The Death of the Future: What Can We Do?

We sit, helpless, before the images on television. We read the words in the newspapers and sense an impending doom. The words and images come to us almost instantaneously now, the fruits of a communications technology unheard of not that long ago. But the news they bring—scenes of fire and death and ruin and abiding hatred—is old news, as old as mankind itself.

We grow numb under its assault, and worry that we may be losing the capacity to feel. We grow hopeless, for the leaders and the statesmen, at least up to this writing on a bright morning in mid-April, have failed. Two old men, the bitterest of enemies, have their hands around each other’s throats and they will not let go. Thousands perish or know living misery in the conflict. We see the burned and twisted steel of the exploded bus in Haifa, the body bags next to it. We see the terrified mother and her children peering out of the rubble of a building in Nablus leveled by tank fire. And we here in our peaceful seaside village are impotent spectators, able only to look on and wring our hands.

Hope never dies entirely, of course. By the time you read this, Colin Powell or somebody else may have erected a jerry-built cease-fire. One fervently hopes so. But it probably will not last. If the past remains the reliable guide it has been, the two sides, after resting briefly from their exhaustion, will tear at each other again in blind fury. We cannot know the consequences. In a haunting and eloquent sentence uttered by a man not known for his rhetoric, President Bush said that when an eighteen-year-old Palestinian girl blows herself up and takes with her a seventeen-year-old Israeli girl, "the future itself is dying."

What is happening in the Middle East pits not only Arafat against Sharon, Palestinians against Israelis, Arabs against Jews, and a militant and radical brand of Islam against the modernist values of the West. It is above all a war between love and hate—between the best, most generous and most God-given impulse of the human spirit, and all the dark forces, both within us and operating in the world around us, that would replace it with a mortal enmity.

Hate is winning. The future is dying. What can we do now?

One clue comes from South Africa, and an extraordinary experiment called the Commission on Reconciliation, which was chaired by Episcopal Bishop Desmond Tutu. Its purpose was to lance the boil of hatred that had grown between blacks who had been oppressed, disenfranchised, beaten, jailed and even murdered by whites in the long decades of apartheid, and the whites who had committed crimes against them. Those who agreed to go before the commission had to face their victims—and indeed the whole country, for the proceedings were televised. In return for their confessions, they would escape criminal action for what they had done.

Which to cynics like me sounded like cheap daytime television, and an easy way out for people who otherwise would spend a healthy stretch, if not life, in jail.

I was wrong. I have not seen the Commission’s proceedings myself, but I have since read about them and have talked to others who have seen them. In these amazing sessions murderers and torturers guilty of ghastly crimes not only confessed but begged for forgiveness, and the weeping relatives of their victims, who had begun with shouted accusations and anger, granted it. Bishop Tutu himself was often overwhelmed by what he heard. No one watching, a friend told me, could doubt the genuineness of either the remorse or the forgiveness.

All this took place under the government of Nelson Mandela, who had spent almost half his life in white prisons. South Africa today has many inequities, many other problems, but visceral, undying hatred between black and white is not one of them. The work of the commission has to be responsible in part for that.

The commission ran on emotion, while so far all the potential solutions to the Palestine problem have relied on historical and logical argument (who gets how much land and where and when and why), and all the levers of power have been in the hands of people who have suffered nothing. Arafat’s family is in Paris. No one will ever get to Sharon’s family through the bristling screens of Israeli security. Agitated diplomats in striped pants have paid no personal price either, nor will they.

And all have failed. Perhaps it is time to tell the statesmen and the leaders to shut up, sit down, and listen. Perhaps it is time to begin the work of healing and accommodation by handing the initial work to people with a unique qualification for doing it—the families of noncombatant innocents who were killed.

A dozen families, perhaps, six from each side. Nonpolitical people, insofar as it is possible to be nonpolitical in the Middle East. Children would get as much time to speak as their elders (more, if they need it; we would especially want to hear from the children).

The proceedings would be broadcast live at full length on every TV channel and radio station, no exceptions. The leaders of Israel and the Palestinian Authority would be required to attend every session in person, and remain silent throughout it.

The families would speak alternately, Palestinian and Jew, and they would speak from the heart and not the head. They would begin by speaking of the ones they had lost, what kind of people they were, how much they loved them and missed them. Then they could speak of their feelings for those on the other side, confessing their hatreds. And when that was all over, they would be asked again if anything they had heard had moved them to feel a different way about others who had suffered as they had. Finally, we can then tell the statesmen and the leaders to make peace, with their own hearts guided as the families’ hearts were.

But will this work? How do we know the participants won’t remain as full of hatred toward each other, as full of blame, as their separate nations seem to be? How do we know the whole thing won’t be another failure?

We don’t. But we have on our side a powerful truth—the sure and certain knowledge that, through the grace of God, every human being is born already knowing how to love. Hate, on the other hand, is something we have to learn. And what has to be learned can be unlearned. South Africa discovered that.

Is there anyone better suited to understand the grief of a young Israeli husband who has lost his pregnant wife in a bombing than a young Palestinian whose own beloved died when the rockets fired from an Israeli helicopter went astray? What parent or grandparent who has lost a son or daughter cannot feel for a counterpart on the other side feeling the same grief? Is there a political difference that separates the death of children, making one death tragic and another just an unfortunate example of collateral damage?

I cannot think my survivors, scarred by tragedy, would make any distinction. And I cannot think the witnesses who hear them would either. Hearts of stone would become hearts of flesh, and a door to peace might open.