November 2003

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Tear Down the Wall

David Nurenberg has written previously for the Daily Hampshire Gazette and the Boston Globe .

When we search for a nonviolent response to terrorist threats, perhaps we need look no farther than Robert Frost. In Frost's 1915^* poem Mending Wall , he writes:

Before I build a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.

The genesis of any war or conflict lies not in bullets, bombs, or weapons of mass destruction, but in the walls of dehumanization built by all sides. When we read of Hamas attacks in Israel, we frequently ask, "How could they kill innocent women and children? There's obviously no reasoning with these hateful people. They only understand force."

Hamas and groups of its ilk are capable of such acts of depravity because of the walls they build, walls of propaganda which portray Israelis not as men, women and children going about their business, but as inhuman conquerors who exist solely to crush the Palestinian spirit.

A Palestinian I met at college told me that, before coming to the US, he didn't even know Jews were human beings, and was shocked to find, when he spent time with some Jewish people here, that they shared the same emotions he did. Medieval anti-Semitism thrived on fabricated tales of Jewish rituals involving using Christian children's blood for matzah. Before you can slaughter innocents, you first need the wall.

Residents of the US, sadly, are no strangers to such walls. In every US military campaign, too many of us dismiss innocent deaths as "collateral damage," eschewing media coverage that puts faces on the victims of errant bombs. We seldom see vivid descriptions of the approximately 3750 civilian Iraqis <www.commw.org/pda/0310rm8.html> killed to date in our latest war.

We, the US public, become capable of financing, with our taxes, the deaths of thousands of innocents, not because we're inherently horrible people, or because we can't be reasoned with, but because we construct and permit the construction of walls between us and the humanity of others. We too easily rationalize such killing as necessary for the greater good (e.g. overthrowing Sadam Hussein) while at the same time condemning terrorist doctrines that rely on the same grisly logic.

Graffito on Berlin Wall: "Every Wall Falls Eventually." Photo Frederik Ramm www.remote.org/frederik/culture/berlin/

Breaking down these walls is the only way to combat terror. With every physical wall, like the one Israel is now building; with every propaganda wall; with every increase in border patrols, denial of student visas, and scrutiny of library material; the walls climb higher and higher, making it, ironically, easier and easier for war and terror to continue. Since those in power, everywhere, often have a vested interest in war, it falls upon individuals to seek out their counterparts in other cultures, publish our own inter-cultural media, and do anything we can to break down the walls between us. Putting a human face on each other prevents the taking of lives.

From the Seeds of Peace camp in Maine that unites Israeli and Palestinain children, to the embedded US journalists who worried that their objectivity suffered because of all the time they spent with soldiers, meeting real people creates bonds.

Let us all do some embedding of our own. Robert Frost realized that in each of us there lies "something that doesn't love a wall, that wants it down." Much of terror is terror of the unknown. To win a "War on Terror," the unknown is the real enemy, and the best weapon is our own willingness to reach out and learn.

* In the printed version, we erroneously listed the date of the poem as 1874. For the full text of Frost's poem, please see http://www.bartleby.com/118/2.html.

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