Often I have repeated that a visit to attendingtheworld.wordpress.com, a site that speaks for the Muslim viewpoint as well as those of others in the Middle East not heard strongly enough here, will be richly rewarded. A recent post covers the views and work of Richard Forer, an American of the Jewish Faith, who has theorized the following as a road map to peace:
Perhaps you have it within yourself to look beyond what you currently see as all sides of the issue.[italics mine] I hope so because the lives of those who suffer on either side of the conflict depend upon people like you. Peace is only possible when we care for people on both sides equally. We do not have to like the other but we have to recognize that he is just as entitled to self-determination as us, that he has the same human needs for respect and dignity as do we. We also have to begin to understand and ask why the other acts as he does. Does his motivation arise in a vacuum or does it arise in relationship to our own behavior. Have we played roles in inciting his behavior? Until we take responsibility for the parts we play in the drama of human suffering and as it relates to the Israel-Palestine conflict, peace has no chance; and the people we claim to care about will continue to suffer and die, now and into the bloody future, in Israel, in Palestine and throughout the world. They will die and suffer because our true goal is not their well being; our true goal is to maintain our presumed identity; it is to confirm the beliefs and images that we incorrectly associate with our personal and collective identity.
As long as we believe in a world of Us against Them we will see a world of Us against Them. Our emotions, our attitudes toward others, the way we interpret events, what we notice and what we don’t notice will mirror our world view, thereby confirming and reinforcing it. In short, individually and collectively, we create the world we live in. Thus, the great struggle all of us must take on, if we truly want peace and respect between peoples, is to transform our consciousness from Us against Them to one of tolerance and understanding.
I encourage you to visit this post that provides a rich source for Richard Forer’s work as well as for further reading but then this is also the modus operandi of the site itself.
Posted on June 26, 2010