Blessed are the peacemakers

There are cer­tain moments that stand out after a polit­ical film about intense emo­tions, telling human ges­tures and moments of trust or intim­acy or cour­age. In the case of I Know I’m Not Alone, Michael Franti’s new film, those moments include the way the Israeli sol­dier’s hand keeps twitch­ing after Franti asks him to take his finger off his gun trig­ger and he slings his rifle over his back instead. The sol­dier has had that finger on that trig­ger for so long now, it’s a com­fort blanket and without it, the finger seeks blindly for it, jit­ters and moves, the whole hand dan­cing around so I lose track of what Franti is saying to him. 

Another is Franti going in and singing “Bomb the World” for US troops in Iraq. He’s nervous, never sung this to people like this before, and here they are with their Amer­ican flags on their sleeves, lit­er­ally, as he sings those open­ing lines “Tell me the reason behind the col­ours that you fly/love just one nation and the whole world we divide”. For them, he changes one line: “We can bomb the world to pieces, but can we bomb it into peace?” making it a ques­tion rather than his usual bald state­ment that it’s not possible… 

And then of course there are the vic­tims: the chil­dren without legs, the moth­ers of sui­cide bombers and officers, the young sol­dier who has told him­self over and over he won’t cross this moral line and finds that he can, he has…

Franti seeks out the poets, the musi­cians. A child recites a love poem, all smiles. Franti jams with Sheva, and it’s odd to see Mosh Ben-Ari (who I’ve met) talk about how Israel will always be in his soul even though I know he’s now living in Mel­bourne with the woman he ‘wed’ at Wood­ford a couple of years ago. 

There’s a moment in a pirate radio sta­tion in Uday Hus­sein’s old apart­ment where they’re listen­ing to that line of “We Don’t Stop” where he says “And if I was in Bagh­dad, I would rock Iraq” and they all laugh. To some extent, that’s my only cri­ti­cism of this film: here he is, in Bagh­dad, and he makes some lazy excuse that he could­n’t learn a whole song in Arabic so he cre­ates a one word chant on ‘habibi’… To really rock Iraq, he only needed a line, a sen­tence, some­thing more than that. And that song, if he really made that effort, could be released and give the same mes­sage of peace and tol­er­ance to the Arabic-speak­ing world as he gives to us.

In the end, it’s a tragedy that it’s the olive trees that the Israelis are tear­ing down to build their wall: that olive branch that has for so long been a symbol of peace. 

As usual, it’s up to all of us to refuse to par­take in the pro­cesses and pro­ceeds of war, to stand up and be refus­niks ourselves. That has its price, as Penny poin­ted out to me: the sol­dier who refused to return to duty in an illegal war because he thought it was immoral to do so has just been con­victed by a Brit­ish court mar­tial.

This isn’t about sides, about being pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli, anti-Amer­ican or anti-Iraqi. This is about peace and find­ing common ground. This is about doing the right thing. This is about love and for­give­ness and put­ting aside retri­bu­tion and revenge. 

I was going to write a sep­ar­ate post about the Pas­sover dinner at raven_’s place, but actu­ally, it’s all related. Carla, Thorf, Geor­gia and I had Seder dinner on Wed­nes­day. None of us is par­tic­u­larly reli­gious; it’s about cul­ture and her­it­age. We told stor­ies about refugees and per­sonal stor­ies about our fam­il­ies and suf­fer­ing, Geor­gi­a’s family get­ting out of Poland just before the war thanks to a per­sonal spon­sor­ship from King George IV, my grand­father escap­ing from Ukraine after the pogroms, Thor­f’s grand­mother get­ting mar­ried to his grand­father to avoid being taken as a com­fort woman by the Japan­ese, Car­la’s grand­father being jailed as a con­scien­tious objector in Hol­land. It’s not about what your back­ground is. It’s about human rights, about dig­nity and free­dom from fear. It’s not easy. It is worth it.