Citizen diplomacy, the basics
by Tamar Miller | Common Ground News Service | 22 Aug 2006
Cambridge, Massachusetts – At the beginning of the 2nd intifada in 2000, there were simultaneous protests in Harvard Yard. On the steps of the library stood 50 MIT and Harvard members of the Arab Students Associations. Each wore black, silently holding signs with the names of the first 50 casualties in today’s Palestine. On the opposite side of the Yard, a rally was under way supporting Israel for suffering yet another round of violence. I grew up an Orthodox Jew, spent a good deal of time in Jerusalem and identify deeply with my people. But with whom would I stand? Why were there separate rallies? In the end, I stood awkwardly in the middle holding a small sign that read, “I support life for Israelis and Palestinians.”
Six years later, as people are wounded beyond recognition and dying beyond hope in Lebanon and Israel, I would rather not argue historical grievances, compare traumas, nor let my imagination run riot with messianic yearning. My temporarily defeated spirit wants to do away with public conversations that define Israel’s war with Hizbullah as one between us vs. them.
At the core, most of us want to live in dignity and security. For the few pathologically evil people, there is little hope of repair. There are, however, many more of us than them and I cannot believe that war is inevitable. My aching heart knows that citizen diplomacy, among Christians, Jews and Muslims anywhere, would have helped limit the consequences of hate and fear by drying up the sea of sympathy around those who believe in violence. Framing the conflict in terms of us vs. them frustrates, if not completely kills, imaginative solutions.
Citizen diplomacy would have lessened the likelihood of this war and now as it dies down, I would like to make attempts to reshape public discourse in ways that do not perpetuate polarisation and unholy ideological traps. As my friend Yitzhak Frankenthal, founder of the Israeli and Palestinian Bereaved Families Forum puts it, “my son died because there is no peace.”
Citizen diplomacy is not a collection of saccharine and inconsequential gestures, but rather of powerful agents for confronting pain and then healing it. Recently, scores of imams and rabbis conversed and debated in Seville as part of a process sponsored by the French organisation Hommes de Parole; Hartford Seminary offers newly created courses in Building Abrahamic Partnerships; the Coexistence Center of Amman just visited the Pluralism Project at Harvard University; Festive meals and text study at local mosques, churches and synagogues are increasing in frequency, sponsored by the Center for Jewish-Muslim Relations in Boston; an American rabbi recently spoke before thousands of Muslims in Syria, and many Iraqi refugees also who greeted him warmly even in the midst of war; community service projects of the Interfaith Youth Core based in Chicago are catching on all over the United States; and the Israel Palestine Center for Research and Information provides peace education training for Palestinian and Israeli school teachers. There are hundreds more citizen initiatives like these that are the best-kept secrets of peacemaking.
I know that privately many of my Jewish relatives, friends and colleagues are agonising over Lebanese civilian deaths. Yet, most public statements by the Jewish community include only the slightest mention of Lebanese suffering. Because nearly everything in our public arena is framed as us vs. them, the discourse takes on a defensively arrogant tone. A powerful air force does nothing to extinguish the existential terror of many Israelis and Jews. There is little undisturbed public space to reflect on the deep fear about Israel “being wiped off the face of the earth” (as Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad declare) and, at the same time, express what we really feel — grief and despair over dead Lebanese women, children and men and profound uncertainty about how to fight a fatal threat.
Citizen diplomacy is not what my brother calls (with a funny mixture of deference and disdain) a “hug-a-terrorist programme”. It is rather an invitation to speak and act peaceably toward one another when the logic of war is so compelling. Citizen diplomacy is possible because nations are made up of people. Nations are not monoliths: “something large and immovable, something massive and unchanging and of uniform character and difficult to deal with on a human level” (Webster Dictionary). Nations are a collection of many of us, the peaceable majority and, only a few of them, the irredeemably hateful minority. That is a root cause for hope.
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* Tamar Miller is a social entrepreneur in Cambridge, MA. She is a former co-director of the New Israel Fund/New England and former Executive Director of the Institute for Social and Economic Policy at Harvard University. This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed at http://www.commongroundnews.org.
Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 22 August 2006
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