While I went home after two sessions on Thursday and wrote my first post about the Festival, the Emerging Artist stayed on at Carriageworks for Anne Summers: 50 Years of Damned Whores and God’s Police.
We debriefed over dinner, then were back into the fray for:
22 May 8 pm: Ittay Flescher: The Holy and the Broken
Michael Visontay sat alone on the stage and interviewed a huge image of Ittay Flescher on a screen behind him.
Ittay Flescher is the Education Director at Kids4Peace Jerusalem, described on the Festival website as an interfaith movement that ‘works to build trust and friendship between Israeli and Palestinian teens’. His response to Visontay’s opening question said a lot about his work. The question included the word ‘conflict’. He said that like many words, that one is itself ‘conflicted’: some hear it as implying two more or less equal sides and so denying the reality of genocide. He listed a number of terms that have radically different meanings depending on your point of view: Holocaust, naqba, Zionism, Muslim, Jew, Christian, Palestinian.
Serendipitously, today (Friday) I saw a T-shirt bearing a poem by Sakr Omar that speaks directly to his point from a Palestinian point of view, it’s one of a series of shirts produced by Readers and Writers against Genocide:
Back to Ittay Flescher. ‘I’m not a politician,’ he said. ‘I wrote the book as an educator.’ And he spent his brief hour educating us. Both Jews and Palestinians have a deep sense of having been oppressed, both with good reason. He sees it as absolutely necessary that the ancient terrors and hatreds born of those brutal histories not to be passed on to the next generation. His work is all about countering the dehumanisation of the Other, and helping people to learn to have open-hearted conversations among people from opposite sides of great divides. He asks: ‘What happened in your life to lead you to believe what you believe, to hold the positions you hold?’ Then he shares his own beliefs and the experience that underlie them. A conversation of this sort doesn’t aim to reach agreement but to recognise the humanity of each other.
He has been called pathetic, naive and delusional by a staunch Zionist journalist, and seen as unbelievably one-sided by some Palestinian activists. But he has many emails from people approaching him as a therapist: ‘I am torn. What should I do?’
If you look at the news, not just from Israel–Palestine but from many places in the world, an understandable response is to despair. In his view, despair leads to more violence. It’s necessary to have a sense of possibility, to have some vision for a resolution where both peoples can live in a secure, just peace. (He didn’t mention Rebecca Solnit, but I was reminded of her argument – I’m paraphrasing from memory – that you can never know what your smallest action in a good direction will lead to, there is never a reason not to have a go.) There’s actually an Egyptian peace proposal on the table that he thinks should be taken up.
That’s a crude condensation of what he had to say. Responding to questions, he made it clear that his work, and his organisation, are part of a peace-building community in Israel and Palestine that includes hundred of organisations and thousands of people.
I bought a copy of his book, The Holy and the Broken: A cry for peace from a land that must be shared. I expect I’ll be writing more about it in time.
The Sydney Writers’ Festival is happening on Gadigal land. I have written this blog post on Gadigal and Wangal land. I acknowledge their Elders past present and emerging. Looking ahead a little, a poet from the United Arab emirates said today (Friday) that she was enjoying the rain. This is glorious, wet country.
Me fail? I fly! 