Several weeks ago, we convened a group of Muslims and Jews in our network to talk about the unrelenting pain we have been experiencing on, before, and after October 7, 2023, when everything that was already so broken in Israel-Palestine became exponentially broken.

It was days after the discovery of six Israeli hostages shot dead just before their captors fled. “I feel like I am mourning for Hersh [Goldberg-Polin]. I feel like I knew him,” said Ryan, who is Muslim. His grief was palpable. Deeply authentic. His words hung heavy in the air.

Then after a breath, he continued with equal weight, “And I can’t help wondering how many Palestinian Hershs have also been killed, along with all of the life and potential that lay ahead for them.”

With that breath, and what came before and after, Ryan modeled the full human compassion that has been counterintuitive for so many over the past 12 months:

Palestinian lives are grievable. Full stop.

Israeli lives are grievable. Full stop.

Full “Yes.” Full “And.”

In the words of Hersh’s mother, Rachel Goldberg-Polin, “The time has come to be human.” She was exhorting negotiators and national leaders on CNN, but this holds true for all of us. As scared, infuriated, and desperate as we may feel right now, we need to remember that our fates and interests are intertwined. If we cannot find one another’s humanity, we risk our collective future.

We have worked together over several decades at NewGround, a Los Angeles-based organization that empowers Muslims and Jews to bridge divides that threaten both our communities’ well-being and our fragile democracy. This past year, we and our staff have convened diverse groups of Angelenos around the most difficult questions of this moment—from “Does the phrase ‘From the River to the Sea’ mean the elimination of Israel—or of Jews?” to “Is Israel committing genocide of Palestinians?”—in a space where holding on to one another’s humanity is possible. Our network includes Jews, Muslims, and at times people from other faith communities, some with deep connections to Israel and Palestine, some without personal connections at all. We know that the conflict in Israel-Palestine is political and that there are always religious overtones to it, and we know that not all Palestinians are Muslim and that not all Israeli citizens are Jewish. Nevertheless, no one in the NewGround network has been left untouched by the impact of the violence there and the polarization here.

And the hardest part has been trying to help even our own people to resist the dehumanization of one group or another. Our brains are wired to homogenize people we perceive as outside our “tribe”—a tendency that increases dramatically in high conflict.

We see how hard it is for some Jews, Israelis, and others to imagine Palestinians as parents who love their children. And how demoralizing it is for Muslims and Palestinians to have to prove their humanity at this most basic level. Muslims find themselves asking questions like, “How can killing 200 Palestinians to rescue four Israelis be justified?”

We see how difficult it is for some Muslims, especially Palestinians, and others deeply concerned for them, to see individual Israelis as anything other than evil aggressors. Jews and Israelis find themselves wondering, “How can you not see mothers taken from children, children taken from parents, people who have been working toward peace killed in homes and fields?”

Interests coming from many directions have been working overtime to convince us that only one group or the other has humanity and value. This is especially difficult terrain to navigate for individuals who have direct personal experience and trauma connected to one side or the other.

In the conversations we convene at NewGround, we strive to create conditions that help people share their pain and perspectives authentically—giving them the resilience to witness the pain of others, who can then, in turn, soften and open themselves to a wider range of perspectives. We pose hard questions where we know there are big differences, then ask people to stand on a spectrum of agreement and disagreement before speaking to why they chose to stand where they did. Or we might do a fishbowl exercise, inviting Muslim and Jewish participants to create two concentric circles, both facing inward. The outer circle listens—not talking—as members of the inner circle—either Muslim or Jewish—speak one-by-one and in discussion, in response to a hot question. When the first conversation concludes, the circles switch places. Afterward, the whole group talks. Working with a heterogenous group of Jews and of Muslims, at times with other faith communities present, ensures that participants can better grasp all that is at stake, rather than remaining in binary thinking.

It takes discipline to process our own pain, create space for our tears to flow instead of suppressing them, and care for the pain of others. It takes humility, especially amidst deep vulnerability, to say, “I don’t always understand, but I know I need to.” We continue to rededicate ourselves to holding tight to values expressed in both traditions: Each life is an entire world, and kindness and justice must walk hand in hand. It’s beyond challenging and yet it is essential.

Truly rehumanizing one another’s people requires recognizing specific lives lived and lost, not merely speaking of a generalized “suffering” of one group. Knowing people’s names and who they might have become in the world. Describing the hell in which people are continuing to live. Understanding that neither of our communities are monoliths.

So we remember the death and life of Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, whose final interview with CNN was broadcast, per his request, only after he was killed on December 7, 2023. In the interview, he described the feelings of despair as a parent powerless to protect his children. Unimaginable calculations such as: “How can you hug your child so as not to scare them with what might feel like a ‘farewell hug’?” “Should we sleep in the same room so that if we die, we die together, or divide into two rooms in case some of the family might survive?”

And we remember the death and life of Israeli peacemaker Vivian Silver, who was killed on October 7. Hiding in her home’s safe room on Kibbutz Be’eri, Vivian—angry at being forced to articulate a one-sided position—argued with a radio interviewer. “If I survive, then we will have a deep and complex conversation about two sides,” she told him. Her son, Yonatan Zeigen, is now engaged in peacebuilding full-time, and recently shared how moved he was to learn that a soup kitchen had been set up in Gaza in his mother’s name because of the relationships she forged with people there.

We are working hard, and against the grain, to expand the capacity for our people—and those beyond our network—to hold all this humanity and all this loss together. It takes courage and strength to look at someone else’s pain when you are in deep pain yourself. Especially when it feels threatening to do so because you know their pain is being used by others to delegitimize your own.

We learned from the late neuroscientist Emile Bruneau that dehumanization builds in the gap between excess empathy for one group, and lack of empathy for the other. His findings on empathy and conflict resolution have helped us understand so much about our work in perspective building and conflict transformation. Unfortunately, at this moment, as we look out into rhetoric and actions in our broader communities, we are seeing much of what was described in his studies bearing out between our larger communities, both in Israel-Palestine and here at home. We are seeing things like triumph and glee at pagers exploding in grocery stores, or calls for all Jews to “go back to Poland.”

We know that the only antidote to this kind of dehumanization is inviting people toward rehumanizing one another. This will not stop the violence right away. But it is part of the calculus of any permanent solution to the conflict. And one powerful form of rehumanization is to grieve all of our people together, as Palestinians and Israelis do every year at a joint memorial ceremony.

In a session earlier in the year, one of our Jewish members, Eli, reminded us of the philosopher Judith Butler’s concept of “grievability.” Butler asks us to be attentive to whose pain, whose humanity is grievable, and whose isn’t. Grievability can shift depending upon the context, but it tends to fall where forces of power are concentrated. Speaking very generally, in mainstream American politics and media, Israeli lives are grievable and Palestinian lives much less so. On “the street” (including lots of social media and alternative spaces), Palestinian lives are grievable and Israeli lives much less so (and there is also a kind of power here, of a different nature). In the 2017 study “The Enemy as Animal,” Bruneau and psychologist Nour Kteily found that even in asymmetrical conflicts, symmetrical dehumanization contributes to prolonging violence.

These critical insights, along with those of civil rights scholar john a. powell, who urges us to “be hard on structures and soft on people,” remind us to acknowledge and address power imbalances and to remember that pain is pain and must also be acknowledged and addressed for us to move forward together. 

So our ask is very simple, yet extremely difficult: Seek out, listen to, and grieve one another’s stories. Even—and especially—when it is the hardest. Resist the way your anger and despair might pull you away from another’s humanity. Even righteous anger has an insatiable appetite; it can rob you of your own humanity and impact the way you become with others, including your loved ones. Re-member one another, and please remember for yourself: A key to stopping the violence permanently is to see beyond the exclusive, “us or them” view the world prefers, and expand our lens to a larger scope of dignity, security, and justice for all.   

The post Why Can’t We Grieve for All the Dead? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, soon to be the first prime minister of Israel, gave the first public reading of Israel’s Declaration of Independence. With an eye toward wooing the powerful United States, the first draft had liberally cribbed from the American declaration, directly invoking “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Revisions, arguments, and more revisions ensued; but Ben-Gurion’s words retained a strongly international flavor, and—strikingly—appealed repeatedly to the then-new United Nations.

Israel’s birth 75 years ago this month followed a long and violent struggle over land and sovereignty. There were cheers in the streets but also, the New York Times reported, the “rumbling of guns” as fighting flared around the region. For Zionists, who gained a state, it was a long-awaited day of celebration. For Arabs, who bitterly opposed the prospect of a Jewish state in their midst, it was the “Nakba,” or catastrophe.

The events took place in the Middle East, but it was a story, mainly, of European colonialism. Tel Aviv, where Ben-Gurion shared the declaration, had been ruled by Britain since 1920. British control of the former Ottoman territory of Palestine stemmed from a post-World War I decision by the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations, to hand the colonies of vanquished states to the victors via a system known as the “mandates.”

It took World War II to force Britain to give up control of the Palestine mandate. And it took the brand-new United Nations, in turn, to create the state of Israel. The story of that process—and its chief architect, the Black American diplomat and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ralph Bunche—is now largely forgotten, but can help us understand the persistence and intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today.

Bunche’s involvement in what he called “the problem of Palestine” grew out of a lifelong commitment to anticolonialism and racial justice. He strongly believed in the right of all peoples to self-determination. But in Palestine, he faced a vexing problem—that of two peoples, both claiming the same land—that challenged his undying belief in the power of reason and cooperation to create peace.

Born in Detroit in 1904, and raised mostly in Los Angeles, Bunche was a very successful student at Thomas Jefferson High School, just south of downtown L.A. After studying at UCLA, where he also played basketball, and then at Harvard, where he earned a PhD in political science, Bunche, barely 25, became a professor at Howard University.

His scholarly specialty was African colonialism—and unlike most of his peers, he studied it on the ground. His dissertation compared how two French West African territories moved toward independence. He found that the mandate system the League had devised rarely made any difference.

Bunche had been teaching at Howard for over a decade when, in 1941, with war raging around the globe, the Roosevelt administration asked him to join what became the Office of Strategic Services (and later the Central Intelligence Agency). Bunche’s task was to help prepare for conflict in an Africa the colonial powers—mainly the Allies—had spent the past half century brutally carving up.

The Africa front swiftly faded in importance, however, and he moved to the State Department, where he helped design what became the United Nations. At first the phrase simply referred to the Allies. But it soon became shorthand for the postwar peace organization the U.S. was proposing, which would recast the international order by creating a novel system of collective security—one much more effective, FDR hoped, than that of the League.

As a staunch opponent of empire, Bunche fought hard to make sure the new U.N. Charter would facilitate independence for the hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa still under foreign domination. Despite his criticism of the mandates, he helped design the U.N. system of “trusteeship,” which updated and improved the League’s system.

At the end of the war, Bunche joined the staff of the new U.N. Shortly after his arrival Britain, exhausted by years of conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, proposed to hand the problem to the U.N. Here was a chance for the new organization to help a colony achieve self-governance. The only question was how. Trygve Lie, the secretary-general of the U.N., viewed Bunche, who had expertise in colonial rule and was a fast learner with political acumen and legendary negotiating prowess, as the best person to address the challenge.

His first task was to lead a “Special Committee on Palestine” in the summer of 1947 to recommend a solution. U.N. leadership stocked the committee with a motley assortment of diplomats drawn from a dozen states. Some were openly anti-Semitic—and even saw the prospect of a Jewish state as a chance to send their own Jewish citizens to Palestine. The U.N. diplomats tried to make sense of the complex situation but often bumbled. One literally fell into the Tomb of Nicodemus. In a letter home to his wife, Ruth, Bunche called them “just about the worst crew I have ever had to deal with.”

The U.N. team toured the region, interviewing leaders and common farmers alike, some of whom were actually Jewish spies in disguise. Jerusalem, full of barbed wire and barricades, was tense and hot. There was intermittent fighting between Arabs and Jews. The only thing the two sides could agree on, Bunche later said, was that “the British must go.”

The U.N. committee’s final report, largely drafted by Bunche, offered two options. The majority of committee members proposed to divide Palestine into two states, Arab and Jewish; the minority to create a single, binational state. In November 1947, the U.N. approved the majority recommendation, partitioning Palestine into “independent Arab and Jewish States” which would come into existence two months after British forces departed, “but in any case not later than 1 October 1948.”

Fighting flared anew in the wake of the momentous decision. Arab states, viewing the U.N. resolution as illegitimate, refused to implement it. Many around the world questioned how—or whether—the land could ever be peacefully divided. But Bunche and his colleagues had cast the die. When Jewish leaders gathered to proclaim Israel’s independence in May of 1948, they repeatedly invoked the U.N.’s core role. “Recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable,” they declared. Diplomatic recognitions soon rolled in, with the U.S. first out of the gate. Everyone was “startled” by Harry Truman’s rapid recognition of Israel, Bunche noted in his diary—even many American diplomats.

Ralph Bunche’s work for the U.N. was decisive for Israel’s birth; it was decisive for its survival, too. When, a few months later, the chief U.N. mediator in the region was gunned down in broad daylight by Jewish extremists, Bunche—having narrowly missed being assassinated himself—took the reins of the negotiation process between Arab and Jews.

Over months in a shuttered hotel on the Mediterranean island of Rhodes he met with the warring sides. He used charm, deft-maneuvering, and arm-twisting, as well as many games at the billiards table, to help forge a series of armistices that quelled the fighting. Bunche was often frustrated—to Ruth he wrote, “I talk, argue, and threaten these stubborn people day and night in an effort to reach agreement”—but his hard work paid off. Indeed, the following year it netted him the Nobel Peace Prize. From a ticker tape parade down Broadway to meeting Harry Truman to presenting the Best Picture Award onstage at the 1951 Oscars, Bunche was now a rare and revered Black diplomatic celebrity. 

Ralph Bunche was a self-proclaimed “professional optimist.” Were he alive today, he would likely be deeply troubled by the conflict that still besets the Middle East. Early on he recognized that a just resolution to what he called “the refugee problem”—the Palestinians displaced from their lands—was essential to any lasting peace. The two-state solution of his original U.N. proposal has, of course, never been realized, despite the widespread recognition of the state of Palestine in recent years. The occupation and settlement of the West Bank continues. Israeli democracy itself is under threat today, increasingly riven by intense internal struggle and violence.

But even 75 years after Israel’s birth, Bunche would surely not give up on the prospects for peace. “Peace,” like war, he said at UCLA in 1969, “can only be won by bold and courageous initiatives”— and by taking “some deliberate risks.”

The post The Black Angeleno Who Took on the ‘Problem of Palestine’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The post Home Away from Home appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“It’s normal,” said 13-year-old Alá. She stared out of her bus window toward the field of stumps, and the towering gray separation wall just beyond. Alá, a gifted and traumatized violinist who grew up during the second Palestinian intifada, was riding with fellow musicians from Ramallah to a concert in Bethlehem. The journey once took 20 minutes, but now its snaking path can require at least two hours, depending on the military checkpoints.

“Normal” was also the word Alá used to describe the time she and fellow musicians were stopped late one night at a “flying checkpoint,” one of 600 such obstacles in a land slightly smaller than the state of Delaware. There, a soldier demanded she step out of the van and play her violin. And “normal” is the word her neighbor used when told of a 2 a.m. raid by ten soldiers who burst into the flat of a young mother. She was home alone with her 6-month-old boy; they pointed their machine guns at her, only to find they had stormed the wrong apartment.

Indeed, Israel’s military occupation itself, which began 48 years ago this June 6, during the Six Day War, is itself the norm for all Palestinian children, and anyone under the age of 50, living in the West Bank. Occupation, relentless settler colonization, and the ever-splintering archipelago of semi-sovereign Palestinian islands in a sea of Israeli military control: For many Palestinians, this is normal; it’s all they know.

In the face of this—and Israel’s offensive into Gaza last summer, which by U.N. estimates killed nearly 1,500 civilians, including 500 children—it is hardly surprising that a nonviolent movement of Palestinians and their overseas supporters to confront Israel has grown stronger in recent years. The movement is diverse and its approach varies, but its shared tactics include boycotting Israel by divesting from companies that profit from the occupation, shaming artists slated to perform in Israel, and discontinuing exchanges with Israeli universities. The effort, spearheaded by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, is reminiscent of an earlier generation’s campaign against South Africa during the Apartheid regime.

Today Israel is paying an increasingly steep reputational price for its treatment of Palestinians. In 2013 the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking canceled a visit to a conference in Israel. Later that year the American Studies Association, citing the conditions of Israel’s occupation, voted to endorse an academic boycott of Israel. Last year the actress Scarlett Johansson was forced to resign as an Oxfam global ambassador after she refused to stop pitching for the beverage maker SodaStream, which operates a factory in the occupied West Bank. Last June, the Presbyterian Church USA narrowly voted to divest from three companies which profit from the occupation, including Caterpillar, whose bulldozers plow under Palestinian olive trees and demolish their homes. Late last year, the European Union announced a ban on importing food from Israeli settlements. Earlier this year, after its bids for numerous contracts in the U.S. were opposed by activists, the French infrastructure conglomerate Veolia sold off much of its operations in Israel. And last month, the singer Lauryn Hill canceled her concert in Tel Aviv.

In the face of these modest successes, Israeli government officials and some of their political allies overseas try to silence pro-divestment critics. A central tactic is to accuse them of anti-Semitism rather than engage in a substantive debate on the realities of an occupation that will soon reach its half-century mark. On May 31 Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu decried the “international campaign to blacken” Israel’s name, likening the effort to past efforts accusing Jews “that we are the focus of all the evil in the world.” Such cynical accusations are especially insulting to the many Jews, both in and outside of Israel, concerned that the occupation and relentless settlement-building is shredding the fabric of Israel’s democracy.

It is hardly anti-Semitic to point out, for example, the separate and unequal reality facing Palestinian children, like the teenage violinist Alá and her fellow music students, who must wait in long checkpoint lines while the privileged, of another class and religion, whisk through a separate kiosk in the fast lane. Or that the ringing of East Jerusalem by Jewish settlements has all but killed the Palestinian dream of a viable, contiguous, independent state standing side by side with Israel. It is truths like these, not anti-Semitism, that fuel Israel’s critics and strengthen their arguments.

In 2010, an Israeli think tank warned that the growing “delegitimization” challenge could “develop into a comprehensive existential threat within a few years.” Late last year, a former chief of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, warned that “we are losing the fight for Israel in the academic world,” as Israel has replaced the old South Africa as the catalyst for student outrage on campuses across the Western world.

Palestinians seeking redress, meanwhile, have redoubled their strategy of direct nonviolent confrontation. Surely this is preferable, and more effective, than lobbing rockets over Gaza’s borders toward Israeli cities and its Iron Dome, or sending young men strapped with explosives into Tel Aviv cafés.

Alongside the nonviolent political activism, Palestinians are increasingly using civil society institutions, including the arts, to create the conditions for their own freedom. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in music—most of all, improbably, classical music—where burgeoning youth orchestras and music programs in villages and refugee camps offer Palestinian children a chance to reimagine their lives.

“This is a musical intifada!” shouted Ramzi Aburedwan, the bearded young founder of Al Kamandjati (“The Violinist”), to a bus full of children heading toward a nonviolent confrontation with their occupiers. Ramzi himself, at age 8, had thrown stones at Israeli soldiers during the first Palestinian intifada, which began in 1987. Now, he seeks to give the next generation a creative outlet to resist Israel’s military domination of their lives.

One sun-baked afternoon, I watched Ramzi lead the young musicians, including 13-year-old Alá, off their bus and into the terminal at the towering Qalandia checkpoint, which separates Ramallah from Jerusalem. There in the terminal, a kind of holding pen filled with metal chutes and bars, they set up their music stands in plain view of stunned Israeli soldiers. At the signal of the conductor, Alá and the other members of the youth orchestra paused, instruments at the ready. Ramzi had told the young musicians that if a soldier tells them to stop, “don’t listen, just play.” And so they did: the sound of Mozart’s Symphony No. 6 filled the terminal, to the astonishment of the soldiers and the Palestinians clutching their precious permits for their journey to Jerusalem. We are here, Alá and her fellow musicians seemed to be saying.

On the bus home, Alá allowed herself a smile. “This,” said the teenage violinist, “was the best concert of my life.”

The post A ‘Musical Intifada’ in the West Bank appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Beit Daras was a village of approximately 3,000 people, one elementary school, and two mosques. My grandmother’s family lived comfortably, growing a variety of crops, including wheat, barley, lentils, sesame, corn, cucumbers, tomatoes, and sunflowers. There were separate fields of orange and citrus trees as well as grapes, figs, and apples. My grandmother loved her ’illiyya, a room with big windows on the roof of her house used mainly in summer, made from wood and palm fronds to enjoy the summer breezes and the beautiful view of her village.

One night, in May 1948, the Hagana (the Jewish militia) attacked my grandmother’s village with shelling that seemed to come from everywhere. Terrified, she carried her infant son, Jawad, to look for safety, all the while surrounded by explosions, gunfire, and screaming families. She has often told me that a gate to hell opened that day and never closed.

The village of Beit Daras no longer exists in the current world’s maps and consciousness. In its stead, three Jewish-only colonies were established in 1950. Dispossessed, Palestinians have since faced segregation and isolation from one another. Some have never been reunited.

As Moshe Sharett, Israel’s second prime minister, once said, “We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it.” My grandmother was never permitted to return to her home.

As summer approaches Gaza, and the heat rises amid electricity blackouts (the Israeli military bombed Gaza’s only power plant), my grandmother recalls the hundreds of acres of land she lost. Everything is gone now, she says—the ‘illiyya, the view, the breezes, the space, the land, the home, the fields, and the dignity.

Today, she is tired of being offered the same political menus of no solution or inconsequential solutions, such as the two-state solution, which offer no return to what is rightfully hers. For my grandmother, the recent warning of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry that the window of opportunity for a two-state solution is closing is meaningless. The past 20 years of the so-called peace process have led nowhere. Instead, we have witnessed Israel swallow more Palestinian land, apply more restrictions and checkpoints, and expand settlements. There is no time left for my grandmother to continue taking the drug of gradualism. Is she not entitled to the same rights as the Jewish settlers who 65 years ago moved her off her land and out of her home?

My grandmother’s principal consolation is the education she insisted upon for her children and grandchildren and the determination to instill in us the memory of homeland and desire for freedom. I’ve never been to Beit Daras. But I have an overwhelming feeling for the place. I dream of going, even though I wonder if I ever will during my lifetime. To this day, I feel that my body is in Shatat (Diaspora), my heart is in Khan Younis refugee camp and Gaza, and that my soul is in Beit Daras. It’s a complicated feeling, but that yearning for homeland, even a damaged homeland, was captured by poet Salem Jubran when he wrote, “As a mother loves her disabled son, I will love you my homeland.”

The post My Grandmother in Exile appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.