Yesterday I participated in a meeting with Faten, a Christian Palestinian woman living in Bethlehem. The meeting was organized by Gilda Bartel from Das Goetheanum magazine. It all started a couple of months ago when I sent my poem Israel to the editorial team of the magazine. Gilda wrote back to me and said that she would like to include it in a short piece she is writing about Faten. She then suggested that the three of us meet each other for a conversation shedding light on the current events and the history that led up to this point from an Israeli, Palestinian and German perspectives. At the time I was visiting my family in Israel and Faten was in Bethlehem. It is somewhat ironic and sad that we were geographically so close to each other yet because of the political reality we could not meet in person as I am not allowed in Bethlehem and she is not allowed in Israel. And so we had to wait for another opportunity. This came about as a total coincidence when Gilda was visiting Berlin and realized that Faten was also there because of a lecture tour she was giving in the region. We met in the house of Bodo von Plato, my former teacher at the Goetheanum and a dear friend, and with two other women who were there as part of a study group on aesthetics.
As I entered everyone was already sitting at a big table on top of which was a collection of pastries, including small brownies which Gilda made herself and which reminded me of the ones my mother used to make when I was young. After very short introductions we dived into deep waters: Faten was asked if she could explain the relationship between "average" Palestinians and Hamas. It is one of many questions that in order to give a meaningful answer one must trace their steps backward ad infinitum. And so she did, describing in great detail and for well over an hour the ethnic layers of Israeli society, the connection between Arab and European Jews, the Oslo accords and the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, the disengagement from Gaza and the takeover by Hamas, the limited nature of democracy in the West Bank and the dynamics between Jewish settlers their Palestinian neighbours. I felt a strong urge during her speech to stop her, not because I disagreed with the things she was saying but rather because it felt that we were just reinforcing established thought patterns and sinking deeper into mud. Yet something stopped me from doing that, an inner voice which said "now you just listen". And so I did.
By the time she finished some of us were overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information as well as powerless in imagining any way out of this calamity. Gilda and Bodo invited us to think of where all of this external violence meets us on the inside. In my answer I started from the recent killing of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and how Prime Minister Netanyahu said in response that this killing "settles the score with the one responsible for the murder of countless Israelis...". When examining his answer it is clear that the motive for the killing was not a cold analytic one based on security reasons but is rather pure revenge. Taking a step further into this mindset it becomes clear that this revenge was not targeted merely at Nasrallah and does not stop with him. It continues its journey backward in time, revisiting stations like the Second Intifada where it wants to avenge all the Israelis that died in suicide bombings and the Yom Kippur War where it wants to reclaim the illusion of Israeli military supremacy which was then shattered. But it does not stop there either. It goes further into the time of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust where the blood of millions of children separated from their mothers and sent to the gas chambers nourishes its own thirst for blood. And it continues its journey into the deep past through centuries and millennia of antisemitism. Yet this karmic wave of violence and revenge that crushes us at specific moments in history is not unique to the Jewish people. Muslims and Christians know it too when living as minorities. And Africans, and Indigenous people, and the list goes on. This wave is a universal one, enshrined deep within our consciousness, and manifesting itself in unique ways throughout history. Imagining it again, this time not going backward but coming towards me, confronting me with all of its historical weight. Can I face the wave, let it wash over me while staying upright and not collapsing under its weight? Can I decide that this karma stops with me?
I then told of my friend Aviv who helped me so much years ago when I was facing great depression and who is now in Israel trying to organize healing ceremonies for Israelis and Palestinians. And Faten told of her friend Elias from Gush Etzion who is engaged in an initiative to promote the idea of a Jewish-Palestinian federation as a potential solution to the conflict. He started by saying that it is very difficult to "sell" this idea because it is fundamentally based on mutual trust which is direly lacking these days. Indeed, in a news piece which I saw on German national television a few days ago, Israelis and Palestinians were interviewed and asked about their prospects for the future. Their answers were practically identical: the Israelis said that after October 7th they cannot trust Palestinians anymore. And the Palestinians said that after what they did in Gaza they cannot trust Israelis anymore. Perhaps that is the reason why we all gathered here in Berlin – Israelis, Palestinians and Germans – to build the trust that in each side there are still people who are devoted to and willing to work for peace.
At the end of the meeting Faten and I hugged. I believe it was our genuine attention in listening to all she had to say that softened her and enabled all of us to go beyond the political level and meet each other with open hearts. She then took down a pin in the shape of a dove which she was wearing and attached it to my shirt. On Saturday I will be singing together with my choir at a peace concert in the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche. I will be wearing Faten's pin.
Written on October 15, 2023.
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