When I traveled in Israel I thought I might get a glimpse of my maternal grandfather’s heritage. I got some flavor for the land and its contentions and troubles as well as its mystique. Jerusalem actually does gleam like scripture says. It sits on a hill 2500 feet above sea level and in the sun looks as if it has a halo.
If I thought the land belonged to me I too might try to take possession. The problem is that too many people think God meant it for them— and God meant it for everyone!
People I guess fight over what they hold most dear and desire most strongly. This land is doomed to be shared.
Janet Flanner who wrote for the New Yorker Magazine is best known for the Letters from Paris column, but she also provided commentary during World War II. She wrote about European politics and culture, published a piece about Hitler's rise to power in 1936, and covered the Nuremburg trials in 1945.
She once said that of all the work she did for the magazine, she was most proud of her 1936 piece on Hitler.
In her profile, titled "Führer," she wrote:
"Being self-taught, his mental processes are mysterious; he is missionary-minded; his thinking is emotional, his conclusions material. He has been studious with strange results: he says he regards liberalism as a form of tyranny, hatred and attack as part of man's civic virtues, and equality of men as immoral and against nature. Since he is a concentrated, introspective dogmatist, he is uninformed by exterior criticism. On the other hand, he is a natural and masterly advertiser, a phenomenal propagandist within his limits, the greatest mob orator in German annals, and one of the most inventive organizers in European history. He believes in intolerance as a pragmatic principle. He accepts violence as a detail of state, he says mercy is not his affair with men, yet he is kind to dumb animals. ... His moods change often, his opinions never. Since the age of twenty, they have been mainly anti-Semitic, anti-Communist, anti-suffrage, and Pan-German. He has a fine library of six thousand volumes, yet he never reads; books would do him no good — his mind is made up."
I can only say three things. In a book called “For Your Own Good” by psychologist Alice Miller I read that Hitler’s mother was a Jewish housemaid; and 2) As a spiritual practice I must name gross distortions of human goodness, even if I know that’s not all there is. Hitler was “kind to dumb animals” for god’s sake. Hitler was also a sociopath. 3) The power imbalance between Israelis and Palestinians is unjust and oppressive, and the U.S. is part of the problem.
I never knew my grandfather who died in 1924. Still, maybe some of his relatives, and mine, died at Hitler’s command. What I wonder would he have said or felt?
As a Christian priest I should forgive. I’ve not forgiven the old pervert who abused me when I was eight, unless you count forgetting and healing as forgiveness.
I doubt that Jesus forgave from the cross while gasping and dying, but those who knew him in life knew it would be like him to forgive—and also like him to ask God to do it for him. I don’t know if anyone forgave Hitler or other perpetrators of arbitrary genocide.
Some things only Godde can forgive.
And some forgiveness is a forever process.
Showing posts with label Israel/Palestine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Israel/Palestine. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
2012.07.18 A Gift That Gave
I Shall Not Hate by Izzeldin Abuelaish, was a spontaneous gift from a stranger on an airplane flight from Tel Aviv to London. We struck up a conversation across the aisle when lunch or breakfast or whatever meal it was (on airplanes they blend together like time zones) arrived.
I asked her about the book she was reading so intently. She showed it to me and said she’d give it to me when she finished it. I was reading Jesus Freak (Sara Miles) and she was reading I Shall Not Hate. How do such connections happen!! Nimisha is Hindu, a clinical psychologist living in London who travels to Gaza five times a year for two weeks to help treat post-traumatic stress disorder among Palestinians. “I hear horror stories. That’s why I watch dumb movies on airplanes,” she said. “Well, after I finish this book.”
“This book is for everyone,” she said when she, in a short time, passed it across to me.
*******
I thanked her and began to read. The first thing I noticed was that the author was a Palestinian who had grown up in a refugee camp in Gaza and that there was a praise-filled Foreword by a Jewish Israeli physician, Dr. Marek Glezerman, chairman of the Hospital for Women and deputy director of Rabin Medical Center, Israel. Glezerman expressed surprise that Abuelaish, though chronically humiliated by Israeli military border procedures (harrasments really) while traveling for his work, was not “the very angry man I expected to greet.”
On our pilgrimage we visited a refugee camp in Efrata North, south of Jerusalem, established in 1949. We heard a young Arab Muslim, 24, speak of his life there and his dream of returning home to West Jerusalem. He wasn’t angry either but spoke with a kind of derailed depression freckled with hope and good humor. He had 30 hours to go in the university in the camp where, tellingly, he studied psychology and social work. “I’m afraid to graduate,” he told us. “What then? My friend applied for a job in Nablus with 11,000 applicants!” I asked him about his faith in Allah. His answer was simple: “When I choose the good way and pray first.”
As a feisty Christian feminist westerner I felt humbled. How come neither this man nor Abuelaish haven’t given up on God? I thought that until I remembered that I hadn’t either, although my trials have been minor.
Abuelaish is an ObGyn doctor who specializes in infertility medicine. He has a heart for families, mothers and newborns, loss. He was born in a refugee camp in Gaza where life was harsh. But his mother was a “lioness” mother who never let up on him about study, study study. He obeyed and eventually received a scholarship award and went to study medicine. Life in Gaza remained restrictive, and travel back and forth to work required him to cultivate teeth-gritting patience.
Through unimaginable suffering and tragic loss Abuelaish persisted. I Shall Not Hate is his memoir. It’s his testament to his religious faith and to the friendships of many Israeli colleagues who helped him and value his work and person. I’m reminded of the New Testament story of the friends who removed roof tiles to lower their paralyzed buddy on his stretcher down through a roof so he could bypass crowds to get to Jesus for healing. And Jesus told him faith had made him well—his own and that of his friends.
********
Chapter One, titled “Sand and Sky” begins: “It was as close to heaven and as far from hell as I could get that day, an isolated stretch of beach just two and a half miles from the misery of Gaza City, where waves roll up on the shore as if to wash away yesterday and leave a fresh start for tomorrow. We probably looked like any other family at the beach—...” I was hooked.
Abuelaish had brought his two sons and six daughters plus cousins, aunts and uncles to the beach to find peace in the midst of grief at the premature death of his wife Nadia from leukemia just two weeks after diagnosis. Little did Abuelaish know that in a short time his home would be the target, mistaken but never apologized for, of a fatal shelling during the 23-day siege of Gaza (Dec., 2009 into 2010) in which more family members would die. The sustained attack was designed to intimidate Hamas, retaliation for their suicide bombings. But instead it murdered innocent people. Under a photo of himself in a graveyard Abuelaish wrote: “No caption can express a father’s loss.”
Feelings of agony, rage, terror, love, patience, and hope course side by side through this book but never overwhelm the story, nor the author’s peace and friendship platform. The prose is clear and direct—accessible. No facts, no matter how painful, are sentimentalized, minimalized, or sensationalized. This is the work of an ordered mind that manages to stay sane in the midst of insanity. He never blames Israelis for their government’s actions.
Medicine is his practice, healing physical illness and souls as it creates a level playing field of need and compassionate care. Strong Muslim faith is his stronghold. “For the three weeks during the war, we lost our belief in humanity, so God and each other were all we had left.” AND....... friends on the other side. “The tank pointing its guns at my house ... looked like the angel of death. I called Shlomi Eldar.” Eldar, his friend on the putative other side, managed to engineer a military inquiry into the matter and also set up an interview on Israeli radio. The story went viral and that crisis was averted—until the next one.
At one point Abuelaish ran for public office in Gaza as an independent, thinking it might be a way to work for change. His campaign platform stressed the same issues (poverty, health, education) as the Hamas platform. But Abuelaish’s campaign included raising the status of women. Abuelaish lost.
In 2009 he won the Niarchos Prize for Survivorship. How ironic there is such a prize. It is given by the Survivor Corps an organization that works to break cycles of victimization and violence. Nomika Zion, an Israeli woman, shared the prize with Abuelaish. She and other neighboring Israelis, act and lobby in solidarity with Gazans.
Zion (I love the irony of the name!) accepted the award and spoke against the glorification of war. “I am frightened that we are losing the human ability to see the other side, to feel, to be horrified and to show empathy. It’s our obligation to make our leaders talk, to compel them to tell us, for a change, a different story.” Abuelaish in his acceptance speech encouraged action and to think forward together. “The dignity of Palestinians equals the dignity of Israelis . . .” Does that sound familiar?
*******
Having finally to make the hard decision to leave Gaza, Abuelaish got a job and moved his family to Toronto where his children could experience safety and hope for a future. But he plans to return to his native land and continue his healing mission to encourage an internal shift from hate to respect, on both sides at grassroots levels. He isn’t the first to have such a dream.
The very first activity his younger children performed at their new home in Toronto was to take down a section of the fence between their house and the neighbors so the kids could run back and forth. “How prophetic that I witnessed what I had been dreaming about for years for our two neighbors, Israel and Palestine,” Abuelaish wrote.
*******
DAUGHTERS FOR LIFE is the foundation Abuelaish has started. It is dedicated to change the status and role of women through the provision of scholarships for high school and university education. Ultimately he hopes his foundation will create a credible voice for female values throughout the Middle East. I just made a small gift online.
I asked her about the book she was reading so intently. She showed it to me and said she’d give it to me when she finished it. I was reading Jesus Freak (Sara Miles) and she was reading I Shall Not Hate. How do such connections happen!! Nimisha is Hindu, a clinical psychologist living in London who travels to Gaza five times a year for two weeks to help treat post-traumatic stress disorder among Palestinians. “I hear horror stories. That’s why I watch dumb movies on airplanes,” she said. “Well, after I finish this book.”
“This book is for everyone,” she said when she, in a short time, passed it across to me.
*******
I thanked her and began to read. The first thing I noticed was that the author was a Palestinian who had grown up in a refugee camp in Gaza and that there was a praise-filled Foreword by a Jewish Israeli physician, Dr. Marek Glezerman, chairman of the Hospital for Women and deputy director of Rabin Medical Center, Israel. Glezerman expressed surprise that Abuelaish, though chronically humiliated by Israeli military border procedures (harrasments really) while traveling for his work, was not “the very angry man I expected to greet.”
On our pilgrimage we visited a refugee camp in Efrata North, south of Jerusalem, established in 1949. We heard a young Arab Muslim, 24, speak of his life there and his dream of returning home to West Jerusalem. He wasn’t angry either but spoke with a kind of derailed depression freckled with hope and good humor. He had 30 hours to go in the university in the camp where, tellingly, he studied psychology and social work. “I’m afraid to graduate,” he told us. “What then? My friend applied for a job in Nablus with 11,000 applicants!” I asked him about his faith in Allah. His answer was simple: “When I choose the good way and pray first.”
As a feisty Christian feminist westerner I felt humbled. How come neither this man nor Abuelaish haven’t given up on God? I thought that until I remembered that I hadn’t either, although my trials have been minor.
Abuelaish is an ObGyn doctor who specializes in infertility medicine. He has a heart for families, mothers and newborns, loss. He was born in a refugee camp in Gaza where life was harsh. But his mother was a “lioness” mother who never let up on him about study, study study. He obeyed and eventually received a scholarship award and went to study medicine. Life in Gaza remained restrictive, and travel back and forth to work required him to cultivate teeth-gritting patience.
Through unimaginable suffering and tragic loss Abuelaish persisted. I Shall Not Hate is his memoir. It’s his testament to his religious faith and to the friendships of many Israeli colleagues who helped him and value his work and person. I’m reminded of the New Testament story of the friends who removed roof tiles to lower their paralyzed buddy on his stretcher down through a roof so he could bypass crowds to get to Jesus for healing. And Jesus told him faith had made him well—his own and that of his friends.
********
Chapter One, titled “Sand and Sky” begins: “It was as close to heaven and as far from hell as I could get that day, an isolated stretch of beach just two and a half miles from the misery of Gaza City, where waves roll up on the shore as if to wash away yesterday and leave a fresh start for tomorrow. We probably looked like any other family at the beach—...” I was hooked.
Abuelaish had brought his two sons and six daughters plus cousins, aunts and uncles to the beach to find peace in the midst of grief at the premature death of his wife Nadia from leukemia just two weeks after diagnosis. Little did Abuelaish know that in a short time his home would be the target, mistaken but never apologized for, of a fatal shelling during the 23-day siege of Gaza (Dec., 2009 into 2010) in which more family members would die. The sustained attack was designed to intimidate Hamas, retaliation for their suicide bombings. But instead it murdered innocent people. Under a photo of himself in a graveyard Abuelaish wrote: “No caption can express a father’s loss.”
Feelings of agony, rage, terror, love, patience, and hope course side by side through this book but never overwhelm the story, nor the author’s peace and friendship platform. The prose is clear and direct—accessible. No facts, no matter how painful, are sentimentalized, minimalized, or sensationalized. This is the work of an ordered mind that manages to stay sane in the midst of insanity. He never blames Israelis for their government’s actions.
Medicine is his practice, healing physical illness and souls as it creates a level playing field of need and compassionate care. Strong Muslim faith is his stronghold. “For the three weeks during the war, we lost our belief in humanity, so God and each other were all we had left.” AND....... friends on the other side. “The tank pointing its guns at my house ... looked like the angel of death. I called Shlomi Eldar.” Eldar, his friend on the putative other side, managed to engineer a military inquiry into the matter and also set up an interview on Israeli radio. The story went viral and that crisis was averted—until the next one.
At one point Abuelaish ran for public office in Gaza as an independent, thinking it might be a way to work for change. His campaign platform stressed the same issues (poverty, health, education) as the Hamas platform. But Abuelaish’s campaign included raising the status of women. Abuelaish lost.
In 2009 he won the Niarchos Prize for Survivorship. How ironic there is such a prize. It is given by the Survivor Corps an organization that works to break cycles of victimization and violence. Nomika Zion, an Israeli woman, shared the prize with Abuelaish. She and other neighboring Israelis, act and lobby in solidarity with Gazans.
Zion (I love the irony of the name!) accepted the award and spoke against the glorification of war. “I am frightened that we are losing the human ability to see the other side, to feel, to be horrified and to show empathy. It’s our obligation to make our leaders talk, to compel them to tell us, for a change, a different story.” Abuelaish in his acceptance speech encouraged action and to think forward together. “The dignity of Palestinians equals the dignity of Israelis . . .” Does that sound familiar?
*******
Having finally to make the hard decision to leave Gaza, Abuelaish got a job and moved his family to Toronto where his children could experience safety and hope for a future. But he plans to return to his native land and continue his healing mission to encourage an internal shift from hate to respect, on both sides at grassroots levels. He isn’t the first to have such a dream.
The very first activity his younger children performed at their new home in Toronto was to take down a section of the fence between their house and the neighbors so the kids could run back and forth. “How prophetic that I witnessed what I had been dreaming about for years for our two neighbors, Israel and Palestine,” Abuelaish wrote.
*******
DAUGHTERS FOR LIFE is the foundation Abuelaish has started. It is dedicated to change the status and role of women through the provision of scholarships for high school and university education. Ultimately he hopes his foundation will create a credible voice for female values throughout the Middle East. I just made a small gift online.
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