Cracking the Walls of Hate and Fear

By Joy Pople

"We can break this endless cycle of revenge, retaliation and
punishment; the only way to do it is to listen to the pain of the
other," said Rami Elhanan, an Israeli Jew whose fourteen-year-old
daughter was killed in a suicide attack in Jerusalem.

Jewish Israeli Rami Elhanan of the Bereaved Families Forum lost his 14
year old daughter to a suicide bomber

He and a Palestinian who had lost a brother in the conflict were
speaking on behalf of the Bereaved Families Forum to 120 participants
in the Universal Peace Federation's Middle East Peace Initiative in
Jerusalem April 10-16, 2007.

Dr. Frank Kaufmann of UPF moderates the session on reconciliation

A graphic designer whose family has roots in Jerusalem dating back
seven generations, Rami described the day his daughter Smadir died,
September 4, 1997. When he heard the news of a suicide bombing near
where his daughter and her friends were shopping on Ben-Yehuda Street
in Jerusalem, he went running in the streets and then from hospital to
hospital looking for her. Finally he found her body at the morgue. "It
was a sight and time I will never ever be able to forget, and it
changed my life completely," he said.

He had been a young soldier during the Yom Kippur War in a company
that had eleven tanks at the start of the war and only three at its
close. He lost good friends and ended the war with the determination
to look out after himself. He got married, and he and his wife had
four children. After Smadir's death, their house was filled for seven
days and seven nights with thousands and thousands of people coming to
pay condolences, during the Jewish period of mourning. On the eighth
day he found himself alone facing the decision of what to do with the
sea of anger within himself.

"I'm a Jew. I'm an Israeli. Before anything else, I am a human being,"
Rami said. "There are only two options. The first is the obvious one:
when someone kills your child you want to get angry. Most people
choose the way of hatred and retaliation. But we are people, not
animals; we can think. You ask yourself if killing anyone will bring
her back, if causing pain to anyone will ease your pain."

At first he thought he could go back to his normal life and pretend
that nothing had happened. But life was not normal any more. Then he
met Yitzhak Frankenthal, who co-founded the gatherings of bereaved
families in 1995, after his son Arik was kidnapped and murdered.

Yitzhak invited Rami to come to a meeting, where he saw people he had
long admired, such as Yaacov Guterman, a Holocaust survivor who lost
his son Raz during the war in Lebanon. For the first time in his life
he saw Palestinian bereaved families, and they shook his hand and
cried with him. An old Arab lady had a picture of her six-year-old kid
on her chest.

"I'm not a very religious person," Rami reflected. "I cannot explain
what happened to me that minute nine years ago. I know this: from that
moment on I devote my life to go anywhere to speak to anyone, those
who listen and those who do not want to listen, to convey one simple
truth: we are not doomed. It is not our destiny to keep murdering. If
I am listening to the pain of my brother here, whom I really love like
my own brother, I can expect him to listen to my own pain. We can go
on the long and difficult journey and together we can go to peace. We
put cracks of hope in the wall of hatred and fear. We say that our
blood is the same color. Our pain is the same pain. We paid the
highest price possible. If we can talk to one another, anyone can."

Rami is the son of a Holocaust survivor. As his grandparents were
taken to the ovens in Europe, the free and civilized nations never
lifted a finger. He expressed appreciation for people with open hearts
who come to the Holy Land to listen, learn and work for peace.

The Bereaved Families Forum sends pairs of Jews and Palestinians to
speak in high schools. In Israeli schools, they ask how many students
in their audience had met a Palestinian before, and most of them never
had. In Palestinian schools, the young people tell them they had never
met an Israeli other than a soldier. Through the Bereaved Families
Forum, young people have a new type of encounter. In 2006, they held
meetings in more than 1,000 schools. Students tell them: "You opened a
new way of thinking for us," and "This changed my life." The
organization hosts a call-in radio program in Arabic and Hebrew on All
for Peace Radio and a telephone hotline that gives Jews and
Palestinians an opportunity to talk to each other. In four years, more
than four million phone calls were placed. They also run summer camps
for Israeli and Palestinian teens who have lost family members to
violence.

Aziz Abu Sarah came with Rami to tell his family's story. A fourth-
generation resident of Jerusalem, Aziz is the Palestinian chairman of
the Bereaved Families Forum.

Aziz Abu Sarah a Muslim Palestinian lost his 11 year old brother to
the conflict

"When people come here and spend a few days touring the Holy Land,
they start feeling hopeless," Aziz began. They see how people are
living and don't know any way to make a difference.

"I grew up in Bethany," he explained. "It was a normal childhood, in a
sense, but nothing is normal here. By the time I was seven I had been
shot at. I saw a neighbor killed. If it's not near your home, it's not
so close. When I was nine, soldiers came into our house looking for
something and didn't find it, so they took my older brother. We
finally figured out that he was suspected of throwing stones. He was
beaten during interrogation. They released him, but already his liver
and spleen were damaged. We took him to the hospital where he had
surgery. But a few days later he died."

It was the brother closest in age to him, and they were very close.
Aziz became very angry and very bitter. "I believed it was my duty to
avenge my brother. I got involved very early in politics. I was an
editor of a [Fatah] youth publication in Jerusalem by age sixteen. My
writing was very much like the media you listen to today. It wasn't
anything good. I wanted to leave the country. All the anger and
bitterness makes you empty within."

At age eighteen, he was living in Jerusalem and didn't speak a word of
Hebrew because it was the language of his enemy. He had run away from
every class in Hebrew for two years but finally decided to learn
Hebrew, because he realized that if he wanted to succeed in life he
realized he had to communicate in Hebrew. He went to the school where
immigrants study Hebrew.

Previously, Aziz's only encounter with the other side was with
soldiers or settlers. In that class, he got to meet the other side.
"In this conflict," he explained, "people demonize the other side. If
you demonize the other, you don't feel bad when they are killed.
That's how a lot of people grow up. In the class the teacher was nice
to me. The students were nice to me. They looked the same as me; they
wanted to be my friends, and it made no sense of me. If you are sure
of something all your life, it's very unsettling. It was very
redeeming and very refreshing to see that we are all human beings."

He learned that he has the power of choice in his life. "Just because
someone chose to kill my brother and act in a way that was very
inhumane, I didn't have to choose that. I grew up believing that I
didn't have a choice. So many people here don't believe they have a
choice."

When he makes presentations in classrooms Aziz challenges the young
people. They think that if someone bombs them, they have to bomb back.
They don't understand the alternatives they have. One side wants to
kill all the Arabs. One side wants to throw all the Jews into the sea.

"Israelis want security, but the only way you can get what you want is
to help others get what they want. We do a lot of dialogue work. We
say we lost those who are close to us. We put our hatred and anger
behind us. Rami is one of my closest friends. I think it is kind of
ironic that a Palestinian can say an Israeli is one of my closest
friends. If I'm in trouble, this is the one I call, and he has to help
me out. We show people it is possible. If Rami and I can call each
other brothers, anybody can."

Aziz co-hosts a show on All For Peace Radio; he also runs an
organization aimed at empowering Palestinian youth.

Joy Pople is Assistant Communications Director of the Universal Peace
Federation