Published by the Church of Scientology International

One person at a time
Building Peace in the Middle East
by Alexandra Hopkins

Joan Lonstein (above), founder of the Association for Peace and Understanding in the Middle East (APUME), has joined forces with Zeinab Habash (also above) of the Palestinian Ministry of Education, and like-minded Israeli and Arab humanitarians, to make The Way to Happiness available in Israeli newspapers (1), in shopping hubs (2), on the streets (3), at university campuses (4) and in the markets (5).

Joan Lonstein, a Los Angeles criminal reform specialist, thought she had seen her share of turmoil and strife dealing with criminals within the corrections system. But in October 2000, while in Israel on her annual visit to her son and two grandchildren, she found herself in a real war zone as the Israeli/Palestinian situation suddenly ignited with a deadly new round of conflict.

Peace talks that for almost a decade had contained the explosive scene, simply collapsed. The Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, meant a new and escalating rash of suicide bombings and violent Israeli retaliation. An all-out conflagration seemed at hand — pessimists and the media were warning that this one could devastate the Middle East, disrupt oil-dependent economies and might even turn nuclear should Israel exercise her widely believed nuclear capability.

So Joan’s return to LA did not include the normal adjustment back to the workaday world. Instead she hit the ground running, immediately meeting with friends and co-workers at the Association for Better Living and Education (ABLE) International, a nonprofit public benefit organization dedicated to social betterment.

“It's time we started a campaign,” she told those gathered there — people from across the spectrum of Middle Eastern concerns — Jewish-Americans, Israeli-Americans and Palestinian-Americans. Joan wasted no time in alerting them to what she saw and, more pressingly, what she felt was about to happen in Israel.

ABLE officials, briefed on her plans, encouraged her to take the broadest possible actions to bring greater understanding and peace to the people of Israel.

And one friend, Israeli-American Hagit Raviv, picked up instantly on Joan's call and, within days, the two had launched an initiative to defuse a situation 8,000 miles away. Their campaign revolves around the one-on-one, Middle-Easterner-to-Middle-Easterner distribution of The Way to Happiness booklet, the small, but potent common-sense moral code written by L. Ron Hubbard two decades prior.

Both had seen the calm it brought to other world hot-spots. A decade earlier, for instance, with tensions growing by the day as South Africa prepared for the elections that would finally lay apartheid to rest, violence's fuse was measured in micrometers. But concerned South Africans coolly distributed 800,000 copies of The Way to Happiness booklet. The elections, in which Nelson Mandela became the country's first black President, proceeded peacefully without the riots, or even chaos, that many had feared.

Hoping to bring understanding and tolerance to the Middle East, one person at a time, Joan and Hagit, with the support of ABLE International, began planning a campaign similar to the one that had been successful in South Africa. But they faced one formidable obstacle: distance. The Middle East was halfway around the world. But at the same time, they learned, a business consultant in Israel, Danny Vidislavski, was already taking the key action that would make Joan and Hagit's campaign possible.

Vidislavski describes the times from his perspective: “When the Palestinian uprising started, I was at a barbecue with friends. Someone called me to tell me what was happening. I immediately had the thought, ‘This is war; we should do something about it.’

“Right then, I decided that we needed to distribute 20,000 The Way to Happiness booklets to Arabs living in Israel — not in the Palestinian areas, as we couldn't travel there. But there are many Arabs living in Israel too. At 6 p.m. that evening, I started calling people from my address book asking for money. I got some friends to help. Our batteries ran down on our cell phones and other guys came with battery chargers. We kept calling through the night and by 2 or 3 a.m. we had 19,000 shekels ($4,000), just from regular people. Most people charged it on credit cards.

“Soon we reached Joan and Hagit in America. With their help and with the help of many supporters in Israel, we raised the rest of the funds for that first printing.

“There was a problem though: We had no Arabic translation of the booklet. I found out that a translation had been started in Italy. We got a hold of the translation and then contacted a Bedouin who lives in a tent. Astonishingly, he had no electric lights but he had a laptop. He finished the translation for us in a few days. We found an Israeli who could print in Arabic. Within a week of the start of the Intifada, we had printed 20,000 copies of The Way to Happiness booklet.

“But we didn't know how to distribute them. I didn't know any Arabs, just the ones I saw on TV. We started asking around and eventually we made some contacts. An Arab DJ got a copy of the booklet and read it on the radio. He read one chapter a day for 21 days. Within a few weeks, we distributed all 20,000 booklets.

“In contrast to the Israeli Arabs, the Palestinian Arabs — those outside Israel — turned to violence,” he noted.