Reflections from Palestine

"I know that when I stand before God on Judgement Day, I shall not be asked the question posed to Cain--where were you when your brother's blood was crying out to God?" --Imre Bathory, Righteous Among Nations, Hungary

We sit among men outside the tea house of the oldest men's sport club in Nablus. Our new friend, poet Saed Abu-Hijleh, professor of Political Geography and Founder/Director of the Center for Global Consciousness, reassures us that we're ok if we're with him. He's "kind of a big deal," it seems, and gets away with informal female friendships because he did his studies in the U.S. We drink hot mint tea; it's 10:30 pm, and soon the group will race to their respective homes so that they're off the streets when the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) enter like clockwork at midnight (they do their staging in front of our apartment building, so believe me, these nightly incursions are not an invention of Al Jazeera). But for now we sit and sip tea, the crowd of men around us rapidly expanding, philosophizing about life and humanity.

Earlier that evening, sitting on Saed's porch and watching yet another brilliant Nablus sunset paint the white stone homes and hills in golden reds, I ask Saed whether he thinks humans are inherently good or bad. His own mother was shot by the IDF during the 2nd Intifada in 2002, just sitting doing embroidery on her front stoop with her husband during curfew, having committed no crime. And yet Saed tells me he thinks there is both good and evil inside every human being, and that good always has the chance of winning out over bad. He laughs a bit sadly, still deeply grieved over his mother's murder. "I could have become a fighter, could have joined the resistance after her death, but I can't even kill a spider--I have to sweep them gently outside, and I don't even step on ants." He takes us upstairs to show us the bullet holes in the front window, which they've covered in clear packing tape to preserve history. He fingers a deep chip in the stone wall: "This one hit just above her head," he tells us, and I marvel that anyone could have enough goodness in him to avoid vengeful violence. If this had been done to my mother, I'm not sure I could have taken the moral high road.

At the tea house, Saed asks his friends my question about good and evil. I look at his kind face in the streetlight outside the ancient building, still amazed that anyone could remain so positive in such circumstances. As he translates my question, I remember his poetry homework for my class the day before:

Three bullets hit me when I was fifteen,
The pain was unbearable,
Difficult for you to know what I mean...
I was tortured on my wounds when I was sixteen,
They whipped with electrical wiring,
Put me in a room full of sewage,
But I came out clean!

I am deep in thought as the men discuss my question in Arabic. How could I have turned out so cynical with so few difficult life experiences, while a man like Saed remains so hopeful with so much evidence of human barbarity still scarred into his skin? His friend Quais, a sort of self-proclaimed philosopher with the scar from a bullet wound on his throat, insists that there are both bad and good people, but he surprises me by claiming he sees no grey area in between. "How do we make sure goodness wins, then?" I ask, really hoping he has an answer I might live by, and Saed smiles appreciatively as he translates the question.

Quais sips at his tea thoughtfully. First, he tells us, we have to let ourselves really listen to each other, not just with our ears but with ALL our senses. God gave us more than one sense for a reason, he tells us, and we need to learn to use them all, to listen with our eyes and our hearts, even to smell each other before we can claim to know one another. Laughing a little, Liz and I move simultaneously on the same instinct and sniff at ourselves, quickly reassuring everyone that we smell just fine, and the whole crowd of men laughs. But even as I laugh, I know why his point matters. We can't use all our senses to know each other unless we are among one another, physically present beside each other. The media gives us something to see and hear, something incomplete at its best and inaccurate at its worst, but to feel another human's heartbeat and to smell his goodness and inherent humanity takes being there. Being here.

I shake my head. "God, I really am a cynic," I say bitterly, though only Liz hears me. Saed's friend goes on. "Quantitative accumulation creates qualitative change," he says. "A few drops of water in a glass and we can no longer call it empty; enough drops, and we have an ocean. This is how goodness can win," he tells us. I am reminded of Margaret Mead's claim that a few committed individuals can change the world and are the only thing that ever has. And I sip my tea in the hovering darkness, listening deeply to the goodness around me, and I feel the world changing, if only briefly, if only for a small group of committed individuals outside a tea house in Palestine.

*For more information on the death of Saed's mother and the subsequent media
storm and investigations, go to http://www.remembershaden.org/.