Rula Abo Hussein (foreground) and May Freed (background)

It takes a certain amount of determination to traverse the winding hills that lead to Nancy Dickenson’s beautiful home in Santa Fe; MapQuest warns of ‘portions unpaved” and lifting one’s eyes from the road to take in the surrounding stellar views is to risk veering into paint-peeling scrub brush.

It takes a bit more determination, admittedly, to leave one’s home and family in Israel and the Palestinian territories to journey to a place as unfamiliar and exotic as New Mexico for the purpose of coming face-to-face with “the enemy” under the auspices of the program Creativity for Peace. At Ms. Dickenson’s home on the afternoon of July 11th, two CFP participants, Israeli Jew May Freed and Arab Rula Abo Hussein, came to share their experiences with supporters and friends of the program.

Since 2003, Creativity for Peace has brought more than 126 Palestinian and Israeli adolescent girls and women together to talk, listen and heal through facilitated discussion, art, and simple socializing. Over time stereotypes are shattered, and hatred and distrust fades. Upon return to their home communities, these young women are often assailed as traitors and collaborators, but their commitment to advancing peaceful coexistence trumps such concerns. “I want to open people’s minds,” insists May, a commitment seconded by Hussein, who shares her new friend’s belief that, “we can make a change.”

The day after the CFP gathering, Another Jewish Voice Santa Fe – “a grassroots organization of progressive Santa Fe, New Mexico area Jews and friends” — sponsored a performance of Seven Jewish Children, A Play for Gaza. Ostensibly a decrial of Israel’s military actions in Gaza during last year’s Operation Cast Lead, as written by British playwright Caryl Churchill, a vehement supporter of anti-Israel causes who refuses to allow her plays to be performed in The Jewish State, the short performance is essential a mocking of Jewish paranoia, Jewish “tribalism,” Holocaust obsessiveness and — a particular bugaboo of European leftists — Jewish “chosenness.” In eight pages, the play captures none of the complexity of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in favor of gross caricaturing.

Since its debut at London’s Royal Court Theatre last February, the play has been met by some scathing reviews. British critic and author Howard Jacobson, who is hardly known as a pro-Israel reactionary, calls it “a toxic discourse that masquerades Jew-hatred as denunciation of Israel.” Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic Monthly, laments, “It reads like anti-Jewish agitprop to me. I see it as a short polemic directed against one party in a complicated conflict.” In a letter published in the Daily Telegraph, sixty well-known British Jews objected to Seven Jewish Children’s depiction of Israelis as “inhuman triumphalists”, and British Anti-Semitism monitors Dave Rich and Mark Gardner argue, “Seven Jewish Children is not a play about Israel… (Churchill’s) response to Gaza is to accuse Jews of having undergone a pathological transformation from victims to oppressors.”

The primary question that arises then from AJVSF’s staging of such a work is, what’s the point? As a sermon to the converted (who, in the words of Seth Frantzman, “have in mind an Israel that is a dark fantasy…the Israel they need to exist in order to think the worst about it”) there’s no new insight to be gained, no transfer of information, just a reaffirming of the canards that have made it possible in supposedly enlightened circles to resurrect the long discredited “Zionism equals racism” charge with moral impunity.

Another Jewish Voice Santa Fe’s mission statement declares that, “The restoration of the basic values of justice and dignity, for one’s neighbor and oneself is essential to achieving a just peace.” Fair enough. But exactly how does giving voice to one of Churchill’s Jewish monsters crowing, “they’re animals living in rubble…I wouldn’t care if we wiped them out” promote such worthy aspirations? As for AJVSF’s assertion that American Jews should, “formulate, propose, and advocate creative new foreign policy initiatives toward Israel and Palestine,” it’s doubtful that staging Seven Jewish Children will promote a new perspective amongst our leaders anywhere as meaningfully as when CFP Board member Dr. Paul Kovnat handed a letter from Creativity to Peace to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during a recent visit to the Capital. In light of AJVSF’s own mission statement, using Seven Jewish Children as an instrument to effect change seems, at best, cynically disingenuous.

As the participants of Creativity for Peace prove, changing hearts, minds and policies is certainly harder work than simply pointing fingers. In an incisive op-ed titled, “End the Preoccupation,” Michael Brooks acknowledges within American Jewry a “profound sense of sadness and frustration at the continued suffering of the Palestinian people and the less-than-equal treatment of Arab citizens in the Jewish State,” but chastens pro-Palestinian advocates to, “drop the Anti-Semitism.” “Clean up your act,” he scolds. “Do you really think that presenting yourselves as racists and anti-Semites will build sympathy for the creation of a Palestinian state? Enough is enough.”

Enough, indeed. “Tell them we want peace” one of Churchill’s Jews deceptively declares towards the end of the play, a sneering rebuttal to the inconvenient truth that most Israelis – not to mention British and American Jews – do favor a two-state solution. The heavy lifting towards this goal, however, will be done by the May Freed and Arab Rula Abo Hussein’s of the region; young adults who with their dedication, open-mindedness and sheer bravery will make the vision of peace in the Middle East breathe and come to light. That’s progressiveness in its truest form, progressiveness that a small piece of hate literature can’t begin to approach.