Nonviolent Change Journal

     "Reconciliation is that place between forgiveness and vengeance," Pat Anderson of the Aboriginal leadership in Australia told about 30 physicians, philosophers, leaders and scholars who convened last weekend in London to discuss the possibilities of reconciliation in a collapsing world.

     "I cannot forget what they did to my mother," she said. "Nor what they did to my sisters or to the generations of children that were kidnapped. We are not speaking about forgetting or causing others to forget the discrimination, the dispossession and the persecution from which we suffered for 300 years. We want to start out on a new pathway, to preserve our culture and our heritage - and to talk about our common future in Australia. We want to go beyond hatred, beyond pain and beyond the feeling of impotence, and be part of an Australia that shares with us the wealth that belongs to us all."

     Conference participants from Japan, India, Pakistan, the United States, New Zealand, Zambia, South Africa, Bosnia and Australia spoke about the beginnings of reconciliation processes. And we, the Israelis, had very little to offer.

     At the conference, I heard about millions of people all over the world who in the midst of the insanity of terror and war and are looking for ways toward reconciliation. And I asked myself if any of the generals who lead us, who are busy asking whom to liquidate tomorrow morning and with whom not to speak are also interested in the difference between reconciliation, peace and forgiveness.

     Charles Villa-Vicencio, the former national research director of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, spoke about the similarity between personal reconciliation and political reconciliation. In South Africa, he explained, this has only begun, and the immense and still-growing economic gaps have not yet been resolved. But the pathway to resolution of the material problems passes through the search for reconciliation. The pathway does not begin with forgiveness, he said, but rather when the two communities have undergone a process that is given the time and place for anger and grieving, and pain and healing of wounds. Approximately 22,000 people testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa. Most of the victims, he said, did not want revenge, but rather recognition of their pain, public recognition of their personal story, which is part of the story of discrimination and repression in South Africa.

     Our story is different, of course. But here, too, people from one group have more rights than those from the other group. Perhaps instead of saying that we will never talk about the right of return, we should try to talk with the Palestinians about our rights and theirs.

     To effect a significant change, a process of reconciliation must be generated. In the course of this process, the two communities would hear testimony from the victims of the violence. This is the idea that the South Africans are trying to offer to other points of conflict around the world. Villa-Vicencio related that when he asked Sudanese leaders, one of the elders said: Reconciliation is when you are ready to sit down with your enemy under the same tree. And I thought about all the olive trees that we have uprooted in the territories since the Oslo Accords. With our own hands we cut down the meeting place, along with the hope. Instead, we increasingly erected roadblocks, so there are no places where Israelis can meet Palestinians today.

      Jakob Finci talked about the difficulties he faces in his attempts to set up a truth and reconciliation commission in Bosnia. The International Criminal Court in The Hague will try the war criminals, he explained, but reconciliation is also related to a public process in which testimony is taken from victims and from soldiers or civilians who do not sleep well at night because they committed acts that should not be committed in wartime. This process of testimony is no less important than bringing the war criminals to trial because it enables the healing of the pain of the terrible war; it enables communities to build a common future.

     In all of the peace talks in Madrid and in Oslo and in Taba and in Sharm and in Washington and in all of the places whose names we have already forgotten, there has been no talk of reconciliation. No one has asked how Jews and Arabs will live here together. How we will share the same land? How we will remember our pain and open our hearts to the pain of others? How we will remember the history of our pain, and theirs?

     Helpless, we say that there is no one to talk with, or say that there are issues like the right of return about which we are not willing to talk - and that we have no choice because they do not want to talk with us about reconciliation. We are afraid every morning when we take the children to school and consider the safest route to take to work. And we do not speak about reconciliation. Not the battle-satiated prime minister, and not the opposition. And not those among us who believe in reconciliation. They, too, do not know how to go about achieving it.

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