Erella Dunayevsky’s stories evoke the dailiness of Palestinians’ lives under occupation. They take place over many years but, as Dunayevsky has written, “the essence of the stories is identical, whether they took place during the nineties of the previous century or are happening right now…”
…
Nabi
December 4, 2008
Greetings, dear friends,
The wadi at noon. The sun is pleasing. Neither too hot, nor too cold. The wind unsettles the fire and we still manage to cook lunch. Now we sit in our tent. The wind continues to moan outside and the tent, a gentle buffer, allows me to be inside and feel as if I were outside. I like such twofold states. They create a certain open space within me, hosting the experience that is forming or that has already formed but not yet finished its function. So now Nabi’s story is inside me, asking to be let out.
In 1995…It sounds as if this happened long ago, but it could be just now…
So, in 1995 as the First Intifada was still licking its wounds, the Israeli army was leaving Nablus and the Palestinian Authority was not yet installed, I facilitated encounters between local people and Israelis. These meetings took place once a month, depending on the whims of the occupation. Local people hosted the Israelis for two days each time. The participants included a core of regulars — ten Palestinians and ten Israelis, and new participants. Each encounter was led by four facilitators, two from Palestine and two from Israel, all of us educators and mental and spiritual health professionals. The meetings were intended to enable participants to encounter their pain and transform it into a source of constructive inner strength — Hence the name: “The transformation of pain.”’
Many painful stories were told at these encounters, and many tears softened hardened hearts, enabling participants to experience — perhaps for the first time in their lives — trust, confidence and fellowship that cautiously, steadily replaced fear, suspicion and hatred.
The painful stories were as varied as were their mechanisms of transformation into constructive strength. The practical expressions of this inner transformation also differed from one person to another and from one group to another. But the same question invariably came up: “How will this bring peace?” was asked at the final assembly of each encounter. My answer to this question was invariably the same:
Once upon a time there was a boy who wholeheartedly loved the sea. He loved the sand and the water, the waves that stroked the shore, but more than anything else he loved the starfish that lived in shallow water. Every morning, the boy would go down to the shore to see his beloved starfish. He watched them gladdened by the rising sun and gentle caress of the waves that gave them life. One day, the tide was low. The sea receded, leaving the starfish prey to the heat of the sun. They began to die off. There were many of them. The boy stood there, overwhelmed with sadness. After a moment of confused distress and shock, he began to pick up the starfish and throw them with all his might into the sea, to the water, to life.
Suddenly, the boy felt a light clap on his small shoulder. He looked up and saw a man in front of him. A tall elegant man. The man asked him: ‘What are you doing, child?’ And the boy answered with that unique confidence born of helplessness: ‘Please sir, look, the tide has gone out and all the starfish I love are dying. I’m just putting them back in the sea.’ ‘Child’, said the man, ‘look up along the beach, there are millions of them, billions, zillions, what difference does it make?’ The boy did as he was bid. Raised his head and looked at the shoreline.
‘True,’ he thought, ‘they are countless. So many…’ As he was about to turn back to the man and tell him he was probably right, the boy’s eyes fell on a large starfish taking its last breath at their very feet. The boy picked it up and with all his strength flung it into the sea. Then, looking into the man’s eyes, he pointed to the starfish he’d just thrown into the sea, and said: ‘To him, it makes a difference.’
…
In 1997, a new participant appeared at an encounter — a young man from Nablus.
Right from the start, he didn’t fit in. He asked defiant questions which hampered the course of the meeting and resisted the facilitators’ requests to wait for a more appropriate moment.
At the first break, I went over to him and asked: “What made you come here and how can this meeting help you?” The young man leapt at my question as if it were just what he had been waiting for and didn’t know how to get to it, saying: “My name is Nabi. I am 18. I was in the Hamas Youth movement. I heard about your meetings and I came. I want you to teach me how to love.” He said nothing more. The look in his dark eyes was direct and penetrating, the look of someone who would not give up, and he met my eyes that were able to contain him.
Reaching Nabi was difficult. His mind was uncultivated territory. His forces clashed as they sought their proper place within him. He feverishly examined every word and issue and his fine sensitivity didn’t know how to restore his trust in himself and in the world. A few years later, in one of his emails, he would write to me: “I want to warn you, I’m not an easy boy…”
Nabi tested everyone’s loyalty. And all of us – facilitators and participants alike – tried to help him find a scrap of inner ground steady enough for him to stand on. Every time Nabi managed to reinforce his self-confidence, the exacting skepticism that served his wounded trust would spoil every appeased part.
The meetings consisted of talking and doing. Action took place in various areas of the city requiring rehabilitation: from trips to the Kasba, rebuilt out of the ruins of the First Intifada — trips that even enabled the Israelis in the group to assuage their fear of the Kasba — to more renovation works in the city.
At one of these meetings, we got together to help the Palestinian facilitator, a speech therapist by profession, clean up the yard of a building intended as a kindergarten for children with speech difficulties, some from birth and most of them after a traumatic experience, usually occupation horrors: soldiers breaking into homes at night; a brother, a father, a mother, or a friend shot dead or wounded in their presence, etc.
Nabi was with us. We worked all morning, leaving a yard that was clean and ready for the children. Nabi approached me, saying: “I think I’m managing to enjoy myself.” I looked at him affectionately, joining in his pride, and gave him the thumbs up: “Good for you!”
The meetings were a success story. Had they continued, they would probably have enabled a few more lost starfish to reach the water.
But they did not continue. Circumstances beyond our control cut them off. It began in 1999. The Palestinian Authority established its control over the city and suspicion of any activity they did not sponsor, increased. As we were trying to trace the map of a changing reality, Israel struck its Temple Mount blow, popularly called “the events of October, 2000”, thus serving up the Second Intifada on a silver platter.
Days of brutal force followed. I don’t know where the spirit of those days was taken with the unique essence created in the encounters between a handful of people from Israel and Palestine, but I do know that something of this essence was absorbed by all who were a part of it. The encounters were cast like bread upon the water and gathered in various and mysterious ways to the shore.
We stayed in contact by phone and internet.
Nabi and I spoke every week, except for times when he had no money to pay the phone company. Young Nabi brought his suspicions, his radical way of thinking, and his despair to our conversations. These were manifested in the various facets of his life, paralyzing him with destructive tension. At the end of every conversation, he expressed suffocation at there being no future, the sense of a blocked horizon, a life controlled by others, the inability to plan even for the next day.
When the meetings were stopped, Nabi had not yet learned again how to love. I told him that we begin this lesson from the inside out, and that only someone who trusts himself, loves himself unconditionally can respect, love, and trust other people, even – perhaps especially – at such difficult times.
At the end of March, 2002, Israel sent its army again into the cities of the occupied West Bank, from which it had gradually retreated at the end of the previous century.
Communication between Nabi and myself continues. His attempt to acquire trust is a part of his ongoing life experience – incidents at work, in his studies, in his yearning for romance…
On April 24, 2002, a machine broke down in the graphic design office where Nabi was employed. At the time he was studying computer graphics at university. Nabi was drowning in utter despair, furious with himself and the world. He loses his equilibrium and calls at my peak working hours from his home porch. He sounded as if he were about to jump off it at any moment.
Together we meditated, aided by the moon that Nabi could see from his porch, and I was even able to persuade him to give himself Reiki. It was a weird phone conversation, neither talk nor contact, but it was, nonetheless, calming and consoling.
The following day I wrote him an email:
“I hope you slept well after our talk last night. I felt your restlessness at first, and then I slowly felt you relaxing as if someone had calmed your nerves in soft warm oil. I’m sure you were able to breathe and that the moon helped you release some of your troubling thoughts.
Now you are probably trying to resolve your problem with the machine. I’m waiting for your phone call on Friday, to know whether or not you managed to resolve it. But Nabi, even if you don’t manage to fix it, please don’t see it as the end of the road. I know that it’s painful and sad and makes you angry. Let all those feelings pass through you and let them go so you’ll have space to think about a solution for your problem with the machine. If we look closely, we can see a door opening when a window is shut. I send my trust in you, and my love.
Take care, Erella.”
That evening, April 25, 2002, Nabi answered:
“I really want to thank you. You helped me. I don’t really know how to thank you. I’m afraid even many thanks aren’t enough. So at least I can say: Thank you, my dear friend. After our talk last night, I managed not to think about the problem 85% of the time. I slept well and found the solution in a dream. This morning, I went to the office to see if the solution would work but there was no time as clients needed posters of their loved ones who’d been killed in the Intifada. So, I went to the biggest printer in Nablus and asked the manager for help. He gave me the exact same solution I’d found in my dream. I made two posters and got 640 NIS for them. I’m proud of you and of myself. You have no idea how glad I am. I proved to myself that I can trust myself.
There’s still a long way to go and I need your encouragement. I love you very much. I’ll call soon.
Take care of yourself,
Nabi”
…
There have been ups and downs in Nabi’s process of rehabilitating his self-confidence. And meanwhile, the army was crushing Nablus, going from one neighborhood to another, leaving its mark.
Nabi was silent. Prevented from calling him, receiving no reply to my emails, I became worried. I didn’t know what was happening in his neighborhood or what had happened to him.
In July, 2002, Nabi suddenly called. His voice sounded confident, even festive. There were many questions I wanted to ask, but was silent and gave him space.
“They came into our street at the beginning of the week,” Nabi leapt into the space, continuing: “I knew they’d get to our house as well. They passed nearly every building and every storey. I was afraid. I was so afraid I couldn’t do anything except be afraid. And they came. Yesterday they got to our house. We live on the third floor. I heard them on the first floor. I heard them banging doors and bursting in. I had no idea what they did when they got in, or why they came, which increased my fear until I almost lost control. They were already on the second floor. On our floor. And suddenly, in the midst of this fear, you came into my mind. ‘What would she have said to me?’ I asked myself, and heard your voice say, ‘Rely on yourself, trust yourself, love begins within.’
And here they were at the door. I managed to ask my father to go into the back room and let me deal with it.
The knocks were loud and I heard myself saying in English: ‘No need to bang,’ and I opened the door wide. There were three Israeli soldiers. They came in through the wide-open door and I immediately asked them: ‘Would you like something to drink?’ They seemed taken aback by my question. One of them tried unsuccessfully to use his cell phone. I suggested he use our land line. I asked them how I could help them. They said they wanted to see the computer. I said: ‘No problem. I have no secrets but I do have things that are very important to me and I also use it for work. I’d be pleased if you wouldn’t wreck it.’ I took them to the computer. They sat there scanning it for a long time. Then they left. I don’t know if things would have worked out like that, without the humiliations that had taken place in other apartments, if there had been three different soldiers, or how much depended on my behavior, if at all. But I do know that my fear did not come back and I feel I won. I don’t like what they’re doing here, but I managed not to hate. It was my self-confidence that helped me not to give them power over me. I can’t believe it but it’s working. D’you hear?”
The whole time Nabi was speaking, I was silent. Not only out of respect for him and the desire to give him space, but especially because I was shocked. “Yes, it works,” I answered. “It won’t bring peace, Nabi, but it is one more starfish that has come back to life.”
Almost seven years have gone by since then. We no longer talk on the phone every week. Just periodically.
Nabi whom I knew as an 18-year-old is now 30. Today Nabi is fighting for his right to live with his Gazan wife. Nothing has changed in their life conditions. There are no basic rights, no right of movement, no right to earn a respectable living, no right to live, and all the other tribulations dealt by the occupiers. But Nabi has learned to love.
A precious starfish.
Erella