I attended a 2+ hour presentation by an Israeli and Palestinian, discussing their peoples’ situation. The words “Hamas,” “October 7,” and “Gaza” never came up.
Palestinian activist Noor A’wad, and Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger, a Zionist West Bank settler, are both proponents of “Roots/Shorashim/Judur,” a local community program enabling the two ethnicities to interact positively. Deemed the only such shared space in the otherwise strictly segregated West Bank. Such separation, Schlesinger said, breeds stereotyping, fear, enmity, and hatred.
He grew up American, but emigrated to Israel to join its settler movement, of Jews moving into the largely Palestinian West Bank, which Israel has occupied since the 1967 Six-Day War. He cast Jews as an “extended family” and Zionism as aiming to “Bring the Jewish people home,” quoting the wishful invocation, “Next Year in Jerusalem” (heard in my own childhood family gatherings). Settlers, he said, make not just a political but a historical statement — the Jewish realm of ancient (Biblical) times was actually centered in kingdoms located in the West Bank called Judaea and Samaria — names often on settlers’ lips.
Then a decade ago, he said, he realized he didn’t know what he was talking about. His epiphany came with a remark about always picking up hitch-hikers — but he knew he lied, because it’s never Palestinians. Never interacting with them at all, living in a “Jewish bubble.” But suddenly seeing that in addition to the Jewish story shaping his own life, there’s another one, making his a half truth. Which is “close to falsehood.”
Thus he spoke of the “hubris of exclusivity.” The idea that Jewish people belong there, and others don’t, denying any legitimacy to their narrative. While in reality the same land birthed two peoples, and both “belong” there.
“I don’t have to be who I am at the expense of who you are,” Schlesinger avowed. Yet the Jewish settler movement operates at the expense of Palestinians and their human dignity. It’s wrong, unjust, bad, he said. Instead, we must “get the two truths into one heart.”
Noor grew up during the Second Intifada, a Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation, making normal life impossible — a wrong which he felt must be fought, both nonviolently and violently. Later he worked as a tour guide. This, at one point, gave him a very rare encounter with a settler. Who declaimed that there’s no “occupation,” it’s just simply Jewish land. Indeed, there are no “Palestinians,” only “Arabs,” and with 22 Arab countries why do they need another? Hearing this was unsettling (pun intended). Then Noor met Rabbi Schlesinger.
Each side, Noor said, seems to think the problem’s solution is to disappear the other (or at least they act that way). But he realized that they must instead coexist. Echoing Schlesinger in saying that his own heritage actually encompasses both narratives — the land’s Jewish history is integral to his own.
But what, really, is the solution? Schlesinger spoke of not just a “two state” paradigm but rather a “confederation” — not separate states but, much like the European Union, with open borders between them, and citizens of both free to live in either.
Yet we often hear even the thinner “two state solution” ruled out because Israel has no “partner for peace.” And the intensity of enmity, ratcheted up by both sides’ violence, does seem to bar any such rationality.
Schlesinger — though a rabbi — said religion is part of the problem. It’s a huge part. When you believe God has told you something, you’d damn well better act accordingly. Though of course what people hear God saying is what they wish to hear. And other human values go out the window, a prescription for nightmares. Pray for people to free themselves from delusional, nonsensical beliefs that negate their humanity.
Delusionality too was behind October 7, imagining violence could force the Jews out of Israel. Likewise Israel’s response, imagining violence can end its Palestinian “problem,” when in reality the horror Israel is unleashing can only make it worse.
The cycle of violence feeding violence, neither side seeing humanity in the other, is insane. Full stop. They have to live together in that land. “From the river to the sea” — it’s big enough for both. And could be so much better for both if they’d cooperate to their mutual benefit, instead of trying to kill each other.
If only they were atheists.