By Amy Hirschberg Lederman, Special to JTNews
We sat with our friends on the rooftop of their apartment building, a glorious display of fireworks exploding over our heads in the Jerusalem night sky. In the streets below, thousands of men, women and children cheered and sang in joyous celebration. Children on roller skates passed mischievous teens spraying colorful, plastic string on passers-by while other Israelis danced until dawn. It was a night to be remembered and savored, one that only 50 years before had seemed improbable. This was Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day.
It is 10 years since my family and I lived in Israel and celebrated its 50th birthday. But Israel at 50 was a very different Israel than the one we now know at 60. In 1998, we were optimistic that the progress made since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 would bring peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Tragically, that momentum was halted when the second intifada erupted in 2000. Today, peace seems less than remote: the wall being erected between Israel and the Palestinians stands as testimony to how far apart both sides are now from the hopes of peace that existed only a decade ago.
When I first lived in Israel in 1974, during my junior year of college, I read a poem that has held a special place in my heart ever since. Written by the late Yehuda Amichai, considered by many to be the greatest modern Israeli poet, it describes an Arab shepherd who is searching for his goat on Mount Zion, and on the opposite mountain, a Jewish man searching for his little boy. These few lines poignantly depict their angst:
An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
Both in their temporary failure…
Our two voices met above
The Sultan’s Pool in the valley between us.
Neither of us wants the boy or the goat
To get caught in the wheels
Of the ‘Had Gadya’ machine.
The “temporary failure” that Amichai describes is what all of us fear most: the loss of what is most precious to us, be it our children or the animals we tend for our livelihood. Arab and Jew come together in their desperate search, fearful that what they love most will be lost in the death machine.
The poem concludes with an image of the two men laughing and crying, as the goat and the son are found together in the bushes. We witness for a second time, the coming together of Jew and Arab, as love and life overcome fear and death.
Afterward we found them among the bushes
And our voices came back inside us, laughing and crying.
Searching for a goat or a son
Has always been the beginning
Of a new religion in these mountains.
I was reminded of this poem while reading a story in the New York Times about an Israeli family and an Arab family, each huddled on opposite sides of a curtain in the intensive care unit of an Israeli hospital. On one side was Osher Twito, 8, who was severely wounded by a rocket fired from Gaza City by Palestinian terrorists, which landed outside his Sderot home; on the other was Yakoub Natil, 7, who had been seriously injured by shrapnel from an Israeli Air Force strike on Gaza City. The valley between them was not created by the Sultan’s Pool, but by the years of frustration, loss, hopelessness and terror that now defines the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Amichai was no romantic. He saw Israel for what it was — and portrayed it through all of its grit, humor, tragedy and complexities. More than 40 years ago, he had the vision to imagine a moment in history when the love for our children and what is most precious to us conquered the fear, anger, and hatred that has led two people, historically linked as brothers, to destroy each other’s families.
Amichai refers to the sacrifices — the goat and the son — that are part of the narratives from which Judaism and Islam were born. A ram, found in the bushes, was offered by Abraham in lieu of sacrificing his beloved son, Isaac. And Ishmael, Abraham’s other son, was banished with Hagar, yet survives to become the family from which Islam is born. From the beginning of Biblical time, sacrifices have been required in order to survive, and there is hardly an Israeli today who would debate that a lasting, meaningful peace will require them. The Oslo Accords were premised on that belief.
Osher Twito and Yakoub Natil were victims, caught in the chain of events of history and almost destroyed by the Had Gadya machine. It is untenable that they should become the sacrifices required for peace.
Sacrifices cannot be unilateral; they must be made on both sides. Amichai’s poem inspires us to believe that peace is still possible. When Jew and Arab search together to save rather than to destroy what is most precious to them, be it their children or their land; when Jew and Arab mutually agree to educate their children about the necessity and benefits of peace, rather than to deploy them, as Palestinians suicide bombers have done; and when love for life trumps hatred and revenge, then we will see a new beginning in the land of Israel.