World Peace: The Guide to Reconcile the Children of Abraham

We are all partners in a coalition called the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions, and our demonstration was to be held jointly with the Palestinian Land Defense General Committee. Through the bus microphone, I listened to Meir Margalit explain the action and sketch one chilling scenario.

There must not be violence on our side, but if the army engages in violence, do not separate from the Palestinians. The army will be more brutal to the Palestinians if the soldiers manage to separate us. Suddenly a call came across a mobile phone and Meir took the mike again. They thought they had found refuge in Anata. After driving the narrow unpaved streets of Anata for what seemed an interminable time, w still had to walk 10 minutes down narrow, zig-zagging dirt roads between crowded homes until we came to the outskirts of Anata.

We ran toward the edge of the hill and saw below a beautiful home set into the pastoral valley, one of its walls now crumpled into rubble by a roaring bulldozer; a family and neighbors sobbing nearby; and a unit of Israeli soldiers preventing anyone else from approaching.

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We surged down the hill in our small group until the soldiers blocked our progress with their guns and bodies. There were scuffles trying to get past them, but more soldiers joined the barricade. Naomi Chazan who was with us demanded to see the order proclaiming this a "closed military zone", as the soldiers claimed, and after several long minutes the officer complied. Who knows if the order was genuine or invented at the last minute?

But the guns were real.

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So there we stood on the side of the hill and watched with an unbearable sense of helplessness as the "civil" administration's bulldozer took the house apart wall by wall. He drove through the front garden with a profusion of flowers and a lemon tree and slammed the front door as if he were God Almighty. Backing away, he slammed again until the entire front was shattered and dangling from metal rods. Then he came from every side, slamming and crashing his shovel against the walls. Finally he lifted off the roof, barely suspended, and sent it crashing below. When that was done, he went around the back of the house and crashed through all the fruit trees, including a small olive stand.

He saw a water tank on a platform and knocked that over, the tank tumbling down and a cascade of water drenching the trees now uprooted and broken. He saw two more tanks nearby and knocked those over as well. I have never seen anyone in the Middle East deliberately waste so much water. Then he noticed a shack in the corner of the yard and he churned over to that, his cleated treads grinding and squealing over the rubble he had to climb over.

The shack was an easy swipe for his shovel, and we were surprised to see two doves fly out, one white and one black, frightened out of their wits. They flapped their wings briefly and landed not far from their former home. All the while, a crowd of Palestinian neighbors and young men were gathering behind us on the mountain crest, cat-calling and jeering. From our Israeli group, many engaged the soldiers in challenges: Every single soldier, from the high commander to the lowest GI responded the same way: But nothing we could think to say stopped the roar of devastation.

By then I had managed to move down past the soldiers and was with the family outside their former home. One woman was sobbing and I put my arms around her. When I began to cry too, she put her arms around me. A weeping girl joined us and we both encircled her with our arms. I later learned that this was year-old Lena and this house had once been hers. Then suddenly, gunshots rang out. Some of the young Palestinian men had begun throwing stones — from a very great distance, I note — and Israeli soldiers retaliated by opening fire and running up the hill after them.

The soldiers were shooting as they ran, setting off their guns like the wild west. I saw the commander and told him that this was illegal, a clear violation of the "open fire regulations" of the Israeli army, which stipulate that a soldier's life be in danger before he opens fire. I demanded repeatedly that he tell the soldiers to stop.

The commander shrugged and didn't bother answering. After 10 minutes or so, the shooting stopped. Amazingly, no "stray" bullets had hit any of our group, although the Palestinians, as usual, were not so lucky. A man approached the crowd of neighbors, said a few words, and instantly two women let out piercing shrieks and tore up the hill, running at top speed. The son of one of them had been hit by a bullet. I don't know his condition. Already in the hospital was Arabiyeh, the mother of the family, who had been violently struck by soldiers when she tried to prevent them from destroying her home.

By then there was nothing to do but sift through the rubble. I picked through the rocks and talked to Jeff Halper, who is organizing the program to "adopt" Palestinian families whose homes are slated for demolition. Jeff had sat in the living room of this home last week, now a pile of jagged concrete slabs, hearing Salim and Arabiyeh talk about the problem of Palestinians not being issued construction permits.

Now there are 6 children without tv, toys, books, diapers, bottles, or a place to lay their heads. Instead, they remain with the trauma of the Israeli bulldozer turning their home and security into a bottomless pit of hatred for this occupation and the people who carry it out. A lot of us picked up olive branches from the yard as we walked back to the buses.

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Most of the branches, like mine, were crushed by the treads of power run amuck. For the first time, I also noticed the scenery around us. On a nearby mountain — not a distant one, mind you — were the classrooms and amphitheater of the Mount Scopus campus of Hebrew University. Had they looked out their classroom window, the students studying ethics and justice could have had a clear view of the scene of brute power and the trampling of this family's lives. And surrounding everything, on mountains and hilltops to our left, right, and center, were the bright orange rooftops of the settler homes in the Occupied Territories.

The settlers have no problem whatsoever in getting construction permits.

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And no one would dare uproot their olive trees, waste their water, harm their homes, or turn their children out into the streets. This long, sad story must not end here. Our group, the same people and more I hope, will be going back next Friday to begin rebuilding this home. This is a new tradition of non-violent resistance that began a few weeks ago, and is gaining momentum. The Palestinians rebuild, the Israeli army demolishes, and they rebuild again. As one of the neighbors said, "We'll see who lasts longer. Please, please, please use your power to get this to stop.

The messages you have sent are incredibly effective — foreign political leaders have begun to raise the issue of home emolitions with Israeli leaders. Write a brief message to several people — especially the leaders of America and Israel. Tell them that the Israeli demolition of Palestinian homes must be stopped. Say it in the subject line, so they get the point quickly. And circulate this letter to more people. First for the tears of two peoples, Israeli and Palestinian; then for the bitterness of both peoples, tasting ruined lives; and then for the sweetness of two peoples, Palestinian and Israeli.

For the future of both peoples, who must learn not to repeat the sorrows of the past but to create the joys of the future. In the middle of the description, suddenly we heard a burst of fire. I looked up and saw a Jordanian soldier firing from the observation tower. The girls started to take cover as one burst came after another. He had to change a magazine and when he did so, which didn't work, that was the end of it.

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It was a nightmare. I still can't take in what happened here. I said to myself, 'What will happen until help comes? We didn't tell them all the truth. We told them that some are wounded and some of them would not be coming back to us. Within days, King Hussein of Jordan came to visit the seven Israeli families whose children had been killed.

He said to them, "No words can express how I personally feel, how my family feels, how my people feel. We consider this a loss that all of us suffered. I feel that I have lost a child, and I feel that if there is anything in life, it is to insure that all the children enjoy peace and security. I hope you consider me a brother and a member of the family.

Since the bulldozers began scarring the land at Jabal Abu Ghaneim [Har Homa], a tiny tent "city" of about a dozen tents has sprung up on the hillside opposite. For the last couple weeks, hundreds of Palestinians and Israelis have come to this site every day and some have slept there — to protest, express solidarity, and make it clear to one another that this is a struggle that we share.

Neither side can do it alone. Last Thursday yesterday for me , thanks to the wonderful organizing of Rapprochement — a joint Israeli-Palestinian dialogue group that has persisted through the past 9 years — hundreds of children, women, and men from many Israeli and Palestinian peace organizations came together on the hillside to call for the bulldozers to stop. The media were there and the speeches were moving: Representatives of a dozen organizations spoke eloquently about ending the bloodshed, creating a Palestinian state, sharing Jerusalem as a capital, finding a way to live together cooperatively on this land cherished by both peoples.

Their words seemed so clear and compelling as they carried across the valley, a reflection of the spring flowers pushing their way out of the rocky terrain around us. But perhaps the most encouraging part was the children. The organizers had set up swings and slides, and set mattresses down so the children would have softer landings. Soon they were playing hide-'n-seek together "Mommy, count to 10 in Arabic for me"; "Daddy, tell him in Hebrew that it's his turn to hide".

Then it was time to draw pictures of the landscape, and suddenly 50 portraits appeared of the blue skies and green covered hill opposite. The children posed as a group holding their crayoned drawings out in front of them, as the media caught their hopeful perceptions, eclipsing for a moment the harsher political reality behind them. We adults settled into comfortable conversations, enjoying the balmy weather, the repertoire of a Palestinian children's folk dance troupe, camaraderie, and a break from the intensity.

I heard some "un-organized" singing at a distance and went to observe. It was a group of Israeli and Palestinian children, perhaps 8 to 10 years old, sitting on the ground completely mixed up with one another, trying to sing "Heveinu Shalom Aleikhem" together, which the Palestinian children rendered as "Shalom Aleifa".

When that was over, the Palestinian children sang with gusto "Biladi" — "my country" — which has spontaneously become the national anthem of the Palestinians. These children will grow into adulthood creating their own state. It reminded me of the fervor of the Jewish children who helped create their own state of Israel. Too much fervor on both sides to ever extinguish, I thought to myself.

The afternoon continued at that shifting pace — fervor alternating with tranquillity — and then two small groups of women separated themselves — Israelis from Bat Shalom and Palestinians from the adjoining village of Beit Sahur. Together we formed a joint delegation to pay a condolence call at the home of the Salah family, whose son Abdallah had been killed last Saturday by Israeli cross-fire in the territories.

We filed into the room and each woman, in turn, spoke a few quiet words to the mother who sat stonily in the corner. We took seats around the room — by then we were perhaps 40 women there - - and some of the women began to weep. One of them said that the grandparents of the boy were refugees of A man came in and stood at the doorway. He then made a speech that sounded — and he said it was — rehearsed repeatedly in the media over the past five days: He was a good student and going to be an engineer. The floor I built over our heads was for him when he would get married.

One of the women from Bat Shalom said a few words about the sorrow we felt over Abdallah's death, and our prayers that there would be no more violence and bloodshed. That opened a flood of wrath from the mother. Where is the world? Why did King Hussein get down on his knees to ask forgiveness in Israel, but Netanyahu does nothing? He is a dog, the son of a dog, and I would kill him with my bare hands, if I could.

We sat and listened to her unanswerable questions, responded when she allowed us, listened to her unquenchable fury, offered her words and tears, heard her rage, and one of the Israeli women kept her hand on her arm throughout. The mother would not cry among us, as the father had let himself do. When she drew to an end, the women stood up. As we left the home, each of us was handed a glossy picture of Abdallah: He looked like he would have made a fine engineer. The stranger who lives-as-a-stranger [hager hagar] with you shall be as one of your citizens; you shall love her as yourself.

Because this Torah teaches: Four children bring different questions to the Seder table tonight: The angry child asks, "Why should I compromise? If we fail to compromise, we will lose a vision of the future for our children. The naive child asks, "Why can't we just love each other? Unfortunately, too much blood has already been shed on both sides. It takes time to build trust. The frightened child asks, "How can I be safe? This is the question we wrestle with tonight.

But this is a question that goes beyond tonight. For in each one us lives all four children: Each of us bears in our own belly the angry one, the frightened one, the naive one, the wise one. Which of these children shall we bring to birth?

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Only if we can deeply hear all four of them can we truthfully answer the fourth question. Only if we can deeply hear all four of them can we bring to birth a child, a people, that is truly wise. When the midwives Shifrah and Puah Saved the children that Pharaoh ordered them to kill, That was the beginning of the birth-time; When Pharaoh's daughter joined with Miriam To give a second birth to Moses from the waters, She birthed herself anew into God's daughter, Bat-yah, And our people turned to draw ourself toward life. When God became our Midwife And named us Her firstborn, Though we were the smallest and youngest of the peoples, The birthing began; When the waters of the Red Sea broke, We were delivered.

So tonight it is our task to help the Midwife Who tonight is giving birth to two new peoples — For tonight only Hagar can give a new birth to the children of Israel, And only Sarah can give a new birth to the children of Ishmael. Our lives are in each other's hands. No Pharaoh can force us to kill. Tonight we gather on the anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King. He taught us how to act when the path ahead is harsh and dimly lit:.

On the very night before his death, he called to mind the ancient images of freedom from the Narrow Place, of journey toward the Promised Land:. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain.

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And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land. So I'm happy tonight, I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord! It is Isaac speaking. Too long have we crossed swords over Sinai, Too long has there been desert between us, Where nothing grows. Let there be peace. One night, At the foot of Sabbath, I waited for you.

You said you would come to Jerusalem, And meet me face to face. I watched you, Ishmael, As you rode above the desert sand, On a strange, colossal camel, With smoking hooves, Across a cloudless sky. And I ran to meet you, And held out both my hands.

I have waited for this moment Countless generations. We wept and embraced. O Ishmael, How long shall we wage war with one another? How long must there be rancor and mistrust? How much more blood must still be spilled Before the final epic? English Choose a language for shopping. Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers. Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web. AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally. Amazon Inspire Digital Educational Resources.

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