GIVAT ADA, Israel: “There is nothing more frightening than ignorance in action . This universal lesson was articulated by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Germany more than two hundred years ago and it has remained relevant for anyone involved in intercultural dialogue, particularly Jewish-Arab intercultural dialogue.
Givat Haviva, which is marking its 60th anniversary, always viewed ignorance of the other side as the main obstacle standing in the way of achieving the perceptual change needed to forge decent and sustainable majority-minority relations within Israeli society. It has, therefore, coined the motto “to put a face to the other as the primary concept underlying all of its activities.
The need to lower the walls of ignorance that exist on both sides is also the primary motivation for a project to digitize a collection of early Palestinian publications held in Givat Haviva’s Peace Library. The aim of the project was to convert the actual printed newspapers, which had faded over the years, into digital files that can be accessed online.
The collection is the largest of its kind in the region and continues to grow daily. Its most important sections, especially the materials from before 1948, were contributed by the members of the Hashomer Hatzair (the oldest Zionist youth movement) who had been at the forefront of research into Arab society in the country.
Years of experience have taught us that in pursuit of Jewish-Arab understanding, it is important to present and juxtapose testimonies from the past which can contribute to an understanding of each side’s present-day reality, especially in terms of the political and cultural positions which the other side might see as unacceptable and even threatening.
Here, at Givat Haviva, we witness time and time again how encounters between young people reveal what the participants have in common in matters of culture, lifestyle, dreams and aspirations, love and personal problems. Suddenly it becomes clear to these young people that when it comes to their relationship with their parents and family, what they look like and how they dress, their relationships with people of the opposite sex, school, television program and musical tastes – they are on the same side – a common multicultural “side which is above nationality.
This is a very powerful experience which when coupled with a different understanding of the history of the other side, could be conducive to the creation of a shared future in a shared society. It is possible to replace ignorance, stigmas, fears and one-sidedness with a more complex and constructive view of reality, both in terms of the past and with regards to possibilities for the future.
A project of this kind offers a window into the fascinating society and culture that existed in Palestine during the British Mandate period and still exists today in Israel. Reading through the collection gives the Israeli and the Palestinian reader a sense of how similar the daily lives of the two societies were. These were societies that lived side-by-side and sometimes one inside the other, as a recent research study into the mixed towns and cities at the beginning of the century has shown – describing Jewish pioneers playing backgammon and smoking Nargila pipes while Arab workers sang and spoke in Yiddish. It is an aspect which has been absent from the history books because the dominant political-ideological discourse has suppressed it.
The range of topics in the collection point to the variety of social groups within Arab society – communists, bourgeoisie, nationalists – and demonstrate the different attitudes towards developments within Arab society, including attitudes toward early Jewish settlement and the Zionist movement.
By presenting daily life in Arab society, be it the prices of vegetables and cheese in Jaffa, football tournaments in Haifa against a group of employees from the Egyptian train company, town hall meetings and cultural activities in the villages or film posters advertising Egyptian and American films – the collection reveals Palestinian society in its many facets and thereby relieves it of its anonymity.
It should be acknowledged, however, that materials held in this collection can also teach us about blindness and denial: blindness regarding the changing reality and its consequences, especially on the part of the Arabs on the eve of Israel’s war of independence. The fiery nationalist position which refused to internalize the changes in the world and the region, dominated most of the headlines and reminds us of the tone characteristic of Israeli and Palestinian leaders today who also refuse to pay attention to the substantial shifts which are taking place in Washington with respect to the problems of this region and approaches to solving them.
Perhaps all that is stored in this collection – in both its positive and negative aspects – can be summarized in one “musical sentence: Let the polyphony be heard so that one tone will not dominate over all the others.
Putting a face to the story of the relationship and learning about the small details that make up the bigger picture will allow the human component which underlines it to take centre stage. Once we are able to achieve a different reading of the past, we will have created a space for a different writing of the future.
Dudu Amitai is the spokesperson for Givat Haviva and the co-director of the digitization project of the Palestinian newspaper archive in the Peace Library. The collection can be accessed at: http://www.falastinnewspaper.info. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).
