The Shouting Fence

Mar 11, 2011

I’d heard about the dilemma of the Druze Arabs of Majdal Shams, first from Druze workers and Jewish friends on the kibbutz when I lived there in 1989, and then from residents, artists and activists of this town in the Golan Heights when I finally had a chance to visit last summer.

I even saw the infamous “shouting fence”—two fences actually, which create a no-man’s land between the Israeli-annexed Golan and neighbouring Syria. Friends, neighbours and family members who have been separated by this fence—some for 40 years—come together to call across to each other (some using megaphones) in a poignant symbol of this divided land

The fence was quiet when I visited. Apparently, cellphones and easier access to Syria via Jordan have cut down on its necessity. Still, the story of the Druze of the Golan should be listened to. Theirs is one of the more complex stories in a part of the world where nobody’s story is simple.

That’s what I was delighted to learn about and am keen to track down this recent Dutch documentary, Shout, which apparently traces the lives of two young friends from Majdal Shams, who cross over to study in Syria and then who must make the difficult decision of whether to stay there or return to their home on the far side of the fence, knowing that this decision is final and likely irrevocable.

Here is the trailer:

Remnick Does Haaretz

Remnick Does Haaretz

Mar 2, 2011

Anyone who knows me also knows I’m a magaholic, and that there’s little I enjoy more than a great magazine. (In fact, I take great pleasure in merely good or even flashily mediocre magazines, and my subscription addiction borders on the pathological.)

I also get a serious readerly woody for great newspapers, a love first kindled while fighting for sections around our family’s ink-stained, paper-cluttered dining room table in Ottawa.

Finally, as this blog makes clear, I’ve got a long-standing fascination with Israel and Israeli culture and politics.

So just imagine how many degrees of heaven I was in, when I opened the latest issue of The New Yorker to discover an in-depth feature (by editor-in-chief David Remnick no less!) about the influential left-wing Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz (whose English edition I read on a regular basis online and which I devour whenever I’m in Israel).

It’s a fascinating profile of a complex publication — that rare paper where the publisher actually pushes his editorial staff to be more radical, more provocative, and risk alienating readers more than they often want to. The title says it all: “Haaretz prides itself on being the conscience of Israel. Does it have a future?”

Read it and decide for yourself.

The Car and the Kibbutz

The Car and the Kibbutz

Feb 25, 2011


I’ve been thinking a lot about cars the past few days. How they control—and often threaten—our lives. These reflections have been rekindled, in large part, because a colleague and friend was badly injured in car accident a week ago. I don’t know the details of the incident and am relieved to hear she is recovering, but it will be a long, slow, healing process, and her life has been significantly altered by this violent event.

A week before that, walking my dog home from the video store at night, I was nearly bowled over by a driver in an SUV who didn’t see me as she accelerated left into the pedestrian crossing … because she had turned her head in the opposite direction to talk to her passenger! She braked a foot away from me (and would have crushed poor Bo if she hadn’t) after I thrust out my hand and started shouting. (My shouting—laced with words I won’t reprint here—continued as I leaned toward her windshield and shared my opinion of her driving skills.) Since then, I’ve been even more hyper-vigilant of careless drivers on my walk to and from daycare, often with my son dawdling behind me on his bike, with vehicles whizzing past on the road beside the sidewalk.

I haven’t owned a car in a decade. However, I’m not sure when my antagonistic relationship with the internal-combustion engine began. I never had that “car gene” that other North American boys seem to be born with. But I didn’t hate them either—certainly not growing up in the suburbs of Ottawa, where you often needed to be driven around to get anywhere, where getting your license remains one of the last rites of passage into adulthood. (Trust me: getting to vote doesn’t count for an 18-year-old.)

It was only on the kibbutz, I suppose, that I first experienced the pleasures of a largely car-free community. While we were taken by bus on volunteer trips and in the back of old Toyota trucks to work the fields, I rarely rode in a car while living in Israel. I didn’t miss it. And I learned to appreciate a community design in which motorized vehicles (aside from the occasional golf cart) were second-class citizens, shunted to the margins of the encircling ring road, and pedestrians ruled the laneways. You could walk everywhere, at any time, and not worry about doing a shoulder check or dodging hasty drivers.

There were, quite simply, few cars in this community. They were all collectively owned and generally reserved for important kibbutz business, not for cruising around or short-hop shopping trips or dragging the kids from school to soccer to play dates—all those activities occurred instead within the barbed-wire enclosure of the kibbutz, in walking or cycling distance. And in that way, you bumped into friends and neighbours and other community members, as you wandered the grounds of the kibbutz and went about your business.

Some of that has changed in the 21st-century privatized kibbutz. People have bought their own cars, so they’re not reliant on using the communally owned vehicles. They have joined the swarm of traffic that chokes the urban streets and nation-crossing highways of this densely populated country. And yet many of these communities have retained a fleet of collective cars and trucks, with high-tech booking systems, that would be the envy of embryonic “car share” operations (like the Victoria Car Share Co-op, which I belong to) in North America. Not owning a car is still not a problem. Being “car-free” is certainly not viewed as the social aberration that it is here in Canada. (I worry that people must think I don’t drive because I lost my license to a DUI or something.)
Aerial view of Kibbutz Urim
The “needs” of automobiles have started to affect how kibbutzim are redesigned in small ways. I noticed more internal roads and parking lots in the centre of Kibbutz Shamir than I remember from 20 years ago. On Kibbutz Urim, near the Gaza Strip, cars remain on the periphery, except now, because the kibbutz runs a licensed daycare for both members and outsiders, authorities are demanding that the community conform to safety regulations and widen the narrow internal lanes so that emergency vehicles can more easily access the daycare. Many of the new neighbourhoods being erected, and then marketed to non-members as suburban getaways, feature North American-style single-family dwellings, with long driveways so you can park your car mere steps from your front door. (In North America, the notion that you might have to take more than 10 paces from your Ford to your foyer borders on insanity.)
Still, most people still get around their kibbutz homes by foot, bike, scooter or the proliferation of electric golf-carts (no longer just used by pensioners or the infirm). In this way, the kibbutz remains an ideal to me of a human-scale “eco-topia”—a place where you can live without the buzz and threat of cars, where all the amenities have been designed with the walker not the driver in mind, where the only collisions that occur are the serendipitous intersections of friends and neighbours amid the network of pedestrian pathways, where children can roam free and explore, in nature, away from the menace of the infernal combustion engine. Where the car is no longer king of the road.
The Kibbutz in the News

The Kibbutz in the News

Feb 25, 2011


There is plenty to catch up with in news of the kibbutz. Most recently, Ha’aretz printed an interesting article about the evolving volunteer programs on kibbutzim—how more volunteers are now coming from places like India or Latin America, and how these new volunteers fit within the 21st-century economics of privatized kibbutzim now more likely to use cheap imported labour (usually Thai workers) for agricultural field work that was once the domain of itinerant volunteers from North America, Australia and Europe.

As the director of the kibbutz movement’s volunteer department explains the pros and cons of inviting volunteers into a community: “Kibbutzim want to feel young again, and the universality of the volunteers, their vivacity. Volunteers require a bigger investment of energy; you have to see to their conditions, to trips, vacations – not every kibbutz [is willing to] do this. Some say, ‘It doesn’t suit us to run a kindergarten.'”

The Guardian in the U.K. published a short memoir, by novelist Noam Shpancer, about growing up on a kibbutz in the communal children’s house. He lauds the freedom to explore that he experienced as a child:

Entertainment was mostly of the found, not manufactured, sort. Our playgrounds were junkyards. We played with defunct tractors, old boxes, used clothing and discarded tools. We roamed the yard, mostly barefoot. We built tree houses. We took turns on the lone communal bicycle. In winter we collected mushrooms in the forest and brought them to the communal dining room to be cooked.

He also describes the stultifying effects of the relentless pressure to conform, to be one with the peer group:

Individuality and competition were looked down upon. Children who were unusual, eccentric or sought to distinguish themselves, were shunned. We were socialised to be strong and sunny, simple and similar. Emotional expression was demeaned as weak and self-involved. We learned to numb ourselves. I haven’t cried since I was 10. I’d like to but I can’t.

He writes about how the kibbutz system gave his parents, his father especially, the stability and purpose (beyond mere survival) that they had lost in their escape from Nazi Germany. He also describes how these pioneers failed to prepare for the “second day” of the revolution—“in which the self-defining project of their youthful rebellion would become a mundane, constricting ‘home town’ to their children, propelling the children to seek their own identities and adventures elsewhere.”

Ultimately, nearly an entire generation of kibbutz children (like Shpancer) sought their own identities and adventures beyond the wire of their home kibbutz. Only now are some of them returning to a much-changed movement that has abandoned the strict enforcement of collective child-rearing and other communal ideals. For someone who experienced it first-hand, Shpancer doesn’t think such changes are a bad thing.

The plight of Sudanese refugees who escaped to Israel over the Egyptian border is a complicated issue. A recent Jerusalem Post article describes efforts (including some kibbutz-based programs) to retrain and help refugees resettle back in southern Sudan. One former refugee hopes to found not one but a series of Sudanese kibbutzim, inspired by his experiences in Israel:

Emanuel Logooro, who returned to Southern Sudan nearly a year ago after four years at Kibbutz Eilot, said he was in the process of starting up a kibbutz back home. “I want to contribute to my country, and a kibbutz would be a great contribution,” he said while visiting Israel. “My family said I could have some of their land – Sudan is a very, very big country, and they gave me enough land to start seven kibbutzim. I got a bank loan to start building the facilities, and now I’m hoping to find about 40 families to join,” said Logooro, who came to Israel with his wife and is now back home with her and their three children.

Finally, the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company performed this week in Vancouver. I wish KCDC had made it to Victoria. In 2009, I was lucky enough to tour the company’s facilities on Kibbutz Ga’aton and catch a sneak peek at a few rehearsals. There is no better symbol of the change at this now-privatized kibbutz than that, when I was there two summers ago, the dining room—once the social hub of the community—was about to be renovated into another rehearsal/performance space for the internationally acclaimed dance troupe. Artistic director explained to a reporter from Vancouver’s Georgia Straight that while his troupe isn’t political per se, it’s hard to separate geopolitical realities from a cultural group coming from Israel:
So while Be’er doesn’t necessarily want his work seen as a literal commentary on the Israel that surrounds him, he does relish the thought of bringing his country’s perspective—and talent—to the rest of the world. “It’s important that we arrive from Israel and it’s not just the Israel you see in the news with crisis and bombing—that there is another side to it,” he says with heartfelt conviction. “There’s a lot of creativity and activity here, and I believe we can create communication—we can create a bridge.”

Part Two: School for Peace (Q&A with Abdessalam Najjar)

Feb 21, 2011

Since the beginning, it was clear for everybody that we will not be only a mixed community; we will deal with this conflict using educational tools. Of course, we had  thousands and thousands of ideas, but it means that what exists is what was possible to do. And one of the first educational institutions that we did here, we call it today the School for Peace, and the School for Peace encounter workshops for groups in conflict

What kind of groups would come together?
 

At that time, I had finished my study at university and I became a teacher in high school. The first thing to make it, I brought my pupils, the Palestinian pupils, here to Wahat Al-Salam/Neve Shalom. My Jewish colleague, he’s a teacher of Jewish school, he brought his pupils here—and they start meet here. And the only motivation is a good will. No experience. No profession. Nothing. What to do with them, we don’t know. Okay, let’s talk. Let’s dance. Let’s pray together. In this way. And sometimes, this day was so calm; pupils went home and we summarized it: it was a successful day. Sometimes,  pupils they entered into hot discussions and shouting and a lot of anger coming out, and we summarized: it was a failure day. Until some people from outside the community—I think they were there from the academy—came to see the new thing that is happening here, encounters and all of these things.

And there was nothing sort of else like it in Israel or Palestine?

No, there was not a lot of things like this. We were the first to create this kind of thing. And the first thing I—the most—I still remember up to today is that [we asked] how do you decide if it was a failure and how it was a success? Upon what criteria? Let’s put question mark on it—we’re not sure. And then it shook our confidence, this kind of intervention. It was not easy for me to accept it. But, the reality is stronger than my feelings and then—then after some years, we decide to have a very serious academic research about this kind of activities. We get help to invite and research institution from outside of the community, and we ask from them a program of research, and they give us five years intervention and research and it’s the step that crystallized the work of Wahat Al-Salam/Neve Shalom, the School for Peace, until today. Of course one of the concepts that, that there is no one reality; there is no real results; everything is in (pause) changing as reality change, and the work should be changed here.

And how did it exactly crystallize? It was just a new way of thinking about it or?

No. They started with us as we are. Okay, what are your plans? What you are planning to achieve? Okay, this is what you want to achieve. Let’s make a questionnaire upon these things and give it to the participants. We choose a test group that they are not participating in the workshop and let’s see the change of the ideas of the participants.

So like a control group and a test group.

And the first year, black was in our eyes. That our activities, results, it was the total opposite of our aims. The participants, they gained more hatred, more prejudices before related to the other groups.

Really?

And the difference was, the other [non-workshop] groups, all their attention to the other side, they were assuming. Our group [in the workshops], they were sure. We needed to change all our attitudes.

What did you feel when you got those results at first?

Well, first of all, we were shocked. And then the research group, they said, let’s analyze it. …. Maybe our methodology, our approach, is not good; we need to change our methodology. Because we did at that time, it was belonged to the theory called the “contact theory”. The contact theory assumed that if you have two groups, different groups, and bring them together for a short period, the attitude of the participants toward the other group will be less prejudice and less enmity.

Okay. And just by being in contact?

Yes, by being in contact. And there were a lot of researches done all over the world and they found it positively. Why here it’s the negative—the opposite. And then they said, maybe the reality here between Arabs and Jews is not the same like the reality between Americans and Chinese or between French and British or between other things.

Or French and English Canadians.

Yeah, something like that. Then we need to have a different approach. We said, okay, why we just feel the need to do it? Because we have a conflict. Does the conflict have any role inside the encounter? Yes or no. In the contact theory, no. Then we need to bring the conflict inside the group. “We don’t need to bring it,” they said. Maybe the facilitation is preventing the conflict from getting inside. And it’s right. Because other time we were using things like, “Let’s listen one to the other side. Let’s be patient one to the other side. We don’t want to—let’s calm the situation.” All these have a meaning as a message: don’t bring conflict inside. And then the participants, they didn’t bring conflict inside.

Then we said, let’s try, okay, if somebody will talk about his or her fear, about her anger, about her prejudice—come in, and take it as a material. And give it a place and, of course, we changed our analyses and our concentration from the interpersonal relation to the intergroup relation. Because, really, the individuals when they are coming as individuals, one of their aims is to have a personal relation. But the conflict is not there. The conflict is somewhere else in the intergroup relation. And, if we are not touching this level, we can’t understand the conflictual dynamics. And we start working in this thing. And created a lot of difficulties for the schools, for the participants themselves, and sometimes, for mainly the Jewish participants that one of their aims to participate in the workshop is to stay on the human level of the interpersonal relation. The facilitation help us how to see the diversity of the motivation of the two groups.

And what were the differences?  

The differences…one of the things that we realized that when hot discussions started, they—the Jewish participants—they make their efforts to calm the situation: “We didn’t come here to fight; please, be quiet.” All of these things. “I understand your anger, but, the reality is not like that.” Means give [acknowledgement] to the individual of their anger, but not to the reality of it. Or to exclude a negative experience of one person from the reality. The Arab, the Palestinian participants— they didn’t go to this direction. When one Palestinian participant broke his anger, and all they joined his anger: yes, it’s ours—like this. They didn’t cooperate with the Jews more for having the human aspect or the participating or calming the situation. They started: “no we are not coming here to speak about personal relations; we are coming here to speak about our rights. We are going, we are ready to speak about equality.”

So as a facilitator, how do you moderate those kind of differences? To bring people to be aware what is going on?

Okay, so you just make them aware of those differences.

Yeah. For example, we think participants, they are not aware what is going on. Even very simple things, when they are sitting together and discussing, the first thing is happening just in the first minute when we come inside the room together, you will find that half of the circle, they are Jews, and half the circle, they are Arabs. Just to give a photo. It seems that it’s still—we are not so confident. Are all Jews in one side and all Arabs on other side? We don’t know what it means, but it exists. As the facilitators, we learn that we are not allowed to make it more than it is. Just this is—maybe for some, it has a meaning; for others, it’s just that.