As I am sitting here at midnight on a moonless night in Tel Aviv, Israel, I find
myself wondering how I could best contribute to this much - discussed subject.
The quiet night and the silence of the sky are so much in contrast to the firing
and battles of the day, as if the two sides take their rest before the next battle.
It is sad that each family here has had three generations of soldiers figting our wars.

Each generation brought hopes for peace, hopes that they will not know the smell
of gunpowder, and hopes that peace and mutual freedom will be the rulers of their lives.

Sometimes, I wonder if the bloodshed would continue on like this if the leaders
of the two sides were women, if the leaders had to bear the babies, breastfeed them
and protect them until an age where they coulb let them go. Would they let go of them
to die in the battlefields? I wonder if a Palestinian mother and an Israeli mother would
work out an earlier settlement of a peace agreement, if they would build universities,
if they would grow fields of organic food, if they would develop the land, and if they
would invest in culture and education. In peace, there is no need for boundaries to be
guarded by soldiers. In peace, there is no need to invest in guns and war weapons.
In peace, there is an opportunity for freedom and prosperity for all.

As I am sitting here daydreming on this calm night, I know that our reality is that the
leaders of the region will continue to use the weapons of wer, and the mothers of the
two sides will continue to bury their sons.

When I was a young girl, I had this fantasy of being a leader, one associated with
heroism. Being a daughter of a partisan and a fighter of the Warsaw ghetto uprising,
I have heard many heroic stories about my father. Everyone called him a hero, and
he received a very high medal of honor from the polish government for his heroic
actions in saving 400 people during the wer. He hid the people in the woods and
brought food to their hiding places. My father was a hero, dut was he a leader?
He was not a leader in the sense of holding a torch for peopele to follow. He was not
a charismatic man, and he was very humble and quiet, never bragging about his past.
In fact, I first learned about my father's heroism long after it all happened. It was just by coincidence, while living in Montreal, when an old man there asked me for my maiden
name. When I told him, he inquired about my father's name and origin, and, from that
moment, he couldn't stop telling me about him, how he was searching for him all these
years, about the fact that my father saved his life and the lives of his entire family. That
was the first time I ever heard of the 400 people he saved. My father paid a high price
for not disclosing the hiding places of Jews. The SS killed his wife and two children,
and he himself was tortured, lost an eye, and was shot in the lags and chest.

My father never wanted the praise and the fame he could have received. As I analyze
this now, I know he was a hero, but not necessarily a leader. He definitely challenged
the status quo, and his goal was to save many people from the hands of the Nazis.
He definitely had his set of values and priorities well focused, but he was not a visionary.
I am not sure if he planned one step beyond the one he took at each moment.

I believe that leaders are born out of conflicting sets of needs that are being expressed
by groups of people. Leaders recognize these needs and are driven to satisfy them.
If it's wartime, economic upheaval, famine, environmental tragedies, or threat of any
kind to large groups of people, leders recognize the needs and move for ward to satisfy
these needs. On the other hand, they also recognize the needs and take action at times
when prosperity requires direc tion, organizations require structure, overflow of information requires prioritization, etc. Different times, conditions, and realities require different leaders
with different sats of values and standards.

I believe that some leaders will emerge and even surprise themselves at the moment of
crisis and need. Often, leaders discover themselves in the process of leadership.

Today, when I look back at my own life, I can recognize some threads of my fatherws
legacy to me. I set standards and coach people to achieve their goals and visions. In many venues, I am a pioneer as I seek new challenges and communicate my vision to others.

One does not have to be a hero in order to lead. That kind of leadership might be long
gone, but I still find it so romantic. Why not dare to dream of this kind of leadership?