Sitting Down for Peace

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Sitting Down for Peace

I went with a few friends of mine to Friday night
services. My friends were Jewish and Muslim, US born
and migrant. After services a friend
of mine (Israeli) came up to me and said,
"I need to talk to you."

We sat down and she told me with so much pain that she
wanted to do something; that she wanted to plan some
sort of event, rally, something that brought
together everyone, that truly was about peace. I
stopped for a long minute. I said "I don't think
that's as easy as it seems." By the end of the night,
I realized perhaps it is.

Peace for me is really about understanding. As a
Jewish person, I grew up indoctrinated with Zionist
propaganda. I wrote in a childhood essay that I found
recently "It was great to hear the speech and I
understand how Israel is the land given to Jews by
God and the Arabs should leave."

For me coming to a point where I can understand what
peace means in the Middle East, has been about
understanding that the creation of Israel was done
under a false pretense. As I understand God she
or he does not have any intention for one type of
person or being living on any land to the exclusion of
another. I can see little difference in a people
saying only white people with blue eyes are
entitled to live on a land, all others must leave; to
a people saying only people of a certain faith are
entitled to live on a land, all others must leave.

It is clear to me that the idea of "homeland" that is
only for me and not for you is far from God or
spirituality, not only because of the pain and
suffering I see in the people of Palestine and
Lebanon, but because of the anger and violence and
suffering I see in my Israeli friends as they try to
justify their right to power and land above another.

So, what is the solution? The land now called Israel
and Palestine is now lived upon by Jewish people and
Palestinian people as it has been for a long part of
history. Zionist people living there are scared that
if they stop living with the extraordinary amount of
violence that they use that they will not be able to
live.

My answer is that we need to respect
the history of the creation of Israel, that the land
was the home to someone else when we started to
migrate there in such massive numbers. We cannot use
the Pogroms or the Holocaust as an excuse to expel
another group from their land, to cause them to live
in refuge camps, seperate them from their families and
livelihoods with wall, or to deem them terrorists for
fighting back in desperation. If I was to go through
enormous struggle in my life, it would not give me the
right to force someone out of their home, even if I
was scared and landless. Just as the Holocaust does
not give us, as Jews, the right to take the homes of
the Palestinian people, even if we lived there a long
time ago.

What we can do is to take a step back and apologize.
We must say, "we have joined you on this land that our
ancestors have also lived upon and shared with your
ancestors. We have faced many struggles through our
history as a people, as have you. We are looking now
to find a way to share the land with you, and BECAUSE
WE HAVE WRONGED YOU SO TERRIBLY IN TAKING THIS LAND
AND FORCING YOU INTO EXILE, TO DEATH AND TO POVERTY
that are willing to make some major sacrifices to the
way we identify with the land to allow us to live
together in peace. We are willing to be truly humble
in our apology. This means letting go of the idea of
Zionism as it says the land can only be ours. It
means finding a home in the land in a way where we are
truly on a spiritual path to sit down with others in
peace.

We cannot argue over borders and titles, over walls
and guns, until we come to an understanding together.
We can only come to an understanding if each one of us
is willing to be humble. If more of us sit down,
perhaps we will find a solution. My words are of
course, just some words; it is only if we sit down
will we find a solution.

Last night four of us sat down on the street corner.
By the end of the night, hours later, a group of 14
of us sat together. Israeli and Muslim, migrant and US
born and together we took a small step for peace.
From little things, sometimes big things grow.

Jonah Zern
Program Committee Coordinator, Education Not
Incarceration (http://www.ednotinc.org)

"Not by might and not by power, but by spirit alone,
shall we all live in peace." Jewish folk song