After School: A Chance to Study Face to Face
By Joshua M. Z. Stanton
As students in Israel and Palestine – as elsewhere – begin a new academic year, many will look back on last year as one of accomplishment. But few deserve to be as proud of themselves as the participants in the Face to Face/Faith to Faith (FtF) program in Jerusalem, which is co-sponsored by the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel and Auburn Theological Seminary.
This was an all-too-ordinary a school year for the Israeli and Palestinian youth who took part in FtF. Like most of their peers, they witnessed tragedy too overpowering for even the strongest of adults. An inconclusive war raged on between their nations, this time presenting itself in Gaza and southern Israel. Hundreds of Palestinian civilians were killed during the fighting; Israel failed to upend Hamas’ political and military hold on the Gaza Strip; and extremists continue to menace civilian areas in Israel with rocket fire. As a rabbinical student studying in Jerusalem for the year, I found it difficult to watch the news for weeks on end. Yet the remarkable Palestinian (Muslim and Christian) and Israeli high school students from FtF brought me great hope about sustaining inter-religious dialogue even in the midst of strife.
Instead of finding a stressful and stressed environment, when I joined the ten students and three facilitators of FtF towards the end of the school year, there was an odd sense of normalcy about the interactions – as though Palestinian and Jewish youth actually hung out all the time in Jerusalem. The students joked, laughed, patted each other on the back, and argued in a friendly but avid manner. Aside from the simultaneous translation in Hebrew and Arabic – and the hummus and pita the students were eating for breakfast – it could have just as easily been an inter-religious group in America. It would have been nearly impossible to guess that just a few months earlier some of the students stayed up late into the night, fearing for the lives of siblings fighting in the Israeli army, while others did the same for relatives witnessing the war firsthand in Gaza. What had the program done to make interactions like this possible?
In typical Israeli and Palestinian fashion (behind closed doors, that is), the students were self-effacing rather than proud and critical rather than confident when I asked them how the group had managed to stay together during such a tough time. Their responses quickly digressed into discussions about where the FtF program would take them volunteering, college entrance exams, and what to study after high school or mandatory military service. It was as though a truce had made within the group, so that life could go on and mundane issues could come to the fore. And, in fact, such a truce seems to have been explicitly reached.
During the Gaza War, FtF’s Israeli and Palestinian facilitators recognized that the conflict was far too immediate a source of grief to simply overlook. Their only option was to address it head-on, in a structured format. Sticking to their usual protocol, they insisted that every comment students made be translated into both Hebrew and Arabic. The translations slowed the pace of conversation just enough to give students the chance to think about how they wanted to respond. The translations also suggested the parity between Israelis and Palestinians, since both of their native tongues were made primary.
Furthermore, the facilitators pressed students to focus on the issues surrounding the war, political and religious alike, rather than the personal implications of each issue. There would have been no way to respond if a student participant said “My uncle was killed during the bombardment” or “My cousin was killed during a rocket attack,” but far more to say if one reflected, “I think that aerial bombardment is un/justified because…” The goal had to remain dialogue, rather than winning the argument, and the group’s facilitators ensured that it did.
In time, after several heated sessions in which some students actually opted to leave the program, the remaining participants revealed what mature young adults they truly were. Having been carefully selected for their intellect, social skills, and demonstrated background as leaders, they were able to rise above the conflict. Face to Face had given the students a chance to prove their mettle, and they did so remarkably.
By moderating the reactions of students while providing a structured forum for the most intense of feelings, the facilitators held the group together and allowed students to gain a more nuanced understanding of the conflict – and ultimately each other. As one student put, eliciting the affirmation of others, “If we were able to get through those times without hating each other, nothing can keep us from being friends.” Once friendship had been affirmed, even in the crucible of war, the program could then shift focus to meaningful community service activities to serve both Palestinian and Israeli residents of Jerusalem. It was an inter-religious experience that the students would not soon forget.
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Joshua Stanton is an Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue™ and a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College. No publication or dissemination of this article is permitted without permission of the author.
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