‘Peace can only come if each side hears, acknowledges trauma of the other’

On Oct. 6, 2023, I sat with a group of 14 other Eugene-Springfield residents at Bethlehem Bible College, listening to a peacemaker.

We’d just spent time elsewhere in the West Bank, having our eyes opened to the reality of life there. High walls surrounded expressways cutting through Palestinian land but closed to cars with Palestinian license plates.

We saw illegal Israeli settlements — modern, multistory houses with tile roofs — encroaching into olive groves of poor Palestinian villages. Water cisterns – rather than red tiles – covered roofs in those villages because their residents never knew when Israel would cut off their water supply.

Our speaker was Sami Awad. He was born in the U.S. to Palestinian Christian refugees, but grew up in Bethlehem, where his father helped start the Bible college. I was struck then by Awad’s generosity in speaking about his oppressors. He said his nonprofit, Holy Land Trust, was committed to nonviolent resistance to Israeli occupation, and creating a society based on justice and equal rights for all.

He also said peace can only come if each side hears and acknowledges the genuine trauma of the other. Because violence is rooted in trauma and fear.

The next morning, Oct. 7, we heard and felt the bombs marking the start of the Gaza War. We didn’t immediately hear about the Hamas invasion and the atrocities committed against Israeli civilians — tiny babies, frail elders, young concert-goers, even Palestinian rights activists. But we witnessed the Israeli military response. First the strange, curlicue contrails of Iron Dome rockets intercepting missiles, then the drone of planes as Israel began bombing Gaza.

Later that day, we had a personal taste of the restrictions that West Bank Palestinians live with daily: Our van went to a checkpoint to leave the West Bank for presumably safer Tiberius. But an armed Israeli soldier boarded our van, looked at our U.S. passports and told us we could not leave. Fortunately, we got out at another checkpoint that evening.

My encounters with Palestinians on that trip have made it excruciating to see the slaughter and starvation of more than 60,000 Gazans, mostly civilians. I am outraged by bombed hospitals and blocked food, homes and hospitals reduced to rubble, disappeared doctors and murdered journalists. Worst are images of child amputees and tiny, white-shrouded bodies.

Yet, U.S. support for Israel continues.

I am part of a new local group, People for Peace and Justice in Palestine. We are Jews, Christians, Muslims and those with no religious affiliation. We hope to help our neighbors more completely understand the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

Some evangelical Christians in our group challenge the position of fellow evangelicals — including those shaping U.S. policy — that unconditional support for Israel brings God’s blessing on the U.S.

Our group hopes that those hearing Awad will join us in pressing U.S. officials to promote peace, not enable violence.

We are bringing Awad, now a co-director of Nonviolence International, to Lane County next week to share the view he still holds — despite what he calls Israeli genocide against his people. To achieve peace and justice, he insists, it is crucial to acknowledge that both Palestinians and Israelis have suffered enormous losses and that both have historic ties to the Holy Land.

Israelis’ trauma culminated in the Shoah, holocaust in Hebrew, the murder of 6 million Jews by Nazi Germany in World War II. But it began long before that, Awad said, with centuries of suffering and persecution in Europe (and, I would add, the U.S.). Their understandable response was distrust of others and seeking to protect themselves.

This prompted them to seek a homeland, Awad said. And, though colonial powers had promised the region to both peoples, “Palestinians paid the price,” he said.

The Nakba, catastrophe in Arabic, is the Palestinian term for their violent displacement/ethnic cleansing by the Israeli government, beginning in 1948 and continuing to this day, with the bombing and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza and Israeli settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.

“We need to acknowledge that both people live in this land, both people have a connection to this land, and both people need to find a way to live in peace and respect for each other in this land,” Awad said.

For a list of Sami Awad’s Lane County speaking events, visit Palestinian Christian Alliance for Peace.