Speech for Berlin on breaking down cultural walls
It is a pleasure for me to represent the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Dr. Albert Schweitzer. Dr. Schweitzer remains familiar to many of you here in Germany and throughout Europe as he was a very famous theologian, philosopher, and musician at the turn of the 20th century. He was famed for his lectures and for his organ recitals, mainly playing the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, often here in Berlin. So I feel a very strong connection to this city.
Schweitzer is renowned for giving up his prominence in Europe and becoming a medical doctor ministering to the poor in what was then French Equatorial Africa and is now Gabon. Yet he became even more famous as not many people in that day and age would go to another country solely to serve the poor and to work to improve the lives of a group of people that had a completely different culture and build bridges instead of walls between Africans and Europeans. He felt his most important philosophy, though, was his idea of Reverence for Life, which I understand is more accurately translated from the German as to be in awe of life, plants, animals and humans. It is tough to build a wall if you view another person, like yourself, as an awesome, wondrous human being and deserving of the same rights and privileges.
Nevertheless, there are both metaphorical and physical walls between people and I hope this Summit tears some down.
Last August, I spent time visiting both Palestine and Israel for the first time since 1998. I wanted to see if there was any way to use Dr. Schweitzer’s ideals to bridge the gaps between Palestinians and Israelis or knock down even a tiny part of the walls between them.
I did not find much hope.
When I went there in 1998, I found that most checkpoints in Israel and the West Bank were sometimes a wooden box and an umbrella to keep the sun’s rays off of them. There was a spirit in the air that conveyed the optimism that peace was possible. Now, in those same places, there are hardened concrete bunkers that have replaced the relatively innocuous barriers I remembered. Any glimmers of trust are almost completely gone.
In Palestine, I met with about 30 young people who expressed to me their anger at their lack of hope in their lives for a future that would enable them to provide a home and food and education for their family. They all thought that the world portrayed them negatively in the movies and newspapers and thought that all Palestinians were terrorists. One asked me if I had ever been to the sea and what it was like since he had never been there before although it is only about 30 or 40 kilometers away from his home. This is because Israel requires so many passes to be able to get through their checkpoints. Some told me of their friends who still wanted to become a suicide bomber and all felt that there was a lack of opportunity for them in the future to get any kind of a job. All students felt that Israel did not care what happened to them or to Palestine.
In Israel, I came face to face with the wall that has been built around the perimeters of Israel with weird, convoluted diversions in places to envelope sacred spots or other points of significance to the Israelis. It looked like a monstrous scar to me that hadn’t healed. I met some farmers that had the wall built through their land, cutting them off from the orchards.
Most of the people we met with in Israel were from the so called peace wing of Israeli life. Almost all were despondent as they did not see any real hope for peace. They felt that the Palestinian kids I met with were right, that Israelis did not care about what happened in Palestine, they just wanted to be left alone.
For peace to occur, everyone has to care about what happens in Palestine. Martin Luther King Jr, a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, said that no one was free unless everyone was free and in Palestine and Israel, there will be no peace unless everyone has peace.
I spoke with one person who was the former chief of staff under Prime Minister Ehud Barak who told me that he had been working on peace in the Middle East for the last 15 to 18 years while in and out of political power. I asked him if he had ever, during that time period, been optimistic about peace. He said No. I asked if he was optimistic about peace now and he said yes. That surprised me so I asked why. He said that he was an optimist because he did not want to die a pessimist and that was his sole reason for optimism. I hope that when he does die, it will be after concrete actions have been taken that that will give allof us good reasons to be optimistic about peace in the Middle East and I hope all of you help in that process.
I think that a third intifada is coming that may be more brutal than the first two unless there is some room found somewhere for Palestinians and Israelis to live with dignity. I look forward to the rumored peace plan to be presented by President Obama sometime soon, and I hope it is something that I can support and takes into consideration the need for both sides to be treated as first class citizens and neither the Israeli nor the Palestinian side holding enough power to veto any progressive idea.
In my own country, I am embarrassed by the wall that is slowly being built along our border with Mexico from San Diego in the west to Brownsville, Texas to keep our neighbors in the south in their place.
I just returned from two visits, one to Guatemala in the summer to work with the Rigoberta Menchu Foundation building schools for her Mayan people, and last weekend, from Nicaragua where we will be working on building schools there also. Our fence will keep out many people that we met in both countries who are working for a dollar a day, if that, and some of whom that are reduced to making hamburgers out of a combination of clay and soil to eat in their tortillas. One of the teachers we work with asked me plaintively if I could help her find a job in the United States as she only made $4 a day even with her university degree which meant that she had to chose whether to buy black plastic to cover the holes in her walls and roof or feed her children. The laborers that are in our countries right now are often exploited and disposable, in part because they are poor and in part because they are viewed as different or as the dangerous other. A strong belief in Schweitzer’s system of ethics would prevent people from being perceived as disposable and rather, be welcomed into the United States or helped to live in their own country with dignity. Instead of building the wall along our border, we should tear down that wall and use the money instead to work together with our Latin American brothers and sisters to provide roads, schools, clinics and anything else that can provide everyone with a way of life full of pride and honor in oneself.
In Guatemala, I also came face to face with the second class citizenship that has violated much of their indigenous communities. As my students and I entered the village where we were to build a classroom for their school, we first had to go to a town meeting to which every resident was invited. We had to assure them, with the help of representatives from the Rigoberta Menchu Foundation, that we were not there to kidnap their children nor were we there to take minerals from their sacred mountains. Only then were we allowed to live and work in their community. The Mayan people had had too much experience with other white people who took looked like me who had taken advantage of them to the detriment of their way of life, their pride, and their self esteem.
Our students lived with Mayan families, many of whom had never had that intimate contact with white people before. At first, my students were treated with suspicion, but within a day, both the Mayan families and my students, some of whom are in this audience, were sharing with each other as equals as the Mayans taught my students their language and my students taught them English through rudimentary Spanish. There was a celebration occurring in a dimly lit, mud brick home that transcended boundaries and enable us as equals to connect through some magic of shared experiences and the wonder of a different culture.
One can argue that it is hard to tear down these walls between cultures, religions, and ethnic groups. Many times it is. But often, if one can learn to celebrate differences instead of letting our differences divide us, these walls can melt away. If we have reverence one for another as Schweitzer suggested, perhaps some of these walls can be torn down.
Albert Schweitzer Institute
Gorbachev Foundation
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