Changing the story conjures new peaceful reality

Changes in South Africa and the North show that what can seem fanciful is in fact possible, says Ann Cahill

IF THE future were a book, would you read it or write it?” That’s the question asked of young people from the world’s conflict zones applying for places on unique leadership programmes.

It started almost 20 years ago with Northern Ireland, expanded to South Africa, and now has taken on what could be its biggest challenge, the Middle East.

Three of the four people rising to this challenge — to unite Israeli and Palestinian youths — were Irish and graduates of the Washington Ireland programme. They were Diane Halley who worked in Ramallah, Brussels, and Washington (and who tragically died earlier this month following a short stay in hospital); Kate Hardie Buckley, who also helped set up the South African programme; and John Callaghan, who works in Dublin. It was hosted by Seán Kelly MEP, who as GAA president oversaw the dropping of the ban on “foreign sports” and the admittance of Northern Irish security forces to clubs.

Called New Story Leadership for the Middle East, some of the graduates from the first two programmes told their stories to the European Parliament.

Paul Costello started the Washington Ireland scheme using a simple concept: Change the story.

“You do not have to heal the people, just the story because people become victims of our own story,” he says about the idea of narrative theory which changed his life. “We train people about the power of stories because they have real effects, shapes destiny and dictates behaviour.”

He says coming together to create a story that will shape and design the future is more exciting than fighting the same old pub brawls.

Thinking back to the first days of the Washington Ireland programme he recalled that many said there would never be peace there — “nobody says it now because that story is dead”.

“Israel and Palestine is the hopeless case today. But you learn that if South Africa and Northern Ireland can do it, you can do it.”

There have been more than 650 graduates of the programme, and several of them are ministers in governments. “You are looking at a secret lobby group that is taking over the world,” says Paul.

The New Story Leadership Middle East group now has 30 graduates whom he describes as not pretending to be superhuman but “they want to infect you with a new story, and a new story needs a new audience” — and so they came to Brussels.

He quoted Abraham Lincoln, who said in the midst of the war seeking to end slavery: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our cause is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we may save our country.”

The European Parliament is in itself a miracle that nobody had a right to expect — and as such was an appropriate place for some of those young people to tell their story.

Noa Spira, a 22-year-old Israeli journalist, was first up. She had just finished her compulsory period with the military when she was selected for the Washington programme.

She described her daily life as the Middle East conflict. She recounted being called a traitor when she protested against the removal of Palestinians from their homes, and calling a Palestinian she knew from the programme who described the bombs falling around him.

Another day a Palestinian friend living in the West Bank heard about the missiles falling around the city where she lives and he phoned her, offering her a safe place. “Does having Palestinian friends make me a traitor?” she asked herself.

The populations are completely segregated and politically inactive — and Noa was living in Tel Aviv with friends on both sides.

“How was I to choose sides?

“Our expectations are so low — when did we stop believing that something could be done?”

When she went to Washington for the eight weeks Noa learned that you make peace with your enemies, not your friends. “We rejected segregation and formed a bond we could never have made in our region. We are protesting and practicing non-violent action and we are changing the rules of the game, but without the support of the international community it will not work. The only thing that can end the occupation of the West Bank is international pressure. Soon the two-state solution will have no meaning on the ground.

“I am not a traitor. I am still Jewish. I believe in the right of every human being to live with human rights between the Jordan and the Holy Sea.”

Palestinian graduate Dia Majadleh’s introduction to the group included the fact that he was not allowed to board his flight for Brussels because he did not have a transit visa for London where he changed flights. The organisers, with just minutes to spare, booked him through Turkey instead. He said the European Parliament was one of the most helpful institutions in the world and he cherished the chance to go there to tell of the harsh reality to those who care.

He comes from a land where the image of a happy mother is replaced by that of a her holding her dead child; where a happy boy in school is replaced by a picture off an empty chair — that of his close friend who died during the second intifada; where politicians replace talking about peace with a squeeze of a trigger. “I grew up in a time of history written in blood,” he says. His first meeting with the enemy came when he was 15 and was invited to Chicago for dialogue sessions — “lots of shouting and tears”.

“The only solution I could imagine then was that one nation would throw the other in the sea. The intifada hunted me down, filled me with hate and anger. But in the last three years, so much has happened to make me an almost normal person.”

That included being hosted by one of the programme’s founders in Washington, Joyce Schwartz, with other Palestinians and Israelis.

“We had relationships like brothers and sisters, we fought like siblings — not Israeli and Palestinian. It made me wonder what is reality — Palestinians and Israeli’s have adjusted themselves to lives that are abnormal.”

Back in the Middle East it is impossible — and illegal — for the new friends to meet. But, says Dia: “The intensity of the four-week programme creates a bond that is unbreakable”.

That unbreakable bond, adds Noa: “Changed my political identity to the core. It is so personal I can never walk away from this. None of it is a headline in a newspaper any more — it’s personal.”

Dia’s message is a series of wake- up calls — don’t blindly take sides; urge the international community to organise more opportunities like the New Story Leadership; and finally he urges the international community not to abandon hope.

“Today, youth have the potential to bring change our parents have failed [to], until finally a new story for the Middle East emerges.”