A Rosh Hashanah lesson on sulha
For the Jewish community, it is the celebration of the fall harvest. For the Palestinian community in Israel, it is the season of the olive harvest. Below you will find reports of violence around Nablus, where I worked during the month of September. On Rosh Hashanah, while visiting my friend Hisham Sharabati in Hebron, we were showered with stones by young settler children from Kiryat Arba dressed in their holy day whites. In their young innocence, they have already been schooled in hatred for leftists and Palestinians.
Zoughbi Zoughbi from the Wi’am Palestinian Conflict Resolution Centre taught a session on sulha on Rosh Hashanah. Sulha is the Palestinian art of reconciliation. Wi’am resides in a beautiful stone house in Bethlehem directly opposite the separation barrier. Wi’am recently relocated near the barrier “to be confronted by its reality every day.” Wi’am was founded the same year Barukh Goldstein entered Abraham’s tomb on Purim, 1994, and murdered 29 Muslim worshippers. Zoughbi reminded us that, “When one is involved in conflict transformation, one becomes an ultra sound. You can feel what conflicts are driving people. Therefore our work is both reactive and proactive, a work of transformation. Sulha offers us a process of transformation, but we are not loyal to any one form. We take a synergetic and mosaic approach and learn from tradition as well as the best knowledge of the present. We offer a message of hope.”
While a distant cousin of sulha has been used by some on the Jewish Israeli side as a kind of peace gathering, the Palestinian example in its root is quite different, and more technical. There are two traditional types of sulha according to Zoughbi Zoughbi, which are dedicated to conflict transformation: one initiates a process of acknowledgment when the perpetrator of a wrong begins the sulha by admitting wrongdoing and sends a delegation to the victim’s house. An acknowledgment sulha is dedicated to finding suitable restitution for the offense. As Zoughbi was describing this type of reconciliation, I thought of Jacob delivering an abundance of gifts to Esau accompanied by his awareness that his brother Esau, is indeed, a face of the divine.
The second form of sulha is investigative. A neutral third party tries to establish a chain of accountability in order to reach fair restitution and reconciliation between parties in conflict. Elements associated with this kind of sulha are the ability to reserve judgment, compassionate listening, separating the problem from the person; collecting, analyzing, and mapping information, shuttle diplomacy, and an ability to harmonize and build on an ongoing process. Both types of sulha are manifestations of restorative justice.
As members of the Jewish community invite the ancestors into the Sukkah, I believe it is time for us to initiate an acknowledgment sulha. I believe we need to formally acknowledge what we have wrought. This sulha must include an investigatory aspect, much of which has been accomplished by the Goldstone Report and other investigative bodies such as B’Tselem and Al Haq. As violence increases during the olive harvest season and Palestinians are denied the fruit of their harvest while we enjoy ours, we need sulha more than ever. How else will we find our way toward each other?
This particular method of reconciliation known as sulha preceded Abrahamic religions and can be a process that reunites us. The goal is restoration of relationships. Zoughbi reminded us that the process begins with storytelling. Now more than ever, we have to hear stories from the Palestinian community directly, and we have to make every effort to make those stories available to anyone who is able to listen. We need to find a way to offer ongoing restitution and acknowledgment of what we have wrought, but we can only do so in partnership with those we have wronged. Let the season of reconciliation begin.
Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb is one of the first ten women ordained as a rabbi in modern Judaism. A long-time member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, she is the coordinator of the Shomer Shalom Network of Jewish Nonviolence and a cofounder of the Community of Living Traditions, both of which are FOR affiliates. Gottlieb was coleader of FOR’s September 2011 arts delegation to Balata, Palestine.
[Photo: Mural in Hebron, Palestine.]
Jewish settlers torch 10 Palestinian dunums of olive trees
NABLUS, (PIC) 10 Oct — Palestinian fire fighters managed on Monday morning to put off a huge fire that was blazing in 20 dunums of Palestinian olive farmland in ‘Awarta village, south of Nablus, a statement for the fire brigades said. It noted that Jewish settlers had started the fire late on Sunday night, adding that many olive trees were damaged in addition to a reporter’s car, which was intentionally targeted by those settlers. Ghassan Daghlas, in-charge of monitoring Jewish settlement activity in northern West Bank areas, said that the farmers in ‘Awarta and Yanun villages decided to delay the reaping of their olive crops this year due to the escalating settlers’ attacks.
PA: Settlers clash with olive harvesters near Nablus
NABLUS (Ma‘an) 10 Oct - …-Dozens of settlers from the Elon Moreh Jewish-only settlement attacked Palestinians picking olives in Azmut village east of Nablus, PA settlement affairs official Ghassan Doughlas told Ma‘an. The villagers refused to abandon their harvest, and fist fights broke out with the settlers, Doughlas said, adding that no injuries were recorded. After half an hour, Israeli forces arrived and moved the settlers out of the village, he said.
Settlers clash with Palestinian farmers
NABLUS (AFP) 9 Oct — Jewish settlers clashed with Palestinian farmers on Sunday, as they tried to pick olives from land owned by relatives of two men convicted of killing a settler family. At least three Palestinians were injured when dozens of settlers from Itamar armed with sticks and stones attacked the group of about 50 workers harvesting olives, on land belonging to the Awwad family from the nearby village of Awarta, an AFP correspondent reported.
