It was a bit like going back to a double maths class on a Saturday morning. Except that I was sitting in the shade of a pepper tree in the garden of an East Jerusalem research centre, surrounded by international and local thinkers and tinkerers. Around me were perhaps 100 people, from suited diplomats with shades still on as they squinted into the low evening rays, to sandalled NGO recruits in their early 20s, Arabs in Western dress and Westerners in Arab dress and one man looking like he'd come straight from Kathmandu wearing an Indian cloth turban above his scraggy blonde beard, a battered rucksack lying by his feet. This is Jerusalem. One small fragment of it, at least.
The author of the book being launched began to speak and after only two minutes I was totally lost. Although I was there to learn more about a single state solution for Israel and Palestine, I have to admit I knew no more about it after one hour in that garden. I whisked back in time to that double maths class on a sunny Saturday morning at school, where you realise on zoning back in, that even if you'd been concentrating for the past 10 minutes, you still wouldn't have understood.
She's a brilliant and well respected woman, but for me there was no layman's in-road to the caverns of a PHD mind. More of a shop floor kind of girl at the moment, I'd spent the previous week filming 3 eye surgeons from the USA as they carried out their work in the West Bank and showing me the stash of corneas they'd imported from Texas for the hospital. Donating body parts is not yet a common practise in the Arab world, so hospitals and patients in the West Bank are dependent on foreign organ donors. I wondered how many Palestinians are currently wandering about wearing Texan corneas.
But the one thing I did get out of the PHD presentation on the single state solution for Israel and Palestine - regarded by some as the only way forward; and by others as a naive hope - was a wonderful quote from Howard Zinn:
“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction."
Magnificent is such a great word. And it got me thinking about all the magnificence I'd read and heard about that week.
Living here, our phones and inboxes squeak with messages all day long recounting grim tales: grimmer than Grimms' own. Daily messages that can easily snuff out hope:
Like the accounts of Israeli soldiers in Gaza admitting to what they did last summer in Operation Protective Edge. One soldier explained how during his summer in Gaza he felt like the boundaries of good and evil became blurred and he just keep shooting at moving objects as though it were quite a fun computer game, forgetting that these are people.
Like the fact that according to Yesh Din, an Israeli legal rights organization: The chance that a complaint submitted to the Israeli Police by a Palestinian will lead to an effective investigation, the location of a suspect, prosecution, and ultimate conviction is just 1.9 percent.
And that Israel is to begin operating controversial Palestinian only bus travel in the West Bank. 'Palestinian workers will have to return from Israel to the West Bank via the same checkpoint they left and will not be allowed to ride Israeli bus lines. The new regulations, implemented by the Civil Administration, could lengthen some workers' commutes by as much as two hours.' Israelis and Palestinians on separate buses? Has anyone heard of Rosa Parks? And that was decades ago.
But like the moss and flowers, that against all odds grow out of a rock face or a stony wall, there's always defiance to the norm. And in this case, the magnificence of people who are changing the narrative.
For instance, the very existence of Breaking the Silence, the organisation for ex-Israeli Defence Forces who have collected these testimonies from last summer in Gaza, which are now being heard in the Israeli Knesset. This breaking of silence must often also result in the breaking of family ties as soldiers bravely speak out about what they now see to be wrong and want to tell the world about it. They're the only ones that are licensed to tell as it was only they who were there, then: licensed to kill.
Then I read about a dating App named 'Verona' after the location of Romeo and Juliet's feuding families, designed as a dating tool to enable Palestinians and Israelis to meet and date each other. I'm speaking to the App creator this week to find out more.
Then I read that just a couple of days after the idea of separating Israelis and Palestinians on buses was suggested, the idea was batted down as apartheid nonsense. The idea floated for less than 24 hours I'm happy to say.
And then, a literal Hallelujah as the Vatican recognised the state of Palestine, in the same week as it canonised two Palestinian nuns: Mariam Baouardy and Marie Alphonsine Danil Ghattas. The first ever Arab saints. And two women at that.
The deputy Latin patriarch of Jerusalem said: 'The two saints lived in Palestine before it was divided. They did not know the Israeli-Arab conflict. I am sure they will follow our situation from heaven and will continue to intercede for peace and reconciliation in the Holy Land...By coincidence both are called Mary, Miriam. It is extraordinary: This name is common to Jews, Christians, Muslims. May they become a bridge beween us all."
And finally, the Palestinian who risked his own life by entering Syria and negotiating the release of 2 Swedes from Al Nusra - a terrorist branch affiliated with Al Qaeda. No money exchanged hands.
Truly magnificent, wouldn't you say?
The author of the book being launched began to speak and after only two minutes I was totally lost. Although I was there to learn more about a single state solution for Israel and Palestine, I have to admit I knew no more about it after one hour in that garden. I whisked back in time to that double maths class on a sunny Saturday morning at school, where you realise on zoning back in, that even if you'd been concentrating for the past 10 minutes, you still wouldn't have understood.
She's a brilliant and well respected woman, but for me there was no layman's in-road to the caverns of a PHD mind. More of a shop floor kind of girl at the moment, I'd spent the previous week filming 3 eye surgeons from the USA as they carried out their work in the West Bank and showing me the stash of corneas they'd imported from Texas for the hospital. Donating body parts is not yet a common practise in the Arab world, so hospitals and patients in the West Bank are dependent on foreign organ donors. I wondered how many Palestinians are currently wandering about wearing Texan corneas.
But the one thing I did get out of the PHD presentation on the single state solution for Israel and Palestine - regarded by some as the only way forward; and by others as a naive hope - was a wonderful quote from Howard Zinn:
“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction."
Magnificent is such a great word. And it got me thinking about all the magnificence I'd read and heard about that week.
Living here, our phones and inboxes squeak with messages all day long recounting grim tales: grimmer than Grimms' own. Daily messages that can easily snuff out hope:
Like the accounts of Israeli soldiers in Gaza admitting to what they did last summer in Operation Protective Edge. One soldier explained how during his summer in Gaza he felt like the boundaries of good and evil became blurred and he just keep shooting at moving objects as though it were quite a fun computer game, forgetting that these are people.
Like the fact that according to Yesh Din, an Israeli legal rights organization: The chance that a complaint submitted to the Israeli Police by a Palestinian will lead to an effective investigation, the location of a suspect, prosecution, and ultimate conviction is just 1.9 percent.
And that Israel is to begin operating controversial Palestinian only bus travel in the West Bank. 'Palestinian workers will have to return from Israel to the West Bank via the same checkpoint they left and will not be allowed to ride Israeli bus lines. The new regulations, implemented by the Civil Administration, could lengthen some workers' commutes by as much as two hours.' Israelis and Palestinians on separate buses? Has anyone heard of Rosa Parks? And that was decades ago.
But like the moss and flowers, that against all odds grow out of a rock face or a stony wall, there's always defiance to the norm. And in this case, the magnificence of people who are changing the narrative.
For instance, the very existence of Breaking the Silence, the organisation for ex-Israeli Defence Forces who have collected these testimonies from last summer in Gaza, which are now being heard in the Israeli Knesset. This breaking of silence must often also result in the breaking of family ties as soldiers bravely speak out about what they now see to be wrong and want to tell the world about it. They're the only ones that are licensed to tell as it was only they who were there, then: licensed to kill.
Then I read about a dating App named 'Verona' after the location of Romeo and Juliet's feuding families, designed as a dating tool to enable Palestinians and Israelis to meet and date each other. I'm speaking to the App creator this week to find out more.
Then I read that just a couple of days after the idea of separating Israelis and Palestinians on buses was suggested, the idea was batted down as apartheid nonsense. The idea floated for less than 24 hours I'm happy to say.
And then, a literal Hallelujah as the Vatican recognised the state of Palestine, in the same week as it canonised two Palestinian nuns: Mariam Baouardy and Marie Alphonsine Danil Ghattas. The first ever Arab saints. And two women at that.
The deputy Latin patriarch of Jerusalem said: 'The two saints lived in Palestine before it was divided. They did not know the Israeli-Arab conflict. I am sure they will follow our situation from heaven and will continue to intercede for peace and reconciliation in the Holy Land...By coincidence both are called Mary, Miriam. It is extraordinary: This name is common to Jews, Christians, Muslims. May they become a bridge beween us all."
And finally, the Palestinian who risked his own life by entering Syria and negotiating the release of 2 Swedes from Al Nusra - a terrorist branch affiliated with Al Qaeda. No money exchanged hands.
Truly magnificent, wouldn't you say?
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