Imagine there’s no countries. Imagine Woodstock for Peace

This is your job, they told me. You will have two six-hour shifts and will be walking around for most of it, keeping alert at all times.

Two six-hour shifts? For the weeks beforehand, I was anxious yet excited. I told many people about it, shared the link, invited friends. I couldn’t understand how other people hadn’t heard of it, weren’t coming.

Woodstock for Peace. My job was to be a Nomad of the Heart. In other words, I was to walk around the festival site, checking people were okay. Yes, you heard me right, but I’ll say it again just in case. I was to spend 12 hours out of the three days and nights walking around the festival, checking everyone was okay.

You may ask, why on earth wouldn’t people be okay? After all, they bought a ticket. They wanted to go. They knew what they were getting themselves into.

No?

I’ve been to quite a few music festivals, in my time. Drugs, sex and rock and roll. Yes. And don’t forget the bucket. My friends used to laugh at me, but when the toilets became so incredibly disgusting they’d had enough of being grossed out, holding their breath and closing their eyes, they and our other tent neighbours would come begging to use it. I let them, and without a fee. Silly, really. I could have made a fortune.

I remember Oasis performing on the main stage, and being warned to stay away from large young men with plastic glasses full of a yellow liquid. The lads’ idea of a good time was throwing them into the crowd. Unfortunately, a few of my friends found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, and suddenly their long and beautiful brown or blonde hair was covered in the stuff. We spent the rest of the evening trying to wash urine out of their hair in the freezing cold water provided by the festival taps.

Or that other time, when I crawled, yes crawled, from tent to tent, trying to find my way ‘home’. Where the hell was my tent? It took the whole night, and part of the morning, for me to find it.

I can’t remember eating anything at these festivals. But I do remember huge burger bars and the constant smell of roasted dead animal and fried onions and potatoes.

I haven’t been to a music festival for at least twenty years. And if you’d asked me a year ago if I would ever go to one again, the answer would have been a firm no.

A year ago, I don’t think I had any intention of celebrating anything again. Even the thought of celebrating my son’s birthday this year on the eleventh of October turned my stomach. How could we do such a thing, when our brothers and sisters were still, still! starving in tunnels, or dying in their thousands in Gaza and Lebanon (and yes I mean Israeli soldiers and innocent Palestinian and Lebanese citizens) and so many people have been forced out of their homes in the south and the north, and have no idea when they will be able to go back.

Everything often feels so hopeless. The demonstrations for the return of the hostages go on and on. I go each week to at least one.

I wear three yellow ribbons on one wrist, one on the other, one even in my hair; we have our yellow ribbons on the car, and ‘decorating’ the house.

On and on time goes, and I’m in a million WhatsApp groups and a million organisations for peace, to release the hostages, to stop the war. And yet I go to work every day and life carries on and nothing changes.

Nothing changes.

What good does any of it do?

So I certainly never would have thought, in the midst of this ongoing hell, of going to a music festival, like the Nova partygoers. The images of the bullet-ridden doors of the toilets, of the rockets in the sky like fireworks, of the screaming, running away terrified youngsters, of those who hid who made it, and those who didn’t, still haunt me every day. All of this in the desert. We went there. We saw pictures and evidence of the devastation.

And then we heard of the Woodstock for Peace festival in the desert, and I knew that all three of us had to be a part of it.

We got there five hours before it all began with the rest of the volunteers, to be guided around and have our jobs explained to us, as we had been guided on Zoom a few evenings before. Baruch, my husband, was to work on the information desk, where people would go to find out anything they needed to know about the festival or if they, or their children got lost. My 8-year-old son said he wanted to help me, to be a little Nomad.

I can’t, and it wouldn’t, do the festival justice even if I were to give every single detail of it. When people ask me to describe it, I tell them how those three days were some of the best of my life so far.

Think of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ coming to life for three days of your life. Imagine all the people living in the moment, for the music, every kind of music you could possibly imagine, on the main stage and on the small stage, throughout the day and half the night, famous and not yet famous, together as equals, for the art everywhere, paintings of our hostages beautiful and large as life near the tent corner, for the peace workshops with Arab and Jewish speakers, for the prayers, the meditation, the spontaneous creation of art, music and dance in corners all over the site, for the exhibitions, like Etty Hillesums’ words on giant cards hung on a long line for all to see, and Women Wage Peace’s “Pieces for Peace” displaying patches of imagined peace sown together to create stunning quilts, for the Liberation Station and the Safe Zone and the Café with its tiny delicious chocolate treats and the outdoor restaurant with its vegan salads and heart-warming soups (and not a disposable cup, plate or fork in sight – everything eco-friendly), for the children’s corner with the giant boat made of wood, for the random conversations and genuine friend making, for every moment being in that moment.

And for the constantly clean toilets, because one of the many volunteer teams was dedicated to keeping the whole site clean the whole time. For hot water and warm showers.  For people being constantly looked after by all the Nomads of the heart, including our little boy who handed out heart stickers to so many surprised and delighted festival goers. For no lost people. For crying or sad or traumatised people being comforted. Imagine no countries, just Israel and Palestine and America and Germany and England and all the other nations who were there, joining together, no religion, simply praying and singing together, Judaism and Islam and Christianity and Buddhism and whatever else all merged into one. Imagine a place where the people are heavenly, and kind and true, and the atmosphere is one for dreamers.

Two thousand five hundred festival goers together, of all ages – the majority young but many middle-aged and some even elderly — envisioning and being inside a world of peace. Not enough of course. Still not enough. Yet enough, yes, enough of us together to know a future of peace is possible for this country.

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

Photos by Shoshana Lavan