{"id":70377,"date":"2025-02-21T10:59:29","date_gmt":"2025-02-21T09:59:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/libmod.de\/?p=70377"},"modified":"2025-02-21T11:31:05","modified_gmt":"2025-02-21T10:31:05","slug":"my-personal-history-gives-reason-for-hope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libmod.de\/en\/my-personal-history-gives-reason-for-hope\/","title":{"rendered":"My personal history gives reason for hope"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Foto: Imago<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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It is her own personal story that gives hope: Israeli Tzipi Diskind was born in Jerusalem and is a member of the ultra-religious Haredim. According to the mother of four, her religious community could play a special mediating role in the conflict with the Pales\u00adtinians. After all, they have a lot in common with religious Muslims, she says. Empathy  and trust, above all, are needed so that dialog between Israelis and Pales\u00adtinians can succeed, as Tzipi Diskind writes. She believes in a peaceful solution to the conflict \u2014 despite the extremely difficult political situation.<\/h3>\n

[\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text css=\u201c\u201d]The year was 1934 and my great-grand\u00adfather was, once again, on a business trip in Cairo. He was an agent of an inter\u00adna\u00adtional company, travelling on the Damascus-Alexandria line. This time, he had something important in his pocket: a picture of a young woman from Tel Aviv who was very much inter\u00adested in marrying him. While he was many years her senior, she was very attractive: good looking, highly intel\u00adligent, polyglot, an excellent baker and chef. For some reason, he wasn\u2019t sure yet. Sitting with his Cairene friends, he casually mentioned this woman, showing them her picture.<\/p>\n

Grandfather\u2019s story<\/h2>\n

\u201cAre you nuts?\u201d came the answer. \u201cHow can you even think twice about it? Marry her!\u201d<\/p>\n

The rest is history.<\/p>\n

And so, my great-grandfather\u2019s Arab friends from Egypt are one of the factors of how I came to exist.<\/p>\n

This anecdote has so many layers in it, relevant to our current days, but the first question I would like to entertain is \u2013 why couldn\u2019t this happen today? Or at least, why are the odds for this to happen today so low? Why can\u2019t a Jewish businessman from Jerusalem consult with his Pales\u00adtinian peers from Ramallah about a possible future wife?<\/p>\n

For me, the first answer is that we learned to think about each other in terms of labels, coins, put each other into molds, often led, too often misled, by the media we consume. After so many years of hostility between our nations \u2013 we stopped thinking about each other as individuals, human-beings, persons with lives full of everyday details, characters, desires, dreams and hopes. We stopped trying to under\u00adstand what is driving the other side\u2019s actions, we often just hypoth\u00adesize about what they are, based on our prior misled assumptions.<\/p>\n

Haredim as mediators<\/h2>\n

And this is so unfor\u00adtunate. To quote a friend of mine \u2013 us, Haredi people, could be a bridge to our neighbors. Because the fact we are religious creates an under\u00adstanding of the religious feelings of our neighbors in general, and to everyday practices stemming from religion in particular. I, as a Haredi woman who dresses modestly and covers her hair with a headscarf, who teaches her children to devout their lives to the ways of G\u2011d, can very much identify with a Muslim woman who does the same. I stop my day to pray the Mincha prayer, just as a Muslim woman stops to pray one of her afternoon prayers. I could go on and on with this.<\/p>\n

But how many times do we think this way? How many times did we really stop to think about our neighbors, seeing them as human beings? I know exactly how and why we came to be this way, yet I think that our way to stop this is to start knowing each other. The only Pales\u00adtinians we know are those who work inside Israel, so we might know them as construction builders or movers, but we almost never know anything about their lives. Who are they, why do they live here, what do their lives look like?<\/p>\n

Talking with one another instead of talking about the other<\/h2>\n

The only way to break this is to really stop educating ourselves about the others. So let me start with myself \u2013 I\u2019m a mother of four, living in Jerusalem where my mother and grand\u00adfather were born. A software engineer by my education, I write about science, technology and foreign news for Mishpacha Magazine, a widely-read magazine for the Jewish Orthodox community around the globe. I see the fact that I live in the city where my ancestors lived as a huge merit. My youngest daughter is going to school right across the street from where my grandfather\u2019s grand\u00adparents used to live \u2013 their apartment is still there. As a religious woman, I feel double-privi\u00adleged to live in the holy land, because many of the Mitzvot, Hebrew for command\u00adments, are dependent upon our living on this land. It is a Mitzvah in the Torah, the 5 books of Moses, that gave us the name The People of the Book, to live in the holy land. And there is a chain of Mitzvot that we can fulfill only with the Holy Land\u2019s produce or the Holy Land\u2019s fields. This desire to fulfill G\u2011d\u2019s command\u00adments is what led my ancestors to come back to this land, and is why I, and many thousands of people from my community, live here \u2013 not because of any political desire, but because of our desire to do what G\u2011d commanded us to do.<\/p>\n

To live side by side with one another<\/h2>\n

This worldview is what led a delegation of Haredi rabbis from Jerusalem to travel to Jordan on February 24, 1924 and meet the Emir Abdallah, later the first king of Jordan, and his father, the Sheriff Hussein Bin Ali. They wanted to make sure that the Arabs will know that the inten\u00adtions of our community were to live here alongside Arabs, and cooperate with them. Hussein Bin Ali was all for it \u2013 but history went in different directions.<\/p>\n

The time has come for us to renew this effort \u2013 let\u2019s have delega\u00adtions of our religious leaders meet each other. Let\u2019s meet each other ourselves. It\u2019s time for us to break the spell of the bloodshed here and start striving for a mutual future. I believe we can do it. Do you?<\/p>\n

The article was first published in the Pales\u00adtinian daily newspaper AlQuds.<\/em>[\/vc_column_text][vc_separator][vc_column_text]Hat Ihnen unser Beitrag gefallen? Dann spenden Sie doch einfach und bequem \u00fcber unser Spendentool. Sie unter\u00adst\u00fctzen damit die publizis\u00adtische Arbeit von LibMod.<\/p>\n

Spenden mit Bankeinzug<\/h2>\n

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