She Teaches Peace to Mortal Enemies
In war-weary Israel, a teacher is helping Jewish, Christian and Muslim teens
become emissaries of hope—and rekindling Mariane Pearl’s optimism about the
Middle East.
January 4, 2008
One-woman catalyst for peace: Angelica Edna Calo Livne
In October 2004 I went to Israel to write about the tenth anniversary of a Nobel
Prize that had been given to three men who’d committed themselves to creating
peace in the Middle East: Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, Israeli Foreign
Minister Shimon Peres and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. They’d accepted
the honor by pledging to continue their historic dialogue. But violence would
abort that promise. In 1995 Rabin was assassinated. Five years later began the
“second intifada,” or Palestinian uprising, a bloody conflict with Israel that
continues to this day.
As a writer dedicated to bridging civilizations, I wanted to ask the two
surviving Nobel laureates about their forgotten mission. First, I met with
Arafat in the Palestinian city of Ramallah; it was just one month before his
death. Israeli authorities had erected a controversial wall two years earlier,
cutting off Ramallah from Jerusalem, and tension between Palestinians and
Israeli soldiers thickened the dusty air. Arafat’s dilapidated compound was
surrounded by cars that had been crushed by Israeli tanks. Inside, his advisers,
some carrying guns, welcomed me to the dining room, where Arafat waited in his
trademark kaffiyeh, or head scarf. For a moment, the only sound to be heard came
from a television set next door tuned to CNN International.
Arafat was warm as he offered condolences for the death of my husband, Danny,
who was killed by Islamic terrorists in Pakistan in 2002. “Those are not true
Muslims,” he insisted. “They are cowards, a shame to the human race.” Over
lunch, I tried to ask Arafat about the pleas he’d made for enduring dialogue in
his Nobel speech, but to no avail. Instead, like a concerned father, he fed me
steamed zucchini (he was on a diet) from his own plate and by his own hand. He
didn’t want to talk about communication with Israel; his side of the
conversation had ended, crushed by politics just as the cars outside had been
flattened. Yet I couldn’t forget the final words of his Nobel lecture: “Peace on
earth and goodwill to all people.”
During my visit with Peres in Tel Aviv at the Peres Center for Peace, I
encountered a similar dead end. Peres had expressed his condolences in a letter
to my husband’s family after he died, and our meeting was cozy and casual. We
discussed weaponry and the Gaza Strip. We talked about the militant group
Hezbollah and the violence and distrust between Arabs and Jews. In other words,
we talked about war, not peace. When I finally inquired about the hopes he’d
expressed a decade earlier, it was in a whisper, as if I were stirring a knife
in an open wound. I felt that Peres didn’t see the point of revisiting seemingly
buried vows.
So there was no dialogue to speak of. Deeply discouraged, I didn’t write about
my trip. Then, while researching this column for Glamour, I read these words
penned by a woman in northern Israel. “What if there were more than one truth?”
she wrote in her book, A Yes, a Beginning, a Hope. “What if we embraced our many
truths and found our common ground?” The author was not a politician but a
schoolteacher who promotes understanding across religious and ethnic boundaries.
Her suggestions for ways to heal wounds between warring neighbors drew me back
to Israel.
Angelica Edna Calo Livne, a 52-year-old Italian-Jewish immigrant, is a force of
nature, an impassioned woman with black curls and sparkling eyes. Born in the
library of a hospital in Rome because the delivery rooms were filled, she was
named Angelica for her Italian grandmother and Edna for a pioneering Israeli
woman her mother read about in the makeshift maternity ward. Edna, as she is
known here, now lives in Kibbutz Sasa in Upper Galilee, a communal settlement of
80 Jewish families set in a bucolic landscape of apple orchards and grapevines.
For working in the kibbutz’s fields or in its factory, which makes protective
gear like bulletproof vests and plates for armored vehicles, Sasa’s inhabitants
receive food and shelter.
Surrounding Sasa are small villages where Christians, Arabs and Druze (members
of a non-Muslim Arabic religion) live—an intriguing scene for those of us who
see our world as a global village. The diverse communities are separated by
little land but by great gaps of understanding fed by ancestral conflicts. Two
miles from Sasa is Israel’s volatile border with Lebanon. Just 18 months ago,
bombs fell from the heavens during the four-week war between Hezbollah in
Lebanon and the Israeli army. “You would see missiles fly across the sky,” says
Edna. “The war made me fight even harder for peace.”
In 2000 Edna was asked by a charity group to escort 50 Israeli children who’d
been wounded in terrorist attacks to Italy for therapy. Moria, 15, had been
eating pizza with friends in a town near Jerusalem when a suicide bomb exploded.
Just before fainting, Moria—a flutist, guitarist and dancer—had said, “Where is
my arm?” When asked whether she hated the man who killed her friends and
crippled her, she replied, “No. If I hate, I can’t live.” In those children,
Edna witnessed quiet, heroic strength. “From then on,” she says, “I knew I
couldn’t go on without trying to bring us all together.”
Two years later, Edna, who has a master’s degree in arts education, started the
Arcobaleno-Rainbow Theater. Under her guidance, young Jews, Muslims, Druze and
Christians perform plays that explore the rifts splitting their people. They
simulate war and pray for peace. Some might hold the Koran, others the Torah or
the New Testament—but they all feel the same fear. “With theater,” Edna says,
“you have to be open, listen and reckon what people have in common.”
During the theater’s first year, terror strikes killed people all over the
country. “I felt like a drop of hope flowing against the current of war,” she
recalls. She also faced funding shortages. One day Edna sat at her dining table
and scolded her God. Moments later, the phone rang. It was a man announcing that
the theater had won a monetary award from the Vatican for promoting peace
through education. “Are you an angel?” Edna asked the caller. “No,” he said.
“I’m a priest.” That money helped Edna keep the theater going; it’s now thriving
and tours both Israel and Italy. Her work has even gained international
recognition, including Italy’s Assisi Peace Prize in 2004 and a Nobel Peace
Prize nomination one year later.
“For me, one of the beautiful things about being Jewish,” Edna says, “is about
rebirth—the capacity to start over when all has been destroyed.” But there is
also the pain, made tangible when Edna takes me to the kibbutz art gallery to
meet Varda Yatom, a renowned sculptor whose work can be unbearable to look at.
In one piece, some tormented characters vomit flames, while others are doubled
over in pain wearing gas masks or display their faces frozen in horror. “I
sculpt the fear of the Israeli people,” Varda says. Later I learn that on the
day she finished that sculpture, one of her five sons almost lost his eye in a
skirmish with Hezbollah. With two of Edna’s own four sons already in the army
(military service is compulsory here), Edna is pragmatic about the
contradictions in her life. “People say I’m naive to push for peace,” she says.
“But you can’t be naive when you have to send your sons to the front line.”
Cooking an Italian dinner one night, Edna puts too much food on the table, just
as it should be. As the sauce simmers, she whistles like a truck driver to call
her husband, Yehuda. (“He’s my dearest supporter and my wailing wall,” she says,
grinning.) When we sit down at the table, she commands, “You eat. I talk and you
eat!” My new friend is not only a Jewish mother but an Italian one, and her
children include all fellow warriors for peace. Right now, that means me. I stop
writing and eat the lasagna.
Another night, at the theater’s weekly rehearsal, 32 young actors exchange high
fives, hug and warm up as Edna plays an Arabic rap song. Donning expressionless
white masks, the kids start in on Beresheet (In the Beginning), a play that
dramatically interprets the region’s conflicts. At first, the actors separate
into two clashing groups, but their aggression ebbs away until finally the
opponents touch and entwine. Only then are the masks removed—all but two,
“because some people are unreachable,” Edna explains. The first actor to slowly
reveal himself is Moussa, a 21-year-old Christian Arab. “We not only take off
our masks as Arabs or Jews,” he tells me. “The most difficult thing is to take
off the mask and be yourself.”
It required a lot of courage for young Muslim actors such as 17-year-old Nidaa
to remove their metaphoric masks. Nidaa, an Israeli Arab, faces resentment from
members of her community for participating in plays with Jews. During her five
years acting for the theater, Nidaa has often performed in an adaptation of The
Diary of Anne Frank. “Before, I didn’t even know who Anne Frank was,” Nidaa
says. Then she read the book in Arabic and was given a tough role, the Nazi
soldier who seizes Anne Frank from her refuge. “It was very difficult, but it
taught me so much about the human condition,” she says. During the war last
year, missiles fell near Nidaa’s home. Stuck there, she e-mailed her theater
friends, “I miss you very much. Thinking of us helps me through this difficult
time.” Her mother, Balkis, a Rainbow Theater supporter, says that during the war
her heart bled twice, “for the people of Israel and for my Muslim brothers.”
Despite continuing tension in the region, the theater is helping to loosen
long-held grudges. Sharif, a young Arab actor, told Edna how he and his friends
had been sparring with local Jewish boys. “There was gang warfare,” Sharif said
to her. “Then one day, one of the Jewish kids came to our play. I went up to him
and said, ‘Friend, remember me?’ We made a sulha, which means reconciliation” in
both Arabic and Hebrew. Of the truce, Edna proudly says, “It was an outbreak of
peace, real peace.”
At a Sasa disco on a Saturday night, I see that Edna is right—there is more than
one truth here. Girls wearing midriff-baring tops and skinny jeans sway to a
Shakira tune as guys sit watching them, drinking beer. One almost forgets that
the disco doubles as a bomb shelter. The kibbutz kids dance their worries away,
but in the morning some are leaving for the army. Yotam, 22, Edna’s second son,
must report to the Lebanese border. “It’s nerve-wracking,” he tells me. Though
Yotam’s eyes sparkle like his mother’s, he is tense. Watching him pack candy and
a poetry book into his military bag, I think of Edna, who must balance her
optimism with the realities of being a mother in a perilous land.
In 1994 Shimon Peres closed his Nobel speech by saying, “We have reached the age
where dialogue is the only option for our world.” Maybe now we’ve reached an age
when peace talks should be led by ordinary citizens: people like Edna, who do
not believe in religious or ethnic labels but in humanity’s ability to learn,
care—and change.
Mariane Pearl’s collection of her Global Diary columns, In Search of Hope, can
be purchased on glamour.com/about/global-diary. Glamour’s proceeds go to the
charities of the women profiled.
Photo: Natan Dvir/Polaris Images
source:
http://www.glamour.com/magazine/2008/01/global-diary-israel |