Like many American Jews, I have spent the last few weeks obsessively checking online news sources for the latest on the conflict in the Middle East. There has been so much information, so many conflicting reports, so many false starts. So much of the news is awful that I have had the urge several times to shut down my computer, unplug the television, and sit in my living room pretending that Israel and the Palestinian Authority were still on a seemingly forward, if shaky, path towards co-existence.
Reality always has a way of intervening, however.
What stopped me from waiting out this latest conflict like an ostrich has been the daily flood email messages of a group of Israeli and Palestinian teenage girls. These girls met each other, and me through a peace program they attended and I staffed this past summer, called Building Bridges For Peace. Away from newspapers and email, they spent several hours each day in communications workshops, where they told each other their stories. They argued about the past, the present, and the future, Oslo and Arafat, settlements, checkpoints, the army, the Holocaust. Amidst a daily dose of yelling, crying, and stubborn silence, they learned to disagree while still seeing each other as people, and eventually, to seek common ground in the midst of conflict.