The Anatomy of PEACE. RESOLVING THE HEART OF CONFLICT. The Arbinger Institute

him hard, whether in schoolwork or sports, and their
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relationship had a kind of striving intensity about it as a result. But Lou was fiercely proud of Jesse. Was this too an out-of-the- box place? He wasn't sure. "If you needed to," Avi added, "you might call or go to one of these people merely to have a con-versation or perhaps to ask for help with the struggle you are having.
"Or you might try thinking about the people who have had the greatest influence for good in your life and why," he con�tinued.
Lou suddenly found himself thinking about Carol and about her steady, devoted influence. "Very often," Avi's voice continued, "simply the memory of those people can take you to a different vantage point.
"Or maybe there was a time," he continued, "when some�one treated you kindly�especially when you didn't deserve it."
Lou remembered his father's response when he had dumped their new car into the Hudson. "Such memories can be helpful to me when I find that I am in the box railing against someone I don't think deserves to be treated kindly," Avi said.
"Or maybe there is a particular book or book passage that has a powerful effect on you," he continued, "a writing that in�vites you out of the box." Lou thought of The Hiding Place and Jacques Lusseyran's autobiography, And There Was Light. These were each accounts of people who despite terrible hardships found ways not to be bitter.
"Or maybe an activity or place that does the same," Avi continued. "Maybe some location that brings back memories of when all was right, for example. For me, I have discovered that Frank Sinatra music, of all things, invites me to an out-of- the-box place! It has this effect on me, I believe, because I be�gan listening to Sinatra when I used to rock our youngest child,
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Lydia, to sleep. So for me, Sinatra invites me back to the mem�ories of those times�unencumbered memories that give me the chance to think and feel more clearly in the present.
"This all sounds fairly basic, but most people who are trying to find their way out of conflict and bitterness never think to do it. Finding themselves stuck in bitterness, it never occurs to them that they have access to unbitter places in every moment.
"Once we find our way to such a place, we are ready for the next step in the getting-out-of-the-box process. We can now, by virtue of the out-of-the-box space we have found, ponder our dif�ficult situations anew, from a perspective of peace and clarity." At that, Avi added a third item to the process he was outlining on the board.
RECOVERING INNER CLARITY AND PEACE
(FOUR PARTS)
Getting out of the box
1. Look for the signs of the box (blame, justification, horribilization, common box styles, etc.).
2. Find an out-of-the-box place (out-of-the-box relationships, memories, activities, places, etc.).
3. Ponder the situation anew (i.e., from this out-of-the-box perspective).
"What does pondering the situation anew mean?" Pettis asked. "And how do you do it, exactly?" "Could I speak to that, Avi?" Yusuf said. "Of course. Go ahead."
Yusuf came up to the front. "What does it mean, you ask? It means that once you find an out-of-the-box vantage point, you are now in a position to think new thoughts about situations that
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have troubled you. Because you will be thinking about them from a new perspective, you will be able to access thoughts and ideas that may have eluded you while you were trying to think about the situation from within the box.
"Avi found that kind of perspective," he continued, "under a star-filled sky. This may not be an out-of-the-box place for you, but Avi's point is that something will be. You need only to iden�tify the relationships, places, memories, activities, book pas-sages, and so on, that have that kind of power for you, and then remember to search them out when you feel war rising within you. When you've accessed such a place�an internal vantage point where peace remains�you can begin to ponder your challenges anew."
"But how?" Pettis asked.
"By learning to ask some questions."
"What questions?"
"Queries I began learning in a grassy Connecticut park," Yusuf answered. "When canisters of tear gas were exploding around me."
20 � Finding Outward Peace
"Connecticut?" Lou asked in interest, as it was his home. "And tear gas?"
"Yes," Yusuf answered. He looked contemplatively at the group for a moment. "Avi shared his story of coming to the States. Perhaps it is time I shared mine as well.
"As you'll recall from yesterday, I ended up in Bethlehem when Jordan annexed the West Bank. I began my hustling of Westerners and, as it turns out, my lessons in English when I was about eight. That would have been around 1951. Unlike Avi, I didn't have any friends from across the ethnic divide, which probably wouldn't surprise you given my antipathy toward Mordechai Lavon. In fact, I spent most of my teenage years dreaming of revenge for the murder of my father. This desire had fertile ground in which to grow, as a kind of nationalistic fever started to burn among the Palestinian people beginning in the fifties and continuing into the sixties.
"In 1957, at the age of fourteen, I joined a youth movement known as the Young Lions for Freedom. This group was an infor�mal offshoot of student unions of Palestinians that began emerging in the region's universities in the 1950s. The younger brothers of these students, longing to attach themselves to the causes of their elders, hatched mirror organizations among their neighborhood clans. Ours was such an organization, patterned after the fore�most of the student unions, which was located at Cairo Univer�sity and headed by an engineering student named Yasir Arafat."
Eyebrows raised at the name.
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"Yes, one and the same," Yusuf said.
"I quickly distinguished myself as a leader in the organiza�tion," he continued. "When I was just sixteen, I was invited to Kuwait to meet with the newly established leaders�Arafat one of the chief among them�of a movement that called itself Harakat At-Tahiri Al-Filistimiya, or the Palestinian National Liberation Movement. Known more popularly as Fatah, the re�verse acronym of its formal name, the organization's goal, stated clearly in its founding documents, was to replace the State of Israel in its entirety with a Palestinian State through means of armed revolution. It was an intoxicating vision for a young man bent on revenge.
"I returned from Kuwait looking forward to the annihilation of Israel. It was only a matter of time; I was going to get my re�venge against an entire people. I was giddy with anticipation and happiness.
"My mother, however, did not share my joy. She distrusted the messengers that would drop notes by my house at all hours of the night and began first to intercept and then to destroy the communications. 'I will not lose first my husband and then my only son too!' she yelled at me. 'The answer to the tragedy of Deir Yassin is not simply to swap the identity of the parties. You will not take up arms against the Israelis unless they first take up arms against you!'
"'But they have, Mother,' I pointed out, 'they have taken up arms; they have joined league with the West and are assembling the most powerful arsenal in the region.'
"'What do you know of arms and politics!' she snapped back at me. 'You are only a child with his head either in the clouds or buried in the sand. And as my child, you will not enter into league with these bandits of the night,' which is what she called the movement's messengers.
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"'Then as my father's child, I will,' I shot back, knowing there would be no retribution for my impudence. 'I must.'
"And so I did. I began to act as the cell leader for Fatah in the greater Jerusalem area. This was heady stuff for a young man. As it turns out, too heady. In 1962, after I had built a grassroots network of some five thousand committed and loyal fedayeen, a nephew of Arafat moved in and took over the re�gion. I was officially placed as second in command. Everyone in the organization knew the truth, however: I had been stripped of my power.
"This was humiliating to me, but my hatred for the Zionist Jews outstripped the humiliation, and I stayed on as a loyal foot soldier. I looked forward to our victory even in my diminished role.
"The apparent final push to victory began in the spring of 1967. In mid-May, Egypt mobilized one hundred thousand sol�diers along Israel's southwestern border and declared that the Straits of Tiran would be closed to ships bound to and from Israel. President Nasser of Egypt then announced his intention to destroy Israel.
"In response, the Arab world became gripped with a kind of anticipatory hysteria. Arab forces from around the region were mobilized on all sides so that by the end of May, Israel was sur�rounded by an Arab legion force of some 250,000 troops, 2,000 tanks, and 700 military aircraft. I joined a battalion that had taken up a strategic position at Latrun, one of the westernmost locations in the Jordanian-occupied West Bank.
"Latrun was located on the highway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the main artery in Israel. It overlooked the Jerusalem corridor, a stretch of Israeli-controlled land that fingered its way to the western parts of Jerusalem but was surrounded by Jorda�nian forces on the ridges to the north and the south. Latrun
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would be a key position from which the corridor would be first cut off from the rest of Israel and then captured. It would also be the focal point of the Arab legion's move down the foothills and across the coastal plains to Tel Aviv. I wanted to be part of the eradication of Israel's heart�both Israeli-controlled West�ern Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. There was no better place than Latrun.
"But you perhaps know what happened. Avi alluded to it ear�lier. On the morning of June 5, 1967, Israel launched a surprise preemptive strike against Egypt's planes and airfields, decimating them in a rout. They soon took out Jordanian and Syrian air power as well, leaving us without protection from the air. We received the command to break into Israeli territory shortly thereafter. But our supply routes were quickly cut off, and the mountains that had been our protection to the east now made our escape impossible. Before night fell, we knew we had been beaten. Jordan agreed to a cease-fire two days later, and the war ended in Israel's total victory just six days after it had begun. When I returned home to Bethlehem, Jordan had been pushed back to the east of the River Jordan; Israel had captured the en�tire West Bank!
"What followed was a crisis of confidence in the Arab world. A bitter despair swept through the Palestinian people as the Jordanians pulled back within their borders. We were left behind with those we viewed as our captors. We had been aban�doned and imprisoned yet again.
"The Fatah network scrambled to regain its footing under the new reality, but we had lost our confidence and along with it much of our hope. Whatever battles lay ahead, I knew they would be much longer than I had hoped. I was not to have a leading role in them in any case. So I started looking for other battles. Battles that could give me release from the daily
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reminder of our failure as a people and from the gnawing hate I was beginning to carry toward my own�who had, after all, re�moved me from power and squandered our great opportunity."
Yusuf paused.
"So where did you look?" Pettis asked. "To what other bat�tles?"
"At first I began to look to other Arab nations�to Egypt, for example, to Syria, to Iraq. I looked for some pro-Arab cause that I could attach myself to. Something with promise. Something to give me some kind of hope against Israel."
"So your heart was at war," Lou said slyly. "You were in the box."
Yusuf looked at him, and smiled. "Yes, Lou, I certainly was. In a box likely larger and darker than any you have ever been tempted to enter."
"Careful now," Lou warned. "I have a better-than box. Don't go trying to make your box bigger than mine."
Everyone in the room burst out laughing.
After the laughter subsided, Elizabeth asked, "So did you find what you were looking for? Did you find a battle to take up elsewhere in the Arab world?"
"I found battles everywhere," Yusuf answered. "But none worth taking up. They were internal battles for the most part. Everyone was maneuvering to capture power within the vac�uum created by the devastation of the war. I wasn't a player in those battles anymore, and their prospects seemed too bleak even if I had been."
"So whatever brought you to the States?" Pettis asked.
"Assassinations," Yusuf answered.
"Assassinations?" Pettis recoiled.
"Yes � of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and Malcolm X in 1965. Their deaths made big headlines in the Arab world. The United
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States was not yet a vociferous ally of Israel, and I and my fellow Arabs looked to America with some bit of hope. I identified myself with the struggle of black Americans. Malcolm X, as a fellow believer in the Koran, intrigued me, and I knew a little about Martin Luther King. I was interested in the revolution that seemed to be taking place in America. With my own revo�lution in shambles, I began looking to the West. Less than a month after the war, I was making plans to go to the United States. I wanted to go to Harvard or Yale to get a degree."
"Ah," Lou said, "that better-than box of yours again."
Yusuf laughed. "Maybe so. On the other hand, they were the only American university names I really knew. A month later, having secured my papers, I boarded a plane in Amman to London and then on to New York City. From there, I made my way to New Haven, Connecticut, where Yale is located. I had to find a way to get accepted. If I couldn't get in there, then my plan was to move on to Boston, to Harvard.
"I had been in New Haven for less than a week when race riots broke out in August of 1967. I was there as well through the infamous Black Panther trials in 1970. It was also while there that I encountered the ideas that changed my view of myself, others, and the world. For it was there that I met a professor of philosophy, Benja