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Peaceful Uses of the Bumper Sticker

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Michael Winship

Last summer, the big hit record on Israeli radio was a rap number by the hip-hop group Hadag Nachash called "Shirat Ha'Sticker" -- "The Sticker Song."

Even more surprising than the song's success was the identity of its lyricist, the thoughtful Israeli novelist and commentator David Grossman.

"Shirat Ha'Sticker" is an ode to the ferocity of public debate in Israel -- all of its words come from the pithy, often rude slogans plastered on the bumpers of cars all over the country. The adhesive graffiti ranges in political sentiment from "A strong people make peace" to "No Arabs. No Terror."

One that I saw several times when I was there last year reads, simply, "Shalom, Haver," which means, "Goodbye, Dear Friend." It refers to farewell remarks made by President Bill Clinton after the death of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Rabin died ten years ago November 4 while attending a rally to cheer on the Oslo peace accords. Writing of that Tel Aviv gathering in a recent edition of the Los Angeles Times, the aforementioned David Grossman recalled, "That night we wanted not just to thank Rabin for how far he'd already come but to encourage him to stride forward, to be more determined and unequivocal. We wanted to remind him that he still had more support among us than he had opponents among those who demonstrated against him and called him a murderer and traitor.

"We wanted to remind him that to achieve peace, it was not enough to meet your enemy halfway. In a certain sense, each side must walk the entire way toward the other, because if you don't walk the full length of the road toward your enemy's fears, wounds and devastation, you haven't moved at all. We felt that the peace process was reversible, fragile, almost hopeless, and that for it to succeed, we would have to act against our most profound fears, against the survival instinct we had attained through so many wars."

That night, a right-wing fanatic gunned down Rabin. The words "Shalom, Haver" thus are as poignant to many Israelis as memories of the November 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy are to so many of us, an end to whatever shreds of childlike innocence remained in either nation.

Such thoughts tumbled through the mind this week for various reasons. Beyond the Rabin anniversary, last Friday marked a year since the death of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. The week also saw Condoleeza Rice brokering a deal allowing greater Palestinian freedom of movement in and out of Gaza, from which the Israelis removed its troops and settlers two months ago, and the unexpected rise of a man named Amir Peretz to head Israel's Labor Party.

Peretz, who, with his formidable mustache looks like Stalin -- if re-engineered by Jim Henson's Muppets -- is a peacenik who believes that, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, "The occupation has corrupted Israeli society. Therefore, Israel has a national interest in bringing it to an end. Someone has to save Israel from itself, he said. He will go on trying."

There also was the visit of my friend Angela Godfrey-Goldstein, an activist with the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions, a group non-violently resisting the tearing down of Palestinian homes in the Occupied Territories.

In the United States on a college speaking tour, she sat in my living room Friday afternoon and with appalling alacrity batted out an op-ed piece urging the realization that Jerusalem is like some cosmic wormhole along the road to Middle East peace. Success there has the potential to advance the process by untold light years, if we'll only pay attention and take a stand.

She wrote: "We Israelis are tired of war, of the never-ending cycle of violence (much of which we are responsible for: militarism comes with that escalating nature built into it), and we desperately need an exit strategy."

Finally, in Saturday's Washington Post, the story of 12-year-old Palestinian Ahmed Katib, mistakenly shot last week by Israeli soldiers. "He died two days later in an Israeli hospital," the Post reported. The boy's parents "made the surprising choice of allowing his organs to be harvested for transplant to Israelis. Six people, including five Israeli Jews, have received the boy's heart, lungs, liver and kidneys."

The father of the little girl who now has Ahmed's heart said, "About my daughter I feel wonderful but about this boy I feel very sad. I believe in one God in this world and that we are all family."

Or, as Angela wrote, "We're desperate... to defuse some of this hellish tension. And to learn to share, in the knowledge deep down that God made all life, and real respect for it means learning how to respect that sacredness in everything and everyone."

In a word: peace. A basic yearning that sticks eloquently to any bumper.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Michael Winship, Writers Guild of America Award winner and former writer with Bill Moyers, writes this weekly column for the Messenger Post Newspapers in upstate New York. Copyright 2005 Messenger Post Newspapers.