Making Peace with Your Enemy

I have been busy organizing events for  2 peacemakers from Israel and Palestine, who are members of Combatants for Peace.  These are Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters who have decided to lay down their arms and to pursue non-violent approaches to resolving the conflict.  Two representatives have come to the U.S. to receive a Courage of Conscience award at the Peace Abbey in Sherborn, on March 13, 2009.

The Palestinian, Bassam Aramin, lost his daughter when she was shot by an Israeli soldier on her way home from school.  He explains that taking a stance of revenge would be the easy thing to do; the harder avenue is to adhere to non-violence, and that's what he has chosen.  Bassam had been in an Israeli prison from the age of 19 for 7 years;  he recounts the dialogue that he had with his jailer, in which the jailer came to see Bassam as a freedom fighter, rather than a terrorist - and in which Bassam came to understand the fear of the jailer and of Israelis.

Yaniv Reshef,  the Israeli,  talks about his experiences serving in the army;   he and his unit, heavily armed from the war in Lebanon, were transferred to Gaza, a densely-populated civilian area where their equipment was inappropriate. They infiltrated houses in the middle of the night, and woke up families.   On one night, their unit of 6-8 soldiers gather up a family in one room, and as they're questioning the family, they hear scratching noises from a nearby cabinet.  They point their M15's towards the cabinet, ready to shoot the terrorist who's hiding there - only to find themselves targeting a family of rabbits that the family raises for food.
As I listened to their testimony, and to questions from the audience, it struck me that there are 2 dimensions to their conversation: the personal and the political.  That is, the combatants tell their personal stories and talk about their internal transformation – what happened in their lives that led them to lay down their arms.  At the same time, they live within a political reality, where there are forces at work that are much bigger than them.  I/we hope that fighters everywhere will lay down their arms, but that’s probably going to be a gradual process, and in the meantime, governments are setting policy, buying and using weapons.  It seems to me that we need to acknowledge both dimensions, and work on both fronts to bring about peace.  Peace is not going to come solely from personal transformation, at this point in history.

Thinking about the personal dimension brings to mind the work of Bob Kegan, Professor of adult development, and Herbert Kelman, Director of the Program on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution.  Kegan explains his model of human development in his book,  In Over Our Head.  In the early stages, people blame others for their problems; they believe the source of the problem is outside of themselves.  As they begin to look inside themselves, they discover that the problem is really their mental formulation of the problem and their attribution (or mis-attribution) of causality.

With a nod to Kelman’s work, Kegan explains the transformation in stages 4-5 (what he calls the “5th order of consciousness”, or the post-modern stage), which relates to the nature and resolution of conflict.  In stage 4, two parties in conflict see each other as the source of the conflict, and each one believes that if the other party just went away the problem would be solved.   Inherent in that is that they don’t need each other as part of their lives.  The transition to stage 5 requires that they realize that their lives are inextricably linked, and that they need one another – and most importantly, if one party goes away, the problem will not be resolved.  We need to recognize our need for each other, because we make each other complete.  This fifth stage suggests a “kind of conflict resolution in which the Palestinian discovers her own Israeli-ness, the rich man discovers his poverty, the woman discovers the man insider her.”

To me, the Combatants for Peace are working in stage 5 – they seem to need one another, in order to make sense of their experiences, in a way that they understand better than their audiences, better than those who haven't been fighters in that conflict.   They make jokes within the context of the Occupation, and of being in prison, that only they, or the parties in conflict, understand.  On spending a lot of time with them, I get to see the intimacy between them, and see how they feed off one another.   They also seem to protect each other when responding to audience questions;   Yaniv is often protective of Bassam,  exquisitely aware of the pain of the loss of his daughter, even if it’s not visible during these talks.   These speakers present a powerful example of recognizing the other after a personal crisis of conscience.  They exemplify the interdependence that Kegan speaks about: the ability to put yourself in the other person's place, and to recognize your interdependence – preconditions to resolving conflict.