Communicating Arts - Main Web SitePeace comes as a shock.
How common suffering becomes when all have had their share of it.
Nature itself has no heart: beware the earthquake, hurricane, tsunami, volcano.
Men, however blackened, twisted, demented, and tormented do have hearts: what to do with the damn things--isn't that a question?
For some time, I've wanted to mention here that the Jews of Israel and the Muslims of Turkey have managed to sustain some $2 billion in trade annually between them.
Granted, it's a complicated relationship: history's in there with the Turks taking in Jews fleeing conversion by the sword of Queen Isabella of Spain during the Inquisition, and so many hundreds of years later, the descendents of those Jews migrating en masse to Jerusalem shortly after the establishment of the "Jewish state"; more contemporaneous arms deals play in the relationship too, along with NATO and Ottoman/Arab animosity and rivalry: and then things are never so pure--I hear the popular Turkish film Valley of the Wolves features U.S. servicemen harvesting body parts from Turkish captives with the help of Jewish surgeons.
Oy vey.
It's not exactly a love fest.
Still, $2 billion--that reminds me that the linens on my bed here are of Turkish origin (and without noticing it, I have bought into the enterprise).
(I believe this is the longest blog lead ever written to showcase someone else's feature article).
:)
:D
The BBC piece by Jeremy Grange covers Parent's Circle, an organization of about 500 bereaved Israeli and Palestinian parents, and the addition to it of a telephone-based community that has logged more than one million calls and produced the kinds of bonds that rather escape political leaders and warrior hotheads alike [1].
Midway through the piece comes the "what it's really all about", for Grange a good quote, for me, everything:
"In 2000, in the early days of the second intifada, a young Israeli woman called Natalia Wieseltier dialled a Jewish friend in Tel Aviv but found herself talking to a Palestinian living in the Gaza Strip.
Instead of hanging up she started a conversation."
There's not much in the Grange piece about the telephone line, physically, but it's the talk, the volume of it, the intimacy in it, the love that comes from it, that counts.
Others, of course, have other purposes in conversation.
Such would seem the case with the unauthorized cellular service put together by Israel's arch-enemy Hezbollah in southern Lebanon [2].
Before I get going, if I get going, I feel compelled to share this tag from a moderator at Lebanese-forces.org (where, for not being waved in in the usual bbs fashion, I don't think I was wanted . . . sigh . . . maybe next year):
"If you think you understand Lebanese politics, it obviously has not been explained to you properly." Anonymous
As often happens in the world--Israel had its Irgun, the United States its CIA force at "Bay of Pigs", the Soviets their KGB--uncertain political organizations may maintain two faces: one civil, one not.
Hezbollah will certainly turn out the Jesuits of Islam, for the Jesuits in medieval origin were self-appointed assassins and long-lived at it in the way of guerrilla groups of all stripes. Today, they're warrior-scholars engaged entirely in services. For the Jesuits, the cosmos and all in it remains Catholic, of course, but take the message with a grain of salt if you're also in need of and lucky enough to get one of their blankets.
Hezbollah, whose influence on Lebanese politics is substantial and not a little due to its wearing a humanitarian face in the neighborhood and obtaining for its interests political representation in the Lebanese government, has also its better known and much less civil side, and with it the might--there is no other word for it--to build and maintain weapons stores and war on its own volition: it needs no approval from the Lebanese government or defense forces, tacit or covert, to attempt to eject UN peacekeepers, French at the moment, and, for starters, launch Katyusha rockets against Israel.
I'm writing with crayons today--big, messy strokes--but in Hezbollah's sphere of influence, the provision of a communications network that has obvious military and political implications may have also hidden political benefits for Israelis and Lebanese, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or "other".
People talk.
People discover that regardless of who they are or what they believe about "the infinite", that they have a raft of problems as well as desires in common, and they may discover that anger, contempt, fear, jealousy, and pretension are the least helpful of characteristics and emotions when it comes to getting in water, distributing electricity, getting goods to market, and even securing homes and properties against criminal trespass and political encroachment from any quarter, including Hezbollah.
In my experience, the written word, when it's not passed along as having come from God, influences opinion and nudges behavior some, but speech--the big, direct "I - thou"--creates relationships, and relationships alter behavior mightily.
In fact, chit-chat over time conforms, reconciles, and transforms how we choose to treat one another.
Good fences make good neighbors, says Robert Frost.
Good communications, whether expressed openly and in public or forged intimately and in privacy, make also for great societies, sez I.
1. Grange, Jeremy. "Line of hope links Palestinians and Israelis." BBC News, August 17, 2007.
2. "Lebanon uncovers secret Hezbollah phone network." Ya Libnan, August 8, 2007.
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
Comments