In 1991, I decided to take a year and go on a spiritual journey round the world. I hoped to go through a spiritual purification and centering that would enable me to find the wisdom for the kind of peace work I felt was needed. For me, it was a year of unfolding miracles. I experienced wise teachings and deep suffering in many ways and from this knowledge found a path to compassion for all those who suffer. It is truly very difficult and requires great courage to be a human being living on this earth. The story of that journey needs to be told in a different place. But it is sufficient to say that when I returned to Israel at the end of 1992, my heart was open to find a path to spiritual peace work where there is compassion and desire to enable healing for all who are involved in the conflict.
When your heart is open and there is a commitment to love, your path flows freely before you. and so it was with the evolving of the peace work I began to do. I decided that I wanted to involve Israelis who are part of the 'New Age' alternative medicine, spiritual movement in Israel. I knew that thousands of these people identify with a peace based on compassion for all people, but most of these 'New Age' believers were not actively involved in peace work, many limiting themselves to mediations for peace.
I began searching for Palestinians with a similar humanistic orientation. I was introduced to a Palestinian woman in Nablus (Shchem), Rawda Basir, a speech therapist who ran a mutual support center for women in Nablus. Rawda, like most Palestinians, is fiercely loyal to her people and, in her youth, served eight years in an Israeli women's prison. In the prison she had a dual experience. On one hand, she and the other Palestinian prisoners were often very badly treated by the prison authorities, including being severely tear-gassed for hunger striking in order to receive books in Arabic. Rawda was injured by this and came out of prison with lung and eye disabilities. On the other hand, it often happened that Israeli women prisoners and, towards the end, even some of the women guards, tried to help them and stand behind them in a demand for better treatment.
This second experience allowed Rawda to feel the common humanity and possibilities for friendship between the Palestinian and Israeli peoples. She came out of prison with a total commitment to stop the suffering she had experienced so deeply. She did not want to see another human being, Israeli or Palestinian, suffer in the ways she had witnessed. It is important to say that I have met many people like Rawda among the Palestinians - people truly dedicated to peace form a place of profound human compassion.
In speaking to Rawda and the people around her, I tried to learn and focus on the needs and problems facing them in their daily struggle to live. The needs I connected with had to do with the Palestinian struggle to deal with emotional and physical traumas resulting form the occupation.
I hoped an Israeli-Palestinian interaction would allow both sides to have their needs met. Both sides would begin experiencing the other as a friend who cares about their human experience. Both could begin a process of healing their mistrust, fear and anger. In sharing their suffering from this situation of aggression and conflict, all could begin the transformation to true compassion for the other as a fellow human being.
