Putting memories of suffering to rest

Memory is an elusive thing. Gadi Kenny was just 6 when his native Israel fought the Six-Day War in 1967 and occupied Gaza and the West Bank. Decades later, as an army reservist guarding Israeli settlers in Gaza, the constant dangers and hate of the Palestinians for the occupiers drove him to think: "God, why do we have this conflict anyway?"

He became a peace activist reaching out to like-minded Jews and Palestinians, at which point terrifying, long-forgotten memories surfaced of his Tel Aviv neighborhood being bombed by Arabs.

"I don't apologize for Israel conquering the West Bank and Gaza," he said.

But after hearing the recollections of suffering from those on the other side, the 47-year-old Kenny transcended his painful memories and belongs to Combatants for Peace, a group of Israelis and Palestinians supporting a nonviolent solution.

Can entire populations similarly reach accord with enemies by making peace with their memories of hardship and suffering caused by the other side? The search for an answer brought Kenny to Boston from Israel last weekend for a workshop run by the six-year-old International Center for Conciliation, whose founder - Hillel Levine, a sociology and religion professor at Boston University - uses what he calls a Jewish approach to peacemaking: acknowledging memories to bridge differences.

Collective memory has been the generational chain binding Jews to their ancestors and giving them an identity. The Hebrew Bible collected - and, scholars say, modified - old traditions to give the Jewish people a narrative of their history to remember.

Modern times have also produced memories indispensable to Jews. "Never again" became the vow against forgetting about the sufferings of the Holocaust.

In much the same way, Levine argues, the collective memory of any people, their suffering or perceived suffering at the hands of their enemies, is the invisible Goliath in any negotiation, an omnipresent force that cannot be wished away. Acknowledging it, he said, is the essential step to empathy.

Used in the wrong way, memory can be an inducement to violence, Levine said in an interview. "Remember the Alamo" was not a peace chant, he said.

Nevertheless, working with memories must be part of the peacemaker's strategy, he said, since merely addressing interests ("Where does the border go? How much money [do the parties want]?") isn't enough, a lesson he said he first learned while working in China and Japan almost 20 years ago.

In China, and elsewhere, he encountered lingering anger about World War II-era use of Chinese and Korean women as "comfort women," or sex slaves, for the Japanese army. It was a lesson that the Japanese didn't understand, or preferred to ignore, he said.

"Just because it seems to be invisible . . . doesn't mean that people forget," he recalled telling Japanese officials.

Last weekend's Boston workshop had a we-are-the-world feel, with 35 participants clustered around a conference table in the Bingham McCutcheon law firm, 25 stories above the city's streets, which has a lawyer on the group's advisory board.

The discussion carried a multiplicity of accents. Among those around the table were a Dutch Moroccan politician, an Indian Hindu HIV/AIDS activist, and a Cambodian International Center for Conciliation fellow.

The group pondered the pivotal role of memory through case studies and role-playing. The participants heard examples of how religious memory in particular can cling to ancient grudges.

The Rev. David Steele, a United Church of Christ minister and senior associate at the conciliation center, described his work mediating conflict during the Kosovo war.

Serbian fury at Kosovo's Albanian Muslims took its fervor in part from memories of a decisive defeat of the Serbs in the 14th century by the Ottoman Empire, a "defining moment for Serbian collective memory and trauma," Steele said.

He told of modern Serb women pronouncing over their newborn sons, "Avenger of Kosovo."

"They were talking about 600 years ago," he said.

Serbian Orthodox religion, he said, has drawn an analogy between that medieval defeat and the crucifixion of Jesus, in which the Albanian Muslims are "identified with the Judas figure, with the antichrist figure."

Kosovo's leaders are hoping for independence now, in the face of this six-century-old Serbian sense of victimization. "What needs to happen is some sort of mourning process" among the Serbs, said Steele. The problem is that it is not clear how an entire nation can work through post-traumatic stress disorder.

One conciliation center staff member said with realistic resignation, "Historical conciliation . . . is a long process."

Blessed are the peacemakers. And, by necessity, patient.

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