Articles
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July 2009, page 48
Personality
Stephen Fulder: An Israeli Buddhist’s Resistance to Occupation
By Robert Hirschfield
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TOUFIK, A Palestinian from the West Bank town of Bartaa, belongs to Middleway, an Israeli/Palestinian anti-occupation and dialogue group founded by the Israeli Buddhist teacher Stephen Fulder. Last year, an ambulance carrying Toufik’s critically ill mother to the hospital was delayed for three and a half hours by soldiers at a West Bank checkpoint. She died at the other side of the checkpoint when she was finally let through.
Fulder recalled the response to the incident by a meditation group in Safad. “They said, ”˜Oh, there must have been a reason why the soldiers did that. They had to have seen something wrong for them to do that.’ Here, society lives by the mantra, it’s not them that’s suffering, it’s us that’s suffering,” he explained. “It’s a total brainwashing. Even people on the left, people who are spiritual, support actions that should be opposed.”
For more than 30 years, Fulder has been a meditation teacher in the Theravadan tradition of Burma, Thailand and Vietnam. A contemplative by nature, he nevertheless came to the belief that “When the ship is sinking, you have to do something political.”
Middleway is the offshoot of Fulder’s first group, People to People, which he founded in 1996. It brought Israelis to Nablus to dialogue with Palestinians. “We were engaged in non-political education rather than a political or community action process,” he said.
The group was dissolved in 1999, shortly after coming under criticism from the Palestinian Authority, which questioned its efficacy, claiming that dialogue divorced from action was a waste of time.
The PA’s criticism forced Fulder and the other group members to examine what was lacking in their approach. “Dialogue was not enough, we realized,” he said. “It needed to be combined with action, with compassionate engagement in the conflict.”
The 61-year-old biochemist from the UK created Middleway along activist lines, while deepening the crucial component of dialogue. (Listening to the other is important to Fulder, who now dialogues with members of the Palestinian Authority.) He made silent peace walks throughout Israel part of the protest landscape. True to its Buddhist principles, one of Middleway’s objectives in staging the walks is to equate the occupation with the whole problem of violence.
Fulder had his group establish a free holistic clinic in Bartaa run by Palestinian and Israeli volunteers. “The clinic was set up only after six months of steady meetings with Palestinians, including the village heads, in order to build trust and understanding,” he explained.
Middleway’s work with Israelis involves counseling soldiers who stand up to other soldiers whom they see committing abuses against Palestinians at the checkpoints or on patrols.
“It is necessary, to stand your ground against the bullying soldier, to let him know you don’t behave like that,” Fulder said. “It may be confrontational, aggressive action, but it is done with the intention of creating harmony, of creating healing, of helping the soldier as well as the Palestinian.”
Fulder himself is a draft resister. Many years ago, when summoned to serve in the Israeli army—at a time when only the tiniest handful of Israelis chose to place their bodies beyond the army’s reach—he told his military interviewers, “’I will do alternative service, but I won’t touch weapons. I am nonviolent.’ The officers tried to frighten me. All I could do was laugh. It was such a ridiculous pantomime. Then, they left me alone. They sent me a letter thanking me for my intention to serve in the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces.)”
Today’s Israeli nonviolence activist, Fulder conceded, is existentially more compromised than Gandhi’s satyagrahi battling the British. “By living in Israel, you are complicit in the machinery of occupation, even if all you do is pay taxes,” he pointed out. “The whole society is the occupier, not just part of it. Israel ties its survival to the heroism of its citizen army. One is under great pressure to serve in the army, even if you disagree with its policies.”
Fulder begins his day by meditating and gardening in the solar-powered, organically farmed village of Clil in the Galilee, which he helped establish 26 years ago. Sensitive to the tension between man and land, he tries hard to make peace with the land on which he lives. He is aware that Israeli attitudes toward Palestinian lands (the Galilee once being part of them) has led to war, sorrow, avidya—the Buddhist term for ignorance and delusion.
Robert Hirschfield is a free-lance writer based in New York City.
