ODYSSEY PART FOUR: Palestine remains perennial problem

I trust that a story about two people who have a dream about what they can do is a dream well shared.

You are generously sharing yours in this very personal account of your lives. We have agreed to describe this process by my deriving questions from a memoir of your lives from your book “Odyssey of a Practical Visionary--Eco-Communities, Sustainable Futures, Refugee Resettlement, Poverty and Racism, Dysfunctional Schools.”

At this point in our “sustainability interview,” Belden has survived a daring, post-college immersion in the slums of Italy where he has met Lisa, (he hadn't really thought much about the subject of women before). Belden then realizes that he'd better get serious about his formal education, and about Lisa. So, partly due to his connections but mostly due to his boots-on-the-ground experiments, he gets admitted at the last minute to the prestigious University of Chicago in political science. Before leaving Italy, he and Lisa together buy “a seventy-piece set of rustic dishes with hand-painted peasant designs...” He also buys a unique ring in a back street Naples jewelry shop that “stands out as the cementing of a relationship that has lasted for more than fifty years.”

Then, while working toward a doctorate in political science, and having his first son (Eric), Belden meets a student from Jordan who says: “the official Arab position is that the Arab governments want NO settlement to the Palestinian problem then or in the foreseeable future. By biding their time and increasing their militancy, eventually they will bankrupt Israel and sap its strength.” The student tells him the root of the problem is not the refugees, although publicly it is, but national pride, demanding defeat of the Jews. Bel says in his book, “As I write this now, it seems incredible that this conversation took place more than fifty years ago, when the exact same problem remains.”

My two questions are:

What was the household division of labor like when Belden was going for an advanced degree?

And, if you could find yourselves back again in that conversation about the Palestinians and Israel, what would you say about the Arab wait-em-out strategy? Most importantly, what strategy would you suggest all parties now try?

A. We arrived at the university almost penniless, having served in Italy as volunteers. We rented a tworoom prefab “hut” in the “rabbit patch” where fellow married students were lodged (so called because many children resulted), for which we paid $48 a month, including utilities and heat.

Lisa was hired at the university personnel office, finding jobs for students. Later she found a great one for me, assisting the CBS radio staff to cover the 1956 Democratic national convention in Chicago (with Walter Cronkite, Eric Severaid, et al).

While Lisa was the main breadwinner, and by mutual agreement ran the household, apart from my rigorous studies I soon landed a research position with two other grad students to write a history of Kashmir. I knew nothing on the subject, but we combed every book in the university library. We invited our professor boss to send us to Kashmir but, unhappily, he had no funds.

Along the way, we faced three big interruptions. The first was academic. In those days, to finish all the Ph.D. work before writing your dissertation, you took four comprehensive four-hour exams, within several days. I passed the first three with flying colors, but the fourth was a bummer. The grading prof, an émigré from Germany whose English comprehension was not the best, apparently could not read my handwriting (admittedly nearly illegible) – and he didn't pass me. To qualify for going on with the Ph.D., I had to take all four exams over again. I changed my subject and did finally arrive.

Our second interruption ushered in an exciting new venture; at the time we had no clue that it would be life-changing. My successor from Naples days, Don Murray, now an actor, stopped by our prefab and the three of us sat up most of the night reminiscing about Italy. Don was in Chicago to publicize his new film, “Bus Stop,” playing opposite Marilyn Monroe.

With some money in his pocket, instead of moving to Hollywood he wanted to return to Italy to help solve the “hard-core” refugee problem, and he wanted me to join him. (Part of our work in Naples had included doing relief work in the refugee camps.) We knew there were thousands of escapees from communism in eastern Europe still stagnating in these barbed wire camps now more than 10 years after the war. Although most world authorities had given up hope for any solution, we knew some of them personally, and believed that with a creative project, at least some of them could become self-sufficient. But I had a Ph.D. to finish.

And we'd just experienced a third interruption, wonderful as it was. Two weeks before, Lisa had given birth to Eric. Our first priority now had to be to take care of our new family. During the next year this combination of family matters, the Ph.D., and Don's proposed project presented formidable challenges.

One of our recreations at the university was to visit International House, where many of the foreign students lived. My sister Polly, a theology student, was president there and knew all the residents. Since she remembered that Lisa and I had visited a refugee camp in Jordan on our trip to the Middle East before leaving Naples, she urged us to meet several Arab grad students. I found them very reluctant to talk; they feared that if they expressed their views publicly, they'd lose their scholarships. They assumed all Americans were pro-Jewish, and they knew that some of the university's most distinguished professors were Jews who had escaped from Nazi Germany. Finally I showed them a large beautiful hand-drawn poster with Arabic poetry given us in the refugee camp in Jordan. It had a map of the land now in Israel that this particular refugee once owned. The students really opened up.

We said we had spent several hours in the camp and were very sympathetic to the Arab refugee situation. Thousands continued to exist in the camps in appalling conditions (today, there are more than a million). These were people who had once lived in Palestine and then, for a multitude of complex reasons, had left when the new state of Israel was established by the United Nations in 1947-48. Lisa and I made clear that we personally were neither pro-Jewish nor pro-Arab; we simply wanted to see peace achieved. These students said the only way to resolve the problem would be for all the refugees to return to their former lands, now part of Israel. This will never happen – thus, perpetuation of the camps.

When Don Murray and I organized our project in Sardinia to resettle refugees stagnating in camps in Italy (these were European not Arab refugees), we created a strategy that eventually won the support of both the U.N. and the Italian government. We proposed to buy and develop land and small industries in one of the country's most depressed areas (Sardinia), helping both the participating refugees and the surrounding region. We created jobs for the refugees and the local people; the project's net impact brought benefits to both populations.

The Italian authorities, facing their own huge unemployment problem, and also very worried about domestic communism, had little interest in bringing refugees from other countries into their economy. Further, these anti-communist refugees were considered an internal threat. However, the government saw value in our approach of providing local jobs and new technology even though we were using the refugees to enhance the depressed region. The U.N. high commissioner for refugees, on the other hand, had no particular interest in contributing to the Italian economy unless this contributed directly to refugee resettlement, as happened with our project.

While working in Sardinia and later with the U.N., I found surprising interest among top officials in utilizing our model with the Arab refugees. Although our project was small in size, it had obvious visible relevance to the massive issue of the refugees now stagnating in the camps of Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. I prepared a “Proposal for Pilot Project to Resettle Arab Refugees Now in Camps in an Underdeveloped Area of the Near East.” I received letters from Sen. Hubert Humphrey; an official of the U.S. State Department; a senior official of UNHCR in Geneva; and the head of the Near East Christian Council for Refugee Work in Jerusalem. I surmised that they liked our ideas based on practical experience. Given all my other responsibilities at the time, however, I didn't follow through with this expressed interest.

I sense today that the situation has not fundamentally changed from the conversation at the University of Chicago in the mid-1950s. Eventually, a Mandela-type leader may emerge who will rise above the historic emotions set in concrete by all sides, to find a solution to this great unresolved political conflict and human tragedy. (In the past, valiant peace efforts were made by Anwar al-Sadat of Egypt and Rabin of Israel, but they were both assassinated.) At a minimum, I expect peace will include these ingredients: 1) recognition of Israel's right to exist within the borders agreed to by the U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 (that is, giving up lands acquired from the war of 1967, with some accommodation of Israeli settlements in the West Bank); 2) establishment of a Palestinian state with recognized national borders; 3) some sort of international jurisdiction for Jerusalem, a place of sacred historic importance for both Jews and Arabs; 4) resettlement of most Arab refugees now in the camps in Arab lands, probably with a strategy similar to that used in our Sardinia project (a few refugees may return to Israel but most will go elsewhere); 5) massive international financial assistance and political support and guarantees to support implementation.