Lone voices: Lawyer and anchor call out across the W. Bank
Ati Nurbaiti, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Among the almost bare shelves of a local Times bookstore outlet, which was closing recently, was a 2003 Penguin paperback, Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine.
Its appeal was on the cover: an excerpt from a review that suggested readers might come to understand a little about one of the world's most violent regions, the Middle East, and the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
By the middle of the book -- which is a personal account of the lawyer, activist and writer Raja Shehadeh -- the reader is willingly led into the depths of the contradictions and anguish of a teenager, and later a young man, who struggles to gain recognition from a father preoccupied with his work and obsession with a reconciled Palestine and Israel.
Shehadeh's father is the controversial lawyer Aziz Shehadeh, who dares to voice the unspeakable dream: The recognition of not only Palestine, but also of the Jewish state, as the only way to peace. Even among his own people during his time, it was one mad notion.
The tale is beautifully written: literarily, in the physical description of the hills of the disputed holy lands, and also in how it sheds light on the tragedy that seems to ensnare young people on both sides of the conflict, mainly Palestinians.
While Strangers in the House stands testimony to the oppression felt among Raja's people, many Indonesians either caught up in or observing the massive rallies supporting the Palestinian cause will find the account to be a lone voice that shocks with its quiet tone.
In sharing his frustrations regarding his father -- and through the senior Shehadeh's reflections on his son's attempts at maintaining distance -- the writer shows how he came to share his father's feelings about their community.
Reconstructing his father's feelings when they finally visited the hometown they had left in the wake of the conflict, Shehadeh writes: "The Palestinians had deserted not only their houses but their lives, and waited for others to manage them... We didn't allow the new generation to make a new life for themselves because we continued to impress them with the glory of what was, a magic that could never be replicated."
When Shehadeh's father was attacked and stabbed, he was left to bleed to death in the rain. Police and medical help were slow to come, in part because on the Palestinian side, people were dependent on the Israeli police for such assistance. The grieving son notes the irony of his father's death, which "demonstrated the absence of all that he had wanted to create: A vital society that could provide for the needs of its citizens".
In emotionally charged issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, insiders' stories like that of Raja Shehadeh are in dire need to help us see beyond the numbing headlines of death and destruction.
From the other side of the West Bank is the voice of the Israeli veteran anchorman, Haim Yavin, whose work has yet to reach Indonesia.
The New York Times published last week a brief story on an upcoming documentary by the 72-year-old "Mr. TV" -- as he is known, having been an anchor since the outset of Israeli television in 1968. Yavin's documentary, Yoman Masa (Diary of a Journey),is about Israeli settlements in the West Bank "that is pessimistic, angry and intensely personal", the daily reported.
Yavin reportedly says in the documentary: "Since 1967, we have been brutal conquerors, occupiers, suppressing another people." The Times said the anchorman filmed Yoman Masa himself in the West Bank and Gaza over the past two and a half years.
"While Israel is planning to pull its 9,000 settlers out of Gaza this summer, Yavin sees no end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, where more than 230,000 Israelis live beyond the 1967 boundary lines, plus another 200,000 or so in East Jerusalem, annexed by Israel after that lightning war in which he fought," the report said.
Yavin calls the issue a "Greek tragedy", because he sees no end to the violence about which even conflict mediators may still be scratching their heads.
A reverse outcome might only be possible if many more voices like Raja Shehadeh's and Yavin's were raised -- from both sides -- along with a willingness, among the conflicting parties' supporters across the world, to hear them.