POETRY AND PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Sarah Zale

“Why did you go to Israel and Palestine? To Turkey?” is the most common question asked following my three-week trip in November. When I left, I thought I knew. I had met Souliman al-Khatib on Bainbridge Island (WA), the first Palestinian to whom I ever really listened. He served ten years in an Israeli prison for his role in the stabbing of two Israeli soldiers. Now he was touring the United States to talk about hope and the value of compassionate listening . In prison, he learned Hebrew (as well as English): “They gave me an education.” When he was released, he co-founded Combatants for Peace, Palestinians and Jews who teach how to find solutions to their problems without violence. If this Arab could feel hope, could imagine a solution to the Arab-Jew conflict, I wanted to listen. Nothing, I thought from where I sat, could be more despairing than this particular Middle East conflict.

From “where I sat,” I knew I understood little about the Middle East. The U.S. media related nothing about peace groups in Israel and Palestine. I decided to see for myself with the Compassionate Listening Project.

Managing this trip financially would not be easy for this poet, this adjunct faculty writing instructor. I turned, in a way I never had before, to my community, believing that perhaps many people felt as I did about peace and hope. Would it help if I told them I was a poet? That I planned to bring back the poetic words of Arabs and Jews? Perhaps. Deep down, I believe the general public has a sense of poetry as a place we all want to be. One person from my community sent a donation within a card, a quote by Freud on the front: “Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me.”

Weeks preceding the trip, I examined closely my reasons for making this difficult and potentially dangerous journey. Was it because I am struggling with my own poetry to move away from postmodern angst and despair into a new millennium era of hope, to a creative mindfulness of praise, as Ilya Kaminsky would say? Was it because I stand on the corner of Washington and Sequim Ave. with the Women in Black and count the people who try so hard not to see us? Or was it because I knew John Barr's essay in Poetry Magazine (Sept. 2006) infuriated me in part because I had been thinking the same thing: “When poets come to pay as much attention to how they live as to what they write, that may mark one new beginning for poetry . . . Poets should live broadly, then write boldly.” Barr quotes Derek Walcott, the West Indian poet who won the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature: “To change your language, you must change your life.”

As a poet of witness, I did wish to do something to truly change my life. And when I returned home, I hoped the words I brought—my own poems and those of others—might play a role in changing the lives of people in my community.

Well past fifty, I shed my first tear
for an Arab. Souliman al-Khatib
was not looking for tears. I do not know
where he was looking. My mirror says
it was not my face, not my dress
nor sweater. It was not my hands
nor the way I sat, listening. Two days
have passed. He says he saw my words.
His eyes are finer than mine. I see
no words. I am looking.

My bags are packed. Aliyah?
Yes and no. To Israel, to Palestine .
Bring an extra suitcase for your words,
he said. But beware and rejoice—
they may or may not pass the checkpoints,
pass customs. The wounded who sit
with the loneliness of a wall can see your words.
They will feel a duty to take them.

__

Upon my immediate return, I had no idea how I had changed—or if I had at all. Other matters held my focus: (1) the poems flooding my email from Israel, Palestine, and Turkey, (2) the peace education resources I had collected (and continue to collect), and (3) my own taking form. I was still basking in the intense warmth of my perception that hundreds of people in the Middle East and elsewhere are working for peace. More people than I ever imagined were saying, “Enough!”

Maha El-Taji was our Arabic translator and “Palestinian” co-leader with American-Jew Leah Green, founder of The Compassionate-Listening Project (CLP). As a result of the Arab diaspora in 1948, Maha's parents fled from Palestine to Lebanon and then Libya, where Maha was born. She grew up hating Jews “for taking our land.” Not so many years ago, in Haifa, at a Buddhist sangha, she shared her story. A Jewish girl teared up and said, “I'm afraid that what happened to Maha's family will happen to mine.” This was the beginning that led Maha to working for peace and offering herself, as she did on our trip, to “partner” herself in spirit with such people as Israeli Shani Werner, a former Zionist, present peace-activist, and one of the first female conscientious objectors to the draft. Maha's words to Shani modeled a guideline of CLP to “hold both sides.”

Did the CLP delegation have an isolated experience, or may I truly believe that the people in Israel and Palestine are ready for peace? To keep hold of my experience, I must remember those I met. People like Ibrahim Issa, director of The Hope Flowers al-Amal School ( amal means “hope”) in Bethlehem, Palestine. The mission of the school is to teach the importance of coexistence and democracy — along with Arabic, English and Hebrew. The PLO blew up the school in 1992; Issa rebuilt. Since the 2000 Intifada, no Israelis are allowed to attend the school. In 2002, Israeli forces arrested Issa and accused him of giving refuge to a terrorist (i.e. a renter at Issa's residence). Issa pleaded his innocence. He was tortured five days, and then released with an apology for the partial demolition of his home. Friends encouraged him to seek retribution. Issa said, “I need to practice forgiveness.” In 2004, Israeli soldiers asked him, “Why do peace education?” Issa replied, “There is no other choice.”

I remember Hagit Ra'anan, an Israeli peacemaker, her husband killed in Beirut by Palestinians. She believes that if we can heal ourselves and heal individuals around us, there is a chance for healing between nations. She says, “I don't think of myself as a ‘peacemaker.' I don't think you can ‘make' peace. It's already here. I just need to be that peace.” Eighty peace poles around the country are of her creation. She served as our guide to Metullah and the “Good Fence” on the Lebanon border, and then to the town of Kiryat Shmona, which suffered the attack of 300 shells per day during the recent war with the Hezbollah of Lebanon. Hagit introduced us to Rhonda Tsipar, a New Jersey-born Jew and director of a school for young children, mother of two Israeli sons who served in the recent war. Rhonda turned her school into a bomb shelter for the Tzfat Hospital, which was bombed in July; she offered Palestinians care and refuge in her school.

The next stop with Hagit was Rosh Pina, center of Creativity for Peace (and yoga) and the home of Anael Harpez, where women, both Jewish and Palestinian, come together in spiritual support. Following the passionate sharing by many of the women, a member of our coalition, Frieda Furman, said, “Thank you for sharing. We've been learning how to hold both sides without judgment. Thank you for giving us a model for how it's done.”

On November 11, the two-year anniversary of Yasser Arafat's death, Hamas member and Mayor of Beit Ommar, Farhan Alqam, with a large photograph of Arafat framed above his head, spoke to our group. He said, “I understand you could have come on a tourist trip for leisure and relaxation, but you have come to listen to the problems and concerns of my country. That makes me want to share from my heart in a deep way.” In Mayor Farhan Alqam, I found a poet. He said, “A drop of water, soft as it is, will make a dent in even the hardest of things. This is the power in the water: to make change and bring justice. This is the hope of my people.”

I remember the dozens of others I spoke to, listened to, in Israel and Palestine: my host family in Al-Arroub Refugee Camp; Israeli soldiers who dared talk to me; shopkeepers; the Michigan Peace Team, protesting the Wall at Bi'lin; Donna Hicks and former NPR journalist Hisham Sharabati of the Christian Peacemaker Team; Dr. Muhammad Essawi, President of Al-Qasemi Academy for Jews and Arabs, who dreams of “taking the model to the whole world”; poet Wagee Burnot, who starred in and wrote poetry for a film about Bi'lin's weekly protests against the Wall; poet Taha Muhammad Ali of Nazareth; and the Israeli-Jew, Dalia (Eshkenazi) Landau, a main character in Sandy Tolan's bestselling book The Lemon Tree. When host of our group one Shabbat, she informed us her father decided to return their home in Ramla to the Khairis, the Palestinian family that owned it before the Arab diaspora in 1948. In demonstration of her personal commitment to mend the break between Jews and Arabs, Dalia autographed a copy of The Lemon Tree for Maha's father: I hope you can forgive us.

In Antalya, Turkey, attended by seven of our CLP delegation, 300 individuals working internationally in peace education internationally met for four days to exchange ideas about how to create a culture of peace. I collected poems and resources, and spoke with poet Ada Aharoni, who has been nominated for a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Was it all lovely? All easy? Was I never in danger? Never afraid? Absolutely not. Yet it is the people being peace, as Thich Nhat Hanh would say, and working for peace that we hear too little about.

___

Find out how you can help:

Al-Arroub Palestinian Refugee Camp, Jamil Roshdy: jroshdy@palnet.com

Al-Qasemi Academy : www.qsm.ac.il

Anael Harpez, heartpaz@netvision.net.il

Christian Peacemaker Teams: www.cpt.org

Dalia Landau: www.openhouse.org.il

Hagit Ra'anan; Bridges of Peace : www.bridgesofpeace.org

Hope Flowers School : www.hope-flowers.org

Michigan Peace Team (international): www.michiganpeaceteam.org/mpt/archives/international-peace-teams/index

Plant Trees for Peace: www.earthstewards.org

Wi'am, Palestinian Conflict Resolution Center : www.planet.edu/~alaslah

[ Sarah Zale teaches writing at Peninsula College and facilitates the online workshop Poetry First! from her website (www.sarahwrite.com). She is Editor of the Pitkin Review at Goddard College ..]

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