Day 14 – 7.10.2017

14th day of ima's peace walk in solidarity with Women Wage Peace. Only a political agreement will end the cycle of violence. Walked in Barton Stacey. 

But how do we get to a political agreement? How do we create the right conditions for a political agreement? 

John Paul Lederach in his book The Moral Imagination (2005) asks: 'How do we transcend the cycles of violence that bewitch our human community while still living in them?' 
He writes: 

'Transcending violence is forged by the capacity to generate, mobilize, and build the moral imagination. The kind of imagination to which I refer is mobilized when four disciplines and capacities are held together and practiced by those who find their way to rise above violence. Stated simply, the moral imagination requires the capacity to imagine ourselves in a web of relationships that includes our enemies; the ability to sustain a paradoxical curiosity that embraces complexity without reliance on dualistic polarity; the fundamental belief in and pursuit of the creative act; and the acceptance of the inherent risk of stepping into the mystery of the unknown that lies beyond the far too familiar landscape of violence.' 

It seems to me that the events and actions that Women Wage Peace do; such as meetings and conversations with different populations, at different places across Israel and the West Bank, meeting Israeli MPs and Arab-Israeli mayors and now mass walking; all these contribute to creating the right conditions for the process of finding and creating a political agreement to begin.