I received an email from a film director, who is making a major film addressing war and peace issues. In my reply from northern Israel, gave him my impressions of my visit to Israel after a couple of weeks there, and meeting with around 300 Israel citizens through the retreats, dharma gathering and DFP.
I have entered this far from Holy Land on an annual basis since 1992 –the countless one to one’s, the groups, the retreats, the dialogues, the Palestinians in Nablus, the talks and the perennial engagements that construct the dialogues. A darkness has fallen over Israel, the pallor of helplessness, a silence of the graveyard, of the mortuary, not a silence pregnant with possibilities.
The relentless machine of government with its tools of propaganda, pumped in the news every 30 minutes, and stridently across the newspapers in banner headlines tell the Israeli public there was “no choice, no other possibility” that the “Arabs hate us”, “Hamas hates us” “Palestinians hate us” and “we have to defend ourselves.” The majority of Israeli citizens, tortoise like, have withdrawn into a shell of victim status, of helplessness, numbness and have abandoned their potential as subjects in history with a power to transform a situation into reconciliation, renewal and the emergence of human dignity.
The peace movement has drifted into inconsequential protests, scattered, fragmented and disheartened. In tatters. Swathes of land and buildings in southern Lebanon and Gaza lie in ruins flooded in the tears born of suffering, maiming, traumatisation and the violent death of loved ones while the citizens of Israel endeavour to get on with their lives, as if this merciless conflict had nothing to do with their own despair and intransigence.
There is one primary question that Israelis, and the concentration of political power in the White House, has to ask itself. WHY DO WE REMAIN SILENT? This conflict in this region is truly a world of military violence, of demonization of the ‘other’ and merciless acts of terror of the government and inhumane reactions from violent organisations within Gaza for whom ideology is more important than life. Israelis and Palestinians abide in a scenario of deceptions upon deceptions hammered home to them by their irresponsible and obscene forms of leadership. It is truly a gross understatement to call this unfolding nightmare here An Inconvenient Lie.
Keep filming. Bring the unspoken to the spoken.