March 16 -- A day with my Esalen group from last year, at Talitha Kumi, in the Occupied Territories of Palestine.
I noticed that Fatina and her son were really frightened. It slowly dawned on me that they were driving on a road that was traveled by Jews only.
I was so looking forward to my time in occupied Palestine, because it meant I would be reunited with the group of Jewish and Arab women I had worked with here in the US at a weeklong workshop at Esalen, in Big Sur, CA.
To get to Talitha Kumi, one has to go through a checkpoint. Because the Arabs who live in Palestine are not allowed to go into Jerusalem, it's only Jews who pass back and forth through this particular checkpoint. It was not difficult for me to pass through.
The night before the workshop, Nitsan and I spent time at the home of Rasha's mother. Rasha had been at Esalen with the Beyond Words group. An Arab from the occupied territory, she had left for the states two years ago without telling her family she wasn't coming back. When her mother found out I was coming, she wanted to meet me and treat me to a feast, because she'd learned that I had been helping her daughter. Rasha had come to the States with no money and no connections, but Americans have been so inspired by her story that she's gotten support from various people. Now she's at Brandeis on a student visa, working toward her PhD.
Rasha's mother, a religious Muslim, had spent two days preparing a feast for our group, and I had been told, "Don't eat before you go there. You won't belie
ve what they're going to do for you." When the mother saw me, we both simultaneously burst into tears. She had fixed this unbelievable meal with Rasha's sister and 
two best friends, and all the little kids sitting around the table for this amazing feast—soup and rice and beans and three different meat courses, olives and pickles and vegetables—and I ate and ate and ate. I was just about to clear away when the mother put a whole chicken on my plate! She cried half the time I was there. Nitsan, from Beyond Words, and Rasha's friends who could speak English were translating. They 
all wanted me to know what life was like for them. It was an amazing experience—and the feast lasted for two hours.
The workshop the next day was in a room of an Arab school. All the women who came had been at Esalen with me—half of them Jewish, and the other half Arabs—three of whom lived in Palestine, and the rest Arab women who lived in Israel. The women of Gaza have to be really careful about not letting people know they are doing this peace work with me and the Beyond Words organization. Only their families know; they are doing this undercover.
The work got very deep, very fast. The women really dug into the politics of the Israeli-Arab conflict, and their feelings of anger and grief were palpable in the room. At Esalen, the Radical Aliveness work was challenging for them, but here, with me, in their own backyard, everyone just went for it. No one was holding back.
They had been working together on and off since I last saw them about a year before. The women of the group were really present and bringing up their feelings. One Arab woman was telling a story about how she works for the housing authority that gives building permits. She had met an Arab man who was dying of cancer and who wanted to build a home for his family. She issued the permit and told him to go ahead and build it, then the Israelis bulldozed his house. She was sobbing, saying how betrayed she felt, and how terrible she felt about her participation in the system. An Arab woman stood up and was angry too. Then a Jewish woman got up and said, "I am an angry Jew—I'm angry at what's going on too." She went wild, and soon everyone was howling in pain. The women really worked directly on the conflict and it was inspiring to see how much safety and trust they were able to create in that room, and how much work they had done together since Esalen a year earlier, work that had freed them up to be more real and more honest. It was a wonderful, deep group and experience.
In the end, we talked about how they had gotten empowered by the work, and how different they felt now compared with when they were at Esalen. They also remarked on how healing it was for them to have an outsider—not Jewish, not part of the conflict—to facilitate. They said it made them much freer to express their feelings. Actually, everyone said this to me everywhere I went. My "outsider" status brought safety and neutrality to the groups, and allowed them to express themselves more powerfully.
At the end of that workshop one of the Beyond Words women, Fatina, a Muslim Arab, wanted to take me to Bethlehem. I agreed. She and her son took me around Bethlehem and showed me the church where people had hidden out without food or medicine to avoid being killed by Israeli forces. The town was thousands of years old. In the center of the town were a lot of youth staging a peaceful demonstration to try and bring the two parties together, Fatah and Hamas. At the time, the town was split between these two parties. They also took me to the center Fatina is starting with other women in the occupied territories—a place to empower women to make money. They served me sweets and coffee and I met all the budding entrepreneurial women.
As they drove me back on the road toward the checkpoint to take me back into Israel, I noticed that Fatina and her son were really frightened. It slowly dawned on me that they were driving on a road that was traveled by Jews only, because Arabs were not allowed to cross at the checkpoint it led to. They were terrified to be caught on that "forbidden" road, and it really brought home to me the kind of fear they live with. Basically, it's a road only for Jews. We were driving really slowly because they were really nervous just to be on that road where Arabs are not supposed to be. Nitsan and Assaf, both Jewish, had already driven through the checkpoint from the Israeli side and were waiting for us, parked just past the checkpoint. This aroused the suspicions of the soldiers. When Nitsan saw Fatina and her son drive up with me, she saw the look on their faces and burst into tears. "I'm so sorry," she said. She kept saying over and over how unfair it was for Fatina and her son, and how badly she felt for them. Nitsan later told me she saw a mother and child who cried and cried because they couldn't go through the checkpoint.
The soldiers did let us drive through, after really checking us out. My own fear, though, made me realize what these Arab women live with daily.
