LIVING IN FEAR: A 2001 REPORT ON A VISIT TO ISRAEL AND PALESTINE

"I want to kill every Palestinian. I wake up with this thought every morning. This is the only solution" said the 40 year-old Tel Aviv office worker.

"The Final Solution?" I asked.

"Yes, I know it is a terrible thing to say but this is what I’m thinking everyday."

The woman expressed her suppressed anger and despair at one of two five day Buddhist retreats for around 160 people that I was leading at a Kibbutz, an hour north of Tel Aviv late last month (late July, 2001). I had invited participants in the retreat to come to the front of the hall to inquire into anything that affected their lives. In a 40-minute dialogue, the woman and I made a dark journey into her inner world charged with concentrated blame upon a stateless people.

She expressed her thoughts while others suppressed them. Expressed or unexpressed, I reminded the retreatants that such thoughts manifest as pervasive resentment and sudden bursts of rage in the circumstances of daily life. As one participant said after the inquiry session, "Israel is falling apart. We have become a dysfunctional nation. We think things can’t get worse but they do."

Some Israelis cried listening to the session, others sobbed and left the hall – mirroring the feelings of helplessness of ordinary Israelis to change their daily nightmare. Despair and frustration haunt Israel, even among thoughtful people seeking to resolve the crisis. You cannot sit in a restaurant, walk the streets, get on a bus or go to club without thinking about terrorism. I sat having a coffee in a crowded restaurant when two Arab Israelis, one carried a shopping bag, walked in to buy a coffee. Some apprehensive customers watched the man closely when his hand went to his bag.

The Chosen People seem to have chosen a nightmare daily existence as the effect of trying to resolve their problems over The Land through denying the rights of Palestinians. Instead of a wise prophet to guide them out of this wilderness of fear and distrust, the Israelis have Prime Minister Sharon.

VISIT TO NABLUS

Two days after the retreat, Mohammed, a Palestinian taxi driver married to an Israeli Arab, picked me up from the outskirts of Tel Aviv to make the 75 minute drive through the heavily guarded Israeli control points ending on the very edge of the largest Palestinian town of Nablus. The town nestles in a deep valley with a population of around 110,000 and famed throughout the Arab world as a centre of resistance against the Israel military forces.

I first came on my annual visits to Israel in 1992 to teach retreats emphasising ethics, meditation, wisdom and compassion. About three years later, Palestinians and Israelis invited me to facilitate dialogue groups in Nablus. About 15-20 Israelis – doctors, psychologists, lawyers, army officers, students, rabbis etc – met with Palestinians for two or three days, stayed in their homes and discussed their conflicts. We called these meetings "Face to Face" with funding from the Oslo Agreement. Until last October when the current waves of violence and recrimination began, friends in both communities held such dialogue groups with the support of Israeli Dharma teacher, Stephen Fulder. The groups met several times a year in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Participants reported that these meetings changed their lives. Israelis and Palestinians realised they have far more in common than what separates them including a deep love of the land and a desire for this cauldron of fear and mistrust to end. The current re-occupation and control over the Palestinian territories ended the dialogue groups. Yet, during my recent brief 24-hour visit to Nablus, I never heard a word of condemnation of Israelis only of the Israeli government and military occupation.

Our Face to Face meetings took place until 1999 in a large room used as a clinic at the top of a narrow five storey building a few hundred metres from the centre of Nablus. Families with children lived in the rooms below. Meetings began taking place every other month at the clinic and elsewhere in the Palestinian territories. This time I travelled to Nablus alone after my Palestinian hosts secured the approval of the (Palestinian) Governor of Nablus for my visit.

On Tuesday (July 31, 2001), the Israeli military fired several missiles from a helicopter into the same room of the same building killing eight people, including two children standing on the pavement outside waiting for their parents to collect them. Israeli government officials dismissed numerous international protests at such acts of state terrorism.

As Mohammed, a good humoured Palestinian, who kindly drove me into Nablus, we took the road on July 24 past the Jewish Settlement perched near Mount Gerazhim, a holy mountain for a Jewish sect, and then weaved our way down the valley into Nablus for a day-long meeting in a nearby building. Mohammed told the soldiers at the checkpoint that I was a religious teacher visiting as a tourist this holy mountain. It was true. To a degree.

In Nablus, I spent the whole day giving a workshop titled Transformation of Suffering to a group of about 20 Palestinian social workers who visit the homes of families directly affected by the current military occupation. In the space of a year, more than 650 Palestinians have died and 25,000 injured through live and rubber bullet wounds, military attacks, beatings, tear gas as the Israeli military attempt to control the lives of 2,000,000 Palestinians. The death toll for innocent Israeli citizens continues to rise to around 200 victims through acts of terrorism in the state of Israel.

Young social workers - men and women, mostly aged in their 20’s – visit homes in Nablus and surrounding small towns and villages giving comfort, support and advice. Risking their lives as they travel along pathways and tracks to villages, always fearful of running across Israel soldiers, they only have time to spend one hour at a time with a distressed family. They listen daily to such reports as:

The mother whose lost her children following an Israel ground to ground missile attack. .
The father who has gone missing for weeks.
The little girl who bursts into tears every time an Israeli fighter plane races through the skies.
The teenager who wakes up screaming every night and wets his bed.
The families whose homes have been demolished..
The women who walk up to the soldiers daily are begging them to stop the killings.
The mother unable to get urgent hospital treatment in Jerusalem for her little girl suffering with cancer. .

In such a workshop, there is no time for theory, nor time for analysis. There is attention to suffering, traumatic, unresolved and intense suffering. I have only a day to try to give some insight and inspiration to these young people. Elsewhere in a Palestinian village outside Bethlehem, a very short drive from Jerusalem, an Israeli Dharma friend, Neta, lives with her husband. Along with Palestinian women and international peace activists, she risks her life daily pleading with tank commanders and soldiers not to kill, maim or beat up Palestinians, or bulldoze their homes, shops and roads. These courageous people find themselves doing the job that the United Nations Peace Keeping Force should be doing. There are probably more non-violent demonstrations taking place in Palestine than anywhere else in the world.

A month before the Israeli soldiers grabbed Neta, dragged her by her hair along the ground, interrogated her, and twisted her arm up her back until it broke. The officer and soldiers were trying to force to her sign a piece of paper stating that she would not return back into the occupied territories. She refused. Her husband is Palestinian. I telephoned Neta on her mobile phone. "What’s all the background noise? I asked. "We are trying to stop the demolition of Palestinian homes," she yelled down the phone. "Everybody is shouting including the journalists who want us activists to get nearer to the tanks to get better pictures. It’s crazy here."

Meanwhile in Nablus, I placed two chairs in the centre of the room. I said to the group: "Imagine that I am a mother. I was told yesterday that a soldier took careful aim and shot my son dead. I am in grief. I can’t stop crying. I don’t want to live any longer. What are you are going to tell me? How can you help me?"

A beautiful Muslim woman, aged about 22, wearing a long, narrow cut, thin cotton coat and Muslim veil around her face, comes to sit in the chair opposite me. She leans forward and confidently speaks to me gently while my Palestinian translator also speaks in a soft tone. I reply as the mother continuing to share my distress with the social worker. Then I say that I am a 12-year-old boy frozen with fear. What you can you say or do? A young man aged around 27 comes forward to sit in a chair.

After such exchanges, I then give my response in terms of the importance of eye contact, touch, words, tone and the amount of reference to the past, present and future. We work hard together all day with the participants, who took many notes, asked many questions as we discussed the plight of families in grief. I am usually hardened to the world of suffering but during a short break in the session, I had tears in my eyes having listened to one distressingly painful situation after another. I knew the social workers were not exaggerating or giving a distorted picture, not in front of twenty of their colleagues

As these conversations with my Palestinian hosts continue into the night, I can hear gunfire. On the top of the two hills surrounding Nablus stand Israeli military camps used to direct missiles at the homes, offices and cars of suspected terrorists. One Palestinian told me: They can shoot anybody in the town any time they like." The following morning around the time I left Nablus, the Israelis fired five ground to ground missiles killing an alleged Hamas representative, Saleh Darwazeh, 38, as he drove his car in the town.
Despite the nightmare of military occupation, there is a general resilience, even cheerfulness, as well as sense of community, among the Palestinians in Nablus. I walked around the town with my hosts seeing for myself the social life. I didn’t see another Westerner in the town during my brief stay.

One of my hosts in Nablus, the saintly Rawda Basir, a recipient of an Italian peace prize, told me: "At the present time, we cannot use the word ‘peace’ here. We use the word "patience" instead. In the space of nine months all the work of reconciliation between the Israeli and Palestinian community has been destroyed.

"We cannot invite our Israeli friends for dialogue in Nablus. The Israel government has blocked off all contact between Israeli and Palestinian citizens. There are also some very angry people in this town who have their lost their loved ones. We cannot risk inviting our beloved Israeli friends here such as Stephen Fulder. We also cannot go to Israel."

Rawda, who spent eight years in Israel jails as a political activist in the late 1970’s, told me she feels she has only recently recovered from the trauma of the beatings and interrogation from that period. Palestinians agree unanimously that this current occupation is far worse than any period since the formation of the nation of Israel. She added: "We have to be patient. We keep telling each other this. We need patience more than anything else. The moral authority rests with us. We have the right to live our own lives free from such a brutal occupation.

One university lecturer in Nablus said to me: "The Israeli army on our land is terrorising us. So some angry Palestinians will kick back against Israeli citizens."

Sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians, as well as the fears of fellow Israelis, Israeli friends gave me an envelope to pay Mohammed for his petrol and time for the journey from Tel Aviv to Nablus that he took at some risk to himself. I handed over the envelope and said "salaam," then disappeared into my friend’s Tel Aviv home leaving him to drive back to Nablus through the control points.

Twenty minutes later, Mohammed is back hooting on his car horn outside my friend’s home. "Your Israeli friends gave you too much money to give me for your ‘taxi’ to Nablus, " he smiles, and hands me back half of the money in the envelope. Human goodness is still to be found there in both communities. The two communities must build on such goodness.

For further information about the remarkable work of the Israeli Sangha to build bridges for peace and reconciliation between the Israeli and Palestinian community, see www.middleway.org