If there were a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “We could be married,” joked the young man to his speaking partner, a woman who appeared old enough to be his mother.
And when the woman teased back saying she was much too old for him, the man replied, “You really don’t want me because I’m a Palestinian,” to the general laughter of the 20 people listening to them.
Such banter may seem hardly remarkable between friends or colleagues in almost any other circumstances; but it was quite remarkable here.
For these two speakers were a Palestinian Arab man, Ali Abu Awwad, and an Israeli Jewish woman, Robi Damelin. And if that by itself weren’t enough, both of them have endured some of the deepest wounds a person can suffer — wounds inflicted upon them by members of the other’s people.
But the fact that they can speak as a team and even tease each other is precisely the point of these two members of the Bereaved Families Forum, a group of more than 500 Israeli and Palestinian families who have lost a family member to the conflict and are seeking a way to reconciliation.
“We are the human message, the consequence of the political decisions,” said Damelin, who works in public relations and lives in Tel Aviv. “There is nothing more important for me any more than to put something together that will make a difference” and so “children will be safe.”
“Everybody wants peace” and “everybody is right,” said Abu Awwad. “The Israelis have a right to security and the Palestinians have a right to be free,” but “nobody wants to pay the price.”
The two were in Milwaukee primarily to appear at an international conference on restorative justice held earlier this week at Marquette University.
But they also had other speaking engagements in the area, including this one, Tuesday at noon, an open meeting of the Israel Task Force of the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations.
They also had appeared in the documentary film “Encounter Point” about the work of the Bereaved Families Forum. This film was shown at the Milwaukee International Film Festival earlier this autumn.
Not ‘hummus and hugs’
Damelin, 63, came to Israel from South Africa in reaction to the 1967 Six Day War. “I had to come to live in Israel and be part of what’s happening,” she said.
She imagined that Israel would be replete with “nice Jewish boys,” and that she would have “a great time.” But she also discovered “the pain of living in Israel” because Israelis are “losing people all the time” to war and terrorism.
She married and had two children. One of them, David, was a talented French horn player and was studying for his master’s degree in education. Then in March 2002, David was doing his reserve army duty at a checkpoint when a Palestinian sniper shot and killed him.
“You can’t describe what it is like to lose a child,” Damelin said. “Your life is never the same.” She tried to keep going with her life, but after a year she decided she had to do something to “stop the cycle of violence.”
For his part, Abu Awwad, 34, “grew up in the conflict,” he said. His family lived in a village in what would become Israel and fled in 1948; most of them are in Jordan now.
His family is “very political,” and as a child in the Israel administered territories, he saw Israelis arrest and beat up his mother for activism with the Palestine Liberation Organization. He himself served four years in Israeli prison, and was released at the time of the Oslo Accords.
Even though he felt despair over the Oslo agreement, Abu Awwad ceased political activism. Then one day during the time of the second intifada, a Jewish settler shot him in the knee. While he was being treated for this in Saudi Arabia, he learned that his older brother Yusef, who also was “not involved” in political activism, had been shot and killed by an Israeli soldier at a checkpoint.
“How many do I have to kill in order to feel better?” he said he thought at the time. “Is it leading my people to freedom?”
After eight months of anguish over this, Abu Awwad received a call from “an Israeli religious man” telling him about the Bereaved Families Forum. He attended a meeting and “for the first time I saw an Israeli cry,” he said.
Neither one is naïve enough to believe that they have chosen an easy path toward reconciliation, one of “hummus and hugs,” as Damelin put it. Neither is doing this because they love or agree with each other; rather because they love and want to serve their own people, they said.
And they are careful to avoid affiliating with any political party or specific solution. “Whatever is decided by both sides, we think is OK,” said Damelin.
But they insist that reconciliation must go with peace and that both sides must listen to the other’s narrative. People must “realize that a Palestinian is not shooting Israelis because he is a killing machine, but because he can’t deal with his hard life,” and that the Israeli soldier at the checkpoint “is carrying fear, the Holocaust, Judaism, history,” said Abu Awwad.
And yet there is potential for great things to result if peace is achieved. “We are the most clever people in the Middle East and the world,” said Abu Awwad. “We can build an amazing land.”
More information about these efforts and the film “Encounter Point” can be found at the Web sites www.theparentscircle.org and www.justvision.org.
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