Imagine... if the kids took over
By Khaled Diab
The future would look very different if we put the peace process in the
hands of Palestinian and Israeli children.
August 2008
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A group of kids in Ramallah © Copyright – Khaled Diab |
A couple of months ago, as Israelis celebrated
60 years of statehood and Palestinians marked six decades of dispossession, I
wondered whether there would ever be peace between the two peoples.
Rather than dwell on the depressing present or
venture into the minefield of the past, I decided to look forward in time, to a
fictional
future where peace prevailed.
Commenting on my article, Hitham
Kayali of OneVoice, a grassroots movement which has gained the
written support of 600,000 Palestinians and Israelis for a two-state solution
said: “Only [by using their imagination] will people understand why compromises
should be made.”
I was pleased to learn from Kayali
that Israeli and Palestinian schoolchildren have been involved in a similar experiment:
using their imagination to dream of what life could be like, 10 years from now,
in a peaceful 2018.
I was intrigued to get some insight into the
thinking of the coming generation, whose voices we rarely get to hear, despite
the fact that they stand to lose the most from this ongoing conflict.
Besides, I have this (perhaps misguided) sense
that children are often more sensible than we adults. At least, they don’t seem
to bear a grudge for long – and that is a precious asset in the Promised Land
where grudges take on a life of their own and can last for generations.
“These children have never experienced peace. They
don’t have the chance to travel to other countries to see how it is. This is
all from their imagination,” Kayali points out.
One Israeli kid from Sderot,
which borders Gaza and is on the receiving end of Qassam
rocket attacks, imagined that he single-handedly laid the ground for peace! “It
all started by accident,” he wrote.
He loaded the radio-controlled plane he got for
his birthday with sweets. His inexperienced hand soon lost control of the
aircraft and it dawned on him that it was on course to become another casualty
of war. In a panic, he pressed the wrong button and inadvertently bombed – or,
more accurately, bon-bonned – Gaza with his payload
of sweets.
“The Israeli army couldn’t figure out what had
happened… everybody was hugging them and they dropped their weapons at once,”
he describes. “I almost started to cry,” he admits, but not out of joy at the
unfolding scene. “All I wanted was to get my model plane back… but then I
realised that I’d actually brought peace to Israel.”
What I like about this story is how it employs
humour to transform the author into an accidental hero. Some may see in this
spontaneous peace a certain childhood naivety. But it could equally be argued
that this vision is more mature than that of the hawks on both sides because it
clearly appreciates the futility of continued armed struggle. The essay also
alludes to the idea that the path to peace need not be complicated if the
barrier of profound distrust is removed.
Gaza also features in the vision of a
Palestinian boy, who studies at a school for the visually impaired in Ramallah. He starts his essay by describing his reaction to
the constant barrage of bad news coming out of the Strip: “My little heart was
tormented with pain, for those [images] could cause rocks to cry.”
Drained, he snoozes in front of the TV and is
awakened in a peaceable country by the sounds of “chirping birds” instead of
“bullets and cannons”. In his dream, the simple joy of mobility features
strongly. He describes getting to school on time because there are no more
military checkpoints, passing his uncle who is “happily ploughing his field”.
He is accompanied by his father because “there isn’t a prison that can deprive
me of him, because prisons have been demolished and converted into parks for
children”.
The boy’s dream may strike an outsider as being
quite humble and unremarkable. But for most of his short life, Palestinians
have been living the reality of Israeli closures, where going even to a
neighbouring village can often be impossible.
A Palestinian girl from Tulkarem
also dreams of the freedom to roam. In her essay, she flits freely between
Jerusalem, Amman, Ramallah, Jericho and the ultimate
symbol of mobility, an international airport in Qalandia.
Back in 2008, this same
In Rita’s dreamscape, the newly independent
Palestine is a dynamic, multicultural, multiethnic land, popular with tourists.
The cities have impressive skylines. She describes forests on the slopes of
mountains and how “Palestinian villages fall asleep in the dreamy, green
embrace of nature”, where there are “no military jeeps on the road and no
settlements” on the hilltops.
So, what is to happen to the Israeli army?
This is the subject of another essay by an
Israeli boy. Dean, a young Israeli soldier, has been called up for some
mysterious mission. His unit informs him that the elusive Hassan
el-Hamid has been located.
You get the feeling that something is amiss
when they pick up a UN representative and that el-Hamid
is perhaps not a fugitive. It turns out that he is actually their commander and
he’s leading them on a peacekeeping mission to Iraq. el-Hamid explains that the Israeli army has been
renamed the Israeli Peace Defence Force and that “many countries need our
assistance in resolving conflicts and deep-rooted disputes and restoring
peace”.
This is not only a commendable dream but
reflects a powerful desire among many Israelis to be fully accepted as
respected and valuable members of the Middle Eastern and international
community.
“The essays which the Palestinian
and Israeli children have written are, in fact, one of the best indicators or opinion
polls of what the situation really is like,” Kayali
asserts.
I would go even further and
publicly urge the adults to let the children take over the peace process and
bring to it the sensibility and competence of childhood.
This column appeared in The Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free section on
31 July 2008. Read the related
discussion.
ã2008 – Khaled Diab.
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