TOP STORY: THE MIDDLE EAST: Palestinian pacifists preach a message of harmony

c. 1996 Religion News Service AL KHADER, West Bank (RNS)-When Hussein Ibrahim Issa dreams, he sees a swimming pool between the olive terraces on the hillside below his elementary school. He imagines Muslim, Christian and Jewish children learning together in a harmony of Arabic and Hebrew. And folk dancing is a required subject. Dancing, says […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

AL KHADER, West Bank (RNS)-When Hussein Ibrahim Issa dreams, he sees a swimming pool between the olive terraces on the hillside below his elementary school. He imagines Muslim, Christian and Jewish children learning together in a harmony of Arabic and Hebrew. And folk dancing is a required subject.

Dancing, says Issa, makes children peaceful and joyful. Dance, in its own peculiar way, can help bring peace between Arabs and Jews.


Issa, founder of the Al Amal Hope Flowers School in Al Khader, a village near Bethlehem, is among a handful of Palestinian pacifists who braved the turmoil of the Israeli occupation and the West Bank Palestinian uprising to preach non-violence and co-existence between Arabs and Jews.

Once regarded as virtual traitors, these grassroots peace activists are increasingly being recognized as role models now as Israel withdraws from portions of the West Bank and Palestinians look for new ways to relate to their Jewish neighbors.

“It’s wonderful to see that people who were outcasts and marginalized by their society are now being hailed as pioneers and peacemaking heroes by the Palestinians themselves,” says American filmmaker Lynn Feinerman, who recently completed a documentary titled “If You Make It Possible” on Israeli and Palestinian grassroots peace activists.

While large portions of Israeli and Palestinian society still remain caught up in the retaliatory cycle of violence and revenge, Palestinian peace activists are seeking to stress the peace messages within Islam. They call it the “Salaam tradition.”

Much of their focus is on education for women and children. In the town of Nablus, a children’s after-school center called House of Hope recently opened its doors. It seeks to inject concepts of peace and democracy into after-school games and educational activities. Women Link, another peace group, makes connections between Israeli and Palestinian women.

In East Jerusalem, Nafez Assaily, a longtime pacifist, operates a mobile library for Palestinian children that travels to remote village schools to provide literature on peace and democracy. He also sponsors seminars for women and youths using trust-building and conflict resolution techniques to teach family rights in Islamic law and peaceful family living.

“When people hear about our ideas as a theory they might not agree, but they like to participate in our activities-and in that way we spread our message,” says Assaily, a devout Muslim.


As a youth, Assaily said he supported violent struggle against Israel-until he read about plans for the film “Ghandi” in 1979 while preparing a term paper at the West Bank’s An Najah University. He read more and decided that Ghandi’s ideas could be applied to Palestinian society-and that violence was neither moral nor practical.

“I strongly believe that in every individual there is a part of God in him. Whenever you think of hurting an individual it means you will hurt the Allah in him,” says Assaily.

For many years, Assaily directed the Jerusalem office of the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence, founded by the Palestinian-American peace educator Mubarak Awad.

Awad gained brief international fame as the Palestinians’ first advocate of passive civil disobedience prior to being deported by Israel in the late 1980s. After the brouhaha died down, it was people like Assaily and Issa who remained in the occupied territories to quietly cultivate broader popular support for non-violence.

In his writings, Assaily has sought to explain the original meaning of “jihad”-commonly translated as “holy war” but which means “effort” in simple Arabic. In Koranic tradition, asserts Assaily, “jihad” can be the “effort” undertaken by a Muslim to provide for the needs of his family, or peaceful attempts, on the moral plane, “to resist the evil in ourselves, to make an effort so that the good side wins over the bad side.”

Koranic phrases and traditions that speak about wisdom, peace and cooperation both among Muslims, and between Muslims, Christians and Jews, shift the focus of religion away from power plays and violent struggle, says Assaily. He has made children’s tapes on plants and animals featured in the Koran. When children learn about care for animals, plants and their natural environment, they develop a more caring approach to other people as well, he believes.


“For me non-violence is a strategy not only on a political level but in the streets, in the schools and in society,” observes Assaily.

Issa, similarly, has taken a holistic approach to peacemaking using theater, dance and visual arts to teach children about self-expression in non-violent ways. His arts program is rare in West Bank primary schools, where government budgets barely cover the teaching of basic skills.

“Handicrafts remove the frustrations from a child. If kids are busy making flowers they don’t have time to engage in violent behavior. Occupational therapists use such crafts for neurotic patients, we use them for peace,” says Issa, displaying pottery and beadwork featuring peace slogans in English and Arabic.

Likewise, Issa has organized seminars for parents on early childhood development, Hebrew classes, school trips to Israeli communities, and folk dance classes to release pent-up energies-despite objections from Islamic fundamentalists who frown on both dancing and music.

A recent school play dealing with upcoming Palestinian elections was designed to teach children about democracy. The presidential candidate in the satirical drama is a woman, Fatima, who wins the race by promising voters a house in paradise.

The child of a refugee family who lost his father in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, Issa experienced plenty of hard knocks growing up in the poverty-stricken Dehaishe Refugee Camp near Bethlehem in the 1950s.


“I faced all kinds of frustrations, starvation and humiliation,” said Issa, 48. Before Israel’s 1967 occupation of the West Bank, he dabbled in a variety of pan-Arab political parties that preached the destruction of Israel. He even claims to have visited Iraq secretly and to meet the youthful Saddam Hussein.

Israel’s 1967 West Bank occupation, ironically, proved to be an eye-opener for him in connection with the Jewish state. “I had imagined that the Jews have long hair and tails and are fearful people,” he said. “But what I saw was normal people.”

Still, he says, he felt no warmth toward Jews personally until he met a religious Israeli peace activist, Yehezkel Landau, in the early 1980s. After a heated argument with him, he invited Landau home-an invitation that launched a lasting friendship.

In 1984 Issa opened a kindergarten for 22 children in his Bethlehem-area home that placed a special emphasis on peace education. “When I looked at other societies, (including) Israeli society I found peace movements, so why not in Palestinian society?”

He says he disagreed with some of Mubarak Awad’s civil disobedience tactics because he feared they might lead to violent confrontations-preferring to focus on more constructive activities such as education and Arab-Israeli dialogue.

But he paid a heavy price for his ideas. After Issa organized a 1988 meeting between Palestinian and Israeli children to draw peace pictures, his house was firebombed. The school bus was burned in 1991. Death threats were issued against him, and his wife and children were continuously harassed.


Today, his privately funded kindergarten has blossomed into an elementary school of 200 Palestinian children housed in a modern building constructed by donations from abroad-both Jewish and Arab. An eternal optimist, Issa has launched construction of a second floor of laboratories,a library and a teacher’s institute-although he has yet to raise the money to complete the addition-or build the long-dreamed-of swimming pool.

“For years, people like Hussein (Issa) exposed themselves daily to social ostracism and real physical danger,” observes Feinerman, the filmmaker. “And yet they continued their work, they were enormously versatile and intrepid, physically and emotionally.”

“I refused death,” Issa says simply, describing how he spent hours and days arguing for his ideas with Palestinian street activists and political leaders, inside the West Bank and even in Jordan.

Now, however, times may be changing. Issa recalls that he recently brought his photo to the Education Ministry offices of the new Palestinian National Authority in the West Bank in order to renew the license of the privately funded Amal school.

“I told my superior that I know my photo is not very beautiful,” recalls Issa. “He said it is very beautiful. And to my great embarrassment, he kissed it.”

MJP END FLETCHER

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