fugitive peace

Bringing Arabs and Jews together for peacemaking events isn’t always an edifying experience. Last year, at a small nightclub in Jerusalem, I spent a few minutes backstage with the Jewish and Arab hip-hop artists at a fundraiser for victims (on both sides) of the Lebanon war. At the time, the Jewish public still overwhelmingly supported the war, and the stuff coming out of some of the rappers’ mouths was definitely not the message of peace and tolerance they were meant to be projecting onstage.

But my cynicism about “co-existence” projects is mainly because too often they bring together people who are already like-minded. Sometimes it’s people who think group hugs and mantras can achieve reconciliation (actually, there is someone who argues quite seriously that yogic flying measurably reduces the level of violence). Or it’s Palestinians joining up with radical-left Israeli Jews who would happily abolish their own country.

Worst - because most seductive - are the meetings of cosmopolitan intellectuals who have more in common with each other than with their compatriots. They talk such fine, eloquent sense. Peace is so close. We all know what it will look like. A little push and we’ll get there. Everyone in the audience nods and beams. A warm glow suffuses my being. I leave with a spring in my step, wishing that they ruled their societies. Then I realise they would also need to be their societies.

But in the course of writing this week’s story I’ve gained more respect for the people who work at the coalface of co-existence, year in, year out. It’s a huge field, and there wasn’t room even to mention some of the most established projects. But I ultimately understood that my question, “what effect have you had on broader public opinion?” might not be the right one. What matters is sometimes not what they do but what they prevent.

My favourite tale of this kind came from Aziz Abu Sarah of the Bereaved Families Forum, which is run by people on both sides who have lost relatives to the conflict. At one of his talks at an Israeli Jewish school, he had met a 17-year-old who was full of anger. Eventually the boy revealed that his uncle had been killed a few months earlier in a suicide bombing, and he was just waiting to be drafted into the army so he could “kill as many Palestinians as possible”. After a long discussion, he apologised and said he had changed his mind. “I saved him from being a killer,” says Abu Sarah, “and I saved all the people he would have killed.” I had to agree with him: that alone was worth all the years of work.