The Middle East Conflict and Heartfelt Thinking

Ofer Sagie, Waldorf teacher from Israel, in conversation with upper school students at the Balingen Waldorf School.

The young people notice Ofer's despair. He has been campaigning for dialogue between Palestine and Israel as a peace activist for 40 years.

Sagie supports the Waldorf movement in China, runs theater projects at many Waldorf schools, and is invited by schools as a peace activist to speak on the Middle East conflict. His lectures in Balingen were funded by the network Schule ohne Rassismus – Schule mit Courage (School without Racism – School with Courage), of which the Balingen school is also a member.

First, rebuild

Before Ofer Sagie begins talking to the nearly 30 tenth-grade students, a Hebrew song is sung: The whole world is a narrow bridge («Kol Ha`olam Kulo/ Gesher Zar Me`od/ ve`Hajkar/ Lo Lefaced Klal»). The benches have been cleared away and the chairs arranged in several rows in a semicircle. A tense silence reigns in the room on this Friday morning. Ofer, who introduces himself as a Waldorf teacher at the Israeli Waldorf School in Harduf, a theater director, and a Bothmer gymnast with three teenage daughters, speaks German well. After all, his grandfather is from Görlitz and his grandmother is from Vienna. His impressive body language and warm tone of voice ensure that he quickly gains access to his young audience.

Powerful narratives

Ofer uses chalk to draw the outline of Israel on the blackboard, showing its Mediterranean coastline, the Jordan River, the Sea of Galilee, and the Dead Sea on the border with Jordan. He locates Jerusalem and shows prints depicting the Western Wall and the Al-Aqsa Mosque – both only 500 meters away from Golgotha, where Jesus was crucified. Ofer goes to great lengths to describe the complexity of the Middle East conflict to his audience. According to the Torah, God gave the land to Abraham, the forefather of the Jewish people, in 1800 BC, long before Moses fled into exile in Egypt with his people centuries later. This narrative and the legal claim to the Holy Land derived from it are still aggressively asserted today by Orthodox Jews, who make up fifteen percent of Israeli society and at the same time the majority of settlers in the occupied West Bank. «It was the Romans», says Ofer, «who first called the area Palestine in 70 BC, which meant Land of the Philistines».

War instead of dialogue

In an area where the holiest sites of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam lie close together, the population was predominantly Muslim, Jewish, and Christian until the late 19th century. With the beginning of Zionist immigration in 1880 and under the influence of Theodor Herzl, author of the seminal work The Jewish State around 1897, more and more Jews from all over the world bought land in Palestine. At that time, Palestine was still part of the Ottoman Empire and, after the First World War, under British colonial rule. Ofer then presented the history of the State of Israel since 1948 as a continuous chain of wars, expulsions, and uprisings, with a look at the large refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and Lebanon, among other places. In addition, the roles of the US, China, and Russia in the background were outlined, as well as aspects of social psychology. For over 75 years, the law of war has prevailed with neighboring Arab states Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon—but also with the Islamic resistance organization Hamas in Gaza, the Al Fatah party in the West Bank, and the Islamist Shiite party Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel has always acted according to the motto «The winner takes it all.» Although Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, Ofer emphasized, he regrets that «Jewish people have not learned to seek dialogue with Palestinians.» The war keeps both peoples in an extremely difficult situation. Under pressure from its right-wing nationalist coalition partners, Benjamin Netanyahu's current government is just as extremist as Hamas in the Gaza Strip. According to Ofer, both are holding Israeli and Palestinian society hostage.

The young people notice Ofer's despair. For 40 years, he has been a peace activist working to promote dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis. This is partly, but not solely, because he has many Palestinian friends from the villages around Harduf and in the West Bank. He encourages the students to call the Israeli army's actions in the Gaza Strip what they are – «genocide». When Ofer quotes the Reuters news agency, which estimates that the cost of the war is around 265 million euros per day and has been for about 400 days, the young people are astonished.

What can I do?

Ofer points out to the young people that every click on the internet, for example on Instagram or TikTok, on a Jewish or Palestinian flag fuels the conflict. Instead, he calls on them to «remain neutral, but active». He urges them to mobilize the forces of human love: «You are the hope for our world. You have learned how to talk.» Before doing anything, he says, you have to understand the complexity. Ofer rounds off this special encounter with a small social exercise in the room and bids farewell to each of the young people individually at the door with a handshake. Looking back three days later, his offer to meet the class again is met with open ears. The attempt to combine historical analysis with human experience, replacing hasty judgments with the practice of tentative heart-based thinking, has been successful. 

Editor's note: Ofer Sagie's visit took place in the spring of 2025, when the term «genocide» was still justified.