Talk is Cheap: Yitzak Green and Hanan Mogannam talk it out in their dialogue group.

Giving It a Chance

Here in Sonoma County, peace can be made. Why not elsewhere?

By Davina Baum

The latest Palestinian intifada has burned on for years now, and there is no resolution in sight. Here among Sonoma County’s Jews and Palestinians, it’s been about 10 months. Friends have been made, conflicts resolved. Seven thousand miles away from the Middle East, people with land of their own–holy land in its own way–can talk, cry, and attempt to heal. Their families in Ramallah, in Jerusalem, in the occupied territories, cannot.

For almost a year, a group of Jews and Palestinian Christians have embarked upon a quixotic journey into themselves–away from conflict, away from bombs and terrorism. They tell stories about their past, about their families and their misconceptions. They share coffee and tea.

Faced with brothers and sisters dying, imprisoned on their own land, terrified for their safety, what can one do? Mediators have accomplished very little. Anger compounds the issue. By looking into their own community, the participants in this dialogue group have found a solution that works for them. Not a solution to the conflict, but a solution to the daily anger and frustration that news of the conflict evokes. And perhaps more, always the hope for more.

In past months, the group, which calls itself Becoming Allies, has reached outside itself to encourage people to think about the issue as it relates to individuals. In July, an event at Sonoma State University brought together an Arab and an Israeli to talk about their stories, shared and otherwise. In conjunction with the Rialto theater, the group presented two nights of dialogue in August after screenings of the touching documentary Promises. And on Nov. 16, Becoming Allies will screen the film Children of Abraham at Santa Rosa Junior College, with a dialogue session to follow.

Yitzak Green, a healthcare consultant and mediator, is an organizer and participant in the dialogue group. “This is not a conflict between strange nations; these are cousins–our ancestors are brothers,” he says.

The group focuses on personal stories because, according to Green, “[People are] learning that the suffering in the families who left Palestine since the occupation is not unlike the suffering in the Jewish families after the Holocaust. They go through the same depression, anger, foisting it upon themselves, upon their family members, and then maybe come out of it, maybe not.”

One of Green’s cohorts in dialogue is Hanan Mogannam, a Palestinian Christian with relatives in Ramallah. Sitting with Green and Mogannam in Courthouse Square one morning, we have a dialogue of our own. In measured and fair terms Mogannam explains her interest in the project. It’s been difficult, she says, to find Palestinians–Muslim or otherwise–who will partake in the dialogue.

“It’s painful and it’s risky and it takes a lot of courage, and they don’t want to bother because what’s the use, is it going to do any good? I feel it on my own part with what I’m doing. I do it because I get something out of it and I think something good will come out of it for other people, but it takes a lot of emotion–there’s anger and frustration. Look at the situation, look what we’re hearing on the news.”

The group tries to avoid talking about what’s happening on the news, because it gets too disheartening. “I’m more encouraged to think that if we can somehow get people to speak to the emotional rather than the rational–the personal family stuff rather than the political-national stuff–we’re likely to at least become friends and be able to talk to one another. I think that can spread,” says Green.

Separating the emotional and the rational, however, when emotions rule over these two nations and their diasporas and rationality ceased to exist 10 years ago, is a challenge.

“It’s easy and it’s superficial to just say that, well, if Arafat only got unhooked or if Sharon got unhooked and if we had someone like Rabin or whatever . . . I’m tired of those conversations, they don’t go anywhere,” Green says.

In the dialogue process, though they share personal stories about their histories and personal lives, Green, Mogannam, and the others can’t avoid sharing their thoughts on how to resolve the conflict. They appear to be largely in sync: The settlements–Israelis reclaiming land within the Palestinian territories–must go; pre-1967 borders must be implemented.

“Settlements are a mistake,” says Mogannam. “The ones who want peace in Israel and are willing to get out of the settlements are not in control.” Green agrees: “On both sides, the extreme factions are in control.”

Outside their largely sympathetic dialogue group, however, all participants encounter opinions that mirror the brutal emotions felt across the world. Green explains, “I had this experience meeting with an elderly Jewish woman who’s filled with anger toward Palestinians, and it’s hard to talk to her without evoking her anger.” Green, employing his listening skills, didn’t counter her rage. “I said, you know, I want to give you all the space you need to say that, and I want to be here to see what we have to talk about after it gets out.

“So one of the things that we’re learning,” Green continues, “is that it takes some training to have the patience to listen to someone’s anger and pain, because we want to get beyond it. ‘How much land do you want? How much security are we going to get’–that’s a conversation that, if we’re in fear or in anger, is a very difficult one to have.”

When it comes down to it, although both groups have strong opinions about the governing bodies and their ineffectiveness, it is the stories that they return to.

“There are a lot of people with stories here–a lot of holocaust survivors, a lot of people who left since the occupation,” says Green. “What if we spent three or four months in churches, in temples, in movie theaters, wherever it is, and we heard from these people. And then those people went to their cousins and said, ‘You know what I heard?’ and then they say, ‘You know, I think I’ve heard something similar in my town.’ And then we hash it out over coffee.”

The emphasis is on humanizing the combatants, who–in the eyes of their enemies–are more often excoriated as animals. Terrorist animals, land-grabbing animals, murderous animals.

“Everybody’s ideology consists of wave the flag and throw some bombs and it will all be better,” says Green. “That’s only a way to immortalize those who have chosen to give their lives to this–I mean suicide bombers. It’s not like going out and meeting somewhere in the streets or in homes and saying, ‘Hello, I’m a human being and so are you, let’s have a cup of coffee.'”

Mogannam counters: “But right now, for you and I to do that, it’s not difficult. I’ll do it, and I don’t feel any hostility from you. I feel like we want the same thing for that part of the world. But for people over there, to say, ‘Hello, can I have a cup of coffee?’–there’s a lot of stuff you have to go through to get to that point. . . .”

The global-local link is utmost on their minds, because though they gain personally from their dialogues, all of the participants have a larger purpose in mind: peace. “I think it will spread out,” says Mogannam. “I think people have to get educated. Once they see that there are human beings here who’ve got stories [and that] there are injustices on both sides, they will stop and see that it’s not going anywhere, that there’s got to be another way. Because it’s got to change here before they change over there.”

Technology, of course, speeds the passage of good will. Green explains that while their small dialogue group may not seem to have great reach, “People are in e-mail connection with people who are there and I have an e-mail connection with a number of peace groups, and an idea that hasn’t been seeded starts someplace.”

That someplace could be Sonoma County. It could be anywhere–people in liberal pockets across the country are seeking resolution to a conflict that’s miles away but so closely tied to nation and religion, race and heritage.

“That’s why I think that maybe we’re in a really unique place,” says Green, “because we’re far enough from the bloodshed so that we feel comfortable enough to have that conversation. And maybe those who are closer to it and have difficulty reaching that point can hear about the fact that there are relatives here talking when it gets peaceful enough. And maybe they can put down their guns long enough to at least learn about these conversations.”

Mogannam says multiple times during our conversation that there is no choice: “You live side by side–isn’t that what everybody wants? They’ve done it in the past. Eventually it’s going to happen. It has to happen.”

The wisdom of distance is powerful, but are the emotions at the core of the conflict surmountable? Hope is all there is.

‘Children of Abraham,’ a film of the Compassionate Listening Project, screens at Newman Auditorium at SRJC on Saturday, Nov. 16, at 7:30pm. Dialogue will follow. 1501 Mendocino Ave., Santa Rosa. 707.793.2133.

From the November 14-20, 2002 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Soul Power

Bald and penitent, Cate Blanchett stars in the arid ‘Heaven’

By

After a very fast and shallow hit titled Run Lola Run, the German director Tom Tykwer has headed for deeper, more rooted material. Heaven is based on a screenplay co-written by Poland’s Krzysztof Kieslowski. The story has the skeleton of an action movie, with a jailbreak, fugitives in love, and police chases, but it’s really about transgression and repentance.

Just like the celestial spot it’s named after, the film exists in a set of circumstances that would be hard for the average person to imagine. Philippa (Cate Blanchett), an English teacher living in Turin, Italy, uses a time bomb to blow up the office of a drug kingpin. But the drug lord isn’t injured. Because of a twist of blind fate–the random chance that so often intoxicates Tykwer–four passersby are blown to kingdom come. The police find and capture Philippa with remarkable speed and take her in for questioning.

We learn her reasons, but the police have no interest in them. Since the drug lord poisoned her husband and killed a little girl, she’s an honorable avenger, yet the police do nothing because they are on the criminal’s payroll. Philippa’s in misery because of the innocent blood on her hands. However, the police still think she’s a terrorist–a crafty one with a pretty odd story, admittedly.

When Philippa demands the right to testify in her own language, she is granted an interpreter, a young and angelic policeman named Filippo (Giovanni Ribisi) who volunteers for the task and quickly falls in love with the repentant woman. He decides to risk everything to help her escape.

Heaven‘s one part of a trilogy of screenplays Kieslowski co-wrote with Krzysztof Piesiewicz (co-author of the films Red, White, and Blue.) The late Polish director planned a sequence that when finished would have encompassed Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. Watching this Heaven sequence suggests why the Hell sequence is everyone’s favorite part of Dante–Hell is more fascinating.

The purifying of the two lovers (Philippa and Filippo, two halves of the same person) begins after their passage through a railroad tunnel (like death) and arrival in a town removed from the world–a limbo. Together they reclaim a lost state of grace, from confession to contrition to penitence. The last stage is indicated by both leads shaving their heads, ostensibly to fool the police.

It never struck me previously how actors really use their hair as part of their masks; when their heads are bald, there’s so much less to act with. Ribisi, plump and with a puckered look from the sufferings of true, pure love, looks a little like a young John Lithgow. He’s better than he’s ever been. By contrast, the usually stunning Blanchett never gets her footing here.

Tykwer’s visual motif in the film involves plenty of aerial shots–“God’s eye” camera–including a love scene conducted in silhouette seen by helicopter. The same helicopter ultimately represents transubstantiation when it rises in the sky to a vanishing point–inspired, yes, and reverent too. Yet Heaven is as free from humor as a Jesuit’s argument. This film works through a system of symbolism so inflexible that this movie might as well be based on an algebra textbook.

‘Heaven’ plays at the Rafael Film Center.

From the November 7-13, 2002 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Michael & Me

How I was stood up by Michael Moore but conducted an interview anyway

It’s not really Michael Moore’s fault. The cancellation of our interview, long scheduled to take place last week at the Ritz Carlton Hotel on Nob Hill in San Francisco, was clearly not due to any breach of faith on Mr. Moore’s part. I realize that. After all, Michael Moore has no control over the speed and reliability of the airline industry. He surely couldn’t have foreseen that his flight from L.A. to San Francisco would be delayed, forcing him to cancel dozens of interviews all up and down his daily planner. So nobody’s blaming him.

Sure, he may be a bestselling author (Downsize This!; Stupid White Men); an immensely popular filmmaker (Roger & Me; The Big One); a certified television grand fromage (The Awful Truth; TV Nation); and a world-class rabble-rouser who strikes fear in the hearts of conservatives and greedy capitalists all over the country, but he’s not God, right? He can’t do all that and be expected to show up for every one of his interviews. I understand completely.

After all, Michael Moore is a very busy man, with an important, high-profile new movie out, Bowling for Columbine–about guns and fear and violence in modern America–and it’s had him hopping all over the country doing important and probably fairly exhausting things.

Still, I prepared some really good questions for Michael Moore, and the editorial staff of the Bohemian was really counting on running this interview, so we’ve decided to follow Michael Moore’s own example when in Roger & Me he finished the movie despite the fact that its main subject–General Motors chairman Roger Smith–never actually showed up. Who needed him anyway?

In that spirit, we present the following insightful Q&A with Michael Moore–minus the input of Michael Moore.

David Templeton: Michael Moore, thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule. Let’s begin. First, I gotta tell you, Bowling for Columbine is an extraordinary film. Wow! May I just say thank you for taking on the difficult and controversial subject of guns and violence in America, and for doing it in such a compassionate and consistently entertaining manner. Once again, thank you.

Michael Moore:

DT: As usual, the film is a tour de force, in which you travel the country, looking for answers about why Americans are so violent, fearful, and addicted to guns. Actually, you travel to more than one country, don’t you, since you do that bit in Canada where you open a bunch of people’s front doors without asking, just to prove that Canadians don’t lock their houses like Americans do.

Along the way, you talk to a bunch of really spooky people, like the social misfit in the video parlor who proudly describes making napalm in his kitchen, and James Nichols, the brother of Oklahoma City co-bomber Terry Nichols, who goes all weird and nutty and puts a gun to his head during your interview. And of course there’s Charlton Heston, who gave me the willies.

Tell me, after spending so much of your career chasing after corporate presidents and CEOs, were you ever frightened or fearful of your life while hanging out with such dangerous people?

MM:

DT: Personally, I don’t known what freaked me out more, the pool-side interview with Charlton Heston or the backstage chat with Marilyn Manson. On the one hand, it was pretty disturbing watching Heston sitting there like an angry deer in the headlights, repeatedly sputtering the words “Constitutional rights! Constitutional rights!” and “From my cold, dead hands!” while obviously wanting to break your neck with his own presumably still-kinda-warm hands.

On the other hand, I was simply not prepared to see Marilyn Manson, sitting there in his dressing room talking like a normal person. Man, that was scary! He still looked like himself, all monstered out with the one pale eye and the Frankenstein makeup, but when you ask him about the Columbine shootings–for which he’s been partially blamed, since the shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were Marilyn Manson fans–and what he’d say to the students who survived the massacre, he says, “I wouldn’t say anything. I’d listen to what they have to say. It doesn’t seem like anyone has been doing that.”

Who’d have guessed that the most compassionate, thoughtful, and sensible remarks of the movie would come from the mouth of Marilyn Manson?

MM:

DT: The Columbine massacre, obviously, was a major inspiration for the film. The title of the movie comes from the odd revelation that Harris and Klebold went bowling just before heading off to school to launch their shooting spree. You even make fun of those social critics who’ve blamed Manson’s music for the shootings by pointing out that since the killers went bowling right before the event, maybe bowling was the actual cause of the violent tragedy. You’re kidding of course, but it made me think: Who hasn’t gone bowling and wanted to kill someone before the goddamn game was over?

MM:

DT: One of the most moving parts of the film is the sequence where you meet the two Columbine survivors. One of them is now in a wheelchair, having been disabled in the shooting; the other has bullets still lodged in his body, one right near his heart. After discussing the fact that those bullets were purchased at a Kmart store, you accompany the boys to the Kmart main headquarters, in Michigan, where the guys attempt to “return the merchandise.” You pointedly ask them to put an end to the sale of automatic weapons ammo.

The next day, a Kmart VIP shows up to announce that the chain will discontinue the selling of all ammunition at all of its stores, and you look like, well . . . you look like you’re about to cry. Is it true that, after dozens and dozens of similar actions you’ve attempted over the years, this was the first time one of your stunts had the desired effect?

MM:

DT: In the film, you repeatedly mention your NRA membership card. You even display it for Charlton Heston when you interview him at his house. Then you confront him about his NRA support, ripping into the NRA’s habit of staging rallies in communities where Columbine-like shootings have recently occurred. You ask him to apologize to those communities for the NRA’s callous behavior.

That’s when he goes all sideways on you.

So let me ask you this: I’ve read that you joined the NRA as a way to start some sort of revolution from the inside, to infect that community with a sense of liberal compassion. I know that it’s dawned on you that that was a hopelessly optimistic goal, which you have since abandoned. I even heard you say, during an NPR interview, that you kind of regret supporting the NRA with the $750 you paid for a lifetime membership. But isn’t it kind of hypocritical that you still keep the card? That you flash it around to gain access to people like Heston? How do you feel about that?

MM:

DT: Tell you what. Let me give you the opportunity, right here and now, to take out your membership card–and rip it into tiny little pieces. It’ll be your way of saying, “Hey NRA. You may have my $750, which you’ve already used to stage one of those offensive progun rallies in Columbine or even my own home town of Flint, Mich., where that six-year-old boy shot a six-year-old girl at school with his uncle’s constitutionally protected death machine. Maybe you do have my money, but you can’t make me carry your damn card anymore!”

Go on. Tear it up right now as a hard-hitting social statement. What do you say, Michael Moore?

MM:

DT: One last question. In the press notes supplied to those at the advance screening, you are described as having a sense of, and I quote, “savage empathy.” What exactly is savage empathy, and isn’t it weird that it sounds so much like Compassionate Conservatism? What’s with that?

MM:

‘Bowling for Columbine’ plays at Rialto Lakeside Cinemas.

From the November 7-13, 2002 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.