View of the Sea (Letter From Bethlehem 62)

by Toine van Teeffelen

May 5, 2004

The view from the Bahai temple on the Carmel mountain of Haifa is on a beautiful day

simply beyond description. Green plateaus covered with flowers form a huge, inviting

staircase waving down from the mountain towards the sea. The horizon shows little

boats imperceptibly moving foreword. The temple itself is surrounded by a large

garden with trees and plants that are extremely well taken care off. The little

things that deviate from the harmonious order, such as an orange fallen down on the

ground, appear like the finishing touch of a painting. We - three Dutch visitors,

educators - silently watch, almost with reverence, a spectacular tree out of which

colorful hanging plants straddle down along the stem. The tree of life.

----------------------------------------

That morning we had visited a school in Haifa to explore the possibility of Dutch,

Palestinian and Israeli schools conducting a computer exchange. One of our

interlocutors was an Israeli school student with 'Seeds for Peace' experience, an

American sponsored Palestinian-Israeli exchange project. The boy harbored youthful

enthusiasm for our newly proposed project. (His teacher gently told him not to speak

too fast). He asked whether there was really a need to have the Dutch included.

After all, we, the Israelis and Palestinians, had to live together, not the Dutch

and Israelis, he said, and why not having contact with the Palestinians directly,

face to face, instead of all this distant communication through the Internet? He was

aware of the existing inequality in almost any contact between Palestinians and

Israelis but thought it could be dealt with, as long as intentions were good.

I made

the point that good intentions in such exchange projects can be easily undermined.

How often did it not happen that Palestinian students went to Turkey or Cyprus for a

beautiful holiday together with Israelis and internationals, and that afterwards the

contacts broke down? Or the Palestinians felt that after their moment of freedom

they returned back to their cage? Educators here call this "the morning after" or

"cold shower" effect. Before and after the talks we strolled across the spacious

school campus where students were sitting and studying in the grass while having a

distant view over the sea only a few hundred meters further down.

Perhaps a view of the sea is the best educational method to release tensions, to

calm down, dream of a harmonious future, I thought. Later on during the day, we

watched a train slowly moving parallel to the sea. Looking at the horizon, I was

reminded of the book of Amin Maalouf (a Lebanese-French writer), titled "Ports of

Call" in the English translation, about the intricacies of Palestinian-Israeli

contacts.

The cover of the book shows a woman staring longingly across the

Mediterranean. She is Jewish, her husband is Arab. They fell in love with each other

during the Second World War as members of an underground resistance cell in France.

Afterwards they decided to emigrate to Haifa where they became members of the

Palestinian communist party. There they pursued an intensive political dialogue of,

what the writer calls, "moral elegance." In each argument about the political

situation the Arab husband did his utmost to show profound understanding of the

Jewish plight in Europe while the Jewish woman went out of her way to justify Arab

resistance. Grace as a guideline for the moral understanding of one another.

The

reality as depicted in the novel was not so graceful, though. During the war of 1948

the Arab happened to be in Beirut. He couldn't come back to his home in Haifa and so

the couple became physically divided. After years of estrangement, they met each

other once again in France, but whether the contact was renewed is left open by the

story. The narrator tells how he watched the man and woman approaching each other on

a Paris bridge but after having observed all what happened before he apparently felt

too committed and therefore unable to adopt the casually curious look of somebody

who stops to observe an interesting scene. So he turned away his face, and at the

end of the story the reader is left in the dark about the future of this specific

Palestinian-Israeli contact. Now I feel that our project of Palestinian-Israeli

school exchanges is such a plunge into darkness too.

However, the three of us feel that despite the risks it is worthwhile, from a

humanist perspective, to give the project a real try. We observe that some of the

interlocutors don't believe much in the contacts, others do. The coordinator of the

school's community project in Haifa, introduced as a leftist, is skeptical about

Palestinian-Israeli exchanges. He finds them "scratching the surface" as long as

there is no general political arrangement between Palestinians and Israelis. How can

those little projects overcome the general gap of suspicion that exists between the

peoples? On the Palestinian side there are even more reservations. Are these

contacts, certainly when they take place between Palestinians from the occupied

territories and Israelis, not legitimizing, "normalizing" the occupation? Many of

the "people to people" projects have been stopped after the beginning of the latest

Intifada.

-------------------------------------

Before I left to Haifa, Mary and I had invited our educational colleagues and two

other friends for a dinner at home. The friends are a couple living at the border of

Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The husband is formally retired but still very active in

developing an Israeli-Palestinian exchange. Due to the circumstances of the Intifada

it had been kept along separate tracks; that is, without direct Israeli-Palestinian

contact. He and his wife told us how their family became thoroughly mixed

Jewish-Palestinian after they adopted Palestinian and Jewish children and after

their own Christian daughter converted to Judaism. The family is totally at peace

with the various identities.

It lately happened, they said, that their Palestinian

adopted son asked permission from an Israeli soldier to enter Jerusalem. For what

reason, the soldier asked. Their son said he wanted to visit his brother in an

Israeli kibbutz in the north. But only Jews live in a kibbutz, the soldier

responded, as if he had found a hole in the explanation and perhaps an excuse to

deny entry. Yes, the son said, my brother is a Jew!

Upon hearing that one of the visiting colleagues was Jewish, Mary told him solemnly,

"Welcome, you are the first Jew in this house. We used to have better relations, and

I hope in the future we will have better relations once again. At the moment, I live

in a small triangle of going to my work, to my family and back home again." Later on

Mary longingly brought back to me the memories of vistas she once enjoyed near the

Lake of Tiberias or from the top of churches in Jerusalem. From Haifa I told her by

phone how beautiful the view from the Carmel was. I felt a bit guilty in making her

jealous. She had to laugh and told me that after Jara had heard the other day that

we had had a Jewish guest in our house, she panicked and said: "But he could have

shot at us!"

---------------------------------------

Back home I met Sana'a, the headmaster of a UN school in Battir to the south-west of

Bethlehem. She told her latest checkpoint story.

Sana'a is a fiercely independent

Moslem woman who fought for her right not to wear a headscarf at a university in

Hebron where she lectures. At the same time she does not hide her criticism of

Christians whom she says have not rarely discriminated against Moslems in Beit Jala,

where she lives. At the Al-Khader checkpoint she lately argued with soldiers about

whether they really succeeded in stopping suicide bombers. She told a soldier that

rather than preventing suicide bombers coming in, the checkpoints created new

suicide bombers because of the humiliations people suffered. Will you also become a

suicide bomber, the soldier asked. Yes, me too, Sana'a responded angrily.

On her way

back she met the same soldier who exclaimed, "There is the suicide bomber!" and then

withheld her ID "for checking." Sana'a was forced to stay at the checkpoint for

three hours while the soldier kept asking her her, mockingly, "So where are your

friends?" In fact, after Sana'a had called the UNRWA headquarters in Jerusalem, soon

two UN representatives in a jeep appeared, one of them a foreigner. They kept

themselves busy trying to contact the soldier in question and convince him giving

back the ID. That was not so easy. The soldier was most of the time roaming the

fields around the checkpoint to catch those who were trying to circumvent it. The UN

persons were all the time following him, or trying to do so. Meanwhile, Sana'a - not

a person to let herself resign to a long view of a checkpoint - gave herself a

practical role and somehow succeeded in "managing" the checkpoint; helping to

translate letters from passers by into Hebrew, pointing out by-pass roads for those

who did not want to queue, or cooling down soldiers.

She observed all the things

which those forced to stand or sit for some hours at checkpoints are used to see: a

lot of shouting, soldiers becoming nervous and shooting into the air or shooting

teargas, rude behavior towards old or disabled people, and the absurdity of soldiers

who sometimes even themselves "suggest" to people they'd better take a hill road

around the checkpoint. Finally the ID of Sana'a was "checked" and she herself

released from her self-imposed duties.

With her characteristic smile, reserved for

the tragicomic stories she likes to tell, she told me that after all these

incidents, and also after all what had happened in Jenin and Rafah, it has become

more difficult for her than ever to have any normal relation with the Israelis.

Still, she is in contact with an Israeli professor at the Hebrew University in order

to pursue her dream, a PhD in physics education. Will it work out? She doesn't know.

Years ago, people at her school used to climb the mountains of Battir and could even

see the sea over 70 kilometers further west. Now it is too dangerous to go up; a

settler's road sneaks through the hills. Down in the village valley there are still

the dilapidated remainders of a railway station dating back to the British Mandate

time. From there you could take a leisurely train to Jaffa and Haifa, and, if I am

not mistaken, even further to Beirut.

------------------------------------------

Mary is called by a student from Gaza who since three years is unable to complete

his final year at Bethlehem University due to the impossibility to travel out of

Gaza. Her heart beat leaps after hearing the familiar voice of the student she knew

so well. He tells her: "But we are better off than you, at least we have the sea

here!"

-----------------------------------------------

At the Peace Center the American actor Richard Gere watches some performances from

Suzy's students who had made some good drama plays based on their recently published

Intifada diaries. (Lately, Suzy was even invited to the Royal Court Theater in

London to tell about her students' experiences). Gere also visits a group of young

children at the Center, among them Jara. They are making drawings of the sea. The

teacher tells Gere that the sand and the shells stuck on the drawings are really

from the sea at Tel Aviv, a sea which the children cannot visit. Afterwards, Jara is

proud to tell her family that she shook the hand of the famous actor. I suggest to

her to copy some beautiful Toscana vistas on a calendar but she refuses.

Tamer also likes to draw but chooses the walls of the rooms as canvas. He keeps his

little fist tightly closed so that we cannot take away his pencils.

------------------------------------------

Toine van Teeffelen is development director at the Arab Educational Institute (AEI)

in Bethlehem and local coordinator of United Civilians for Peace.