I have long felt that the biggest problem in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a lack of human respect and decency too many people give to each other. When Palestinians' experience with Israelis is in the form of callous border guards and armed extremist settlers who abuse them, and Israelis' first association with the word "Palestinian" is "terrorist," it's easy to understand why the conflict perpetuates itself.
Some of you know that I read Ha'Aretz Online almost daily. They publish many interesting stories that I consider making a diary about, but many of the stories are depressing. Here is one that shows what sincerity and human sympathy can do to calm anger and engender respect.
As a December 24 article mentions, on December 11, the mosque in the village of Yasuf, near Nablus, was vandalized in an arson attack. Israeli settlers are suspected, though no suspects have yet been identified. The villagers are quite justifiably furious. It is in this atmosphere that two rabbis decided to pay the village a visit. Well, actually:
We expected to meet [Munir Abbushi, the regional governor] at the entrance to the village, where the Israeli army has an outpost, express our sorrow and then leave.
What happened was quite different.
We were taken by surprise when the governor, speaking with Iyad [their taxi driver] in Arabic, told him we could meet him at the mosque.
For a while, the rabbis thought they might be in physical danger:
Iyad stepped out and we followed. As we stood before the mosque, a few workers emerged. Seeing the kippot on our heads and realizing that we were Jewish, they grew obviously agitated. I reached out to shake hands and no one responded. As word quickly spread of our arrival, some 50 people materialized, seemingly out of nowhere. Clearly offended by our presence, some gestured that we remove our kippot. We indicated that we could not.
Things got pretty tense.
Iyad scolded the crowd for being hostile toward the rabbis, who he pointed out had arrived unarmed. The crowd then began to listen to Rabbi Weiss's words to them.
I had begun speaking in English - expressing sympathy and hope for peace - when governor Abbushi finally arrived. Our words were translated into Arabic: Yair and I spoke of the pain we felt at what had occurred. We, members of a people who had too often been the victims of such attacks throughout history, could not but empathize with our Arab brethren.
I don't want to post more of this story, both in order to respect copyright laws and because it is really worth it for all of us to read it and think about a situation in which we could have put our lives in potential danger or otherwise faced hostility for the sake of peace and either did or didn't take the risk. The short version is that once the rabbis had demonstrated their sincerity and humanity to the villagers, the villagers shook their hands.
I don't think for one second that a conflict over shared claims to land that comes down to actual individual houses, olive groves, and grazing land can possibly be solved only through the kind of gesture these two rabbis made. But I just as surely know that treating people callously; dehumanizing them as not deserving of human kindness, respect, and decency; and seeing them not as people who have individual lives, dreams, and thoughts, but only as "THE ENEMY" are ways to perpetuate conflict and inhumanity. Surely, showing that you care about "the other" - not just as a victim at the other end of a gun but as a human being deserving your respect - has to be the first step
We all have something to learn from the initiative these two rabbis took and the response they engendered.