New Haven Independent

Silvia Margia (pictured above) is a social worker. Five years ago she was introduced to Beyond Words, a project that uses non-verbal techniques such as dance therapy, massage and play as a way for people who work with young children (mothers and child care workers mostly) to learn peaceful ways of being, starting with themselves and then sharing what they’ve learned with the youngsters in their care. They say they’ve reached many hundreds of women and through them, thousands of children, since the group was founded 12 years ago. They spoke to a small group in the Hill’s Courtland Wilson branch library.

Nitzan Gordon-Giles (pictured), the Israeli woman who co-founded the group, said it’s a way of practicing conflict resolution from the inside out and supporting co-existence. She described growing up on a kibbutz on the Jordanian border, fearing for her life in a bomb shelter during the 1967 war, then coming to the U.S. as a pre-teen. In the photo she demonstrated with her hand how she wanted to slip under the table at lunch when kids at her Tennessee middle school made her life as the only Jew in school unbearable. One day the teacher was discussing the Holocaust; a couple of students whispered to her that it was too bad more Jews didn’t die, including her.

From those painful experiences, and from majoring in dance in college, Gordon-Giles co-founded Beyond Words in 1995 with three other women — another Jew and two Arabs. (She did not call them Palestinians; more on that later.) A video made by the group in 1999 showed women dancing alone and together as they held brightly colored scarves, bouncing balloons on their heads, giving each other massages and doing other physical activities to get in touch with their own pain and their own prejudices, and begin to heal them.

Then Margia, who is now co-director of the project with Gordon-Giles, spoke of growing up in Israel and all the parts of herself that were sometimes hard to keep together. It was the experience of Beyond Words that helped her fully claim herself.

Last April, the pair opened their own space for the first time, in a hotel in Nazareth. It’s called “Women in the Center: The Nazareth center for empowerment of women’s voices for peace.”

Margia said it was hard finding her voice as a woman. She read some words she wrote for an organizational flyer: “How shall I speak when I have been taught silence since birth?” Click here to hear her whole statement in her own voice.

She said that peace to her is not the absence of war, but of equality, of not just accepting help from another, but of being the one able to offer help.

A reporter present wondered why neither woman ever mentioned “Palestine” or “Palestinians” but always “Arabs,” when referring to the non-Jews in their group. Do they consider the term divisive?

Margia said that in Israel until a few years ago, she didn’t feel able to identify publicly as a Palestinian, “because if you are a Palestinian, you are [considered to be] against Israel.”

It’s confusing, as Margia noted: There are Palestinian Israelis and Christian Palestinians and many other combinations other than Israeli Jew and Arab Muslim.

Gordon-Giles answered, “We found out, through years of experience, that the first step, if we want to create real change, is to find out the things we share in common, to start there in building a sense of trust and intimacy.” Click here for more.

Then Mazin Qumsiyeh (pictured), a local Palestinian-American, pressed the point. He had earlier established a camaraderie with Gordon-Giles when it turned out both had lived not just in the Chattanooga area, but on Signal Mountain above the city, several years apart. “Maybe in the same house,” he joked.

“The narrative that was presented is Jewish and Arab,” he said, “which is a Zionist perspective: there’s Jews as a national entity, and Arabs as a national entity, which is a narrative which is racist in my view. The concept that there is Jew versus Arab perpetuates a conflict; it does not resolve it.” To illustrate, he said, “The civil rights movement in the U.S. was never whites versus blacks; it was those who supported the racist structure and those who didn’t.” He added that he now defines himself as “a human being. I’ve dropped everything else.” Click here for more.

“I think what you said about reconsidering some of our terminology is very important,” Gordon-Giles responded, but I want to explain where it comes from.” She referred back to her own experiences with violence in Israel and intolerance in the U.S.

At the end of the program, New Haven nurse Gladys Arroyo (pictured on the right with Noshene Ranjbar, the organizer of the event, on the left) said she had learned something important — “the idea that peace means to be seen as an equal, and not necessarily compartmentalized, but as a human being.”

Beyond Words’ approach has obvious applications for individuals and families in New Haven living with violence and discrimination. As the women wound up their presentation, several other women came downstairs to the library’s community room to present a workshop for people who work with residents of homeless shelters. Too bad they couldn’t have joined forces.