Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid...
-Micah 4:4
The riots by Arabs in the Galilee in 2000, and the deadly response,
gave rise to a lot of joint discussion groups and conferences, seeking
to find what went wrong and what could be done about it. At one of
these, I happened to be in a group charged with thinking about how the
arts could serve as a cultural bridge in our context. One of the ideas
the emerged from that discussion, after a few years of incubation,
blossomed into the Galilee Circus, a youth circus currently numbering
about 50 kids aged 6-21. There are generally twice as many Arabs as Jews
in the circus, apparently because the Jewish communities offer a richer
variety of after-school activities – and because Jews tend to be more
afraid of Arabs, whom they don't know so well, than Arabs are afraid of
Jews, whom they, as a minority, know very well. While we've had our ups
and downs and are constantly starved for resources (the families pay,
but it doesn't cover the costs), it has been gratifying to see how the
project has grown and succeeded, how kids have stuck with it and
invested time and effort, so that the quality of the performances has
gone up year by year to a truly professional level. I have no circus
skills, so am not involved on a daily basis, but this spring we've had a
jump in requests for performances (school and community events,
visiting groups from abroad), so I've had the opportunity to watch them
in action a lot (we'll be performing for four days in Philadelphia later
this month, moving on to St. Louis for two weeks of training and
performances with the St. Louis Arches youth circus).
I've learned a few things about youth circus over the years: that
it's a world wide movement that connects kids across continents and
cultures (besides the above trip, we've just received a grant for an
exchange program with a Dutch youth circus); that it is non-verbal, so
we can take kids at an age when they don't have a common language
(except circus); that it is about trust, about overcoming fear, about
making people laugh; that it is a noncompetitive sport; that its impact
is not just on the participants but on the audience as well. The circus
has the ability to create, if only for brief moments, a model of a
shared cultural common denominator, when kids lose their hyphen
(Jewish-Israeli, Arab-Israeli) and are seen for what they can do and not
for who they are, when they model intense mutual trust and unqualified,
unconditional support for each other.
And yet, it's important to remember that the circus and similar
projects have their critics in the world of peace and coexistence
education. One of our early funders started insisting that we move on to
"dialogue." There is a school of thought that says that if we don't
actually grapple with the conflict, with the historical issues, then all
we are doing is playing games. Eating humus together, it is said – or
juggling together – can't resolve a century of deep resentments and
fears. This approach certainly has merit, and can't be dismissed out of
hand. There is no question that superficial, slap-on-the-back
coexistence often covers, thinly, racist attitudes: Some of my best
friends... On the other hand, sometimes I get the feeling that if all we
have in common is the conflict, then we have a perverse interest in
preserving it. Perhaps if we could create a space of shared identity, of
personal acquaintance, of acceptance of each other as real human beings
and not ideologically defined caricatures, then we might be able to
talk about the conflict in different tones, and actually to hear each
other's narratives of victimhood sympathetically.
Not to mention the fact that the kids who joined the circus came to
juggle, not to dialogue. It seems that we are destined to live together
here. We might as well try to enjoy it.
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