Ishmael and Isaac, brothers of the same father and different mothers, together buried their father Abraham. Esau and Jacob, twin brother and rivals, reconciled. When they met after many years, Jacob said: “for truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God – since you have received me with such favor” (Genesis 33:10).
These stories tell of rival brothers, enemy brothers, who made peace. Every human conflict is a conflict between kin. We are all daughters and sons of the same Creator God. God created humankind in God’s own image and likeness. Thus, every human being carries the imago dei, the image of God. When we kill a human being, we are killing an image of God. When we lose sight of this, we lose clarity. We lose focus. We fall into deception and obscurity, into a dangerous shadow place where we understand the Other as altogether Other who may be, or ought to be, expelled or killed. We lose sight of their humanity. And the moment we do this, we forfeit a measure of our own.
Bassam Aramin is a Palestinian fighter who served seven years in jail for planning an attack on Israeli soldiers. When he left jail, he decided to dedicate himself to nonviolent solutions to the Israel/Palestine conflict. January 16, 2007, his 10-year-old daughter, Abir, was walking home from school with her friends in Anata near a border crossing. When an Israeli Border Patrol opened fire, a bullet found the back of Abir’s head. Three days later she was dead.
Yaniv Rashef was an Israeli soldier in the sabotage unit. He lives within range of missiles fired from Gaza. He has joined with Bassam Aramin in a group of about 600 former Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters—Combatants for Peace (C4P)—to work together for peace in Israel/Palestine. They are working together to build playgrounds.
The Courage of Conscience Speaking Tour brings these two men to several cities in the Boston and New York areas, to Rochester, NY, and to Washington, D.C. C4P are in the United States to raise money to build a playground in Se’ir, a village near Hebron, on the West Bank. They are here to ask Congress to encourage Israel to bring the soldier who shot Abir to justice. Because without justice, there can be no peace. They are here to tell their story of reconciliation and peacemaking.
The tour is sponsored by September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, the Peace Abbey, an organization working on nonviolent conflict resolution, and the Rebuilding Alliance, an organization working to rebuild war-torn areas. These are ordinary people working to demonstrate God’s favor to the Other and in so doing to demonstrate the reconciling grace of God and God’s own radical love, the only true way to peace.
Dr. Valerie Elverton Dixon is an independent scholar who publishes lectures and essays at JustPeaceTheory.com. She received her Ph.D. in religion and society from Temple University and taught Christian ethics at United Theological Seminary and Andover Newton Theological School.
