Creating Conversational Circles

Summary

Ms See Guat Kwee visited Israel as a tourist with a group of Christians in January 2001. The Second Intifada, or Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation, had begun, and the Singaporean witnessed at close quarters violence and carnage that she had never known at home. She volunteered her services at a day-care centre for the elderly, where she commiserated with Jewish grandmothers who wondered what kind of future their grandchildren would inherit.

Then she went to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, where she encountered the despair of youth amidst unemployment and the Israeli blockade of towns. There, too, Palestinian grandmothers wondered about the future of their grandchildren. Ms See helped distribute food to the needy, entering their lives with the same compassion that she had felt for Palestinians. Here was a Singaporean Christian who was acting as a human bridge between Jews and Muslims — two other children of Abraham — in a conflict that had turned the Holy Land — holy to all three Abrahamic faiths — into a cruelly contested site of occupation, violence, suicide-bombings and reprisals.

That experience made her decide to sell her apartment in Singapore to pay for a Master's degree programme at the famed Hartford Seminary in the United States, where she delved deeply into Islamic Studies and Christian-Muslim relations. “I started as a Christian with an exclusive view; I am now a Christian with a pluralistic view. I no longer insist that only I have ‘the truth’”, she wrote in a collection of essays, Religious Diversity in Singapore, edited by Lai Ah Eng.

In Israel, she met Jewish interfaith educator Yehezkel Landau, co-founder of Open House, a centre for peace and co-existence among Israeli Arabs and Jews in the mixed city of Ramle. On her return to Singapore, she hosted Yehezkel and other representatives from the Inter-religious Coordinating Council in Israel for a six-day study trip that took them to temples, mosques, churches, synagogues and other religious institutions.