Cal State San Marcos series to focus on peace in the Middle East

By: BRUCE KAUFFMAN - Staff Writer | Tuesday, March 8, 2005 1:28 PM PST ∞

SAN MARCOS ---- A North County man who came back from a trip to Israel in the mid-1990s full of optimism that peace is possible in the Middle East has set out to spread the message through a series of talks at Cal State San Marcos.

The sessions are being sponsored by a nonprofit organization based in Valley Center called PeaceMark. One of the founders, Hank Kraus, said in an interview Monday he's dedicating at least six months this year to help dispel a sense of despair that people harbor about the prospects of Israelis and Palestinians living peacefully side by side.

"There were thousands of years that they lived without conflict," Kraus said. "There are a lot of myths today that peace is not possible, when it is."

Kraus, a so-called turnaround CEO who has gone from company to company getting them ready for sale, said he feels his very Christianity compels him to work for Middle East peace. He said he gained a sense of the toll the conflict had been taking during a trip to Israel in 1996, the same trip that brought him a sense of the depth of the yearning for peace by so many people there.

But the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, led him to feel it was urgent to act, Kraus said, with much of the fervor of the Islamic militants being fueled by the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

"My goal is dialogue," Kraus said. "If we can create some dialogue where there's open discussion of the issues, I think a lot of people will be surprised because there's a lot that they don't know. And the message, again, has to be that peace is possible."

The first of three events begins at 4 p.m. March 16 at Clarke Field House with a talk by Deanna Armbruster, executive director of an organization in the United States that supports the "Oasis of Peace" community in Israel, where Jewish and Palestinian families live, work and educate their children together.

Teddy Katz, an Israeli Jew and peace activist, is scheduled for April 5 and Bishop Samir Kafity, the retired bishop of the Jerusalem diocese and now a resident of Poway, is scheduled for April 14. They will both be speaking in the reading room on the fifth floor of the Kellogg Library.

Admission is free.

Armbruster, a journalist and co-author of "Tears in the Holy Land," a book about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that weaves in the personal stories of Muslims, Christians and Jews in the Middle East, has said that people of all three faiths are searching for the same contentment and happiness in their lives.

Teddy Katz was sued for libel by members of an Israeli army brigade after he wrote in his master's thesis that the brigade was implicated in a massacre of Palestinians in 1948. Katz has been a member of an Israeli kibbutz for more than four decades and has worked for the Israeli government to encourage Jews in Mexico to emigrate to Israel.

Bishop Kafity, who is now an American citizen, is a member of the PeaceMark advisory board. An Arab Christian who was born in Haifa, he has spread the message that the Bible hardly proscribes what territory belongs to whom. God is not a real estate broker, he has said, and all of the borders are made by man.

Contact Bruce Kauffman at 760-761-4410 or bkauffman@nctimes.com.1

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