Treaties don't do it; homes do - NCRonline.org: a sampling of some of the regular features on the NCR Web site - women striving for peace, Israel and West Bank

National Catholic Reporter, Jan 23, 2004 by Joan Chittister

From Where I Stand Excerpt from Jan. 13

Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister has been traveling in Israel and Palestine.

In Israel, I discover, it is unusually easy to become embroiled in the game of who's right and who's wrong.

The Jewish people need a homeland, yes. The Palestinians rejected the 1948 U.N. mandate that decreed that, yes.

The Palestinians need a homeland, yes. The Israelis refuse to recognize that, yes.

The Israelis hesitate to put their children on a school bus, yes. The Arabs, minus the political rights of a sovereign nation, are insecure even in their homes, yes.

The Israelis are living in fear, yes. The Palestinians are living in fear, yes.

Both peoples want peace, yes. Both governments refuse to negotiate it, yes.

When both governments do negotiate, both peoples lose and which side is "right" begins to pale. I saw it with my own eyes.

Basma, the attractive and lively young Palestinian woman who acted as a kind of local secretary to the U.N.-initiated "Women's Global Peace Initiative," met us at our meeting sites every morning in the same clothes. It took four days before I realized that Basma didn't have any other clothes. Her 14-apartment housing complex had been bulldozed the week before because Israeli soldiers had reason to believe that a suspected terrorist had run into the building for refuge. They killed the suspect and then bulldozed the building anyway No residents were allowed to retrieve anything from the building before it was leveled. Basma had no clothes, no books, no records, nothing now. And yet, every morning she came to work for peace.

On the other hand, we visited the planned city of Ariel in Samaria, one of Israel's West Bank settlements. When Ariel's first settlers arrived there in 1975, the mountaintop was bare. Now it is a city of 18,000 inhabitants, 9,000 of whom are immigrants from Russia. It is a gleaming new development, sparklingly clean, completely "built by these 10 fingers," one woman put it.

If present peace plans are ever completed, Ariel will be one of the settlements dismantled or left to Palestinian control.

Jewish women, all longtime members of the Israeli peace movement, sat quietly and listened to the women from Ariel. "We do not seek agreements," they said. "We seek understanding of each other through personal encounters, through humanizing the dispute, through a search for common ground." Three members of the group, all women rabbis, will go back every month to hold discussion groups with the women of Ariel.

Margaret Thatcher said once, "In politics, if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman."

All the treaties written and proclaimed in government Rose Gardens have yet to work. From where I stand, it looks like it may be only these women--one displaced Palestinian girl, one group of Arab-Israeli women--working together to save one another's homes, who can ever get beyond politics to peace.

From Where I Stand by Sr. Joan Chittister is posted to NCRonline.org every Tuesday.