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July 19, 2002
Coexisting or crossing a line?
Two Palestinian-Israeli events raise issues in local Jewish community.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN
Coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians. That was the topic
of two presentations this month that were to have taken place at
the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver (JCC). Coexistence
between members of the Jewish community in the Lower Mainland. That
was the issue being discussed after one of those presentations was
not permitted to speak at the JCC.
Two Israeli women, one a Jew and one an Arab, who work together
in an Israeli group called Ta'ayush (Coexistence) were scheduled
to speak at the JCC on July 2 but were relocated to the Peretz Centre
for Secular Jewish Culture after their booking at the JCC was cancelled.
On July 11, the JCC's early childhood education department hosted
at the centre two Israeli women (also a Jew and an Arab) who work
together in Beyond Words, a program for Jewish and Arab early childhood
educators.
According to Or Shalom Rabbi David Mivasair, who was involved in
organizing both events, the difference between them was that the
first was political and, according to JCC executive director Gerry
Zipursky, the centre does not support political events.
The event at the JCC
Nitzan Gordon started Beyond Words in 1996, partly out of her own
childhood experiences as a Jewish minority when her family lived
in the United States for a time. She was joined at the JCC event
by Mervat Hamati, a graduate of Beyond Words who is now training
to become a leader in the program. To date, about 90 Arab and Jewish
teachers, who together work with more than 3,000 students a year,
have gone through Beyond Words.
"In Israel, about 98 per cent of the schools are segregated,
which means that the Jewish and Arab teachers, and the Jewish and
Arab children do not have a chance to interact," explained
Gordon, the program's founder, to the crowd of about 60 people in
the JCC's L'Chaim Lounge. "When people don't know one another,
it's much easier to turn each other into enemies."
The first step of Beyond Words, then, is to bring the teachers together,
for a period of seven months during which they meet once a week,
said Gordon. Then the program focuses on the characteristics the
women have in common – what they share as women, as mothers,
as wives – rather than focusing on what tears them apart, she
said. They get to know each other using verbal and non-verbal tools
such as dance therapy, art, games and bodywork.
The women are taught to listen to each other and to hear each others
stories without judgment, said Gordon. She gave the following example
of the feelings and pain of the women on both sides on the conflict:
"For many Jews, Mervat, my friend here, my very dear friend,
when they look at her they see a suicide bomber. For many Arabs
who look at me, they see a Jewish soldier, and I did serve in the
military, who's oppressing them, who's not allowing them to have
food, who's not allowing them to have medical care, who's destroying
their houses, who's sometimes killing them. So how can I be expected
as a Jew to care about her story and how can she be expected to
care about my story. We're enemies."
Beyond Words teaches the women to care about each other, said Gordon,
and they take this experience back to their classrooms to create
an environment that supports acceptance and dialogue and teaches
children who are surrounded by violence that there is another possibility,
that coexistence is possible. Gordon is hoping to expand the program
in the future so that, eventually, it is reaching some 6,000 students
every year.
The event that moved
Leena Dallasheh, an Israeli Arab woman, and Noa Nativ, an Israeli
Jew, both of whom recently graduated from the Hebrew University,
were in Vancouver as part of a Canadian tour to raise awareness
of and funds for the activities of Ta'ayush, a group of Israeli
Jews and Palestinians that was formed in November 2000 as a response
to the intifada.
"Our two main goals are to fight, to resist the occupation
and protest it and work toward its end and, on the other hand, within
Israel, to work toward the end of discrimination between all its
citizens, Jewish and Palestinian," Nativ told the audience
of approximately 50 people at the Peretz Centre.
Some of the ways in which Ta'ayush attempts to achieve these goals
are by delivering food, medicine and other necessities into Palestinian
villages, by dismantling a road block at the entrance to the Jerusalem-area
village of Issawiya and by donating blood for those wounded in the
Israeli army's incursion into the occupied territories. Both Nativ
and Dallasheh stressed the nonviolent nature of the group's activities.
Nativ explained that she became involved in Ta'ayush after she witnessed
what she called the brutal response of her government to the intifada.
She said she is questioning all she believed in, "even the
implications of Zionism as it's implemented, when you see the implications
that it has for other people, for the Palestinian people in our
country, you have to ... [ask yourself], Can I continue being like
that, accepting that?"
As a Palestinian Israeli, Dallasheh said she is part of an unrecognized
national minority and, as such, she describes feeling like "a
second-class citizen, as an unwanted guest" in her own home
and in her country.
"The mere definition of Israel as a Jewish state denies me
my right to exist," said Dallasheh, who, as an example of the
discrimination she faces every day, told of being stopped by security
in Jerusalem and interrogated simply because the Muslim friend she
was with was wearing a veil.
"Can you imagine being stopped in your city of Vancouver and
being interrogated and humiliated and shouted at and treated like
criminals only because you are who you are?" asked Dallasheh.
When the intifada started, Dallasheh said she wanted to leave Israel.
Then a friend introduced her to Ta'ayush. "For me, Ta'ayush
gave me the hope," said Dallasheh. "We can live together."
In the question-and-answer period, there was discussion about many
issues, including the Palestinians' rejection of a state in 1948,
to which Dallasheh responded that "maybe a mistake was done."
One audience member said, "The fact that this event ... did
not take place in the Jewish Community Centre, I think is appalling....
I don't think that these people came here in any threatening way
and yet we can't seem to host an event like this at the JCC."
Someone else said she did not defend the JCC's decision but she
could understand why people would be fearful about some of the ideas
being put forward.
"I feel very scared when I hear somebody say, and I hear you
say, we don't want a Jewish state," she said.
"Israel had to be created," agreed Nativ. "It had
to be created but it [shouldn't] have been created by inflicting
a catastrophe on another people.... We are going to have to find
a solution to have a home for the Jewish people that would not deny
the home of the Palestinian people."
Dallasheh and Nativ also spoke at the Unitarian Church of Vancouver,
an event sponsored by a number of groups, including the Palestine
Solidarity Group and Canada-Palestine Support Network (CanPalNet).
Some 150 people turned out at that event July 3 and there was plenty
of literature available in the lobby about the need to "Stop
Israeli war crimes," "Stop Israeli apartheid" and
other anti-Israel material. Many of the sponsors were signatories
to the controversial CanPalNet ad in the June 27-July 4 issue of
the Georgia Straight.
Controversy, confusion
The Web sites of many Palestinian groups, including Ta'ayush, are
very anti-Israeli and Canadian Jewish Congress monitors these things,
according to Nisson Goldman, chair of CJC, Pacific Region. So, when
a staff member saw a poster advertising Ta'ayush's talk at the JCC,
Congress went to the Internet and picked up a lot of material on
the group, said Goldman. "We took that material and we put
it on the desk of Mr. Zipursky and that is it."
Goldman said it was his understanding that the JCC "has a policy
which they're a signatory to, which is with the union of Jewish
community centres across North America, where they allow under their
roof, quote, unquote, mainstream Jewish affairs and thought."
While he heard that the meeting that took place at the Peretz Centre
"was actually probably non-offensive in many ways and not a
kind of meeting that you would say was a rabble-rousing meeting
or anything like that ... Ta'ayush does encourage civil disobedience
within Israel," said Goldman.
"Ta'ayush was free to carry on its activities wherever it wanted
to," he added, pointing out that the group ended up speaking
at two places outside the JCC.
"The last thing I want to see us do ever is to act as a censor,"
said Goldman. "There's lots of room for lots of thought and
I want to keep it that way."
In an interview with the Bulletin, Zipursky said he was not
aware of the policy to which Goldman referred. He said the centre
is "not interested in hosting political programs that are against
Israel" and that Ta'ayush had been misrepresented to him and
his staff when they were initially booked into the centre.
"It was clear that when our assistant [executive director]
was involved initially, the information he received from the source
who made the arrangement to be here, it was very clear that [the
group] was apolitical. The information I received [later] ... in
terms of the funding, etc., [showed] that it was not an apolitical
group," said Zipursky. "It was presented to me that it
was an environmentalist project; two ladies, Israeli and Palestinian,
were involved in some environmental issues and they were working
together and that sounded terrific," he continued. "But
when it gets into political issues, it's not something we want to
support and they had misrepresented themselves in terms of the arrangements
the made to be here."
When asked how he would define "political," Zipursky said,
"If you start having groups that are against Israel, that have
chosen to focus on one side only and some of the groups that were
involved in the funding [of Ta'ayush] clearly have a track record
of being very anti-Israel and it's just something we weren't interested
in supporting."
Zipursky said he hoped the Bulletin would focus on the value
of the centre offering such programs as Beyond Words.
"We are certainly interested in, first and foremost, we are
very concerned about what is going on in Israel. We're also very
concerned about what's happening to Israelis, what's happening to
Palestinians. It is not a question of just focusing on one group.
The fact that we had a recent program that talked about bridging
the gap in early childhood [education] to me clearly reflects the
way we operate," said Zipurksy, adding that the centre has
hosted a number of programs and exhibits over the years that reflect
sensitivity and concern for two peoples living together.
Mivasair, who was the organizer of the Ta'ayush speaking engagement
in the Jewish community and was involved in bringing Beyond Words
to the JCC, said he didn't know why Zipursky thought that Ta'ayush
was discussing environmental issues. But, Mivasair told the Bulletin,
he was aware that people would be hesitant about hearing them speak.
"I know that there are people in the Jewish community who are
very concerned and suspicious about groups of Jews and Arabs working
together in Israel who present an alternative understanding of the
situation there, and who don't want that understanding to be presented
in a place like the JCC. This has been a continual problem for years,"
said Mivasair, acknowledging that he had seen some more openness
at the centre over the last six months with, for example, the screening
of Promises there.
"It seems to me that it's being applied quite selectively,"
said Mivasair of the JCC's policy to not host political events.
"It seems completely arrogant to me for a person who's lived
in Israel perhaps not at all or very little, but certainly not in
any recent times, to sit in the safety of Vancouver and determine
that two people who have lived their entire lives in Israel aren't
legitimate sources of information and understanding for the rest
of us," he said.
In discussing the differences between the two coexistence presentations
and how they were received, Mivasair said Ta'ayush was not sponsored
by any organization in the Jewish community, whereas Beyond Words
was sponsored by the JCC's early childhood education department.
As well, Beyond Words is not at all political, said Mivasair. They
are not critiquing any policy of the government or proposing a solution
to the conflict, other than human relations.
"It's less threatening, of course," he said.
Even so, Mivasair added that the booking of Beyond Words at the
JCC "had to be done with great care and thoughtfulness so that
the people who are very suspicious of these kinds of things wouldn't
shut it down."
However, according to Roslyn Kushner Belle of the JCC's Shalom preschool
and day care, "it wasn't a question," she said, referring
to whether Beyond Words would be put on at the JCC.
"We're always looking for different ways of looking at people
communicating with each other and this looked like a great program.
"I was given the go ahead by the administration when I was
approached," said Belle. "I gave all the information [to
them] and I got back an answer, 'Go for it.' "
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