Philanthropists Vow to Keep Seeking a Just Peace on Both Sides of Apartheid Wall

By Pat and Samir Twair


	Suzanne and Wally Marks hold two of “10,000 Kites” (Staff photo S. Twair).

WALLY AND Suzanne Marks are recognized as generous contributors to causes addressing social injustices in their native Los Angeles. In August 2004, however, they went international in their philanthropic endeavors when the director of Los Angeles Americans for Peace Now introduced them to Israeli artist Adi Yekutieli, who wanted to fly kites for peace on both sides of Israel’s apartheid wall.

Yekutieli told the Markses that a photograph of a forlorn Palestinian boy flying a kite against the backdrop of bulldozers destroying houses in Qalqilya led to his concept of flying kites for peace. The kite project, he explained, would offer workshops in which Jewish and Palestinian families would hear each other’s hopes and aspirations for coexistence.

The struggle between Israelis and Palestinians had concerned the Markses since 1978, when they made a trip to Israel with fellow members of the liberal West Los Angeles Leo Baeck Temple. The synagogue’s cantor, who was acting as a tour guide, pointed out early evidence of settlement development. When Wally and Suzanne repeatedly asked for the justification to build on Palestinian land, no satisfactory answers were forthcoming.

The Markses accepted Yekutieli’s appeal for support to further the project, and invited friends to their home to learn more about 10,000 Kites. Within one week, $20,000 was raised.

An April 2005 date was set for flying 10,000 kites on both sides of the apartheid wall. Yekutieli named Bethlehem sculptor George Nustas his co-partner to recruit Palestinian participants.

An elegant fund-raiser at the Skirball Cultural Center attended by 280 guests last Dec. 2 raised $110,000. A total of $170,000 was realized for the project, which Rabbi Leonard Beerman described as “so absurd, it’s just what Israelis and Palestinians need.”

The kite-flying date was re-scheduled for May 20, 2005, with arrangements proceeding full speed ahead. Glowing reports and articles about 10,000 Kites were received from Israel. But the Palestinians on the West Bank pulled out after their condition that they be allowed to express a political message about the hardships of living under military occupation was rejected.

“It was a great disappointment,” Suzanne said about the Palestinian withdrawal, “but we understood after spending several days visiting West Bank homes and observing the pitiful conditions Palestinians must endure in the shadow of ever-expanding settlements.”

What she found most offensive on their May trip to Israel and the West Bank, said Suzanne, was the sight of Palestinian communities entirely penned in by barbed wire enclosures as high as 10 feet. “To add insult,” she continued, “bales of coiled barbed wire were laid on top of the corrals as far as the eye could see. At times Jewish settlements were adjacent to these fenced-in villages. It made me wonder how Palestinians in their blighted communities feel when they look through the wires at those state-of-the-art enclaves.

“The concrete wall is an abomination, but the barbed wire enclosures—sometimes two layers thick inside the wall on Palestinian land—are something the world needs to know about. I don’t think most Americans comprehend the meaning of ‘occupation.’”

The project did achieve a measure of success on the Israel side of the wall, however, where, on May 20, 35,000 people from 200 Israeli communities flew kites for peace. One-third of the participants were Arab Israelis.

The couple has come away from the 10,000 Kites experience with a commitment to making the Los Angeles Jewish community aware of conditions West Bank Palestinians are enduring under occupation.

“While the media tell Americans about the daily traumas and terrorism that strike Israel,” Suzanne averred, “we must also be informed about the realities on the ground that tear away at the fragile fiber holding Palestinian life together. Without this knowledge, we revert to our hardened positions, doing neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians any favors and maybe contributing to their mutual destruction.”

The Markses hope to fund two part-time positions for a Muslim and Jewish representative from each community to conduct outreach projects that bring both together in joint programs, concerts and meetings in Los Angeles.

Book Explores Catalhoyuk


Author Michael Balter (Staff photos S. Twair).

Michael Balter’s The Goddess and the Bull is sure to become a classic in archaeology literature. The author was in Los Angeles recently to promote his work, published this spring by Simon and Schuster, about Turkey’s legendary Neolithic settlement, Catalhoyuk (pronounced Chatal-Who-Yook), which carbon dating verifies was occupied from c. 7500 to 6300 BC, and was home to an estimated 8,000 people at any given period.

Balter, who writes for Science and has visited the site annually since 1998, has been dubbed the official biographer of Catalhoyuk by the excavation team. His book relates the history of Catalhoyuk’s two famous and vastly different excavators, James Mellaart and Ian Hodder. As an added bonus, he describes what goes on at a dig in a style that makes readers feel part of the expedition.

Mellaart opened his dig at Catalhoyuk in 1960. Although he uncovered only about 3 percent of the site, he proclaimed it to be the world’s first city, and further theorized that a Mother Goddess was worshipped there. Mellaart’s vivid descriptions of dwellings decorated with human breasts from which vultures’ heads protruded, altars and shrines adorned with bulls’ horns, and murals of vultures consuming headless human bodies gained him worldwide fame.

In 1965 a scandal led to Mellaart’s banishment from Turkey. Although married since 1954 to a woman from a prominent Turkish family, the British archaeologist allowed himself to be seduced by Anna Papastrati, whom he met in 1958 on a train bound for Izmir. He accompanied Papastrati to her home and, for one week, illustrated exquisitely crafted objects, many of them in precious metals, which she claimed were from Bronze Age graves opened in the 1920s. Mellaart published these drawings in a four-page report of the Nov. 25, 1959 issue of the London Illustrated News.

The Turkish government demanded possession of this now-documented hoard of priceless objects that became known as the Dorak Treasure. But Mellaart was unable to provide Turkish authorities either with Papastrati or the house in which he drew the precious funerary artifacts. The Dorak Treasure has never surfaced and, as a result of Mellaart’s disgrace, digging at the remarkable Catalhoyuk site was halted for more than 30 years.

Mellaart’s cultural/historical approach to archaeology was giving way in the late 1960s to the New Archaeology, launched by Lewis Binford in the U.S. and David Clarke in the UK, Balter explained. Their rigorous methodology called for hypotheses regarding a prehistoric site to be tested and analyzed through typologies.

In 1976, 28-year-old Ian Hodder was selected to take over Clarke’s Cambridge University post after the latter’s death. Although a New Archaeologist, he was in the process of developing Processual Archaeology, which tests scientific data but interprets it through associated cultural remains.

Deciding that Catalhoyuk was the perfect site to test his theories, in 1990 Hodder traveled to Ankara, where he convinced authorities it was time to re-open the famous mound where signs of warfare, weapons and fortifications were absent and data suggesting sexual equality prevailed.

Today, under Hodder’s guidance, more than 100 archaeologists are in their 10th season of probing the secrets of Catalhoyuk.

AFSC’s Shady Hakim Egypt-Bound


	Shady Hakim is flanked by AFSC co-workers Shan Cretin, Southwest regional director, and Paola Karam (Staff photo S. Twair).

For the past three years, Shady Hakim has served as Middle East peace education coordinator of the Southern California American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). In September, he departed for Egypt for nine months of study at the American University of Cairo’s Center for Arabic Study Abroad.

On Aug. 13 more than 60 friends and relatives gathered in the Sierra Madre home of Shady’s parents, Shadia and Hakim Hakim, for a bon voyage party. Wael Kakish, Maurice Saba and Moudy Elbyayadi of Kan Zaman performed Arabic music, while many guests engaged in belly dances and the debke.

After a repast of Egyptian cuisine, guests voiced personal tributes to Shady. Many recalled how they were arrested with him in conjunction with civil disobedience demonstrations masterminded by Shady in protest of the Iraq war.

The first occurred on Jan. 16, 2003, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, in front of the downtown Los Angeles Federal Building. Dramatizing their opposition to the impending Iraq war, demonstrators staged a mock funeral ceremony for future casualties. As a grim War figure loomed over the scene, 16 clergymen and AFSC members were arrested.

Two months later, Shady staged a protest at the gates of Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems in El Segundo. Demonstrators emphasized that Raytheon’s highest profit margin is for the weapons it produces. This time, 12 people were arrested.

On March 21, 2003, 27 demonstrators were arrested when they blocked the entrance to the downtown Federal Building to protest the invasion of Iraq.

One of Shady’s last projects was arranging a teachers workshop for the Los Angeles Unified School District, slated for Oct. 14-16 at the UTLA headquarters, 3303 Wilshire Blvd. The event will provide resources to educators who wish to bring Middle Eastern topics into the classroom.

Shady and his parents came to the U.S. from Cairo in 1981, when he was 5. He since has earned a bachelor’s degree from Westmont College in Santa Barbara and was a volunteer with Christian Peacemakers Team in Hebron for three months in 1998-99. Upon completing his Arabic studies at AUC, he hopes to study for a Ph.D. degree at an East Coast university.

Pat and Samir Twair are free-lance journalists based in Los Angeles.