For the whole of Wednesday morning I was able to relegate the conflict to the back of my mind, despite being surrounded by Palestinian schoolchildren in the supposedly hostile city of Bethlehem. I had come to their school at the invitation of one of the teachers, ostensibly to watch the kids in action and write about their situation, but instead found myself commandeered and turned into an impromptu classroom assistant.
I spent four hours getting covered in felt-tip and glue, doing my best to help the children make Valentine s Day cards, despite my woeful lack of artistic talent and similar deficiency in spoken Arabic. My saving grace was my ability to write graffiti script, which turned me into an instant hit with the students – all of whom required my services to turn their cards into a bizarre blend of cartoon hearts and flowers teamed with the kind of calligraphy normally seen adorning railway bridges.
In my role as classroom Banksy, I managed to bridge the linguistic and cultural divide between myself and the children, and realized how simple it could be to do the same thing on a far larger scale – something that the school s art teacher hopes to make happen in the coming months. These were the same students who had put on the exhibition I attended a week earlier in Abu Tor, and their teacher, Sarah, has aspirations to put on a similar project in collaboration with their Israeli sister organization.
Most of the children attending the Herman Gmeiner School in Bethlehem are residents of the nearby SOS Children s Village, which was established to provide a home to children from disadvantaged backgrounds. They take in orphans, children from abusive homes, and other youths in need, and the home is part of a worldwide network that boasts over 450 similar villages across the world – including one in Arad, near the southern city of Beersheva.
And, with this readymade link between the Israeli and Palestinian SOS children already in place, Sarah has designs on bringing the members together to work on a joint art project focusing on children s rights.
Having seen for myself how eager the children in Bethlehem were to welcome a stranger into their midst, and how utterly unconcerned they were about my background or ethnicity, it follows that they would be just as accommodating to working with other kids their own age – be they from Israel or Iran – on a project such as this. And that s all that they d be doing, there d be no political message being rammed home by the teachers on either side; no nationalistic drum-banging taking place; nor any attempt to pull the wool over the children s eyes in regard to the conflict.
Sarah told me a poignant story of an Israeli soldier checking a Palestinian child s papers at a checkpoint who, when he asked for the youth s surname, was given SOS in response. Hearing this, the soldier s face broke into a smile, and he told the child that he too was from the SOS family, having grown up in the Israeli SOS village. Of course, nothing changed dramatically for either participant in the exchange – one was still a tool of the occupation, the other still a child living under military rule, but in that moment they shared a common bond that transcended any other link between their respective worlds.
And, Sarah hopes, that kind of mutual recognition can be instigated at a far earlier stage, and in a far more cordial atmosphere, by bringing the children together long before they are forced to meet in more unpleasant conditions through the prism of the conflict. When the students are focused on their art, everything else fades into the background – for the duration of their creative sessions, at least.
I felt it myself inside the crowded classrooms of her school, despite the water being cut off ( yet again , according to Sarah, who complained that it happened on an almost daily basis), and despite the heavily manned guard towers only a couple of streets away. The classroom felt as though it were hermetically sealed from the outside world, and from the delight on the children s faces as they decorated their cards and proudly displayed their work to their teacher, it was clear that they were lost in a world far away from guns and grenades.
It seems a crying shame not to seize on that atmosphere of detachment from reality – however temporary it may be – in order to bring children from both sides of the divide together to explore the things they do have in common. Of course, the hardline detractors will still level the accusation that they don t want anything to do with the children of the occupiers – but that s not going to push things forward, nor is it fair to punish the adults of tomorrow for the crimes of the adults of today.
Instead, the good that could come of a project like Sarah s surely outweighs any bad -and it would be awful if politics were allowed to poison the innocence of such an endeavor. Even if the exercise only leaves lingering memories in the minds of the children, it has to be better than enforcing a total ban on contact between the youth on either side. Allowing them to recognize that they do share many traits with each other is as potent a tool as any for building common ground for the future between the two camps.
Seth Freedmanis a writer living in Jerusalem. This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org.
