This year, Christmas, Eid ul Fitr - the end of Ramadan celebration - and Hanukah were all in the same week, which happens once in only 33 years.
Taking advantage of this coincidence, Palestinian Christians and Muslims held peace prayers in San Francisco's Union Square. In Fremont, across San Francisco Bay, another group of Muslims prayed for peace in the Middle East. In San Jose, south of San Francisco, old enemies from the subcontinent - Indian Hindus and Pakistani Muslims - attended a large Eid fair to share each other's joy.
"If only we could do that [come together] back home," said Ridhwan Al-Khaleel, an electrical engineer from Mosul, Iraq who came to the United States in 1996 to escape Saddam Hussein's "repressive regime."
Tears rolled down the cheeks of Robin Van Tassell at the Union Square vigil while listening to a group of Palestinian children praying for peace.
"If only we could get together like this in Israel, it will rekindle the hopes for peace," said Michael Schwartz, a U.S. national who lives in Israel, but is visiting his parents in San Francisco.
"I came to watch the peace vigil because it is a rare sight for me, particularly after this year's violence."
On Sept. 28, Israel's right-wing opposition leader visited Jerusalem's Temple Mount, a site is sacred to Muslims and Jews, triggering a wave of violence that has already killed more than 350 people, mostly Palestinians.
Arab Christians in the Bay Area listened to the Arabic-language Mass at St. Anne of the Sunset Church on San Francisco's Judah Street. Their pastor, Labib Kobti, was 17 when enrolled in the Catholic seminary near Bethlehem in 1967. He left the Holy Land during the Six-Day War between Arabs and Israel.
He stays in touch with his relatives and friends in Bethlehem through e-mail and phone.
"Celebrations in the Holy Land? Instead of Christmas trees and lights, they are decorating the churches there with broken windows and broken icons," he said when asked how was the Christmas in Bethlehem this year.
He said his relatives had to leave their village to find refuge from Israeli attacks.
"Yes, but it is only in self-defense," said Schwartz adding that the "Palestinians are using the incident at the Temple Mount to start another intifada or uprising against Israel."
"But in North America, such differences of opinion do not lead to violence," says Al-Khaleel. "It is because the freedom to express your opinion ventilates your feeling and cools down tempers."
Al-Khaleel said that in his native Iraq, "if a child went to school and said he did not like Saddam, his entire family would disappear, simply vanish from the face of the earth."
Compared to tensions and tears at Union Square, the atmosphere at the San Jose Eid fair was more joyous, although those who gathered there are as bitterly divided as the Arabs and Israelis, if not more.
But, as President Clinton pointed out in his visit to the subcontinent in March this year, "the Indians and Pakistanis are surprisingly good friends while in the United States." Not so back home, where they have already fought three wars since their independence from Britain in 1947. In 1998 both tested nuclear devices and are now busy developing nuclear weapons.
The Himalayan valley of Kashmir, where India and Pakistan are still fighting each other, was far from the thoughts of Shahzad Khan, a Pakistani from Peshawar. He was more concerned about how to meet the Indian girl he was dating. She got stuck in the traffic jam and was now calling on his cell phone to find an alternative route.
"Why fight when you can love each other?" he said, laughing loudly.
"Back in the Middle East or the subcontinent, we are the prisoners of history. We cannot escape the bitterness of past. We need to learn to forgive and forget," says Ismail Habibi, a software engineer from a village near Tel Aviv who now lives in San Jose.
Copyright 2000 by United Press International.
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