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Our Democracy is in Danger of Being Paralyzed
Bill Moyers

Reclaiming Local Media
Paul Cienfuegos

What You Need to Know About Electronic Voting
William Rivers Pitt

Will the 2004 Election by Stolen With Electronic Voting Machines?
William Rivers Pitt

Myths of the Hermit Kingdom
Eric Sirotkin

Heresies in Pursuit of Peace
Eric Sirotkin

The Empire Strikes Out
Kenny Ausubel

Relationships and Culture
Nita Simons

The Movie Mystic
Stephen Simon

Tai Chi and Qigong
Bill Douglas

A Relationship Practice
Kayla M. Starr, MPH

Cosmic Calendar
Salina Rain

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Heresies in Pursuit of Peace

Thoughts on Israel/Palestine

By Starhawk

In the ruins of Jenin, an old friend of mine is digging bodies out of the rubble where Israeli bulldozers flattened houses, burying people alive. She describes the horrific scene to me: blackened corpses, unearthed from the rubble, displayed to anguished relatives for identification, Palestinian parents crying over the bodies of their children.

Another friend, a Jew, leaves an anguished message on my cell phone: “I’m in downtown Washington DC. There’s a huge, pro-Israel rally going on. I don’t understand it. How can Jews support this? I know you must have something inspirational to say. Send me what you write.”

She doesn’t know that for weeks I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to write something about the situation. I’m overwhelmed with accounts of the atrocities. Yet I am also haunted by images of bodies shattered at a Seder meal, at a café, a Passover drenched in a new plague of blood. I’m frightened and saddened by the real resurgence of anti-Semitism, by swastikas carried in peace marches, synagogues attacked.

A third friend, a deeply spiritual woman and longtime ecofeminist ally, sends me a copy of a letter she wrote to President Bush entitled, “Standing Firmly With Israel.”

In no way can I stand with her. And yet I cannot simply stand against her, either.

I cannot stand with an Israel that tortures prisoners, an Israel that has mounted a restrictive and dehumanizing occupation, that assassinates political leaders as a matter of policy, that has cut down ancient olive groves to destroy the livelihood of the Palestinians, that is daily committing war crimes: refusing medical care to the wounded, firing on journalists and peace demonstrators, bombing civilians, de-stroying homes. Nor can I stand in the bloody remains of the Seder meal, among the corpses in the café, the restaurant. Yet to say, “both sides are wrong, both sides should give up violence” is to ignore the reality that one side, the Israeli side, is the fourth largest military power in the world. That the suicide bombs are a direct response to calculated political assassinations and to a brutal occupation that has made life untenable for the Palestinians. That for over fifty years, the State of Israel has failed to guard and cherish the Palestinians’ rights, aspirations, and hopes for an independence that could lead to peace and prosperity.

It is, on the one hand, incomprehensible to me that my friend could stand with such a regime, that the Jewish community as a whole, composed of people I know to be caring, compassionate and good, can stand behind the tanks, the bombs, the brutality.

On the other hand, I understand quite well the wrenching emotional journey that many Jews must make to admit the reality of what Israel is doing. For those of us who grew up saving our pennies to plant trees in the Galil, who, snowbound in blizzards, celebrated the New Year of the Trees timed to the blossoming of almonds in the Judean hills, who ended every Seder with the prayer “Next year in Jerusalem,” no other issue is so painful and sad.

I am a Jew who has spent her adult life as a voice for a different religion, a blatant Pagan whose spirituality is attuned to the Goddess of regeneration, not the God of my fathers. To Orthodox Jews, I’m a heretic, which gives me a certain freedom to say what I think. I was born into, raised in and acculturated by the post-war Jewish community, but I have not been immersed in that world for many years. I speak from the margins of the Jewish community. But I am still a Jew, and the view from the edge can sometimes be clearer than that from the center.

The San Francisco Chronicle writes a front page story about a school in Gaza where little Palestinian children are taught to hate Jews. I have no reason to doubt the truth of their story, although I question why they feature it front and center with no counterbalancing tale of, say, the Inter-national Solidarity Movement (ISM) where Palestinians and Jews together risk themselves in nonviolent interventions for peace. The hate is real, and the fear it engenders is also real. Yet the story makes me consider what I was taught in ten or more years of Jewish education that included a teenaged summer spent on a kibbutz. We never chanted, “Kill the Arabs.” We were never told in so many words, “Hate them.” Rather, we learned a more subtle disc-ounting, a not-seeing, as if the Palestinians were not full human beings but rather a minor obstacle to the fulfillment of a dream, something to be moved aside, that didn’t really count.

We were taught to be proud of the brave Zionist settlers and pioneers, the idealistic youth who fled the ghettoes and the pogroms of Europe to build a “new” land. And I am proud, still, of their experiments in new ways of living, their awareness of women’s rights, their courage in leaving home and family to escape oppression. But I under-stand now that they did not come into an empty place, and they did not come with the capability of truly seeing and respecting and honoring the people of the land. They came out of a Europe that had an un-shakeable belief in its own cultural and racial superiority and had for centuries been appropriating the lands of darker peoples.

They came as the settlers came to the so-called New World, saying, “This land is ours by right, God gave it to us.” The people who had lived there during those two thousand years of exile were an impediment. And so began the long litany of justi-fications: that the land didn’t really belong to them but to the Turks or the British; that they weren’t doing anything with it, had not made the desert bloom nor drained the swamps, and above all, that they hate us, are raised to hate us, with a hate irrational, implacable, and unchangeable.

The word for this not-seeing is racism. Less blatant, perhaps, than chanting “Kill, kill!” but with the same insidious results.

Yet to simply condemn Zionism as racism without acknowledging the context of centuries of racial hate against Jews from which it arose is to absolve those who have blood on their hands as well. Worse, it is to support the complacency of Jew-haters and fascists who now emerge into the open again. Israel has indeed served the interests of the Western powers in subjugating the Arab world. But Israel also arose out of an oppressed people’s dream of liberation. To discount the oppression, to deny the strength and the beauty of the dream of a homeland, is to miss the full tragedy of what is happening now. Unless we understand the dream, we cannot truly comprehend the nightmare.

I know what Israel meant during my childhood in the fifties, to my family still reeling in shock from the revelations of the gas chambers and the ovens, still searching for news of lost relatives. Israel was the restitution for all the losses of the Holocaust. It was the thing that restored some meaning and some hope into a world utterly shattered by evil. It was the proof that Jews were not just passive victims but actors on the screen of history, capable of fighting back, of taking charge of our own destiny. It was the one safe place, the refuge in a hostile world. And for some, it was the answer to the anguished question, “How can I believe in God in a world in which such things can happen?”

To acknowledge the truth of what Israel is now doing is to face a grief so deep and overwhelming that it seems to suck away all hope. It is to gasp again in the suffo-cation chambers, to cover our faces with the ashes from the ovens and know that there is no redemption, no silver lining, no happy ending, no good and noble thing that emerged to give dignity to these deaths. There is only the terrible cycle, of victims becoming victimizers, the abused perpe-tuating abuse. It is to look down and see the whip in our own hands, the jackboots on our own feet. “Don’t make the Nazi connection,” a Jewish peace group warns. “It only feeds the right wing.” And yet the Nazi connection begs to be made.

But this is not just about Jews and Germans, Israelis and Palestinians, not about how any one people is prone to evil. It’s about us all. The capacity for cruelty, for inflicting horrific harm, exists in us all. All we need is to feel threatened, and to let our fear define our enemy as less than fully human, and the horrors of hell are unleashed.

If we don’t like the Nazi parallel, we must refuse to become Nazis. We must remember that the Nazis played on the German sense of deprivation and loss after World War One, and admit that our own real victimization has not elevated us to some realm of purity and eternal innocence. We can grow beyond the propaganda we were taught and the myths of our childhood and the comfort of our chosenness, and see the Palestinians as the full human beings that they are—even if to do so seems to require us to walk out again into the wilderness with no outstretched hand nor hope of a promised land to guide us.

For if we admit the Palestinians’ full humanity, if we admire their knowledge and appreciate their culture and cherish their children, then all the justifications of conquest fall away. No God, no superior virtue or inherent right, has granted us dominion. We have the land because we were able to take it. And while that admission might seem to threaten Israel’s very right to exist, it is not nearly as much of a threat as clinging to the justifications and rationalizations that prevent us from seeing the Other as fully human.

For full human beings, placed in a situation of utter despair, may turn to suicide bombs and retribution. Full human beings, humiliated beyond belief, may seek revenge. But full human beings are not mindless agents of hate. Given hope and dignity and a future to live for, human beings will tend to choose life. And full human beings can be reasoned with, bargained with, made peace with.

The Boy Who Kissed the Soldier

“Which side’s story do you believe in order to create peace there?” a friend writes when I come back from Palestine. I have no answer, only this story:

I am in Balata refugee camp in occupied Palestine, where the Israeli Defense Forces have rounded up four thousand men, leaving the camp to women and children. The men have offered no resistance, no battle. The camp is deathly quiet. All the shops are shuttered, all the windows closed. Women, children and a few old men hide in their homes. The quiet is shattered by sporadic bursts of gunfire, bangs and explosions.

Earlier in the evening, eight of our friends were arrested, and we know that we could be caught at any moment. It is nearly dark, we are hurrying through the streets looking for a place to spend the night. We need to be indoors before the curfew. “Go into any house,” we’ve been told. “Anyone will be glad to take you in.” But we feel a bit shy.

From a narrow, metal staircase a young woman with a wide, beautiful smile beckons us up. “Welcome, welcome!” Her name is Samar, and she gives us refuge in the three small rooms that house her family: her mother, big bodied and sad, her small nieces and nephews, her brother’s wife Hanin, round-faced and pale and six months pregnant. We sit down on big, overstuffed couches. The women serve us tea. I look around at the pine wood paneling that adds soft curves and warmth to the concrete, at the porcelain birds and artificial flowers that decorate a ledge. The ceilings are carefully painted in simple geometric designs. These women have poured love and care into their home, and it feels like a sanctuary. Outside we can hear sporadic shooting, the deep boom of houses being blown up by Israeli soldiers. But here in these rooms, we are safe—at least as safe as we can be in this place. Inshallah (“God willing”) follows every statement of good fortune here or every commitment to a plan.

Yahoud! the women say when we hear explosions. It is the Arabic word for Jew, the word used for the soldiers of the invading army. It is a word of warning and alarm: “Yahoud!” Don’t go down that alley, out into that street.

But no one invades our refuge this night. Around us houses are exploding, lives are being shattered, but here we sit in an intimate world of women. Hanin brushes my hair, ties it back in a band to control its wildness. We try to talk about our lives. The women of this camp are educated, sophis-ticated. Many we have met throughout the day are teachers, nurses, students—when the Occupation allows.

“Are you Christian?” Hanin asks. Melissa, Jessica and I look at each other. All of us are Jewish, and we’re not sure what the reaction will be if we admit it. Jessica speaks for us.

“Jewish,” she says. The women don’t understand the word. We try several variations, but finally are forced to the blunt and dreaded “Yahoud.”

“Yahoud!” Hanin says. She gives a little surprised laugh, looks at the other women. “Beautiful!”

And that is all. Her welcome to us is undiminished. She shows me the shower, dresses me in her own flowered nightgown and robe, and puts me to bed in the empty side of the double bed she shares with her husband, who has been arrested by the Yahoud. Mats are brought out for the others. Two of the children sleep with us. Ahmed, the little four year old boy, snuggles next to me. He sleeps fiercely, kicking and thrashing in his dreams, and each time an explosion comes, hurls himself into my arms.

I can’t sleep at all. I am thinking about the summer I spent in Israel when I was fifteen, learning Hebrew, working on a kibbutz, touring every memorial to the Holocaust and every site of battle in what we called the War of Independence. I am thinking of one day when we were brought to the Israel/Lebanon border. The Israeli side was green, the other side barren and brown.

“You see what we have made of this land,” we were told. “And that—that’s what they’ve done in two thousand years. Nothing.”

I am old enough now to question the world of assumptions behind that statement, to recognize one of the prime justifications the colonizers have always used against the colonized. “They weren’t doing anything with the land: they weren’t using it.” They are not, somehow, as deserving as we are, as fully human.

One night later, Melissa, Jessica and I again go back to Hanin’s house just as dark is falling. Neta, an Israeli Jew and one of the founders of the International Solidarity Movement, is with us. We have narrowly escaped a troop of soldiers, but no sooner do we arrive than the soldiers come to the door. At least they have come to the door. All day they have been breaking through people’s walls, knocking out the concrete with sledgehammers, bursting through into rooms of terrified people to search, or worse, use the house as a thoroughfare, a safe route that allows them to move through the camp without venturing into the streets.

We come forward to meet these soldiers, to talk with them and witness what they will do. One of the men, with owlish glasses, knows Jessica and Melissa: they have had a long conversation with him standing beside his tank. He is uncomfortable with his role.

Ahmed, the little boy, is terrified of the soldiers. He points at them and cries and screams. We try to comfort him, to carry him away into another room, but he won’t go. He is terrified, but he can’t bear to be out of their sight.

“Take off your helmet,” Jessica tells the soldiers. “Shake hands with him. Show him you’re a human being. Help him not to be so afraid.”

The owlish soldier takes off his helmet, holds out his hand. Ahmed’s sobs subside. The soldiers file out to search the upstairs. Samar and Ahmed follow them. Samar holds the little boy up to the owlish soldier’s face, tells him to give the soldier a kiss. She doesn’t want Ahmed to be afraid, to hate. The little boy kisses the soldier, and the soldier kisses him back, and hands him a small Palestinian flag.

This is the moment to end this story, on a high note of hope, to let it be a story of how simple human warmth, a child’s kiss, can for a moment overcome oppression and hate. But it is a characteristic of the relentless quality of this occupation that the story doesn’t end here.

The soldiers order us all into one room. They close the door, and begin to search the house. We can hear banging and crashing and loud thuds against the walls. When the soldiers finally leave, we emerge to examine the damage. Everything has been thrown in huge piles on the floor: pictures ripped off the walls, clothes pulled out of the closets. The couches have been overturned and their bottoms ripped off. The wood paneling is full of holes. Bags of grain have been emptied into the sink. Broken glass and china covers the floor.

We are a houseful of women, we know how to clean and restore order. Melissa sweeps; Jessica tries to corral the barefoot children until we can get the glass up. I help Hanin clear a path in the bedroom, folding the clothes of her absent husband, hanging up her own things, finding the secret sexy underwear the soldiers have obviously examined.

When the house is back together, Hanin and Samar cook. I sit down, utterly exhausted, as Hanin and the women serve us up a meal. A few china birds are back on the ledge. The artificial flowers have reappeared. Some of the loose boards of the paneling have been pushed back. Somehow once again the house feels like a sanctuary.

“You are amazing,” I tell Hanin. “I am completely exhausted: you’re six months pregnant, it’s your house that has just been trashed, and you’re able to stand there cooking for all of us.”

Hanin shrugs. “For us, this is normal,” she says.

And this is where I would like to end this story, celebrating the resilience of these women, full of faith in their power to renew their lives again and again. But the story doesn’t end here, either.

On the third night. Melissa and Jessica go back to stay with Hanin and her family—“our family,” we now call them. I am staying with another family who has asked for support. The soldiers have searched their house three times, and have promised that they will continue to come back every night. We are sleeping in our clothes, boots ready. We get a call: the soldiers have returned to Hanin’s house.

Again, they lock everyone in one room. Again, they search. This time, the soldier who kissed the boy is not with them. They have some secret intelligence report that tells them there is something to find, although they have not found it. They rip the paneling off the walls. They knock holes in the tiles and the concrete beneath. They smash and destroy, and when they are done, they piss on the mess they have left.

Nothing has been found, but something is lost. The sanctuary is destroyed, the house turned into a wrecking yard. No one kisses these soldiers.

When Hanin emerges and sees what they have done, she goes into shock. She is resilient and strong, but this assault has gone beyond “normal.” She is hyperventilating, her pulse is racing and thready. She could lose the baby, or even die.

Jessica, who is trained as a street medic for actions, informs the soldiers that Hanin needs immediate medical care. The soldiers are reluctant, “We’ll be done soon,” they say. But one is a paramedic, and Melissa and Jessica are able to make him see the seriousness of the situation. He allows the two of them to violate curfew, to run through the dark streets to the clinic, come back with two nurses who somehow get Hanin and the family into an ambulance and take them to the hospital.

This outcome could have been worse. Because Jessica and Melissa were there, Hanin and the baby survive. That is, after all, why we’ve come: to make things not quite as bad as they would be otherwise.

But there is no happy ending to this story, no cheerful resolution. When the soldiers pull out, I go back to say goodbye to Hanin, who has returned from the hospital. She is looking dull, depressed. Her resilience is gone, her eyes have lost their light. She writes her name and phone number for me, she writes “Hanin love you.”

This is not a story of some grand atrocity. It is a story about “normal” life, about what it’s like to live every day under a relentless assault on your sense of safety.

“Which side’s story do you believe in order to create peace there?” a friend writes. I have no answer. Every story goes on too long and turns nasty. A boy whose dreams are disturbed by gunfire kisses a soldier. A soldier kisses a boy, and then destroys his home. Or maybe he simply stands by as others do the destruction, in silence, that same silence too many of us have kept for too long. If there is to be peace, there must first be a vast breaking of silence, an uproar, a refusal to stand by as the boot stomps down.

The God of Force

I write as an admitted heretic, yet it’s clear to me that the orthodoxies of all three great religions—along with atheists, pragmatists and secularists of many political persuasions—are embroiled in a blasphemy that far outweighs any amount of naked dancing around a bonfire. They are united in the worship of the God of Force.

The God of Force says that violence is the ultimate answer to every dilemma, the resolution of every conflict, the only thing “they” understand. The God of Force makes appearances in the Old and New Testaments, the Koran, and other scriptures, both sacred and secular. The God of Force licenses his agents to kill, unleashes the holy war, the jihad, the crusade, the inquisition. The God of Force says, “Go unto the land and kill all the inhabitants thereof.”

I’m a polytheist. I recognize many gods. They are deeply interconnected, but each has its own flavor, character, and name. One advantage of being a polytheist is that you can acknowledge that bloodthirsty and cruel powers exist and still turn resolutely away from them. When one god tells you to commit some horrific atrocity, you can go to another for a second opinion. But monotheism is, of course, the heart and essence of Judaism, as it is of Islam and Christianity. I submit that the God of Force is incompatible with the one God. For if God is one, she or he must by definition be God of all, not of any one people exclusively.

The current situation is a call for both human beings and our notion of God to evolve. Judaism has always had within it a tradition of wrestling with God, as Jacob did with the angel. To see God as fixed and rigid and unchanging is indeed to worship a graven image.

We are commanded not to make images of God because our human imaginations are limited and will only reproduce our own faults and lacks and prejudices. God the General, God the Ruler, God the King, God the Distributor of Real Estate, God the Avenger, God Who Favors One People Above All Others—all these may in reality be that very idol, the truncated image we are told to turn away from. The worst heresy of all may be to limit our conception of God.

Judaism can march lockstep with the Israeli authorities deeper into the domain of force. Israel could conceivably exterminate the Palestinians utterly. (That is the trend of the current policies.) Indeed, nothing less will crush the Palestinians’ aspirations for independence and freedom. A Jewish community that supported such a “final solution” would lose its soul and any claim to moral authority. An Israel that carried out genocide would be no fit homeland for any person of conscience. And genocide would not bring security to Israel: it would simply inflame the hatred of the entire Arab world and take away the rest of the world’s support. That road is likely to lead straight to the fulfillment of Christian prophecies of apocalypse.

One of the agonies of the current crisis is that nobody seems to have much hope of resolving it. We can see where the road leads, but we don’t know how to step off it. “If only the Palestinians would practice nonviolence and embrace the principles of Gandhi and King,” I hear some of my Jewish allies say. But I find myself thinking, wouldn’t it be quicker if Gandhi or King reappeared among the Israeli leadership? Are they not in an even better position to change this situation?
If the Israeli leadership were to abandon the idea that force will resolve this conflict, the solution becomes stunningly clear: The Palestinians need their own state. And it needs to be a viable, coherent state with the potential for prosperity and beauty, not a few scraps of unwanted land the Israelis have decided to discard. A Palestine of milk and honey, of bread and roses, of the vine and the fig tree, of olive groves and red anemones, of health clinics and universities, of a new renaissance of Arabic culture, science, learning, and art. Anything less will be an eternally festering sore, and there will be no peace.

A flourishing and happy Palestine would be Israel’s best security measure, and might even become her closest trading partner. Such a Palestine would offer its youth a better future than becoming human bombs. It is in Israel’s best interest to be surrounded by friends instead of enemies, and therefore to foster the creation of the Palestinian state. And while such a friendship might seem impossible at the moment, consider the friendly relations between the US and our former deadly enemies, Germany and Japan.

The grip of the God of Force is strong—so strong that, even though we can clearly see the solution, we may despair at actually bringing it about. To pry loose that grip, we need to use all the tools of political activism: writing letters, making phone calls, demonstrating, practicing nonviolent civil disobedience, and even joining the peace witnesses on the front lines.

On a spiritual level, we can look into the dark mirror that reveals our own prejudices and reject them. We can believe that the “force of intelligent, embodied love,” as feminist theologian Carol Christ describes the Goddess, is indeed stronger than stupid, disembodied hate.

One last Pagan heresy: we can prod a sluggish God into producing a miracle or two by performing our actions with conscious, focused intention. As a spell for peace, make peace with someone with whom you think you can’t make peace. Notice what resistance arises even at the thought, how you build your case against your enemy, how you marshal your defenses and ready your weapons. Note what it takes to give them up, what you must sacrifice, and what you will gain.

Maybe, in this process, we can all learn something. Maybe we can begin a turning, a transformation that will leave the God of Force starved of his blood sacrifices and burnt offerings, and feed gentler fruit to a kinder God. So that the children of Israel and Palestine can both grow up to enrich the land not by the blood of corpses but by the songs of poets, the works of artists, the healing of doctors, the fruit of farmers, the knowledge of teachers, the wisdom of mystics. And this corner of land, battleground for so many years, might become for all people a place of refuge, vision and hope.

Starhawk is a global justice activist and author who travels internationally teaching the tools of ritual and the skills of activism. Her most recent book, Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising, is a collection of her political writings. For periodic posts of her writings email Starhawk-subscribe@lists.riseup.net and put “Subscribe” in the subject heading, or visit www.starhawk.org.

My parents left Europe just before the Holocaust and they lost most of their family members in it. They came to that part of the world which today is called Israel, and used to be called Palestine, to promise me a better life and the security of a state of our own. After almost 60 years I cannot say that they succeeded; on the contrary. It seems that my parents and others who wanted to build the state of Israel did not understand that it is impossible to build a new future on the relics of oppression. I’ve been defending Palestinians in Israeli courts for some 30 years and despite my efforts have still not succeeded in making judges, whether in military tribunals or the Supreme Court of Justice, understand this basic truth.

The main victims of occupation and oppression are children. In Israel the old British Mandate laws, dating from before independence, are still in force. These are laws of oppression enabling any occupying power to impose collective punishments. Recently I lost a case. I had tried to prevent the destruction of the house of a young man, a Palestinian suicide bomber who had killed himself and eight others near a military camp outside Tel Aviv. According to British Mandate law, the home of the perpetrator of a terrorist attack should be destroyed … Only rarely do we even have time to go to court in such cases. Demolitions usually punish not the offender but their family. Very often they are carried out without warning. “You have five minutes to get out of the house!” is all the time given. The demolishers smash everything—clothes, furniture. I often ask families what they grab in those five minutes and they answer “the children’s school certificates first.” Their optimism is wonderful.

Then there is the murder of children. Recently a 10-year-old threw a stone at a soldier near a roadblock outside Jerusalem and was shot. A one-ton bomb dropped by an Israeli plane on Gaza City, the most densely populated town in the world, killed 16 children. The Palestinian children, the fruit of this war, provide the suicide bombers. I represent those who failed to die and I know about those who died, so I speak with authority. They do not die for the 70 virgins promised them when they become shahid (martyrs) and they are not forced or brainwashed. These youngsters, from all sections of society, volunteer to die because of despair. They feel they have little to lose and perhaps glory to gain. It is terrible when a society produces children willing to die.

From the last intifada until today 700 Palestinian and 100 Jewish children under 16 have died. In the past three years 382 Palestinian children have been killed by the army or settlers, and 79 Israeli children have died. It’s a nightmare to be an Israeli child—afraid to go on the bus, to the market, to the shop. In every doorway there are guards who open your bags and search you.

The memory of the Holocaust—“the world hates the Jews; we have always been victims”—has blurred into the new Israeli victimology: “We are victims because the Palestinians kill us.” This comparison is unacceptable. It is not true. We were victims but now we victimize others.

Excerpted from a talk on childhood and human rights given by Leah Tsemel, an Israeli lawyer, at the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice, Italy.