Habbash's
parents ended up in refugee camps after 1948. Despite all their subsequent
sufferings, we must move forward. We must make some concessions but not give up
everything.
He
said that his grandmother wept once when she saw a funeral where an Israeli
mother was burying her child and weeping.
"Don't
kill my sons and ask me to forgive you," said Habbash.
We
also work for peace and fight the drive toward violence and hatred.
We
accept the two-state solution, with 1967 borders restored, which amounts to 20
percent of the land held by the Palestinians before 1948, a painful price but
worth the peace that is hoped to follow.
There
are three possibilities for both sides, he said: first, the two-state solution,
where Jerusalem serves as capital of both, open to both; if Israel rejects
this, there is the one-state solution, and the name Israel can be kept, the
patriarch who would be well pleased to find peace among his warring offspring.
The
third option, maintaining the uneasy and explosive status quo, means death,
Habbash told us. "Religion teaches the cultivation of life, not death." [Habbash
spoke Arabic, so the words quoted are those of a translator.]
Rabbi
Metzger, next to speak, called Judaism the first religion in the world, which
has always used the greeting "shalom," "peace." In the three prayers of each
day, Jews pray for peace.
He
praised the group's meeting with the vice president and then, turning to the
study of schoolbooks read by children in the Holy Land, he lamented the
lionizing of suicide bombers. If children are inculcated with this principle,
how can there be peace? How can there be peace when, in the south of Israel,
the people must stay in shelters because of constant bombing. This has gone on
for a year, but patience is wearing thin. Education must change and all
children must learn the Golden Rule.
As
a positive example, Metzger spoke of the harmonious coexistence of Jews and
Arabs in Haifa, which the Arabs never left, fully 20 percent of the population.
He
himself, when a mosque was bombed, was the first person to arrive to protest
the desecration, guarded conscientiously by Palestinian police.
Jews
can well relate to this trauma, with their collective recollection of the
infamous Krystallnacht in Austria prior to World War II, when all of the
synagogues in Vienna were destroyed. Metzger nonetheless was not allowed into
the newly destroyed mosque, told that it was already in the process of repair.
He
said that the Israeli police are still looking for the culprit, who may after
all not even be Jewish.
In
Singapore, he said, newspaper headlines on 9/11 reported Mossad as the culprit,
but how can this be when the United States is our mother? he asked. The press
isn't always right.
He
hopes and dreams for a "United Nations" of international clergy, to include
countries that are diplomatically out of the fold. We have a language of faith,
love, peace, justice, and more, he said.
Changing
schoolbooks to an objective narrative will erase hatred. We must liquidate
killing in the name of religion. Peaceful coexistence will make our forefathers
happy.
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