good questions to find out what's really in their hearts.
She reminds us to explore two parts of human nature
within us -- "the mystic" and "the warrior" -- that
can be harnessed to elevate the way we treat each other.
Take
"the Other" to lunch
TedTalk -- Elizabeth Lesser -- 11
min video
http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_lesser_take_the_other_to_lunch.html
Finally in print is the definitive model textbook of respecting, learning,
and teaching parallel but sometimes-conflicting narratives -- many stories, all
one story, our story.
This ground-breaking "dual narrative"
history of Israel and Palestine offers a new paradigm for the teaching of
history in conflict and post-conflict situations
Archival background to this heroic book project
links from http://traubman.igc.org/textbooknight.htm
SIDE
BY SIDE: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine
by Sami Adwan,
Dan Bar-On, Eyal Naveh, and
PRIME - Peace Research Institute in the Middle East
The New Press, New York,
2012, 416 pages
http://thenewpress.com/index.php?option=com_title&task=view_title&metaproductid=1838
This textbook is a new educational standard for studying and respecting
two peoples equally.
- - - - -
These and hundreds of other success stories are preserved at http://traubman.igc.org/messages.htm