Oasis of Understanding in Desert of Despair : It was for many the first time they had knowingly met someone from the other side. : Jews, Arabs Start Dialogue Toward Understanding

They were a group of about 75 Arabs and Jews, both American and foreign born, who were spending a remarkably sunny weekend in a windowless conference room in a hotel basement “rethinking the Middle East.”

And although the workshop took place in the Los Angeles area, where there are estimated to be 600,000 Jews and 250,000 Arabs, it was for many the first time they had knowingly met someone from the other side of the Arab-Israeli conflict. They were not meeting to compare cultures or sample each other’s foods, but to address themselves to the seemingly endless dispute in the Middle East.

They had come with high expectations.

“I couldn’t sleep all night, just knowing I was coming here,” Nabil Dajani, a Palestinian-born Muslim who works as an accountant in Orange County, said by way of introducing himself when it came his turn at the opening session.

‘Like a Dream’

Recently, at his home in Westminster, Dajani thought back on that June workshop, chuckling at his naivete: “I thought I was going to solve the Middle East crisis right there. It was a hope to me. We’ll solve the problem. It was like a dream: ‘Finally we’re coming to meet them face to face in a decent way.’ ”

The Middle East crisis did not get solved, and it was not just a case of “if only we were running the world.” To many, as one exasperated participant blurted during a tedious exchange, they were “not rethinking the Middle East but rehashing it.”

But that the event, sponsored by the Washington-based Foundation for Mideast Communication, happened at all has much to say about a climate that has been steadily developing among some Arabs and Jews here and across the country.

Mention Arab-Jewish relations and more often than not people reply, “Are there any?”

More Get-Togethers

There are. Arabs and Jews are getting together at workshops, conferences and seminars, sitting on panels and task forces, sponsoring speakers, and forming dialogue groups. Far from a groundswell and definitely a grass-roots movement, there is nevertheless sufficient activity that there are some 60 dialogue groups nationally and the newly formed American Coalition for Middle East Dialogue is attempting to bring them together.

Locally this is a movement that involves not thousands but hundreds. Nevertheless, there is sufficient activity that last fall the American Friends Service Committee’s Middle East Task Force started publishing the Olive Branch, a bi-monthly calendar of related local events.

Some want only to increase understanding and better relations between the two groups, but most of those involved see themselves in an open-ended process of reaching consensus, educating the public and taking political action that they hope will contribute to a just and peaceful solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

That is the aim of ACMED and that was also what attracted 200 Zionists and Palestinian nationalists from across the country in response to an invitation to meet in New York “in a spirit of pragmatism . . . committed to an open dialogue and the search for a common ground.” Later, Mark Rosenblum, who had made the invitation on behalf of Friends of Peace Now, a support group for the Israeli peace movement, said they had resolved to encourage the dialogue process and, farther along, to work in a political context.

The conflict they seek to resolve was decribed in its most basic terms recently by a visiting Palestinian, Hanna Siniora, who told an audience of Arabs and Jews at a Los Angeles synagogue, “We are two people. We desire the same homeland.”

That the past few years have seen so much more effort at grassroots conciliation than before, many attribute to a growing sense of urgency.

The conflict, after all, has come home to roost. Added to vague fears of falling victim to random terrorist acts, is the very specific and still unsolved murder of Alex Odeh. Odeh, a Palestinian-born naturalized American, was the director of the regional American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. He was killed in 1985 when a bomb was planted in his Santa Ana office.

Many say his death galvanized them to reach out. Certainly, ADC’s memorial banquets for him have drawn sympathetic Jews, and when New Jewish Agenda memorialized him at a Hanukkah service, Souad Cano of the National Assn. of Arab Americans and Cheryl Feris of the ADC were there as Odeh’s brother, Sami, lit the candles.

More recently, the current situation involving nine Palestinians and a Kenyan arrested (for alleged violations of the McCarren Act) by the Immigration and Naturalization Service earlier this year has been a rallying point for many involved in dialogue and networking. They have been demonstrating and speaking out, protesting the arrests and possible deportations, raising broader civil rights issues, and contributing legal and financial help to their defense.

Beyond such local instances, both Arabs and Jews express an overall frustration with the policies of Israel, the Arab states, the Palestine Liberation Organization and the United States. They describe a stagnant situation at best, with the leadership lacking both the creativity and will to end the conflict. It has produced a climate, they say, where many are deciding it is time to start a grass-roots effort to get something done.

“We don’t have much time. I’ve got to do something,” said Kemal (Casey) Kasem, a nationally known broadcaster and disc jockey of Lebanese Druze background, of his increasing activism. It is not accidental, he said, that he is equally active for global nuclear disarmament, since the Middle East is a logical starting point for global disaster.

However real the urgency, many outside this process but familiar with the Arab-Israeli conflict question the effectiveness of these efforts. Calling them naive, they point to the absence of most of the top leadership from both communities, and the inevitable imbalance in leadership between the well-organized and long-established Jewish community and the less united or organized Arab community.

One skeptic is Joseph Sisco, a Washington-based management consultant and former career diplomat who was assistant secretary of state for Near East-South Asia from 1969-74. He continues to write and lecture on foreign affairs. “I’m for dialogue, if you could get together reasonable individuals from across the board in the leadership of both communities. Notice the big ‘if.’ If they (dialogue groups) get together having concrete objectives, expecting concrete results, seeing themselves as a pressure group, it’s not going to work. It isn’t effective.

“They ought to have as a minimal objective to create understanding within the group. But, it’s absolutely naive if they think they will decisively influence anything, if they have the notion that ‘as a result of our talking, we’ll get the Israelis and Arabs together.’ ”

Both Arabs and Jews involved in this process have not only heard the reservations before, they share them.

“What does it matter,” as Sarah Jacobus, a young Jewish woman involved in a women’s dialogue group, put it, “that Arabs and Jews are sitting in a living room eating cake and coffee?”

They question themselves and they keep going--with or without the across-the-board leadership, convinced they have to start somewhere. To break the distance between the two peoples, they believe, is to break down the fear and hatred that it causes. They say they are getting somewhere.

“Now with more and more groups getting together,” Kasem said, “there just seems to be a strong feeling of trust and a willingness to level with each other.”

The leveling can be intense.

At the heart of these efforts at reconciliation are the handful of ongoing dialogue groups where people meet monthly and begin the slow process of seeking common ground.

When the going gets rough at such meetings, the leveling can degenerate to a “you started it” go-round on the Middle East.

It can happen in a flash as it did at one group when a book on PLO leader Yasser Arafat came under discussion. Several Arab-Americans had put Alan Hart’s “Arafat: Terrorist or Peacemaker” on the agenda.

One Israeli called the author a demagogue and said the book insulted his intelligence. Then Zev Putterman, a lifelong Zionist committed to the peace process, disparaged Hart but said he nevertheless found the book valuable because it told the Arab point of view, something the Arabs had failed to do in the American press. And they were off--from charges about the Israeli lobby and its alleged influence on the American press, to who did what to whom in 1948, who fired the first shot, who lied, who misled, and on to “who’s calling whom a terrorist?”

Finally, Nadia Bettandorf, a Palestinian from Orange County, usually a patient listener, exploded that she was tired of driving up from Orange County for such nonsense. She pleaded that the next agenda get closer to the heart of the matter, suggesting, “How do the Israelis and Jews in the group feel about Palestinian nationalism? Also I would really like to know about AIPAC (the American Israeli Political Affairs Committee). How does it work?”

They calmed down and one man followed her comments with his own plea: “We’ve just got to find out why there is hate among Arabs and Jews.”

Clearly there is hate, but while those involved in dialogue often clash, hatred does not characterize their relations. They have their tender moments as well and can move each other to tears, as happened at a fall meeting when both Nabil Dajani, a Palestinian from Jerusalem, and an Israeli from Tel Aviv who did not want his name printed, reported on their recent trips “home.”

Dajani spoke with a hushed wonder of going to find the house in Jerusalem his family lost in 1948. The Jewish woman who answered the door was frightened at first, then let him inside. He shrugged sheepishly, bringing his story to a human rather than political conclusion: He had remembered the house so much larger.

The Israeli told of his trip to Jerusalem to meet relatives of Dajani’s; of how he and Dajani’s cousin, a doctor, had immediately recognized each other and embraced on the street. Later the doctor drove to the Israeli’s hotel in Tel Aviv, bringing his wife and three children, a visit remarkable, the Israeli said, for its sad rarity.

When they had finished, Ruth Persky, a Jewish woman active in the American Friends Service Committee’s Middle East Task Force, got up and told the silent group that the next time a bomb went off in Jerusalem, she would worry not only about her own relatives, but Dajani’s as well. Now she knew he had family too. In the months since, several others have recalled Persky’s comment, saying that as far as they were concerned, that realization alone is enough to keep them coming to meetings.

It is not all talk and politics. Friendships form, people get together for potlucks, attend each other’s events. Thus, Rosanne Keynan, of Friends of Peace Now, contacted Samir Twair of the ADC when Keynan’s organization brought an Israeli Zionist, Galia Golan, and Hanna Siniora, the Palestinian editor and nationalist, here on a speaking tour. Not only did the visitors speak before the ADC, but Keynan and Twair arranged that Golan stay with an Arab family, Siniora with a Jewish one.

Perhaps because of the high emotional intensity of this issue, it has a way of taking over people’s lives. That has been happening to Harriet Katz, a writer and member of Jews United for Peace and Justice, who said that formerly she would not let the “hopeless” Arab-Israeli conflict into her life.

Hope came to her upon hearing people talk of “two state” solutions, where Israel would return to its 1967 borders and peacefully coexist with a Palestinian state established in the West Bank and Gaza strip, presently occupied by Israel.

She got involved, joined a dialogue group, represents Jews United at a network of organizations interested in connecting this issue to the more general peace movement, and soon found herself hosting a brunch when the Israeli-Arab mayor of Nazareth came to town. More than 60 Arabs and Jews, whole families, came to her house that day. They spilled out onto the front lawn, the neighborhood kids played with the visiting kids, and Katz laughingly remembered recently, “I went around saying to myself in disbelief, ‘The mayor of Nazareth is in my home. The mayor of Nazareth is in my home.’ ”

Women’s Dialogue Group

Nadia Bettandorf wears a gold pendant around her neck that, at first glance, seems to be a figure of Israel--and the West Bank. It is, she is quick to say, a map of Palestine, as indicated by the small enamel Palestinian flag superimposed on it.

Born in Jaffa in what is now Israel, she says still considers her home country to be Palestine. A warm, cheerful woman and a patient listener, she is a high school French teacher, married and the mother of two teen-age sons.

More than busy, she is involved in a women’s dialogue group and a larger one, the Cousins, making the drive to Los Angeles from Orange County for meetings several nights a month.

“It’s almost like a duty to me,” Bettandorf said of her activities. “I feel somehow, somewhere, somebody has to break the silence between the two communities, and the violence. . . . I can’t stop until the Palestinian problem is solved. I’m Palestinian. I would like to have self-determination like anybody else.”

From the dialogues, she said, she has learned how deeply Jews consider themselves an oppressed group. “It’s very deeply felt. They just don’t trust people. Even though it bothers me to keep hearing about the Holocaust--and how every time we talk about anything in the Middle East, they bring it up--nevertheless the fear is real to them. I cannot dismiss it as a political ploy anymore.”

Sarah Jacobus, a Jewish woman in the group with Bettandorf, mentioned the same difficulty when the talk turns to the American Jewish women’s experience of anti-Semitism. “I feel frustration sometimes, that they’re not hearing what we’re saying. I realize it’s hard for a Palestinian living under occupation to recognize Jews are oppressed people too, but it’s critical for a solution.”

Jacobus teaches English as a second language to adults in a public school at night, and has to fit her activism around that schedule. She belongs to New Jewish Agenda and got involved in Arab-Jewish dialogue through that. She went with NJA on a tour of Israel in 1983 and met Israeli Jews active in the peace movement and West Bank Palestinians interested in dialogue.

She has a gentle, reserved manner that does not conceal a vulnerability where this issue is concerned. She cares, and she cares personally.

“Being there, in my bones I felt a very deep connection with the land and culture. It’s a sense of having come from there.”

Since then she has produced one radio program on the issue and is working on another. She has been learning Arabic, studying the issues, corresponding.

“Talking to people face to face made a big difference. It fleshed things out. The political, rhetorical issues became human,” she said of that trip. “I came back knowing the Middle East was going to play an important role in my life.”

All of this recent activity has been slowly, unsteadily building.

Dr. Sabri El-Farra, a Palestinian Muslim in the United States for more than 30 years, is widely recognized as a leader in the local Arab community. He has been speaking to Jewish groups for years, he said, at synagogues, young people’s camps, social clubs, sometimes taking a religious approach, engaging in ecumenical dialogues, especially when he was head of the Islamic Center of Southern California.

Recently he recalled being involved in a dialogue group in the ‘70s that met in members’ homes. He was hazy on the details, but said, “We got along famously, but unfortunately while we were getting along famously, events in the Middle East were going on their own momentum.” Something exploded in the Middle East and that was the end of the meetings.

Rabbi Leonard Beerman, founding rabbi of Leo Baeck Temple and a community leader long supportive of outreach efforts between the two communities, has an equally hazy memory of being in a dialogue group brought to an abrupt end by events in the Middle East. Neither man could remember if it was the same group.

“We got along well, exchanged visits to each other’s homes. It was all very friendly, initially a little strained and very polite. We were just beginning to get into the differences,” Beerman said ironically, “when without consulting us, they went to war.”

Besides attributing the recent increase in activity to the sense of urgency that has developed, several Jews also stressed that only in fairly recent years have many American Jews have been exposed to the diversity of opinion that exists in Israel, and felt free to adopt anything other than complete support of Israeli policies.

Rosanne Keynan of Friends of Peace Now, and Joel Gayman of New Jewish Agenda describe the joint speaking tours of Israelis and Palestinians organized by groups such as theirs as ground-breaking.

“It made it possible locally to begin discussions. There was a desire to have them, but this gave the green light,” Gayman said.

To date, the impetus for dialogue on the Jewish side has been coming largely from members of organizations that challenge current Israeli policy. Jewish establishment leaders often say they support outreach efforts intended to better relations. However, some accuse the Arabs of pushing the dialogue to pointless or improper discussions of Middle East conflict and chide Jews for playing into the hands of the Arabs.

Rather than being duped, Joel Gayman said, people like himself are acting out of pragmatic self-interest. To encourage the peace process, he said, it is necessary not only to demonstrate a Jewish willingness to make a settlement but also to show “there is a change in the Arab rejectionist stance toward Israel. These are Arabs who are fellow human beings with whom we must make an accord.”

It has in fact been Jews who have initiated most of the outreach. One of the main problems in any Arab-Jewish event is achieving a balance. There are never enough Arabs.

George Irani, a faculty member at USC who recently published “The Papacy and the Middle East,” is a Lebanese Christian very active in Arab organizations and in Arab-Jewish dialogue efforts.

Lack of Organization

Like many familiar with the situation, Irani cited the comparative lack of organization in the Arab community. Arabs have only recently begun to form an organizational infrastructure. Likewise, he said, identifying themselves as one community rather than as Syrians, Lebanese, Egyptians, Palestinians, etc., is new and difficult, since many of those groups are in conflict or at war overseas.

Beyond that, Irani said, he also meets a cynical attitude among Arabs of “Why waste time?” or an extension of a West Bank attitude, he said: “There can never be a dialogue between the oppressor and the oppressed.”

On the Arab side, the impetus for dialogue has tended to come from individuals rather than organizations. Alex Odeh, the slain regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, is widely credited as a pioneer who both reached out to the Jewish community and responded positively when approached.

Recently one of the most visibly involved Arab-Americans has been Casey Kasem. A persistently optimistic man with a positive “can-do” attitude and a seemingly innate tendency to ameliorate a situation, Kasem recently said he first began working with the Jewish community on this issue through New Jewish Agenda. A Jewish friend told him he needed to talk with leaders of mainstream organizations from Jewish Federation Council, the umbrella agency of communal organizations. (New Jewish Agenda is part of Federation, but is both new and at the left of the spectrum of member organizations.)

He contacted several. They met for lunch, but nothing came of it. Several who were there said later that while Kasem seemed sincere, his references to the PLO indicated an acceptance of it and connection that put them off. Kasem says simply that perhaps such a meeting was premature.

Undaunted, he continues to accept numerous invitations to interact with the Jewish community. He is working on bringing Arabs and Jews in the entertainment industry together, he said, and has become a close friend of Zev Putterman, a television producer. They sit on the board of the Foundation for Mideast Communication and participate in the Cousins.

“I do feel last year was a breakthrough year,” he said, crediting the Foundation with a role in bringing Arabs and Jews together.

Virtually all Jews involved call themselves Zionists, defining Zionism as a belief in the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state with secure borders and the right of Jews to go there. They deplore expansionist or discriminatory definitions of Zionism, which it has become clear from the dialogues is how most participating Arabs see Zionism. (As one Arab workshop participant asserted, Zionists see anything between the Nile and the Tigris as fair game.)

Almost every Arab involved has at one point advocated self-determination for the Palestinians in the form of a state, usually independent, and support for the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Most of the Jews express acceptance of some sort of Palestinian homeland, and will even say the Israelis and PLO should negotiate, but it is clear the PLO remains to many of them a terrorist group that rejects the legitimacy of Israel and works for its annihilation.

When the dialogue is moving forward, however, both seem to have arrived at a pragmatic acceptance of the other side’s “bottom line.” The Jews seem convinced that the demand for a Palestinian state is not going to go away, and many believe Israel could live in peace with it. Usually the Arabs say they have come to accept Israel’s existence as a fait accompli . It is there. Generations have been born there. It is not going to go away.

“Sometimes Israelis, and American Jews, behave as if you should fall in love with Israel. I can’t. Not me. And not the witnesses (Palestinians in the Middle East),” Thoraya Essakhi, an Iraqi Christian who belongs to a dialogue group, said. “A few generations from now--those who are there then, they will start to love it. But not now. It’s enough to accept the reality of it.”

Although fears and suspicions can resurface at the drop of the right phrase, most of those involved seem to have reached a conclusion that they have to risk trusting each other.

To what end remains to be seen.

While declining to comment on the dialogue groups, Yitzak Eldan, deputy consul of Israel in Los Angeles, said, “the only dialogue that matters is the one that will happen in the Middle East.”

That is the opinion of many informed observers, but just as many people seem convinced there is a connection, however tenuous, between what happens here, even at the grass-roots level and what will happen in the Middle East.

While speaking before local groups, both Galia Golan and Hanna Siniora underscored the importance of the diasporas of both the Jews and the Palestinians here, saying both groups could influence Middle East leaders, and that grass-roots people could move American politicians.

Many who commented on the prospects seemed torn, almost invariably contradicting themselves as they said it was hopeless, ineffective, important and should continue. It seemed to come down to a caveat--”Don’t get your hopes up.”

Gerald Bubis, on the faculty at Hebrew Union College, whose extensive involvements include Federation, the American Jewish Congress and Peace Now, calls himself “a so-called peace campnik.”

Calling dialogue necessary for trust building and trade-offs in any dispute, be it international or domestic, Bubis said he urged the dialogue but was cautious, pessimistic even, of the outcome.

“While important, these efforts are doomed to failure. There’s a lack of symmetry between who the Arabs speak for and who the Jews speak for.”

Bubis said that while he regards current attempts within the Arab community “to identify themselves in an organizational way” as a development that might have potency one day, at present their influence is not clear, while Jews, more organized and less factionalized, can have an influence on the establishment both here and in the Middle East.

“You’re not going to get the powerhouse Jewish machers (big wheels) with anybody they do not perceive to have comparable political power.”

Few Arabs dispute that reading, except they often add that the greater influence of the American Jewish community extends to the American government and media as well, an influence they say Arab Americans do not have. To some extent the absence of the Jewish establishment has influenced who among the Arabs participates.

Arab leader Sabri El-Farra, while supportive of the groups, is not involved personally. He attributed that to lack of time, but said, “I would participate in something I would feel more representative of both sides, so that it would be strong enough to be fruitful. I do not expect an immediate solution to conflict in the Middle East to result.”

Holding that nothing concrete can come out of this process, and questioning the effectiveness of any groups that do not include leadership from across the board, ex-diplomat Joseph Sisco would not write it off entirely.

“The argument about general education, general understanding as against being a pressure group is a decision every public affairs group has to make. There’s nothing unique about this, except that you don’t get many Arabs and Jews getting together. Every group has a right to think (they’ll influence foreign policy). But education of this sort comes slowly. I’ve had a lot of experience with it, with dialogue groups. I’m all for it.”

Likewise, Gerald Bubis had trouble sticking with his own cynicism, “especially since there is this tremendous, hardening polarization going on in Israel,” he said. “Those who are still looking for an accommodating voice would like reinforcement from abroad. The potential geopolitical ramifications are enormous, far beyond what everybody appreciates.”