Next Year in the Oasis of Peace
by Iris Keltz 4/1/07

The cornerstone of Jewish tradition is the dialectic, the art of arriving at the truth through conversation involving question and answer. The rocky road to peace and reconciliation is paved through dialogue. At the Passover seder this year we will ask the four questions, (or maybe more.) In accordance with tradition we will retell the story of Exodus, from slavery to freedom. The precious gift of freedom has to be guarded by each generation but not at the expense of another people’s suffering.

During the seder, we say, “Next year in Jerusalem” a statement that raises many questions. For some, orthodox Jews, Jerusalem is a spiritual state not to be confused with a nation state. But Jerusalem on earth began over four thousand years ago as a Canaanite city and has known a succession of occupiers and conquerors—Romans, Byzantine, Persians, Umayyads, Abbbasids, Crusaders, Mameluks, Ottoman Turks, the British, the Jordanians and currently the Israelis. This year when we say, “next year in Jerusalem” can we imagine the possibility of sharing this war ravaged city, sacred to Jews, Moslems and Christians the world over?

Currently, hostile environment exists when progressive Jews and Jewish organizations dare to speak out. Let it be known, that Jews do not march in lock step and that AIPAC does not speak for all of us. To marginalize our voices diminishes all of us. When Dr. Norman Finkelstein expresses a profound disturbance that holocaust memory is invoked to silence criticism of Israeli government policies, know that he is committed to the survival of that country and he is a child of holocaust survivors. Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian, focuses on the effects of a forty year occupation and the hideous separation wall that afflict the Palestinians. Both men believe that adherence to UN resolutions and International Law is the only way to resolve the sixty year old conflict that threatens to spread to the entire world. Instead of attacking these voices as anti-semitic or self hating, consider the wisdom they bring to the table.

Jewish Law explicitly guides us to ethical behavior. “What is hateful to you, do not do to others.” In 1998, I traveled on ‘Jewish Only Roads’ in a rental car with yellow license plates that identified me as a Jew which allowed me to zoom past checkpoints almost missing the turn off for Jericho, which was not honored with a road sign. Leaving the superhighway, I found myself driving on an old pothole-riddled road fit for donkeys. Palestinian towns do not get equal government funding for schools, roads and infrastructure, even when they pay taxes.

In the halls of Congress, I heard testimony from Israeli soldiers. One told a story of entering a quiet Palestinian village in the middle of the night with his platoon to arrest a young man. When an old woman stepped forward to protect her grandson, the soldier suddenly envisioned the face of his grandmother and knew that she would have stood up for him in the same way. The difference between ‘them and us’ dissolved and he left the army to become a Refusnik.

Some would have us believe that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is too complex for the human mind to comprehend. Throw religion, politics, government, nationalism into the same pot of stew and the result is indigestible. Remove the ism’s, the ideologies and the fear and we are left with this thought: Thousands of Palestinians are suffering human rights abuses as a result of a forty year occupation. The world needs open honest discussion within and without the Jewish community. The final solution will either create a true sanctuary for Jews and Palestinians—there’s land and resources for everyone to share—or it will condemn generations to ongoing racism, violence and war.

On my last trip to Israel/Palestine, I stayed at the Oasis of Peace, Neve Shalom/Wahat al Salaam. This utopian village was abnormally normal—Arabs and Jews lived as neighbors, sent their children to the same schools, sat in each other’s yards and shared the abundance. They prayed in silence in the white domed structure near the village cemetery. A rabbi once said, “The world rests on three things: On Justice, Truth and Peace.” Said another rabbi, “But these three things are one and the same: For if there is Justice, there is truth, and if there is Truth, there is Peace.” Next year may we all be living in an Oasis of Peace, where ever that may be.

Dr. Bill Roley founder/director of the Permaculture Institute of Southern California and professor of environmental design at University of California at Irvine, welcomed Albert Bates, David Cann and me to his permaculture garden and environmentally designed homebuilt house on a hill above Laguna Beach.

The amaranth, carrots, onions, kale, swiss chard and other lucky denizens of Bill Roley’s sheet-mulched garden terraces on a hillside overlooking the ocean bear abundantly.

On the steep incline across the road from his home, Bill built up terraces of compost that are steadied by the roots of the many fruit trees he planted in them. Here Albert Bates inspects the terraces.

Bill’s garden is a place for poetry, music and art as well as for thriving plants that feed people, mineralize and fertilize the soil, feed insects and birds, and provide beauty and shade.

Three robust, chemical-free carrots and a leek on a bamboo cutting board, freshly washed in Bill’s kitchen after being harvested from his garden.

Bill Roley took us for a walk on the summit of the hill onwhich he lives, where we saw a distant squall in the Laguna Hills – unusual weather in those parts.

He also took us sightseeing around Laguna Beach, which deservedly refers to itself as the southern California Riviera. The landscape, weather, and artist milieu certainly resonate with the Mediterranean coast. Here we look south upon Crescent Beach, one of many white sand beach coves, and the hills beyond.

That evening we attended a gathering organized by Bill so his community could hear Albert speak, at the charming, environmentally designed home and garden of green builder/designer Christopher Prelitz and his artist wife Becky.

Rave reviews of the house appeared in Riviera Magazine in December 2006 and Natural Home Magazine in July 2005. It was easy to see why while touring the house with Chris. Elegant natural details, like the nautilus shell at the turn in the staircase abound, yet the house is gorgeously uncluttered. Chris says he built his palace on a shoestring, using many recycled materials, and spending lavishly “only on windows and doors.”

The terraced permaculture garden uses the oddly shaped lot to advantage.

Before the Prelitz’s magical fireplace, mosaic’d with abalone shells reflecting the light of votive candles, I sang an environmental jeremiad as an opening to Albert Bate’s talk on peak oil and global warming. Above the fireplace: one of Becky’s encaustic paintings.

After the talk, Albert answered questions, seriously considering the concerns of his audience.

As promised, I returned to Los Angeles Eco-Village by daylight, but much sooner than I had imagined. The day after his talk there, Albert Bates invited me to accompany him and David Cann, a local community eco-organizer, to visit Dr. Bill Roley, founder/director of the Permaculture Institute of Southern California and professor of environmental science at UC Irvine, at his home and permaculture garden in Laguna Beach. So, we met at the LA Ecovillage before taking off on our journey.

So, here’s how the entrance looks by daylight.

Lois Arkin, co-founder of the LA Eco-Village and a stalwart of the ecovillage movement for decades, welcomed me and David while watering the front garden (fruit trees, herbs and a blossoming cymbidium orchid) and sprucing up the front porch with a handmade broom.

Playful community art adorns the exterior of the building. A mosaic bicycle and wheelchair ramp signed by a local middle school leads from the street to the front walk.

Windchimes, banners, and whirligigs dispell any notion of staidness here.

A cob (mud clay) bench in the shape of a dragon on the street in front. Many intentional communities create public sculpture in this medium.

Drawn in chalk the street in front, a wheel of fortune…

…and an angel. Those, and the dragon, Smaug, sum up the enigma of Los Angeles…

…where a telephone pole is a kind of totem.

The living room/lobby of the ecovillage dormitory, furnished with recycled furniture in the era of the building, serves as a comfortable meeting room.

The very busy bulletin board and flyer table in the living room/lobby.

Bicycle parking in the inner courtyard. Community members proudly disdain automobile ownership, and make use of the city buslines that pass near their home. One member works at a cooperative not-for-profit, the Bicycle Kitchen, which helps people build their own bikes from recycled parts and repair their bikes themselves.

The community garden thrives in a miniature climate created by the buildings on all sides.

March 25, 2007. Albert Bates, ecovillage educator, author, inventor, and environmental savant extraordinaire, presented the case for pausing to breathe and seriously consider the situation rising inexorably before us. Do we go on with business as usual? Do we look for technologies that will solve the disasters inherant in the decline of petroleum production and the rise of global temperatures? Do we scale down our consumption of fossil fuels, meat, trees and nuclear materials, and start planting trees, bamboo, roof gardens, artificial wetlands, and community agriculture projects? Or do we just cower before the oncoming catastrophes and weep?

Albert illustrated his point with a bottle allegory. Suppose if you put two bacteria in a bottle and they double every minute, and the bottle would be full in 24 hours.  When would the bottle be half full? At 23 hours and 59 minutes.  When would it be one quarter full? One minute earlier. When would it be one eighth full? Three minutes to doomsday.  If the bacteria were smarter than humans, would they stop doubling at the point that the bottle is still seven eighths empty? If they could get another bottle when the first one was full, how much longer would they have to live before they began dying off from lack of space?  One minute.

I had never been to the Los Angeles Ecovillage, a group living situation focussed on minimizing its eco footprint and inspiring others to do likewise, located in a densely settled urban area just west of downtown Los Angeles. The folks are very friendly, and I intend to come back and take a tour. I promise I’ll bring my camera and post here! With fifty earnest and educated people gathered in the village living room(some of them ecovillage residents and some students from the recent urban permaculture course), Albert faced a rapt audience. Do we understand how little time we have to DO SOMETHING about this?

The charming old building where the ecovillagers now live once housed the workers who served at the Bimini Hot Springs Resort that existed in the 1920’s on the street of the same name. Somewhere, under this neighborhood, hot springs still bubble!

Albert Bates and I met online some years ago as board members of the online Hippie Museum. I wrote a review of his book The Post Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook for this weblog, and I recently sent his book to my publisher in Japan, Soshisha, Ltd., hoping that they will be as dazzled by it as I am. The book is a necessity for everyone, besides being a fun read, and that’s saying something.

He told us, “The reason I’m not home at the Farm is that I am being Paul Revere.”

March 17, 2007. I join about ten thousand people at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street in Los Angeles to rally and march for peace. Foremost in our intentions is to stop funding the Iraq War and bring home the troops, but, clearly, most of us demonstrators see this war as only part of a larger war of the military-industrial complex and the super-rich upon the poor and middleclass of all nations, and upon the environment. We march for social justice and sustainability all over the planet.

Dr. William Hooks, M.D., a radiologist from Rancho Cucamonga, was working for the day as a documentary photojournalist for ANSWER Coalition, the organizers of the march. He is talking with an indigenous Bolivian woman, who is leafletting to gather support for President Evo Morales and the Bolivian solidarity movement.

Eric Howard, who I met at Kim Cooper and Richard Schave’s wedding last June, showed up on his bike.

Stephen Frank Gary welded and painted this beautiful, large peace symbol, titled  Dreamcatcher Peacewheel.

One very small counter-protest of Christian Fundamentalists appeared at the opening rally, but, otherwise, the world smiled upon our march.

A group of young men sang and played “Give Peace a Chance,” and a group of young women began dancing in the street.

This, in turn, got the women marching with Code Pink to sing and drum “Give Peace a Chance,” and a woman from KPFK walked beside them, recording them for a program.

I carried my usual handmade sign with its positive message, and some of artist Stephanie Farago’s famous bumperstickers “My God Loves Your God,” which I bestowed upon anyone who spoke to me admiringly of them.

We walked to Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue, where we attended a rally at an outdoor stage in front of the famous Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. US Congressional Representative Maxine Waters, founder of the Out of Iraq Caucus, exhorted us to call, email and fax our congressional representatives and tell them not to approve the Pelosi/Murtha plan with its huge supplemental budget for the war. We roared our approval and support. After Rep. Waters, actor Martin Sheen spoke, thundering like God Himself, and after him, actresses Mimi Kennedy (representing Progressive Democrats of America) and Laura Dern.

Next, the legendary singer/songwriter Jackson Browne, a mainstay at events of this sort, performed two of his protest songs, the second one with two singers who also performed later with the band Ozomatli.

Singer/songwriter Ben Harper, eerily recalling a young Richie Havens singing at peace marches during the Vietnam War, who also performed his own protest songs.

Ozomatli, a Grammy Award winning band from Los Angeles, played an entire set. It seems as if all of the band members play more than one instrument, sing, and even dance a bit, and they change roles to perform in a variety of ethnic styles, sometimes within one song: salsa, rap, Arabic, hiphop, and mariachi.

Jackson Browne joined them on the last song of their set.

The demonstrators signalled their solidarity.

Next, Iraq Veterans Against the War spoke.

The Gabriela Network, a feminist group based in the Philipines, protests in particular the effect of war on women and girls, in the form of abductions and rapes, and prostitution surrounding army bases in third world countries.

Jerry Rubin, not the Yippie political activist (who died in 1994), sells political bumper stickers most weekends near the Santa Monica Promenade, and he was on Hollywood Boulevard for the peace march.

Pacifica Radio station KPFK, the voice of the left in LA for nearly five decades, had a canvas available for painting at the their booth, to advertise a day of boycotting gasoline on May 1.

Here’s a slide show of all 51 of my photos from the demonstration!