Finding Outward Peace
Chapter 20 of The Anatomy of Peace
By The Arbinger Institute

Editor’s note: The Anatomy of Peace, an important new book by the writers of Leadership and Self-Deception, shows us the cause of human conflict so that we can learn to live in peace. Look for the continuation next Monday.

“Connecticut?” Lou asked in interest, as it was his home. “And tear gas?”

“Yes,” Yusuf answered. He looked contemplatively at the group for a moment. “Avi shared his story of coming to the States. Perhaps it is time I shared mine as well.

“As you’ll recall from yesterday, I ended up in Bethlehem when Jordan annexed the West Bank. I began my hustling of Westerners and, as it turns out, my lessons in English when I was about eight. That would have been around 1951. Unlike Avi, I didn’t have any friends from across the ethnic divide, which probably wouldn’t surprise you given my antipathy toward Mordechai Lavon. In fact, I spent most of my teenage years dreaming of revenge for the murder of my father. This desire had fertile ground in which to grow, as a kind of nationalistic fever started to burn among the Palestinian people beginning in the ’50s and continuing into the ’60s.

“In 1957, at the age of fourteen, I joined a youth movement known as the Young Lions for Freedom. This group was an informal offshoot of student unions of Palestinians that began emerging in the region’s universities in the 1950s. The younger brothers of these students, longing to attach themselves to the causes of their elders, hatched mirror organizations among their neighborhood clans. Ours was such an organization, patterned after the foremost of the student unions, which was located at Cairo University and headed by an engineering student named Yasir Arafat.”

Eyebrows raised at the name.

“Yes, one and the same,” Yusuf said.

“I quickly distinguished myself as a leader in the organization,” he continued. “When I was just sixteen, I was invited to Kuwait to meet with the newly established leaders — Arafat one of the chief among them — of a movement that called itself Harakat At-Tahiri Al-Filistimiya, or the Palestinian National Liberation Movement. Known more popularly as FATAH, the reverse acronym of its formal name, the organization’s goal, stated clearly in its founding documents, was to replace the State of Israel in its entirety with a Palestinian State through means of armed revolution. It was an intoxicating vision for a young man bent on revenge.   

“I returned from Kuwait looking forward to the annihilation of Israel. It was only a matter of time; I was going to get my revenge against an entire people. I was giddy with anticipation and happiness.

“My mother, however, did not share my joy. She distrusted the messengers that would drop notes by my house at all hours of the night and began first to intercept and then to destroy the communications. ‘I will not lose first my husband and then my only son too!’ she yelled at me. ‘The answer to the tragedy of Deir Yassin is not simply to swap the identity of the parties. You will not take up arms against the Israelis unless they first take up arms against you!’

“‘But they have, Mother,’ I pointed out, ‘they have taken up arms; they have joined league with the West and are assembling the most powerful arsenal in the region.’

“‘What do you know of arms and politics!’ she snapped back at me. ‘You are only a child with his head either in the clouds or buried in the sand. And as my child, you will not enter into league with these bandits of the night,’ which is what she called the movement’s messengers.

“‘Then as my father’s child, I will,’ I shot back, knowing there would be no retribution for my impudence. ‘I must.’ 

“And so I did. I began to act as the cell leader for Fatah in the greater Jerusalem-Bethlehem area. This was heady stuff for a young man. As it turns out, too heady. In 1962, after building a grassroots network of some five thousand committed and loyal fedayeen, a nephew of Arafat moved in and took over the region. I was officially placed as second in command. Everyone in the organization knew the truth, however: I had been stripped of my power.

“This was humiliating to me, but my hatred for the Zionist Jews outstripped the humiliation, and I stayed on as a loyal foot soldier. I looked forward to our victory even in my diminished role.

“The apparent final push to victory began in the spring of 1967. In mid-May of 1967, Egypt mobilized one hundred thousand soldiers along Israel’s southwestern border and declared that the Straits of Tiran would be closed to ships bound to and from Israel. President Nasser of Egypt then announced his intention to destroy Israel.

“In response, the Arab world became gripped with a kind of anticipatory hysteria. Arab forces from around the region were mobilized on all sides, so that by the end of May, Israel was surrounded by an Arab legion force of some 250,000 troops, 2,000 tanks, and 700 military aircraft. I joined a battalion that had taken up a strategic position at Latrun, one of the western most locations in the Jordanian-occupied West Bank.

“Latrun was located on the highway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the main artery in Israel. It overlooked the Jerusalem corridor, a stretch of Israeli-controlled land that fingered its way to the western parts of Jerusalem but was surrounded by Jordanian forces on the ridges to the north and the south. Latrun would be a key position from which the corridor would be first cut off from the rest of Israel and then captured. It would also be the focal point of the Arab legion’s move down the foothills and across the coastal plains to Tel Aviv. I wanted to be part of the eradication of Israel’s heart — both Israeli-controlled western Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. There was no better place than Latrun.

“But you perhaps know what happened. Avi alluded to it earlier. On the morning of June 5, 1967, Israel launched a surprise preemptive strike against Egypt’s planes and airfields, decimating them in a rout. They soon took out Jordanian and Syrian air power as well, leaving us without protection from the air. We received the command to break into Israeli territory shortly thereafter. But our supply routes were quickly cut off, and the mountains that had been our protection to the east now made our escape impossible.

“Before night fell, we knew we had been beaten. Jordan agreed to a ceasefire two days later, and the war ended in Israel’s total victory just six days after it had begun. When I returned home to Bethlehem, Jordan had been pushed back to the east of the River Jordan; Israel had captured the entire West Bank!

“What followed was a crisis of confidence in the Arab world. A bitter despair swept through the Palestinian people as the Jordanians pulled back within their borders. We were left behind with those we viewed as our captors. We had been abandoned and imprisoned yet again.

“The Fatah network scrambled to regain its footing under the new reality, but we had lost our confidence and along with it much of our hope. Whatever battles lay ahead, I knew they would be much longer than I had hoped. I was not to have a leading role in them in any case. So I started looking for other battles. Battles that could give me release from the daily reminder of our failure as a people and from the gnawing hate I was beginning to carry toward my own — who had, after all, removed me from power and squandered our great opportunity.”

Yusuf paused.

“So where did you look?” Pettis asked. “To what other battles?”

“At first I began to look to other Arab nations — to Egypt, for example, to Syria, to Iraq. I looked for some pro-Arab cause that I could attach myself to. Something with promise. Something to give me some kind of hope against Israel.”

“So your heart was at war,” Lou said slyly. “You were in the box.”

Yusuf looked at him, and smiled. “Yes, Lou, I certainly was. In a box likely larger and darker than any you have ever been tempted to enter.”

“Careful now,” Lou warned. “I have a better-than box. Don’t go trying to make your box bigger than mine.”

Everyone in the room burst out laughing.

“So did you find what you were looking for?” Elizabeth finally asked, once the laughter started to subside. “Did you find a battle to take up elsewhere in the Arab world?”

“I found battles everywhere,” Yusuf answered. “But none worth taking up. They were internal battles for the most part. Everyone was maneuvering to capture power within the vacuum created by the devastation of the war. I wasn’t a player in those battles anymore, and their prospects seemed too bleak even if I had been.”

“So whatever brought you to the States?” Pettis asked.

“Assassinations,” Yusuf answered.

“Assassinations?” Pettis recoiled.

“Yes — of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and Malcolm X in 1965. Their deaths made big headlines in the Arab world. The United States was not yet a vociferous ally of Israel, and I and my fellow Arabs looked to America with some bit of hope. I identified myself with the struggle of black Americans. Malcolm X, as a fellow believer in the Koran, intrigued me, and I knew a little about Martin Luther King. I was interested in the revolution that seemed to be taking place in America. With my own revolution in shambles, I began looking again to the West. Less than a month after the war, I was making plans to go to the United States. I wanted to go to Harvard or Yale to get a degree.”

“Ah,” Lou said, “that better-than box of yours again.”

Yusuf laughed. “Maybe so. On the other hand, they were the only American university names I really knew. A month later, having secured my papers, I boarded a plane in Amman to London and then on to New York City. From there, I made my way to New Haven, Connecticut, where Yale is located. I had to find a way to get accepted. If I couldn’t get in there, then my plan was to move on to Boston, to Harvard. 

“I had been in New Haven for less than a week when race riots broke out in August of 1967. I was there as well through the infamous Black Panther trials in 1970. It was also while there that I encountered the ideas that changed my view of myself, others, and the world. For it was there that I met a professor of philosophy, Benjamin Arrig, whose views began to change my own.

“I met Professor Arrig — or Ben, as he soon asked me to call him — on the New Haven Green as we watched black protesters being restrained by shield-carrying police who were shooting tear gas toward the crowds. The three Christian churches on the Green made for an interesting backdrop to the tension and violence. I ignored the warnings of the mounted policemen who told us to leave. The commotion, though substantial, was nothing compared to what I had grown accustomed to. I felt drawn to the spectacle.

“Just then I noticed a black man who seemed similarly drawn. He was among the onlookers, most of whom were white. I watched him curiously. Despite the combustible dangers of the moment, he remained stoically still — neither joining in anger nor running in fear. His face was drawn serious with concern.  

“I sidled up to him to get the black perspective on the conflict — a perspective that, as an oppressed Palestinian Arab, I thought I would readily understand. Here fought the equivalent of my Fatah brothers. Had I recognized any faces in the crowd, I probably would have thrown myself in the way of the canisters of gas. As I approached the man, I was looking to commiserate.

“‘So the oppressed are fighting back?’ I commented almost nonchalantly. My tone must have seemed oddly detached under the circumstances.

“‘Yes,’ the man responded, without moving his eyes from the scene, ‘on both sides.’

“‘Both sides?’ I repeated in surprise.  

“‘Yes.’

“‘How so?’ I challenged. ‘I only see tear gas on one side.’

“‘If you look closely,’ he answered, ‘you will see the desire for tear gas on both sides.’

“I remember looking back at the boiling crowd and wondering what he meant, and how anyone could observe such desire even if it were there.

“‘Where are you from?’ he asked me, without taking his eyes off the scene.

“‘Jerusalem, Palestine,’ I answered. 

“He didn’t say anything.

“I turned back to the melee myself. “I know what they are feeling,” I said, nodding toward the rioters.

“‘Then I pity you,’ the man said.

“I was taken aback.

“‘Pity me? Why?’

“‘Because you have become your own enemy,” he answered quietly but resolutely.

“‘Because I want to fight back?’ I objected. ‘Because I want to right the wrongs that have been done to me and my people?’

“He didn’t say anything.

“‘What if circumstances are such that I’m justified in desiring tear gas?’ I retorted, returning to his earlier comment.

“‘Exactly,’ he said.

“‘Exactly?’ I repeated in confusion. ‘What is that supposed to mean?’

“‘You have become your own enemy.’

“So began my education at the feet of Ben Arrig,” Yusuf continued.

“What happened?” Lou asked.

“Over a period of three years, Ben completely laid waste to the assumptions I had taken to be the truth — to the personal biases I had believed to be reality. First, he taught me about the box, and then he taught me how you can and can’t get out of it. Because of my deeply held biases against Jews, he spent a lot of time with me on the topic of racism and showed that it too was a feature of the box — of mine as much as anyone else’s. ‘If you see people of a particular race or culture as objects,’ he told me, ‘your view of them is racist, whatever your color or lack of color or your power or lack of power.’

“He showed me that this is the same for all divisions, whether between rich and poor, old and young, educated and uneducated, religious and nonreligious, Catholic and Protestant, Shia and Sunni.  

“‘When you begin to see others as people,’ Ben told me, ‘issues related to race, ethnicity, religion, and so on, begin to look and feel different. You end up seeing people who have hopes, dreams, fears, and even justifications that resemble your own.’  

“‘But what if one group of people is oppressing another?’ I once asked Ben.

“‘Then the second group must be careful not to become oppressors themselves. A trap that is all too easy to fall into,’ he added, ‘when the justification of past abuse is readily at hand.’

“‘How would they become oppressors themselves if they simply try to put an end to injustice?’ I asked.

“‘Because most who are trying to put an end to injustice only think of the injustices they believe they themselves have suffered. Which means that they are concerned not really with injustice but with themselves. They hide their focus on themselves behind the righteousness of their outward cause.’”

At this, Yusuf paused and looked around at the group. “Which brings me,” he said, “back to Pettis’s question, of how we can ponder our situations anew.

“The people Ben and I witnessed that day on the New Haven Green appeared more concerned with their own burdens than with others’. I can’t tell for sure as I wasn’t in their skin, but it didn’t appear that they were considering the burdens of those they were railing against, for example, or those whose lives they were putting in danger. It would have been well for them and their cause if they had begun to think as carefully about others as they did about themselves. If they had been able to find their way to an out-of-the-box place, they could have pondered their situations anew by asking a series of questions.”

Walking to the board and beginning to write, he said, “Like these:”

“With Ben’s help,” Yusuf said, as he turned back to the group, “I started to ask these questions — questions that helped me to ponder my situation anew. For most of my life I had been consumed with my own challenges, trials, burdens, and pains, and with those of my people. I had never thought to consider how the Israeli people might feel burdened as well, and how I might have added to the burdens they felt, and how I too had mistreated and neglected.

“As I began to ask these questions, the world began to change for me. I still saw my sufferings, but I was able to see the sufferings of others as well. And when seen in that light, my sufferings took on new meaning. They gave me a window into the pain that others might be feeling as well, some of it at my own hand. Since I no longer needed to feel justified, I no longer needed to sustain my own sufferings, and I could lay down my victimhood. I began to have feelings for and desires toward Israelis that I had before only faintly felt. I began to see possibilities — potential solutions to our problems that no one who is invested in the box can afford to see. I began to feel hope where before I felt only anger and despair.

“One quick story, if I might,” he continued. “I went home to visit my mother a few years after my learning with Ben, and I made a point to visit someone else as well. I wonder whatever happened to Mordechai Lavon? I had thought. Might he still be on the streets? Still begging? Still being ignored?

“I walked up and down Bethlehem’s Manger Street asking the merchants if they knew of an old blind man who begged nearby. He probably would have been seventy by then, I figured. No one seemed to know him or have any memory of him.

“Until finally I happened upon an old woman, herself a beggar. The few yellow teeth that remained jutted angularly from her mouth. Her dark leathery skin and deep wrinkles spoke of a lifetime on the street and under the sun.

“‘Mordechai Lavon? Yes I knew him,’ she cackled.

“‘Do you know where I might find him?’ I asked.

“‘You won’t,’ she said, laughing oddly.

“‘Why not?’

“‘Died years ago. Right over there, ’round that corner.’ She pointed a stubby finger across the street at an alleyway. ‘Body lay there for three days, the police said. No one knew it until he started to smell. My, the smell! Whew!’ she said, recoiling at the memory of it. ‘He couldn’t do much, old Mordechai, but he sure could stink!’ And she cackled oddly again.

“I was surprised by how badly the news hurt me. What a lonely life he led, I lamented. So many burdens, so many pains. And yet surrounded by others so focused only on their own pains that they never noticed his. I turned to leave.

“‘Hey Mister,’ the woman called after me. “How ’bout some money?’

“I found myself stiffening my neck so as not to acknowledge her — not to feel her humanity. It was almost a reflex in me.

“My, the box has staying power, I thought almost audibly. I stopped and took out my wallet. ‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

“‘Nahla,’ she answered, ‘Nahla Mahmuud.’

“I reached in and took out all the bills I was carrying.

“‘For Mordechai,’ I said, extending the bills to her.

“‘Sure, sir’ her face lit up. ‘For Mordechai.’

Yusuf looked around at the group. By now each person was deep in thought and reflection.

Lou’s mind was on three people in particular — Carol, Cory, and Kate. He felt a new desire awakening within him, a desire that built upon the thoughts he had had about Cory earlier that morning. He was feeling a desire to get to know his son. He felt an urge to begin writing a letter to him, to apologize, to share, and just to talk. He would have done so in that moment if he hadn’t still been in the class. He resolved to write it that evening and to leave it here at Camp Moriah for the next mail run to the trail.

And Kate he thought to himself. I’m so sorry for what I have done  — for not listening, for stepping in and controlling how you ran your team, for my stupidity. What can I do to get you back? Yes, that is what I must do, he resolved within, I have to win you back.

This thought led him to Carol — the woman whose heart he had “won” and then forgotten so many years before. He reached over and touched her hand. I will not be forgetting again. But then he realized how naïve this was. Of course he would. The box has staying power, just like Yusuf said. Lou knew he had much more to say to Carol than what he had managed to say that morning. A few good intentions would not overcome decades of bigheadedness. Whatever she needs, I’ll give her, he told himself.

But you won’t, came another voice from within. You’re going to go home and betroth yourself to your work again, and she’ll again take up her role as convenient housemate and caretaker.

No, I can’t let that happen! Lou fairly shouted to himself. “What can I do to change things with my Mordechais before it’s too late and to keep things changed?” he asked urgently.

Yusuf smiled. “The ideas Ben Arrig taught me, in particular his liberating questions, will change everything if you can only find your way to an out-of-the-box place and ask them sincerely. Each time you find you’re getting stuck, whether at work or in your family, you’ll again have to find an out-of-the-box place just as we have found one together here, and then you’ll have to get responsively curious once more. Your questions about others will break you free from your justifications and blame. For a while you will be able to see and feel clearly and to find a way forward that you hadn’t before seen. That is what has happened to you here, is it not?”

Lou slowly nodded.

“Whether you stay free, however,” Yusuf continued, “and to what extent you do, will depend on what happens next.”

“Which is what?” Lou asked.

“The culminating step in the getting-out-of-the-box process.”

Copyright © 2006 by The Arbinger Institute
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