Fall / Winter 2006
MidEast War Engulfs CJP Alums
Ruba Huleihel (left) and Alina Shkolnikov are former Seeds of Peace participants and friends. Ruba is a Palestinian Israeli Muslim and Alina is an Israeli Jew, originally from the Ukraine. They are in “Jerusalem Stories.”
“Please our CJP family, spread the word and do something… PLEASE.”
-Manas Ghanem
Almost a year ago – Oct. 14, 2005 – a newspaper serving Virginia’s central Shenandoah Valley published an inspiring interview with three women studying at EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) – an Israeli Jew, a Palestinian Muslim, and a Lebanese Christian.
Then, the three graduate students – Odelya Gertel, Huda Abu Arquob and Hind Ghorayeb – spoke of celebrating their religious holidays together with affectionate respect. They cooked, studied, and partied together. They visited local worship places, civic groups and schools to share what the Staunton News Leader called their message of “hope, communication and togetherness.”
Today, the three women have scattered to deal with the conflicts in their homelands in their own ways, though they remain in touch by e-mail and sometimes by phone.
Only Gertel, MA ’06, remains in North America. Ghorayeb, MA ’06, returned home this summer right before bombs dropped from airplanes rocked the apartment building in which her family lives in Beirut. It also destroyed the bridge beside the building.
Beirut Workshop Plans Crushed
In the midst of the bombing of Lebanon in July, Beirut resident Muzna Al-Masri, MA ’05, noted with irony that the bombs were destroying her plans to be part of a workshop that month on nonviolent change.
Writing on her online blog, Al-Masri said: “The most frustrating side of all of this is that I am a believer in nonviolence, with an MA in peacebuilding. It is funny that the posters with the call for applications for the ‘3rd Annual Summer School for Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding’ still hang in the streets of the city and on the walls of the NGOs we are spending our war time in. I was supposed to be assisting in that training.”
Rushing to Help
Ghorayeb went into action in the best way she knew. She volunteered at a center packed with refugees. The first step was to see that their basic needs for food, shelter and medicine were met. Then she engaged them in activities designed to help them express their feelings, frustration and worries.
Abu Arquob, MA ’06, set off for her West Bank home – via Jordan – just as the United Nations Security Council agreed upon cease-fire conditions in mid-August. Despite the cease fire, fighting continued to rage between Israel’s soldiers and Hezbollah’s fighters in southern Lebanon.
With more than 100 alumni of one of CJP’s programs living in and around the war zone – in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan, or Syria – CJP found itself in an e-mail hurricane of pain. A CJP e-mail listserv linked faculty, staff, students and alumni wherever they were in the world. A few correspondents angrily questioned the worth of their peacebuilding skills in the face of attacks that they felt left them no choice but to fight for the survival of themselves and their loved ones.
‘We Are Not Crazy’
Rania Kharma, MA ’03, wrote from Gaza, where residents were trying to cope with what amounted to a “lock-down” by the surrounding forces of Israel. Food and potable water were scarce, electricity mostly off, and hospitals unable to function. “The real reason behind all this bloodshed is as clear as the sun in a hot summer day, and yet you just cannot see it, or maybe do not want to … Iraq and Palestine and parts of Lebanon are occupied.
“We are not crazy people who enjoy seeing our countries getting destroyed,” Kharma continued via e-mail. “We are people who have been fighting for justice and freedom for soooo long.”
Ghorayeb, the Christian Lebanese back at home in Beirut, typed on her internet blog: “I can’t stand seeing my little sister shaking and crying and passing out...I can’t stand the sounds of the raids.....I can’t..it’s soo strong, intense, disturbing, traumatizing... I’m still hearing them in the voice of my head, especially when I close my eyes....
“Everyday, while volunteering in schools I hear displaced youth and children wanting to be freedom fighters.....force is nurturing the feeling of martyrdom in their minds…you have no idea guys...and we the non-Shiites, are now forced to fight for our survival.
Hind Youssef Ghorayeb, Odelya Gertel and Huda Abu Arquob
“It could have been me on the bridge, or even my mum that goes to work everyday through this road....I just wish that this will never happen to anyone of you..... Since Internet is my only advocacy tool, I am using it to mobilize people around me....”
Writing from Syria, Manas Ghanem, MA ’06, a Muslim, reached out to Ghorayeb: “Please Hind, if there is a chance to leave, come to Damascus and we’ll share my house with your family and all who you can bring.” And to the rest of us Ghanem wrote: “Please, our CJP family, spread the word and do something… PLEASE.”
'Deserve to Live in Freedom'
Odelya Gertel, who offered the only Israeli voice among messages posted by a half-dozen from surrounding nations, expressed remorse for what her government was doing, but also tried to explain the fear of extermination that motivated her government and many of her fellow citizens.
“You are right, you do deserve to live in freedom, you and those you love deserve to have a country and everything that all others, including myself, sometimes take for granted,” wrote Gertel to Rania Kharma in Gaza, whom she had never met (they graduated three years apart).
“I cannot justify what we Israelis are doing. But it is important nevertheless to understand what brings us to behave the way we do,” she said. “The Israelis are not attacking because they like to attack or they wish for people to die.”
The Israelis also fear for their survival, and it causes them to go to extremes to protect themselves, explained Gertel.
In India, Gladston “Ashok” Xavier, MA ’04, spoke of reading the e-mails from Lebanon to his social work students at Loyola College and of organizing demonstrations of more than 250 people to condemn the killing of innocent people.
Concrete Steps
En route to Zimbabwe with his wife Kirstin Rothrock, Merwyn De Mello circulated via e-mail a thoughtful paper by Rabbi Michael Lerner on concrete steps that the world could take to end the suffering in the Middle East. In it Lerner argued that violence will achieve neither the goals of “the powerful in Israel” nor of “the powerless in Palestine.” [Lerner’s paper is posted at www.tikkun.org.]
De Mello also asked for prayers for Zimbabwe and for him and his wife, both ’05 graduates of CJP, as they take up work there. It was a quiet reminder that in pure numbers, more Africans are losing their lives to violent conflict and resulting economic destruction than in any other region of the world.
CJP professor Lisa Schirch, who had led workshops on building peace in Lebanon the previous year, joined the online discussion with this statement: “The real focus of changing Israeli policy should be on the U.S. and Europe, as Israel won’t be able to continue this type of aggression without U.S. support. Strategic, large-scale advocacy is needed here.
“The current policies of the U.S. and Israel only serve to create more enemies and more people who want to use violence against Americans and Israelis. Violent strategies do not work for Israel or the U.S. I also think violence from Hezbollah and other groups only serves to harden the resolve of the U.S. and Israel to continue the same aggressive policies.
Rania Kharma
”Separate from Schirch’s trip to the Middle East, CJP codirector Howard Zehr led workshops with lawyers in Lebanon in December 2005. Four months later, he participated in a videoconference on restorative justice with Israeli government officials.
A statement sent from Zehr’s e-mail address, but signed by CJP’s five-member leadership team, read in part: “As with the disastrous U.S. war in Iraq, we believe that the confidence the various parties to this conflict have placed in violent ‘solutions’ will prove to be tragically misplaced.
Grievous Catastrophe
“The current catastrophe decimating the innocent country and people of Lebanon is particularly grievous and must be condemned… We also are aware that other regions of the world are experiencing great suffering due to violence, and continue to support those of you working for peace in these areas as well.”
Abu Arquob read most of these e-mails while living in Boston – she had held a temporary job during the last year at the University of the Middle East Project and was getting ready to return to her home near Hebron in the West Bank when the latest war started.
She returned to Harrisonburg the second week of August, just long enough to pack her school belongings, pose for good-bye photos, answer questions for Peacebuilder, and hug her friends at EMU.
She said she looked forward to returning home, even though she would have to endure multiple checkpoints, dragging her three huge bags by herself. A trip from Jordan’s airport to her hometown used to take three hours by car. Now it takes 12 to 20 hours, often waiting in places where there are no toilets, no water, and unfriendly soldiers.
Huda Abu Arquob the day before she left EMU this August.
Bitter at U.S., But Keeping Hope
Regardless of the hardship of the trip or of life in the West Bank, Abu Arquob said she cannot abide living in the United States under the present circumstances. “Everything feels like it has blood on it. I don’t feel right drinking the water, using the electricity, burning up oil in an American car. People are paying with their lives for what people are enjoying here. I have been enjoying it too…
“But I know what it is costing the Palestinians and others in the world – look, nobody is even talking about Africa …the hunger, the AIDS. Instead billions of dollars are being spent on killing people in the Middle East. I don’t enjoy being here anymore.”
Abu Arquob plans to return to teaching English in a secondary school – she will be a teachers’ supervisor now that she has her masters degree in conflict transformation. There is even the possibility of teaching conflict resolution at the University of Hebron.
“I do believe that what we were taught here (at CJP) will help us at the grassroots level, at the self-survival level. In learning how to deal with trauma, what steps to take to address conflict, this will help me and my people to survive.
“I can’t afford to lose hope, because that means being dead or killing yourself and others on your way to death. I will never lose hope.”
While she focuses on the survival of her people, she urges her American friends to focus on ending the U.S.’s global reliance on military force and weaponry to get its way. “Changing U.S. foreign policy is essential to peace in this world.”
Editor’s note: Correspondence quoted in this article and elsewhere in Peacebuilder has been used with the writers’ permission.