The Odd Couple : Jews and Arabs Share a Stage and a Wish for Peace

She starts with a story about the deep sadness and pain of being born Jewish in a world that persecutes Jews. “That wound was healed by the existence of the state of Israel,” says Janina Frankel, 36, an American-born writer who lives in Culver City.

He starts with a story about Jews grafting their homeland onto a country full of Palestinians, Christians and Muslims. “Of course, all that was done without consulting them (the non-Jews),” says Sam Alameddine, 32, an Arab American engineer who was born and raised in Lebanon.

Two people sitting in front of an afternoon class on world political leadership at USC talking about the Middle East may not sound unusual. But the notion of a Jewish speaker going out on a speaking engagement with an Arab American remains practically avant garde.

Frankel and Alameddine, who appeared together at USC this week, are just two speakers from the newly formed Arab-Jewish Speakers Bureau, one of the informal ripples of last year’s Arab-Israeli accords.

Speakers are not expected to solve or erase half a century’s worth of violence and pain. They do not have to think the same, they can agree to disagree, they can disagree on how they disagree. The only requirement is that they be committed to a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict--and that they show they can share a stage in a kind of small-scale peace.

The McLaughlin Group it’s not.

“The surprise is that we can get together and there are no fireworks,” said David Waskow, an American Jewish Congress staffer and member of the speakers bureau who sat in on the speech.

Sometimes the audience is angry that the speakers are not angrier. “When was the last time she was there?” one student--recently returned from a summer trip to Israel--asked skeptically after Frankel said she basically agreed with Alameddine’s main points.

Elliot Berg, a 19-year-old sophomore in the audience whose father was born in Israel, said: “I don’t think she presented the Israeli side as strongly as he presented the Palestinian side.”

“That’s very painful for me,” admitted Frankel afterward. “It’s hard to be looked at as a traitor.”

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For Frankel, who lived in Israel in 1976 but has visited more recently, harsh commentary is part of the process of putting peaceful disagreement on display. And she will not debate the factual history of the Mideast, a subject that has long generated tirades on both sides. “That becomes an argument of who has been hurt more deeply and I don’t think anyone can win that argument.”

These are not the first Jewish and Arab groups in Los Angeles to attempt dialogue, but they do appear to have created the first speakers bureau. Their efforts were sparked by the September, 1993, accord between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, which called for Palestinian self-rule to begin in the Gaza Strip.

The accord, and the extraordinary handshake on the White House lawn between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, gave the speakers bureau legitimacy, said Arthur Stern, a businessman, survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and co-chairman of the speakers bureau.

Frankel added: “The idea that Rabin and Arafat (who, according to some published reports, will receive this year’s Nobel Peace Prize today) would shake hands--10 years ago I would have told you that you were out of your mind.”

The four groups sponsoring the speakers bureau are the American Jewish Congress, Americans for Peace Now (a Jewish group thatwas supporting a negotiated settlement in the early 1980s, when it was considered practically subversive), the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and the National Assn. of Arab Americans.

They started working a year ago, giving presentations to each other, acting as probing audiences. Since May, they have been sending out speakers to schools, colleges and civic organizations.

“We’ve spent the year trying to understand each other,” said Rita Lowenthal, a member of the bureau’s steering committee and of both sponsoring Jewish organizations, “knowing we would never agree completely, but that we all believed in the peace process.”

Their first meeting was at the El Amir restaurant in Beverly Hills. “We sat alternately--Arab-Jew-Arab-Jew,” said Tony Amsih, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Assn. of Arab Americans and a member of the bureau’s steering committee.

For many, the past year’s meetings have forged intense and ultimately warm relationships with people they had learned to distrust. Some perceptions went out the window--even innocuous ones.

“At the first session, we couldn’t tell who was with which group,” said Lowenthal, who noted that she had always believed she could identify someone as Jewish at a glance. “I realized I had my own stereotypes.”

This does not come without some pain.

“One of the main things Arab speakers want to do with Jewish audiences is acquaint them with why Arabs are angry,” said Donald Bustany, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and the other co-chairman of the speakers bureau. “It’s not the Palestinian people who went to where the Jewish people were living and took their land from them,” he said, sitting in a USC classroom with other organizers after the speeches. “It was the other way around.”

Lowenthal smiles ruefully at Bustany’s comment. It is not the first time and it won’t be the last that she hears something so discordant to her ears. “That’s one of our tensions,” she said. “We see the history a little differently.”