Pain of Reconciliation

It is only in the last month that I heard the word "Naqba" (spelt with q or k in the Anglisized form). It is an Arabic word which means "catastrophe". Palestinians use the word to describe May 15, 1948 when the state of Israel was created and many thousands of Palestinians were forced from their homes and not allowed to return, many others were killed in this period. It is a sad part of Palestinian history which their people remember in the same way that the Holocaust was a hideous time in Jewish history that Jews and many others remember or that people in New York remember 9/11. I do not want to compare these horrors and indicate one was worse than other, no doubt far more people were systematically killed in the Holocaust especially in comparison with 9/11, but that does not make the disaster any different in scale for those effected.

In March 2011 the Israeli government passed the "Nakba Law" in which any organisation that marks Nakba Day, even a school, will lose any government funding. Since 20% of the population in Israel (not including the Occupied Territories) is Arab, this has a huge effect on how this community's history can be taught.

On the way out of Tel Aviv on June 3 I bought a copy of the International Herald Tribune: Jerusalem Edition, inside was included Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper for a predominantly Israeli audience with a version in English that caught my eye since it seemed to have what I would have thought were lots of controversial articles. One article was called "Port in a Storm" by Shay Fogelman and the introduction of the article read as follows:

"The mass flight of Haifa's Arabs remains one of the most contested events of the 1948 war. Yet despite strong evidence to support Arab claims, Israeli historians remain economical with the truth."

The article focuses mainly on the events of April 22, 1948 when, during ongoing ceasefire negotiations between Jews and Arabs of Haifa, members of Haganah (the army of Palestinian Jews prior to Israeli independence) started shelling Arab citizens gathered in the market square and how that caused the final fleeing of the Arabs from the city. The final paragraph of the article refers to a conversation with a small group of older Arab men who still live in the city of Haifa as they reflect on their memories of Nakba.

"They take great pride in the deep, friendly relations they maintain with their Jewish neighbours; a few of them say they have been involved over the years in attempts to draw Jews and Arabs closer together. From their viewpoint, the Nakba is a historical fact which needs no confirmation or legislation. Nor, in their view, need it frighten or threaten the Jewish presence in the country. As Awda al-Shehab says, "Only after we recognize mutually the suffering that was endured by the two peoples will we be able to create a common future. That is the true key to coexistence. Without it, each side will continue to live in the past.""

As I have been thinking over how solutions are reached to seemingly intransigent problems I have been heartened to be reading "God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time" by Desmond Tutu, a man who has lived through and personally heard in so much detail the terrible things that man can do and yet has a vibrant faith and seems full of fun. I am old enough to recall that as a teenager, so many people were almost resigned to the idea that change from apartheid would only happen in South Africa through a blood bath. It seemed ridiculous to envisage Nelson Mandela being released from prison, let alone being the President of the nation and standing to welcome people as South Africa first hosted the Rugby World Cup and then later the Football World Cup.

Of course I am aware that very many factors influenced the situation in South Africa or other events like the falling of the Iron Curtain/Berlin Wall in those years. But still I remember the huge surge of excitement and hope I felt waking up to the news the Berlin Wall had been breached in my first month as a university student or searching out televisions at lunch time during work site visits to watch all races of South Africans queue to cast their votes in the elections of 1994 and my utter shock at a colleague who had no idea what the news story was about. There can be change and occasions of good news and healing even after so much pain and conflict.

Sadly in that same year of 1994, 800,000 Rwandan's were brutally killed by their neighbours and while one part of the human family celebrates another part wounds or grieves. Yet even there, as many people's ability to hate was manipulated for terrible purposes there were those who were willing to die themselves to try and defend their neighbours of a different tribe.

Human beings do painful and unjust things to one another, as well as loving and kind things. Reconciliation can only happen when a relationship is broken and we can admit it is broken and reconciliation is painful, the process of healing itself is normally painful.

Desmond Tutu writes in his chapter "God Loves Your Enemies" the following:

"Forgiving and being reconciled to our enemies or our loved ones is not about pretending that things are other than they are. It is not about patting one another on the back and turning a blind eye to the wrong. True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the pain, the hurt, the truth. It could even sometimes make things worse. It is a risky undertaking, but in the end it is worthwhile, because in the end dealing with the real situation helps to bring real healing. Superficial reconciliation can bring only superficial healing."

Graffiti on Israel's Separation Barrier in Bethlehem