After Yuval Roth’s brother, a reserve solider, was kidnapped and murdered by Palestinians in the southern Gaza Strip in 1993, Roth joined the Parents Circle—Families Forum, an Israeli-Palestinian organization for families bereaved by conflict, created by Yitzhak Frankenthal, a religious bereaved father, who believes that reconciliation between individuals and peoples is possible and a prerequisite to achieving a sustainable peace.
One day, a Palestinian member of the group asked Roth to drive his sick brother to treatment at an Israeli hospital, from one of the 11 checkpoints separating Israel and Palestine. Roth recognized it as a further step of reconciliation instead of revenge — a Derech Hachlama, a Road to Recovery. As his phone number began to circulate more and more especially among Palestinian parents struggling to bring their children on checkpoint-to-hospital trips —some daily and even yearly, such as for dialysis and cancer care— Roth searched for volunteers to join him. And found them.
Word of their service spread further — in 2010 Leonard Cohen sent a donation that allowed Roth to create a formal nonprofit organization of even more volunteers “For Peace and Reconciliation - Humanity Before Politics”.
Somewhere along the way, there was a time
a uniformed Israeli officer got lost on his way and ended up by mistake in Jenin. The street there started crowding around him, and there was a lynching atmosphere,” recounts Yuval Roth.
“The Palestinian police turned him over to Israeli hands. When the incident was over, the Palestinian officer who did so called me, and told me he did it for me – because a year earlier I drove his brother to [Haifa’s Rambam hospital].
Today, some 900 RoadToRecovery volunteers drive about 150 seriously ill Palestinian adults, youngsters and babies a day to treatment all around Israel and back again. Roth himself, a master woodworker and professional juggler, continues to be awed that so many are willing to drop everything and drive to checkpoints or treatment locales at any unearthly hours needed. Although the Palestinian Authority pays for the treatment, most patients would be unable to reach it because of cab costs for which they simply do not have the money over and over again.
In summers, beside treatment transportation, RoadToRecovery arranges day-trips to the beach of about 200 patients and their families at a time, carefree compared to the stressed atmosphere inevitable with serious medical care.
RoadToRecovery’s West Bank coordinator, Naeem Al-Baeda, a construction worker, originally met the Israelis in seeking daily transportation to a Tel Aviv hospital for a baby relatve of his. At first,
“I couldn’t believe it until I saw it with my own eyes. I immediately liked this activity, this deed, the whole thing, and have volunteered ever since,” he recounts. “I began being approached by people I didn’t know, but I couldn’t say no to a cancer patient. Slowly I ended up in a situation where I’m coordinating the entire West Bank.”
His own volunteerism comes at no small cost: he lost jobs at several workplaces because of being on the phone constantly, and was questioned by the Palestinian Authority for clarification about his activities, since anything resembling normalization of ties with Israelis is looked upon askance. Then at home after work, handling 20 to 30 phone calls each evening put his wife and children through enough familial sacrifice that it nearly caused divorce, but the message of this Arab-Israeli personal cooperation for Palestinians in need is carrying through.
“The main message is the encounter itself. Getting to know one another. These are two peoples who don’t meet and who hate each other without knowing, without meeting,” Al-Baeda says. “We live in the same land, so small, so beautiful, and we need to look out for it and for the future of our children.”
“The encounter itself, we call it ‘peace for an hour.’ And you really feel that from the very first encounter,” he says.
Road to Recovery recently won the Institute of of International Education‘s 15th annual Victor J. Goldberg Prize for Peace in the Middle East. The $10,000 prize recognizes courageous and compassionate work being carried out jointly by an Israeli Jew and an Arab Muslim, whether a citizen of Israel or not. “While there is no magic solution, one positive force may be to encourage people to live and work together at the grass roots, learning to trust and depend on one another for their common good.”
[Last years recipients for the 14th annual prize were three pairs of Jewish Israelis and Muslim Arabs working to reduce tensions and advance peace: Roie Ravitsky and Raed Badir for their Mosaica Religious Peace Initiative, Dor Dayan and Shadi Khatib for Middle East Peace Players Tamra/Naharia's All-Star team, and Harb Amara and Dr. Nava Sonnenschein won for Change Agents: Jewish and Palestinian Professionals. Photos and information about the work of years of recipients are at this link.]
As a 15-year-old in 1948 Chicago, Vic Goldberg lived among immigrants with numbers on their forearms, drawing him to the idea of a new nation to be a safe place for Jews and embodying the moral and cultural values with which he was raised. Witnessing the decades of ongoing strife, as he worked for and later retired from IBM, and became an IIE trustee, he came to believe that individual courage and compassion are the key to peace. So in 2005 he created and endowed the prize to encourage and support those qualities at person-to-person level.
In 2010, Canadian writer/singer Leonard Cohen read an article about Rambam Hospital that mentioned the voluntters ferrying Palestinian patients back and forth from hospital, with familiarity and empathy between people on opposite, feuding sides of a border.
War is an enduring theme of Cohen's work that—in his earlier songs and early life—he approached ambivalently. Challenged in 1974 over his serious demeanor in concerts and the military salutes he ended them with, Cohen remarked, "I sing serious songs, and I'm serious onstage because I couldn't do it any other way ... I don't consider myself a civilian. I consider myself a soldier, and that's the way soldiers salute."[137]
Deeply moved by encounters with Israeli and Arab soldiers, he left the country to write "Lover Lover Lover". This song has been interpreted as a personal renunciation of armed conflict, and ends with the hope his song will serve a listener as "a shield against the enemy". He would later remark, "'Lover, Lover, Lover' was born over there; the whole world has its eyes riveted on this tragic and complex conflict. Then again, I am faithful to certain ideas, inevitably. I hope that those of which I am in favour will gain."[139]
Further international recognition came when Roth was selected as one of CNN TV network’s 2011 “Heroes”. In making the donation that equipped Roth and Al-Baeda and their colleagues to expand their services, Cohen must have been thinking in 2010 as Goldberg did after him, awarding further support:
“These two men did not accept the status quo. They decided they were going to solve a problem and they solved it by doing it together.”
Al-Baeda believes it’s many more than themselves alone, more even than their organization of volunteers and the hundreds upon hundreds of families who share together the hour of peace in every trip for care:
“I’d like to say that the Palestinian people and the Israeli people are ready and capable and can very easily live as neighbors and as good friends,” he says. “We really wish for it and don’t want anything bad to happen to Israelis or to us … we can all live [here]; there’s room for everyone.”
More photos here.
For another report on not waiting for politics, Gaza Woman Engineer Majd Mashharawi’s Three Inventions the world needs, including US.