Is it enough?

A few weeks ago I attended an evening with Dalia Landau, one of the cofounders of the Open House in Ramle. Many of you know of her or have read her story in the well known book the Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan. The book recounts the true story of two families who lived in the same house in Ramle. It tell the story of how Dalai Landau, a Bulgarian Jew and her family came to live in the home of the Al-Khayri family, a Palestinian family forced out of their home when the Israelis came to create their state. It tells how these two children met and how that relationship developed over the years.

It was an interesting evening in that I was both captivated by Dalia’s compassion and grace and at the same time disturbed. I found myself attracted to the simplicity of her message of the importance of co-existence and the importance of transforming pain and rage in order for healing. I found myself attracted to the idea of people seeing each other as human beings rather than as enemies. I also see myself as a person who believes in the importance of chance encounters as learning experiences. And I believe that we all have shadow sides that must be embraced before we can truly know ourselves or others. All of this resonates for me and is the basis of good pastoral care and counseling.

But I left the event troubled.  I couldn’t quite put a finger on what was bothering me so I reviewed my notes and found that there were moments when Dalia’s answers seemed not very compassionate or understanding. But mostly I was missing the larger context of history, the Nakba, and the brutality of the ongoingness of the occupation.  I also wondered what ever happened to Bashir. Why did he want a daycare center for Arab children? Did he not believe in the co-existence only resistance? Why didn’t Daila read his letter?

Friends of Open House say that even though Dalia and Bashir have never been able to reconcile their historical narratives or ideological positions, they agreed to dedicate their shared home for interrelated purposes: a preschool for less advantaged Arab children and a community center for Jews and Arabs of all ages who come together to share in activities promoting reconciliation. I don’t doubt that Open House does provide a tangible testimony to cooperation but how does it work to end the occupation, or help Palestinians regain their rights of citizenship. How do these encounters or sharing of narratives help the Palestinians rebuild their bulldozed homes or help them return to their homes? 

In order to do justice to these questions, I have decided to write about this topic in two blog posts beginning with a republishing Dalia’s famous letter and Bashir’s response which I found buried in the Lemon Tree. Their letters say a lot about these different narratives.

I invite you to pay attention to what stands out for you when you read her words now after two intifadas and one bloody siege on Gaza. Where do you find yourself pulled in or nodding in agreement or where do you find yourself questioning or pulling back? I invite you to do the same with Bashir’s letter. I have included some questions at the end for reflection.

The “Letter to a Deportee” was written in 1988 while Dalia was pregnant with her son Raphael and confined to a maternity hospital in Jerusalem. While there she learned that Bashir al-Khayri was in administrative detention, facing deportation by the Israeli authorities. She composed an open letter to make public their shared story. Her open letter appeared in The Jerusalem Post on January 14, 1988, the day after Bashir, a lawyer, and three other Palestinians were deported to Lebanon in an Israeli helicopter.

Dear Bashir,

            We got to know each other 20 years ago under unusual and unexpected circumstances. Every since, we have become part of each other's lives. Now I hear that you are about to be deported. Since you are in detention at present, and this may be my last chance to communicate with you. I have chosen to write this open letter. First I want to retell our story.

            After the Six-Day War, you came with two other people to see the house in Ramle where you were born. This was my first encounter with Palestinians. My family and I had been living in that home since 1948, just after your family was forced to leave – you were a child of six then, and I was a year old. We had come to the new state of Israel together with 50,000 other Bulgarian Jews, and your house was considered "abandoned property."

            Following your first visit in 1967, I accepted your invitation to visit you in Ramallah, where I found myself surrounded by hospitality. We talked for hours and established a warm personal connection. However, it became clear that our political views were very far apart. Each of us saw the other through the lens created by the suffering of his own people.

            But some change in perspective was beginning to take place in me. One unforgettable day, your father came to our house in Ramle, accompanied by your brother. Your father was then old and blind. He touched the rugged stones of the house. He then asked if the lemon tree was still in the backyard. He was led to the abundant tree, which he had planted many years before. He caressed it and stood silent. Tears were rolling down his face.

            Many years later, after the death of your father, your mother told me that, whenever he felt troubled at night and could not sleep, he would pace up and down your rented apartment in Ramallah, holding a shriveled lemon in his hand. It was the same lemon my father had given him on that visit.

            Ever since I met you, the feeling has been growing in me that home was not just my home. The lemon tree which yielded so much fruit and gave us so much delight lived in other people's hearts too. The spacious house with its high ceilings, big windows and large grounds was no long just an "Arab house," a desirable form of architecture. It had faces behind it now. The walls evoked other people's memories and tears.

            It was very painful for me, as a young woman 20 years ago, to wake up to a few then well hidden facts. For example, we were all led to believe that the Arab population of Ramle and Lod had run away before the advancing Israeli army in 1948, leaving everything behind in a rushed and cowardly escape. This belief reassured us. It was meant to prevent guilt and remorse. But after 1967, I met not only you, but also an Israeli Jew who had personally participated in the expulsion from Ramle and Lod. He told me the story as he had experienced it, and as Yitzhak Rabin later confirmed in his memoirs.

My love for my country was losing its innocence. It was taking on new dimensions. While I was learning to live with these painful facts, you were imprisoned. You were charge with planting a bomb that killed several civilians. My heart aches for those murdered even now. For your crime, you sat in prison for fifteen years. Passing the Ramle prison on my way to work, I often wondered if you were there. I never had the courage to ask. It was too painful.

            After my marriage and the death of my parents, I inherited the house in Ramle. I shared our story with my husband, and he and I both felt that we wanted to dedicate that house- to some healing purpose. We wished to do this in conjunction with you but we did not know whether this was at all possible. Following your release from prison, we sought you out and met you. I felt that you and I, your family and mine, were bound by a strange destiny, that the house with which our childhood memories were connected had forced us to face each other. However, our conversations revealed that, despite the passage of time, your basic position had not changed – and this makes it impossible to find common ground. Perhaps some day, if we are both willing to make sacrifices, some kind of mutual forgiveness may yet emerge.

            If you could disassociate yourself from your past terrorist actions, your commitment to your own people would gain true moral force in my eyes. I well understand that terror is a term relative to a subjective point of view. Some of Israel's political leaders were terrorists in the past and have never repented. I know that what we consider terror from your side, your people consider their heroic "armed struggle" with the means at their disposal. What we consider our right to self-defense, when we bomb Palestinian targets from the air and inevitably hit civilians, you consider mass terror from the air withadvanced technology. Each side has an ingenuity for justifying its own position. How long shall we perpetuate this vicious circle?

            The first step out of this deadlock is to free ourselves from self-justifying moral relativism. We are taught that the essence of our Jewish tradition can be encapsulated in the following teaching: What is hateful to you, do not do unto others." Unless both Israelis and Palestinians can embrace this basic human principle, we will not have a solid foundation for coexistence. That foundation entails the right to self-determination for both peoples.

            You, Bashir, are a Habash supporter, rejecting the self determination of my people in this land. Most Israelis feel that the planting of bombs, as well as the throwing of stones by Palestinians is not just an expression of resistance to the occupation, but is a much deeper refusal to accept a Jewish state in even part of Palestine. As long as we experience this total rejection, you and your people will not achieve your own independence. For you will alienate all those Israelis who, like myself, are prepared to support the Palestinian struggle for self determination. People like yourself, Bashir, bear a great responsibility for triggering our anxieties, which are well justified, given the PFLP's determination to replace Israel with a "secular democratic state" and to use terror to achieve this aim.

            Regardless of what you may have done recently to displease the military government, deportation is a violation of human rights and is therefore counterproductive for Israel. Not only do the expulsions create greater bitterness and extremism among the Palestinians, thereby escalating the violent confrontations, but the deportees will have greater freedom to plan actions against Israel from abroad. You, Bashir, have already experienced one expulsion from Ramle as a child. Now you are about to experience another from Ramallah forty years later. You will thus become a refugee twice. You may be separated from your wife and your two small children, Ahmed and Hanin, and from your elderly mother and the rest of your family. How can your children avoid hating those who will have deprived them of their father? Will the legacy of pain grow and harden with bitterness as it passes down the generations?

            It is a natural reaction to hate those who have made us suffer. It is also a natural reaction to inflict pain because one has suffered pain, and to justify it ideologically. In this small land, both our peoples are stuck in a fateful embrace. I believe that our finding each other here is potentially for the greater unfolding of life. In order to fulfill this potential, we all need to become more fully human, which to me, means activating our capacity to understand the suffering of others through our own, and to transform pain into healing.

It seems to me, Bashir, that you will now have a new opportunity to assume a leadership role. By its intention to deport you, Israel is actually empowering you. I appeal to you to demonstrate the kind of leadership that uses nonviolent means of struggle for your rights;

a leadership based on education for the recognition of your enemy and his relative justice.

I appeal to both Palestinians and Israelis to understand that the use of force will not resolve this conflict on its fundamental level. This is the kind of war that no one can win, and either both peoples will achieve liberation or neither will.

            Our childhood memories, yours and mine, are intertwined in a tragic way. If we can not find means to transform that tragedy into a shared blessing, our clinging to the past will destroy our future. We will then rob another generation of a joy-filled childhood and turn them into martyrs for an unholy cause. I pray that with your cooperation and God's help, our children will delight in the beauty and bounties of this holy land.

Allah ma'ak - May God be with you.

Dalia

           

Bashir’s Response

Bashir hand wrote his letter in Arabic and then translated it. This letter was not made public and Dalia did not reprint it for people to read.  Pay attention to the questions he chooses to answer.

Dear Dalia,

            It’s true that we got acquainted as you mentioned in your letter in exceptional and unexpected circumstances ... And it’s true that after we got acquainted, each one of us has become part of the life of the other. I don’t deny that what I’ve sensed in you, Dalia, of morality, sensitivity and sensibility, left a deep impact in me that I cannot ignore. There was even a sixth sense that was telling me that in this human being that I got acquainted with lives an alert living conscience that will one day express itself.

            Your letter that came in the period of my exile from my land, from the land of my country, Palestine, after our dialogue, conversations and acquaintance had become the talk of the press in the media, and even the talk of all the people whose consciousness was moved to recognize the truth of what’s really happening and to reassess what happened.

Allow me first to express my affection and respect as well as appreciation of your courage to write to me, and your courage to present the ideas contained in your letter. Please allow me to present my respect to your husband Yehezkel Landau, who I have a lot of appreciation for...

             The Zionist leadership has planted hatred in the souls of one generation after another. He who plants barley, Dalia, will never reap wheat. And he who plants hatred can never reap love. That leadership has planted hatred in our hearts, not affection. It has destroyed all human values the day it destroyed our childhood, our existence, and our right to live on the soil of our homeland. Your change, Dalia, and your new perspective was attained through research and investigation. And your ability to see things the way they are in reality, not the way they were told to you. We were exiled by force of arms. We were exiled on foot. We were exiled to take the earth as our bed. And the sky as a cover. And to be fed from the crumbs of those among the governments and international organizations who imparted their charity. We were exiled but we left our souls, our hopes and our childhood in Palestine. We left our joys and sorrows. We left them in every corner, and on every grain of sand in Palestine. We left them with each lemon fruit, with each olive. We left them in the roses and flowers. We left them in the flowering tree that stands with pride at the entrance of our house in al-Ramla. We left them in the remains of our fathers and ancestors. We left them as witnesses and history. We left them, hoping to return.

             You cannot equate the struggle of the people for liberation and independence and self-determination.  You cannot equate that with aggression, expansionism and oppression of the other.

            Dalia, I have tried to go back to Palestine on board the Ship of Return (Al-Awda), following Gandhi’s road. I did not carry a missile or a bomb ... I was carrying my history and my love for my homeland. But what was the result, Dalia? The ship was sunk before it sailed. It was sunk while it was docked in a Cypriot port. They sunk it so that we would not return ... Why aren’t we given our right to return? Why are we prevented from determining our future and establishing our state? Why am I exiled from my homeland? Why am I separated from my children, Ahmad and Hanine, from my wife, from my mother, from my brothers and sisters, from my family?

I want you to hear something new, Dalia.

            Do you know, Dalia, that in 1948, with childhood innocence, I played with one of the booby-trapped toys that were scattered by the Zionists—Stern, the Haganah and Irgun? The gifts of the terrorist Zionist organizations to the children of Palestine...

The booby-trapped toy exploded in my left hand to crush my palm, to scatter my bones and flesh. And shed my blood, to blend it with the soil of Palestine, to embrace the lemon fruits and the olive leaves, to cling to the dates and the flowers of the fitna tree.

            Who is more entitled to a reunion, Dalia? Sharansky, the Russian who doesn’t have a cultural linguistic historic attachment to Palestine? Or the Palestinian Bashir, who is attached to Palestine with the language, culture, history, family and the remains of my palm that I left in Palestine? Does not the world owe me the right to reunite myself, to reunite my palm with my body? Why do I live without my identity and without my homeland while my palm remains in Palestine?

            I don’t want to overburden you, Dalia. I know how sensitive you are. I know how you hurt. I don’t wish you any pain. All that I wish is for you and me to struggle together with all of the peace and freedom loving people for the establishment of a democratic popular state. And to struggle together to bring the idea of the Dalia child care center to life. And to struggle with me for my return to my old mother, to my wife and my children, to my homeland, to struggle with me to reunite me with my palm, my palm that has blended with every grain of Palestinian soil.

Yours with respect, faithfully,

Bashir

For Reflection

Does Dalia’s letter shed a new light for you on the conflict?

What do you think about her ideas about terror?

Do you think that Bashir or the conflict is locked in “self-justifying moral relativism?”

Do you believe that both peoples are stuck in a “fateful embrace”?

Do you think Bashir is clinging to the past?
What does Bashir mean when he says that "You cannot equate the struggle of the people for liberation and independence with struggle for self-determination?

Why does he tell her about his hand?

How do you respond to his questions about his deportation?

Do you find yourself more sympathetic to one letter over the other? Why?

How does reading these letters affect the way you think about co-existence projects like Open House?