c. 2003 Religion News Service

JERUSALEM _ At the end of May, 120 Arabs and 130 Jews from Israel, along with a similar contingent from France, jointly toured Auschwitz-Birkenau, the infamous Polish concentration camp.

Now the participants must decide what to do for an encore.

By all accounts, this unique encounter was a tremendous success in that it touched raw nerves, challenged basic assumptions and swept away stereotypes. It brought together an unlikely mix of Jews, Muslims and Christians from all points in the political and religious spectrum. Emotional fences came down and friendships were fostered.

Although Jewish groups often visit Auschwitz and other death camps, the trip in May was unprecedented. For one thing, it was initiated by Israeli Arabs working with Archimandrite Emile Shoufani, pastor of the Greek Catholic community in Nazareth. For another, it required no reciprocity, such as a visit to Jenin or another site where Palestinians mourn their dead, on the part of the Jews they invited to join them.

Since their return home to Israel, where Palestinian terrorism and Israel’s military operations have only intensified in the months since the historic visit, the participants have grappled with how best to continue their “journey of healing,” as many now describe it.

Some want to parlay the momentum generated during the Auschwitz visit into clear-cut political action. Others insist on remaining apolitical, in keeping with the guidelines of the Auschwitz visit itself.

Yossi Klein Halevi, a journalist and one of the participants, strongly believes that the group’s future activities must steer clear of the Israeli political mine field.

Politics, Halevi says, “defines and separates” while “love transcends and unites.” What made this group so unique, he theorizes, was “its refusal to make distinctions in the midst of a hard political reality that is defined by distinctions.”

In Israel, these distinctions often lead to hatred and even bloodshed.

In Halevi’s view, the Arab-Israeli conflict is rooted in and nourished by a mutual sense of insecurity.

“For Arabs, a Jewish state means displacement to the periphery of Israeli society. For Jews, Arab insistence on a binational Israel is considered an existential threat. The very existence of the other in our midst threatens our sense of home,” Halevi says.

At Auschwitz, the participants were able to achieve something they seemed unable to do back home.

“We created a politics-free zone, a safe place that has allowed a remarkably diverse group of people to come together as brothers and sisters,” Halevi says.

Participants included members of the Communist party, a former left-wing Knesset member and the rabbi of a Jewish settlement. Initially Halevi, the son of a Holocaust survivor, feared his Arab partners would return from Auschwitz “and assume that they now understood Jewish fears, as if Israel’s wariness could be explained as a psychological disorder, a struggle with historical demons, rather than a rational understanding of Israel’s predicament.”

To his amazement, the journalist discovered his fellow Arab travelers were as deeply moved and perhaps even more traumatized by this memorial to human inhumanity than their Jewish counterparts.

“This pilgrimage enhanced my sense of humanity,” Halevi says with wonder. “To walk arm in arm through the crematorium building with Arabs as fellow mourners is to be liberated from what for me at least has been the most lingering trauma of the Shoah: the abandonment of the Jews by a large part of humanity.”

Halevi says he is excited by the next phase of the Auschwitz “experiment,” which will bring participants together once again, this time to delve into Arab culture and its contribution to the world. Many of the Jews will study Arabic. Most of the Arab citizens already know Hebrew.

Unlike Halevi, Thabet Abu-Ras, the southern regional director of Shatil, a multicultural organization that fosters grass-roots activism in Israel, believes the Auschwitz group’s next initiative must focus on not only ideas but issues.

“I am in favor of studying Arab culture and history and Arabic with Jews, but this is not enough,” says Abu-Ras, who describes himself as a “Palestinian Israeli.”

He intends to launch an educational campaign to convince Arabs both in Israel and elsewhere that Jewish Israelis have a right to live secure lives in Israel and in the Middle East.

Many Arabs, particularly in countries outside Israel, continue to maintain the Jewish State must be eliminated. They express these views in textbooks, at public forums, and through the media and boycotts of Israeli products and meetings where Israelis will be present.

“At Auschwitz I learned that there is a straight line between the Holocaust and the political decisions taken in Jerusalem,” Abu-Ras says, referring to everything from Israeli army incursions to the separation barrier the Israeli government is building between the West Bank and Israel.

For there to be peace, Abu-Ras insists, Arabs “must no longer ignore the issue of Jewish fear. It is not just a Jewish problem,” he says. “It’s also a Palestinian problem. As long as the Jewish people have this fear, I don’t think they will be willing to make a serious compromise, to partition this land.”

The activist believes that “we Palestinians must deal with this fear and recognize not only the State of Israel but the right of Jews to live here forever. We should go to every Jewish and Arab school and promote the notion of living together. We need to raise our voices against terror attacks, against humiliation (of Palestinians) at checkpoints. Only we, and not someone from outside, can solve our problems.”

Halevi won’t be manning the barricades alongside Abu-Ras, but he admires his co-traveler’s insights and enthusiasm.

“It almost doesn’t matter what our group’s next step will be,” Halevi says, “so long as we take it together, and that we do so with love, and that that mutual love is broadcast to our Arab and Jewish publics.”

DEA END CHABIN