This morning we met with a woman named Ayala, who is the current head of the Israeli Black Panthers Party. She is a Moroccan Jew. Her parents immigrated here in 1952 during what was a second wave of Arab Jewish immigration to Israel. During the War of Independence in 1948 many Jews in Arab countries were no longer really welcome in those Arab countries and about 1 million of them immigrated to Israel. Israel enticed them here because it was eager to populate the country with as many Jews as possible. However, given that their culture, as Arabs, was very different from that of the Anglo European Jews who were the founders of the Zionist movement and the leaders of the newly formed state, they found themselves ghettoized almost immediately upon arrival. They were first put in settlement camps and then relocated to homes vacated by Palestinians. They tended to be sent to locations along the border of the newly created State to stake the claim of Israel to those new borders. They generally held the lower paying, lower status jobs in Israel and were not welcome to mix with the European Jews. In Jerusalem, they were housed in an urban ghetto, not far from the Old City. They did not have the same educational opportunities as the European Jews and they faced considerable discrimination. Their situation was, and remains, similar to the conditions that African Americans suffered even after the abolition of slavery in terms of being second class citizens, living in segregated, walled off areas of cities and towns, with much less economic opportunity available to them and facing prejudice because of their dark skin.
Ayala was one of 10 children. When her family first arrived in Jerusalem, they were housed in a home in the Mizrahi section of town, that had formally been a Palestinian neighborhood. After the 1967 war the Israeli government moved her family to a housing project that they built for the Middle Eastern Jews. As Ayala described her childhood, she said that the Middle Eastern Jews got along well with the Palestinians because they all shared a language and culture. They all felt equally alienated from the European Jewish White majority. During the early 70s her brother founded the Israeli Black Panther party, which worked to bring justice to the Middle Eastern Jews, sometimes with violent consequences. Ayala’s brother spent time in jail and she has done her share of jail time too. In fact, she is going to jail next week for 8 days, because of her current activities among the homeless population of her neighborhood. They had a “tent in” (kind of like a sit in only they stayed in tents in the city to protest the lack of affordable housing for the poor and the plight of the many homeless people in their neighborhood) and when the event was over the Israeli police arrested her because they said she didn’t clean up the area properly when the event was done. (Which is a joke because if you could see the streets of E. Jerusalem and her neighborhood in particular you would see that littering is quite obviously a common practice by everyone!!). To this day there is considerable distance and hostility between the Mizrahi Jews and the Ashkenazi Jews. Ayala is now the head of the current Black Panther Party and she is committed to community organizing and to working to better the living conditions for these Middle Eastern Jews.
Ayala believes there should be one, binational state. She also suggested that the Israeli government would be well served to invite the Mizrahi Jews into the negotiations with the Palestinians because these Jews and the Palestinians get along well, understand each other’s language and culture and they could be very helpful in bridging the gap between the Palestinians and the mainstream Israeli Jews. She also said that considerable work needs to be done in Israel to heal relations among the Ashkenazi Jews and the Mizrahi Jews. As she described the situation here, it sounded remarkably like the issues between whites and African Americans in the United States. A lot of churches and other groups are working hard to do anti-racism work, to begin to bridge the cultural and economic gaps between whites and African Americans. From what Ayala told us, the same anti-racism process would be most helpful here between these two very different groups of Jews.
We have come to the end of our incredible journey and we are all feeling exhausted and somewhat overwhelmed by all we’ve seen and heard. It has been a very full and rich two weeks as we have gone into the belly of the beast in this conflict. Several of us have remarked that although we have not done the traditional “Pilgrimage Tour” of the Holy Land, visiting religious shrines and sites of Biblical significance, we have in fact walked in the steps of Jesus by spending our time among the oppressed and marginalized. Ironically, if Jesus were alive today, he would be dealing with the prejudice, the apartheid, and the oppression that we have witnessed in the West Bank and E. Jerusalem because he was a Palestinian Jew! It seems fitting to have spent my first tour of the Holy Land doing this work, rather than visiting tourist shrines.
We leave here at 3:00 am to get to Tel Aviv for a 6:00 flight. If all goes well, I will arrive back in Rochester some 27 hours later! Let’s hope I manage to get through 4 airports with no delays, lost luggage or other adventures!
Friday, August 8, 2008
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Non Violent Resistance
Today we headed back into the West Bank to visit two villages north of Ramallah that are engaged in significant non-violent resistance to the construction of the separation wall, or apartheid wall, through their villages. We stopped first at Nilin, where we met guides who are active in the grass roots organization there that stages weekly demonstrations against the continued building of the wall. The Israeli government is taking 60% of the remaining land that belongs to the village and that is used by the villagers as farm land. This is active farmland that they do cultivate and which provides income for them. The land is being taken by the Israelis to build the separation wall. In the past two weeks there have been two well publicized incidents during these weekly non-violent demonstrations. Israeli soldiers shot and killed a nine year old child two weeks ago, who was walking with members of his family during the demonstration. His uncle was one of our guides today. And his art teacher from school was also with us and showed us a drawing the child had done just days before he was killed. It showed several houses standing side by side. On one house was a Palestinian flag and on the one next door was an Israeli flag. When the teacher asked him why he drew a picture of two houses with the different flags he replied that he hoped that it would be possible for Israelis and Palestinians to live next door to each other. And just last week, two teenagers were shot, one was killed instantly and the other is in the hospital with serious injuries and is not expected to survive. The boy who died last week was 17 years old. When the villagers stage these demonstrations, which are always non-violent, in which they do not carry any weapons, the Israeli soldiers shoot them with rubber coated bullets, tear gas canisters, and concussion grenades. They also routinely beat the demonstrators. These demonstrations have gotten a great deal of publicity around the world and frequently are attended not only by the local citizens of Bilin and Nilin but also by human rights and peace activists from Israel, Palestine and international organizations. We watched a video of the Bilin demonstrations and were surprised to see John, our Christian Peacemaker Team guide from Hebron on the film footage. CPT teams regularly accompany the demonstrators in Bilin and Nilin. In Nilin we got out of the bus on the main street in the village and our guide took us on the dusty, rocky local path out to the olive tree fields where we could see the construction vehicles that are working on the extension of the wall. We also could see, just across the ridge, a black Hummer with an Israeli soldier standing beside it gun in hand. He was keeping a close eye on us the entire time we were out there.
The villagers told us of the repercussions they face from the Israeli military as a result of their non-violent resistance. Not only do they face the violent response from the military when they are demonstrating, but the leaders of the local community group are often taken by the soldiers from their homes in the middle of the night and carted off to prison, charged with being violent terrorists or liberation fighters. One man spoke of the trauma his children are feeling because the soldiers also shoot randomly into the villager’s homes. His son was hit on the shoulder by a rubber bullet and has had symptoms of PTSD ever since. The land that the Israelis are taking represents a significant portion of the land that remains after the 1948 and 1967 wars in which the vast majority of the land that used to be theirs was taken. It is part of the ongoing “war” by the Israelis against the Palestinians in the West Bank and the intentional and concerted effort to simply drive them off the land entirely. As we stood on the hilltop in the olive grove in Nilin we could see the Israeli settlements all around, on every hill. The contrast between the Israeli settlements and the Palestinian villages is striking. The settlements consist of modern homes with manicured lawns, electricity, water, municipal services, and well paved roads with ready access to Jerusalem and other Israeli cities. The villages by contrast are often deprived of water, municipal services like garbage pick up, and have been so isolated by the snaking of the wall through the West Bank that the villagers can’t easily get from one town to the next because of blocked roads and checkpoints. Roads that the settlers can take to get from one place to the next are off limits to Palestinian villagers. They are forced onto secondary roads, that snake miles around the Israeli settlements so that they often have to go 20 miles to get from one place to the next when the actual distance is only a mile or so. The barriers to movement and the taking of the villagers’ land has caused unemployment to skyrocket among the Palestinian villages in the West Bank.
After our visit to Nilin we went to Bilin where we climbed the very steep hill up to the point where the Israeli army is building the separation wall and where the weekly Friday demonstrations take place. Our guide pointed out that every Friday, at the same time as religious Christian pilgrims are walking the Via Dolorosa in the old city of Jerusalem, the villagers of Bilin are walking their own Via Dolorosa as they march in protest against the occupation and specifically the building of the wall through their village. When we got to the barrier point where the demonstrations usually end, we got out of the bus to take photographs. Two Israeli soldiers shortly arrived and kept a very close watch on us from the other side of the fence. Soon, an armored car arrived to back up the two soldiers. Since we were obviously tourists and not demonstrators the soldiers did not bother us, but the tension of the region was palpable as we felt ourselves being watched and scrutinized by two young men carrying weapons.
We had lunch in the home of one of the organizers of the Bilin and Nilin resistance movement. It was true Palestinian hospitality as we sat in his living room, served by his wife and children a delicious lunch of grilled chicken and rice with yogurt and vegetables. In his home were posters with the picture of the 17 year old who was killed last week. I took a picture of his three year old daughter holding that poster up for all of us to see. Once again, we were reminded of the extent to which this occupation and the conflict it is causing is harming yet another generation of innocent children. All these Palestinian families want is to raise their children without fear and with sufficient food, clothing and other life necessities. And everything that the Israeli government is doing is making it next to impossible for parents to raise their children in peace and safety. And then there were the reports yesterday in Sderot of Jewish children growing up traumatized by the Kassam rockets landing in their neighborhoods with alarming regularity.
We then went to Birzeit University, one of the premier universities in the Palestinian West Bank. There we learned of the challenges they face trying to run a university under the conditions of the occupation. They have trouble keeping faculty, because they cannot pay very much and only faculty who live close to the school can work there because of the checkpoints and diversions that make it difficult for anyone other than local residents to get there with any ease. They have also suffered closures of the university by the Israeli government. Their student body has become mostly local young people again because of the difficulty of travel through the West Bank. It is so hard for Palestinians to move about with the checkpoints and closed or diverted roads, that people are deterred from commuting to the university from any distance. We spoke with some students who expressed their feeling that life under occupation is like living in a prison. They are not free to come and go, many of them cannot study abroad because they cannot get a visa to get out of the country, they cannot go to Jerusalem because they don’t have the blue identity card, they have green ones which limit them to the West Bank and on and on.
From there we returned to E. Jerusalem to meet with a representative of Combatants for Peace, a relatively new human rights organization comprised of former Israeli soldiers who believe that this conflict cannot be resolved by force and militarism and Palestinians who have served time in Israeli prisons due to their resistance to the occupation, whether violent or non-violent. The man who spoke to us was Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian who has spent 6 years in Israeli prison. He told us briefly the history of this organization, which started in 2005 when he and a few other Palestinians met with some Israeli soldiers who were disillusioned with the militaristic activities of the Israeli government and began dialogue. Their group gradually grew in number and held a big meeting in 2006 with over 400 people in attendance, including members of the PLO and Hamas. In January 2007, Mr. Aramin was asked to speak at Tel Aviv University. He went to do his talk and there were demonstrators there because by then this organization was well known and protests were common when they were doing speaking events. During the course of that day, Mr. Aramin’s 10 year old daughter, Abir, was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier. Her younger sister was standing right next to her, holding her hand when she fell to the ground. Mr. Aramin has made it clear that he wants justice for his daughter, but not revenge and he is pursuing justice through the military tribunals of the Israeli army, assisted by a human rights organization that provides legal assistance. Mr. Aramin does a lot of public speaking, using this tragedy as a platform to promote his belief in non-violent resolutions to conflict. There was nary a dry eye in the house when he held up a picture of his daughter and said, quietly, “This is not the face of a Palestinian terrorist.” He and the organization have made it part of their agenda to publicize and thereby educate the public about the number of incidents of brutal behavior by young Israeli soldiers, incidents that in many cases qualify as “war crimes.” Mr. Aramin says he is convinced that the average Israeli parent who sends their teenagers off to the mandatory military service required of all 18-21 year olds have no idea exactly what they do during that service. He believes many of them would be outraged at what really goes on and would be sympathetic and desirous of stopping it.
Today was another tough day, emotionally. Once again I was struck by the impact this endless conflict is having on another entire generation of children. The slaughter of the innocents continues day after day. The bullets, the tear gas, the endless, senseless violence. What was encouraging was again to meet people who are committed to working for peace through non-violent means, who believe that fighting with weapons and continuing the cycle of violence will do nothing to end the conflict. The Palestinians we met today are inspiring in their commitment to work for justice without revenge, to pursue peace even when they are being consistently made the victims of violence, when their lives are unnecessarily complicated and oppressed by the occupying force. In the past two weeks we have met many, many Palestinians who want to work for a peaceful resolution to this conflict. It goes without saying that the notion that all Palestinians are terrorists is nothing more than Israeli (and all too often American) propaganda, designed to dehumanize an entire people and to justify relentless violence at their expense. It is time we put a human face on this conflict so that Abir Bassam, the nine year old boy who died two weeks ago and the teenager who died last week will be among the last children to die in this adult conflict.
The villagers told us of the repercussions they face from the Israeli military as a result of their non-violent resistance. Not only do they face the violent response from the military when they are demonstrating, but the leaders of the local community group are often taken by the soldiers from their homes in the middle of the night and carted off to prison, charged with being violent terrorists or liberation fighters. One man spoke of the trauma his children are feeling because the soldiers also shoot randomly into the villager’s homes. His son was hit on the shoulder by a rubber bullet and has had symptoms of PTSD ever since. The land that the Israelis are taking represents a significant portion of the land that remains after the 1948 and 1967 wars in which the vast majority of the land that used to be theirs was taken. It is part of the ongoing “war” by the Israelis against the Palestinians in the West Bank and the intentional and concerted effort to simply drive them off the land entirely. As we stood on the hilltop in the olive grove in Nilin we could see the Israeli settlements all around, on every hill. The contrast between the Israeli settlements and the Palestinian villages is striking. The settlements consist of modern homes with manicured lawns, electricity, water, municipal services, and well paved roads with ready access to Jerusalem and other Israeli cities. The villages by contrast are often deprived of water, municipal services like garbage pick up, and have been so isolated by the snaking of the wall through the West Bank that the villagers can’t easily get from one town to the next because of blocked roads and checkpoints. Roads that the settlers can take to get from one place to the next are off limits to Palestinian villagers. They are forced onto secondary roads, that snake miles around the Israeli settlements so that they often have to go 20 miles to get from one place to the next when the actual distance is only a mile or so. The barriers to movement and the taking of the villagers’ land has caused unemployment to skyrocket among the Palestinian villages in the West Bank.
After our visit to Nilin we went to Bilin where we climbed the very steep hill up to the point where the Israeli army is building the separation wall and where the weekly Friday demonstrations take place. Our guide pointed out that every Friday, at the same time as religious Christian pilgrims are walking the Via Dolorosa in the old city of Jerusalem, the villagers of Bilin are walking their own Via Dolorosa as they march in protest against the occupation and specifically the building of the wall through their village. When we got to the barrier point where the demonstrations usually end, we got out of the bus to take photographs. Two Israeli soldiers shortly arrived and kept a very close watch on us from the other side of the fence. Soon, an armored car arrived to back up the two soldiers. Since we were obviously tourists and not demonstrators the soldiers did not bother us, but the tension of the region was palpable as we felt ourselves being watched and scrutinized by two young men carrying weapons.
We had lunch in the home of one of the organizers of the Bilin and Nilin resistance movement. It was true Palestinian hospitality as we sat in his living room, served by his wife and children a delicious lunch of grilled chicken and rice with yogurt and vegetables. In his home were posters with the picture of the 17 year old who was killed last week. I took a picture of his three year old daughter holding that poster up for all of us to see. Once again, we were reminded of the extent to which this occupation and the conflict it is causing is harming yet another generation of innocent children. All these Palestinian families want is to raise their children without fear and with sufficient food, clothing and other life necessities. And everything that the Israeli government is doing is making it next to impossible for parents to raise their children in peace and safety. And then there were the reports yesterday in Sderot of Jewish children growing up traumatized by the Kassam rockets landing in their neighborhoods with alarming regularity.
We then went to Birzeit University, one of the premier universities in the Palestinian West Bank. There we learned of the challenges they face trying to run a university under the conditions of the occupation. They have trouble keeping faculty, because they cannot pay very much and only faculty who live close to the school can work there because of the checkpoints and diversions that make it difficult for anyone other than local residents to get there with any ease. They have also suffered closures of the university by the Israeli government. Their student body has become mostly local young people again because of the difficulty of travel through the West Bank. It is so hard for Palestinians to move about with the checkpoints and closed or diverted roads, that people are deterred from commuting to the university from any distance. We spoke with some students who expressed their feeling that life under occupation is like living in a prison. They are not free to come and go, many of them cannot study abroad because they cannot get a visa to get out of the country, they cannot go to Jerusalem because they don’t have the blue identity card, they have green ones which limit them to the West Bank and on and on.
From there we returned to E. Jerusalem to meet with a representative of Combatants for Peace, a relatively new human rights organization comprised of former Israeli soldiers who believe that this conflict cannot be resolved by force and militarism and Palestinians who have served time in Israeli prisons due to their resistance to the occupation, whether violent or non-violent. The man who spoke to us was Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian who has spent 6 years in Israeli prison. He told us briefly the history of this organization, which started in 2005 when he and a few other Palestinians met with some Israeli soldiers who were disillusioned with the militaristic activities of the Israeli government and began dialogue. Their group gradually grew in number and held a big meeting in 2006 with over 400 people in attendance, including members of the PLO and Hamas. In January 2007, Mr. Aramin was asked to speak at Tel Aviv University. He went to do his talk and there were demonstrators there because by then this organization was well known and protests were common when they were doing speaking events. During the course of that day, Mr. Aramin’s 10 year old daughter, Abir, was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier. Her younger sister was standing right next to her, holding her hand when she fell to the ground. Mr. Aramin has made it clear that he wants justice for his daughter, but not revenge and he is pursuing justice through the military tribunals of the Israeli army, assisted by a human rights organization that provides legal assistance. Mr. Aramin does a lot of public speaking, using this tragedy as a platform to promote his belief in non-violent resolutions to conflict. There was nary a dry eye in the house when he held up a picture of his daughter and said, quietly, “This is not the face of a Palestinian terrorist.” He and the organization have made it part of their agenda to publicize and thereby educate the public about the number of incidents of brutal behavior by young Israeli soldiers, incidents that in many cases qualify as “war crimes.” Mr. Aramin says he is convinced that the average Israeli parent who sends their teenagers off to the mandatory military service required of all 18-21 year olds have no idea exactly what they do during that service. He believes many of them would be outraged at what really goes on and would be sympathetic and desirous of stopping it.
Today was another tough day, emotionally. Once again I was struck by the impact this endless conflict is having on another entire generation of children. The slaughter of the innocents continues day after day. The bullets, the tear gas, the endless, senseless violence. What was encouraging was again to meet people who are committed to working for peace through non-violent means, who believe that fighting with weapons and continuing the cycle of violence will do nothing to end the conflict. The Palestinians we met today are inspiring in their commitment to work for justice without revenge, to pursue peace even when they are being consistently made the victims of violence, when their lives are unnecessarily complicated and oppressed by the occupying force. In the past two weeks we have met many, many Palestinians who want to work for a peaceful resolution to this conflict. It goes without saying that the notion that all Palestinians are terrorists is nothing more than Israeli (and all too often American) propaganda, designed to dehumanize an entire people and to justify relentless violence at their expense. It is time we put a human face on this conflict so that Abir Bassam, the nine year old boy who died two weeks ago and the teenager who died last week will be among the last children to die in this adult conflict.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
The Other Voice
Today we travelled south, to Sderot, which is an Israeli town right on the border of the Gaza strip. Sderot is somewhat infamous as it is a town which regularly is bombarded with Kassam rockets shot from the Gaza strip. We met with representatives from two different Kibbutzim, and one representative of a community organization that tries to work with marginalized groups in the Sderot kibbutzim communities.
As we drove out of Bethlehem and onto a “settler” road heading south, it was palpable how different was the landscape. In the Palestinian territories, the buildings and the villages are tired, worn, dirty, crumbling – they look much like any ghetto in urban America to a great extent. As soon as we were on a settler road and passing through Israeli settlements and developments, the scenery was much more like any main highway strip in Middle America, with clean, well equipped gas stations, well trimmed landscaping, middle class homes and the like. One of our members quipped as we were moving along, “When do we get to Palm Beach?” It does look a lot like Florida! Obviously, because Israel is such a young country and because it was a planned country, everything that has been built by the Israelis is new (relatively speaking) and of good quality and clearly built for and inhabited by well to do people.
We arrived at the offices of Gvanim, a community organization located near the Kibbutz Migvan, an urban kibbutz, that has been in existence only 21 years. Chen Abrahams gave us a presentation on the work they do at Gvanim, which is a mixture of programs for pre school children, for youth, for disabled children and youth, for parents, for the elderly and the like. The Kibbutz Migvan community and much of Sderot is a multicultural community, comprised of Jews from Morroco, Russia, Ethiopia and other developing countries. Because of the multiculturalism, the standard of living is lower than in many Israeli settlements and the social issues they face are more complex because of the diversity of the population they serve. Chen described life in Sderot and it is a hard life, despite the fact that these people obviously are considerably better off than the Palestinian villagers we’ve been talking to the past few days. Sderot is so close to the Gaza strip that it has been the locus of continuous attacks by Kassam rockets for several years now. Chen described how the entire population is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, particularly the children. There are cement shelters all over the neighborhoods and many people have cement shelters in their homes to which they flee when the sirens go off signaling an attack by kassams. Chen described how her 9 year old son will not sleep alone because he is so afraid of hearing the siren during the night that he won’t sleep away from his parents. Apparently, he is not alone in that chronic fear. And it is not unfounded fear. These Israelis are justifiably fearful because rockets really do land in their backyards with alarming regularity. Chen was quite candid when questioned about what she hopes for in terms of a future for Israel and Palestine. She expressed a hope for a one state solution. She understands why the Palestinians resent the Israelis and she expressed a desire to find a way for all of them to share the land and live in peace. She was very clear that she would love to see them find a path to non-violent co-existence and was adamant that she wishes her child could grow up in a climate not marked by extreme fear and not polluted by hatred.
We then heard from Eric Yellin of the Migvan Community who has founded an organization called “Other Voices” dedicated to instigating and facilitating dialogue between Israelis and Gaza strip Palestinians. This is a group of citizens on both sides of the border who want to engage in dialogue to find a solution to their conflict and who believe that violence is not the answer and that neither the Palestinian Authority nor the Israeli government are capable of fixing the problems. They are a real grass roots movement, and they have recruited members from diverse constituencies in both Israel and the Gaza strip. They are staging an event this Friday, a bike rally, to draw attention to their call for peace through dialogue and bridge building. Eric told us how frustrating it is that the folks on the other side of the border will not be able to participate in the bike rally because Gazans are under house curfew due to recent violence that has broken out in the Gaza strip amongst Palestinian factions there. He did say some of his contacts over there are hoping to participate by phone on Friday, even though they can’t come to Israel or even stage their own parallel event. He related how the Palestinians in the Gaza strip have difficulty even meeting together as a group because of the ban on public assembly. Listening to him gave many of us hope. His willingness to befriend Palestinians in the Gaza strip and his witness that there are groups of people on both sides of the border who want to work for peace was very encouraging. What he said was that the reason Other Voices has been founded is because the people on both sides of the border have concluded that their governmental leaders are not going to bring peace. They really believe that they have to form relationships and build bridges at the grass roots level and hope that they can bring about change from the bottom up.
We then visited another kibbutz, Kibbutz Zikim, a traditional agricultural kibbutz, a stone’s throw from the Gaza border. There an older woman, Edna, who came to the kibbutz in 1957 spoke to us about kibbutz life. This is truly the old school kibbutz – “from each according to his ability to each according to his need.” Everyone works on the kibbutz and all receive the same “salary” whether they serve as a janitor or the principal of the school. Children go to school on the kibbutz but now live with their parents, unlike in the early years when they were raised in a children’s house so as to free their mothers up to participate fully in kibbutz life. Now, because of the kassam rockets and the fear that that incurs in both children and parents, the raising of children has returned to the private nuclear family unit. They get housing, medical care, social and cultural events, household services like cleaning and laundry. They are now into the third generation on the kibbutz, and while things have changed since Edna arrived in 1957, she believes they have more or less kept to their original principles and ideology. She described them as very “left wing” politically. She also described the constant bombardment with kassam rockets and how that affects their lives. There are cement shelters all over the kibbutz so that people can dive for cover if there is an attack. When asked about the Israeli Palestinian conflict Edna was equivocal. To some degree she seemed to give the Israeli “party line” and yet she also acknowledged that the Palestinians in Gaza are suffering at the hands of the Israelis but believed that the Israelis have no choice given the constant rocket bombardments. She is of the belief that the only solution is a two state solution, because she believes the two sides are just too antagonistic ever to be able to live together in one state. It was clear listening to her and to Mayan, the guide who drove us around the kibbutz, that they are affected by the atmosphere of violence in which they constantly live. To a much lesser degree than David Wilder in Hebron, they manifest a kind of bunker mentality, or a siege mentality – rightfully so given the realities on the ground for them – which colors their view of the bigger picture of the Israeli Palestinian conflict and definitely leaves them disinclined to be critical of the Israeli government or military.
We ended our travels today by visiting the Erez Checkpoint, the only border crossing that is open between Israel and the Gaza strip. Almost no one gets through at this point – usually only people who can prove some humanitarian reason for needing to go across. The checkpoint is a fortress, heavily guarded and the guards shouted at us to stop photographing the checkpoint when we got out of the bus. A few Palestinians were going through the checkpoint, but they had been driven there by a United Nations vehicle, so we assumed that they had somehow enlisted UN assistance in getting across into Gaza for some family reason. The checkpoint was yet another vivid symbol of all that is wrong in this terrible conflict – as if cement and barbed wire and armed guards could possibly bring peace or security to either side.
These past three days have been a whirlwind of meeting people deeply involved at all levels in this intractable conflict. If there is any hope to be found in the midst of all the tragedy on the ground, it is the fact that we heard a number of people on both sides express a desire for a one state solution and a willingness to live peacefully, side by side with the other. If only we could figure out how to get past the rhetoric and the pain of the past on both sides, to facilitate the relationship building on the ground we might make that dream a reality someday. Therein lies the kernel of hope.
As we drove out of Bethlehem and onto a “settler” road heading south, it was palpable how different was the landscape. In the Palestinian territories, the buildings and the villages are tired, worn, dirty, crumbling – they look much like any ghetto in urban America to a great extent. As soon as we were on a settler road and passing through Israeli settlements and developments, the scenery was much more like any main highway strip in Middle America, with clean, well equipped gas stations, well trimmed landscaping, middle class homes and the like. One of our members quipped as we were moving along, “When do we get to Palm Beach?” It does look a lot like Florida! Obviously, because Israel is such a young country and because it was a planned country, everything that has been built by the Israelis is new (relatively speaking) and of good quality and clearly built for and inhabited by well to do people.
We arrived at the offices of Gvanim, a community organization located near the Kibbutz Migvan, an urban kibbutz, that has been in existence only 21 years. Chen Abrahams gave us a presentation on the work they do at Gvanim, which is a mixture of programs for pre school children, for youth, for disabled children and youth, for parents, for the elderly and the like. The Kibbutz Migvan community and much of Sderot is a multicultural community, comprised of Jews from Morroco, Russia, Ethiopia and other developing countries. Because of the multiculturalism, the standard of living is lower than in many Israeli settlements and the social issues they face are more complex because of the diversity of the population they serve. Chen described life in Sderot and it is a hard life, despite the fact that these people obviously are considerably better off than the Palestinian villagers we’ve been talking to the past few days. Sderot is so close to the Gaza strip that it has been the locus of continuous attacks by Kassam rockets for several years now. Chen described how the entire population is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, particularly the children. There are cement shelters all over the neighborhoods and many people have cement shelters in their homes to which they flee when the sirens go off signaling an attack by kassams. Chen described how her 9 year old son will not sleep alone because he is so afraid of hearing the siren during the night that he won’t sleep away from his parents. Apparently, he is not alone in that chronic fear. And it is not unfounded fear. These Israelis are justifiably fearful because rockets really do land in their backyards with alarming regularity. Chen was quite candid when questioned about what she hopes for in terms of a future for Israel and Palestine. She expressed a hope for a one state solution. She understands why the Palestinians resent the Israelis and she expressed a desire to find a way for all of them to share the land and live in peace. She was very clear that she would love to see them find a path to non-violent co-existence and was adamant that she wishes her child could grow up in a climate not marked by extreme fear and not polluted by hatred.
We then heard from Eric Yellin of the Migvan Community who has founded an organization called “Other Voices” dedicated to instigating and facilitating dialogue between Israelis and Gaza strip Palestinians. This is a group of citizens on both sides of the border who want to engage in dialogue to find a solution to their conflict and who believe that violence is not the answer and that neither the Palestinian Authority nor the Israeli government are capable of fixing the problems. They are a real grass roots movement, and they have recruited members from diverse constituencies in both Israel and the Gaza strip. They are staging an event this Friday, a bike rally, to draw attention to their call for peace through dialogue and bridge building. Eric told us how frustrating it is that the folks on the other side of the border will not be able to participate in the bike rally because Gazans are under house curfew due to recent violence that has broken out in the Gaza strip amongst Palestinian factions there. He did say some of his contacts over there are hoping to participate by phone on Friday, even though they can’t come to Israel or even stage their own parallel event. He related how the Palestinians in the Gaza strip have difficulty even meeting together as a group because of the ban on public assembly. Listening to him gave many of us hope. His willingness to befriend Palestinians in the Gaza strip and his witness that there are groups of people on both sides of the border who want to work for peace was very encouraging. What he said was that the reason Other Voices has been founded is because the people on both sides of the border have concluded that their governmental leaders are not going to bring peace. They really believe that they have to form relationships and build bridges at the grass roots level and hope that they can bring about change from the bottom up.
We then visited another kibbutz, Kibbutz Zikim, a traditional agricultural kibbutz, a stone’s throw from the Gaza border. There an older woman, Edna, who came to the kibbutz in 1957 spoke to us about kibbutz life. This is truly the old school kibbutz – “from each according to his ability to each according to his need.” Everyone works on the kibbutz and all receive the same “salary” whether they serve as a janitor or the principal of the school. Children go to school on the kibbutz but now live with their parents, unlike in the early years when they were raised in a children’s house so as to free their mothers up to participate fully in kibbutz life. Now, because of the kassam rockets and the fear that that incurs in both children and parents, the raising of children has returned to the private nuclear family unit. They get housing, medical care, social and cultural events, household services like cleaning and laundry. They are now into the third generation on the kibbutz, and while things have changed since Edna arrived in 1957, she believes they have more or less kept to their original principles and ideology. She described them as very “left wing” politically. She also described the constant bombardment with kassam rockets and how that affects their lives. There are cement shelters all over the kibbutz so that people can dive for cover if there is an attack. When asked about the Israeli Palestinian conflict Edna was equivocal. To some degree she seemed to give the Israeli “party line” and yet she also acknowledged that the Palestinians in Gaza are suffering at the hands of the Israelis but believed that the Israelis have no choice given the constant rocket bombardments. She is of the belief that the only solution is a two state solution, because she believes the two sides are just too antagonistic ever to be able to live together in one state. It was clear listening to her and to Mayan, the guide who drove us around the kibbutz, that they are affected by the atmosphere of violence in which they constantly live. To a much lesser degree than David Wilder in Hebron, they manifest a kind of bunker mentality, or a siege mentality – rightfully so given the realities on the ground for them – which colors their view of the bigger picture of the Israeli Palestinian conflict and definitely leaves them disinclined to be critical of the Israeli government or military.
We ended our travels today by visiting the Erez Checkpoint, the only border crossing that is open between Israel and the Gaza strip. Almost no one gets through at this point – usually only people who can prove some humanitarian reason for needing to go across. The checkpoint is a fortress, heavily guarded and the guards shouted at us to stop photographing the checkpoint when we got out of the bus. A few Palestinians were going through the checkpoint, but they had been driven there by a United Nations vehicle, so we assumed that they had somehow enlisted UN assistance in getting across into Gaza for some family reason. The checkpoint was yet another vivid symbol of all that is wrong in this terrible conflict – as if cement and barbed wire and armed guards could possibly bring peace or security to either side.
These past three days have been a whirlwind of meeting people deeply involved at all levels in this intractable conflict. If there is any hope to be found in the midst of all the tragedy on the ground, it is the fact that we heard a number of people on both sides express a desire for a one state solution and a willingness to live peacefully, side by side with the other. If only we could figure out how to get past the rhetoric and the pain of the past on both sides, to facilitate the relationship building on the ground we might make that dream a reality someday. Therein lies the kernel of hope.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
The Land
It's been an absolutely exhausting two days. After our adventure in Hebron yesterday we finished the day at Daher's vineyard, where we spent the night sleeping in a tent. We all awoke today still quite exhausted. The family running the vineyard are very inspiring people - they are working so hard and with such integrity to be peacemakers in a situation where they are surrounded, literally, by people who wish they would disappear. They have spent over $130,000 trying to defend their right to their land. They work the land, growing grapes, olives and farming with goats and chickens. They run summer camps for children and youth teaching them peacemaking skills and trying to give them hope for the future in a world that could easily look hopeless. We had breakfast at the farm at 8:30 and by 9:30 were on the road again, hiking back to our bus.
We then visited Nahalim, a small Palestinian village squeezed between Bethlehem and the surrounding settlements. We met with a representative of the Holy Land Trust which works with local communities teaching principles of non violent resistance to villagers. Many of the women of the village and their children joined us for that meeting. They expressed their willingness to work with the Israelis, to co-exist with them in this land and reading between the lines they seemed to favor a one state solution, with Palestinians gaining full citizenship rights and everyone learning to live together. The village was tiny and in a run down state as are many Palestinian areas. I felt like I'd gone through a time warp when I saw a Palestinian woman, dressed in full Muslim hijab and long black dress riding a donkey down the street with her child beside her!
We then went to Bethelem and visited the Church of the Nativity and had about 15 minutes to do shopping, before going to Badil Resource Center, a NGO that works for Refugee rights in Palestine. They do amazing work with refugees and have published a lot of material that is helpful in explaining the complicated refugee problem in this conflict.
Then we headed to the Deheishah refugee camp. This camp has been here for 60 years and many of the original residents, who fled from their villages in 1948 are still here. They are now on the third generation in the camp. We had a walking tour through the camp, which looks more like a ghetto than a camp, with very narrow streets (pedestrian only) with crumbling buildings filled with graffiti. I kept asking myself why people would choose to stay living in such a place after so long but now know, having spent the past two days immersed in Palestinian culture, that to Palestinians, "THE LAND" is in their blood. As they put it, "the land is our mother." You can no more leave your land or sell it than sell your mother or your child. The Daher family have fought for years to keep their vineyard, and the refugees here refuse to leave this camp because they are determined at all costs to retain some claim to a right of return if peace is ever negotiated between Palestine and Israel. One woman, born here, now 42 years old and mother of four, told us how difficult life is under occupation and particularly living in the camp and begged us to tell her story when we get back home and not to forget the Palestinian people. But there is no way these people will do anything that might compromise their chance of returning to the villages from which their parents were expelled 60 years ago. The stories of the village are told to each successive generation so that each one believes that they belong to that village, even though they have not seen it or lived in it. The story of the Palestinian people is completely tied to THE LAND.
Must get to bed now. I'm in a dormitory room with 10 other women at the refugee camp and am ready to drop from exhaustion. Tomorrow we are off to Sderot before returning to Jerusalem. More anon...
We then visited Nahalim, a small Palestinian village squeezed between Bethlehem and the surrounding settlements. We met with a representative of the Holy Land Trust which works with local communities teaching principles of non violent resistance to villagers. Many of the women of the village and their children joined us for that meeting. They expressed their willingness to work with the Israelis, to co-exist with them in this land and reading between the lines they seemed to favor a one state solution, with Palestinians gaining full citizenship rights and everyone learning to live together. The village was tiny and in a run down state as are many Palestinian areas. I felt like I'd gone through a time warp when I saw a Palestinian woman, dressed in full Muslim hijab and long black dress riding a donkey down the street with her child beside her!
We then went to Bethelem and visited the Church of the Nativity and had about 15 minutes to do shopping, before going to Badil Resource Center, a NGO that works for Refugee rights in Palestine. They do amazing work with refugees and have published a lot of material that is helpful in explaining the complicated refugee problem in this conflict.
Then we headed to the Deheishah refugee camp. This camp has been here for 60 years and many of the original residents, who fled from their villages in 1948 are still here. They are now on the third generation in the camp. We had a walking tour through the camp, which looks more like a ghetto than a camp, with very narrow streets (pedestrian only) with crumbling buildings filled with graffiti. I kept asking myself why people would choose to stay living in such a place after so long but now know, having spent the past two days immersed in Palestinian culture, that to Palestinians, "THE LAND" is in their blood. As they put it, "the land is our mother." You can no more leave your land or sell it than sell your mother or your child. The Daher family have fought for years to keep their vineyard, and the refugees here refuse to leave this camp because they are determined at all costs to retain some claim to a right of return if peace is ever negotiated between Palestine and Israel. One woman, born here, now 42 years old and mother of four, told us how difficult life is under occupation and particularly living in the camp and begged us to tell her story when we get back home and not to forget the Palestinian people. But there is no way these people will do anything that might compromise their chance of returning to the villages from which their parents were expelled 60 years ago. The stories of the village are told to each successive generation so that each one believes that they belong to that village, even though they have not seen it or lived in it. The story of the Palestinian people is completely tied to THE LAND.
Must get to bed now. I'm in a dormitory room with 10 other women at the refugee camp and am ready to drop from exhaustion. Tomorrow we are off to Sderot before returning to Jerusalem. More anon...
Monday, August 4, 2008
From the Ridiculous to the Sublime
This has been the most memorable day of the trip so far. As I write this I am sitting in a cave on a Palestinian farm on a hilltop about five miles from Bethlehem where we are staying the night with a Palestinian family at what is called "The Tent of Nations." We started out visiting the ancient city of Hebron, which in recent years has been the locus of significant violence between radical right wing Israeli settlers and Palestinians. This is the first time that we felt like we were in danger. It took us a long time to get through the checkpoint at the entrance to the city, and when we finally got through the checkpoint we were taken aback to see men walking around with uzzis slung over their shoulders - and they were not the police or the army! We then had a meeting with a spokesperson for the settlers - a man named David Wilder, whom we rapidly concluded is truly a dangerous person. He has a complete bunker mentality, believes all Muslims are terrorists, believes that the Israelis must resort to violence at all times in order to stay safe and on and on. Truly, it became clear as our meeting went on that this was not a person one could talk to. He is simply too far gone in his fantasy world to be reasoned with. He reminded me of the crazy religious folks like the compound in Waco, Texas some years back. It was really scary listening to him. What was even more scary was walking through the Jewish part of the city back to find our guide, who, because he is Palestinian couldn't go with us to the meeting. There were men with guns all over the place and the soldiers were eyeing us pretty carefully. We then went to the mosque where Abraham and Sarah's tomb and Isaac and Rebekah's tomb are, having to go through incredible security to enter. Then we had a tour of the Palestinian parts of Hebron with a guide from the Christian Peacemakers Team. More on them in a later post. We only have the generator on here on the farm for another half hour so I've got to be quick tonight! While walking around Hebron with our guide, we were taken to a spot where the Israelis are trying to push into Palestinian farm land. The settlers were watching us carefully and we heard a gunshot nearby. It was a fascinating tour and I'll post pictures when I get back to Jerusalem.
We ended our day here at Daher's Vineyard, where we will spend the night. This is a Palestinian farm which has been in the same family since 1916. The Israelis have tried over and over to take the land from the family and they have fought back with lawsuits. They have also opened their farm to the world, erecting what they call the"Tent of Nations" here where groups like ours come and help the work the farm and learn about the Palestinian people and their culture and bear witness to their presence on the land. This was such a refreshing change from the crazy man we met in Hebron. Tonight we will have a campfire. The cave I'm sitting in now was the home of our host's father. His grandfather's cave is on the other side of this property. They have "upgraded" the cave to include lights and the internet!! Again, pictures to follow later. Much more could be said about today - it has been unbelievable, but time is short. The good news is there are people like Daoud, our host, who are working for peace and understanding in this war torn land and all our hopes are that his way of being in the world will prevail, not that of the nut we met this morning.
More tomorrow, maybe!
We ended our day here at Daher's Vineyard, where we will spend the night. This is a Palestinian farm which has been in the same family since 1916. The Israelis have tried over and over to take the land from the family and they have fought back with lawsuits. They have also opened their farm to the world, erecting what they call the"Tent of Nations" here where groups like ours come and help the work the farm and learn about the Palestinian people and their culture and bear witness to their presence on the land. This was such a refreshing change from the crazy man we met in Hebron. Tonight we will have a campfire. The cave I'm sitting in now was the home of our host's father. His grandfather's cave is on the other side of this property. They have "upgraded" the cave to include lights and the internet!! Again, pictures to follow later. Much more could be said about today - it has been unbelievable, but time is short. The good news is there are people like Daoud, our host, who are working for peace and understanding in this war torn land and all our hopes are that his way of being in the world will prevail, not that of the nut we met this morning.
More tomorrow, maybe!
Sunday, August 3, 2008
The Alternative Israeli Voice
Today was another full day. We started out in Nazareth where a number of us went to Mass at the Basilica of the Annunciation, a Roman Catholic Basilica which is built over a grotto believed to be the Virgin Mary's home and the place where she was visited by the Angel Gabriel. We attended the 9:00 Mass which is usually their Arabic mass, but today it was in Italian because there was an Italian tour group doing a holy land pilgrimage and the basilica was one of their stops. It was an interesting experience to go through a service in a language I don't speak and remain engaged. Fortunately, the liturgy is the liturgy and it was easy to know what was going on at any given point and to join in silently in English! And, some of the music was familiar so we were able to join in at those points too.
After leaving the church we drove to Tel Aviv and then to Jaffa (also known as Joppa, the town in which St. Peter had the dream of the net descending with all the forbidden foods and from which he left for Rome to be crucified) where we had lunch (delicious, abundant and vegetarian!) in a little dive where we had the pleasure of meeting one of Jake's friends (Jake is one of the leaders of this trip) Tal Door, who is an Israeli, first generation, born here, who is now pursuing a Master's degree in France but who works with human rights organizations here in Israel trying to further the cause of human and equal rights for Palestinians, both in the Occupied Territories and in Israel proper. Her story was very moving. Born to parents who immigrated here from South Africa, she grew up a Zionist Jew in Israel, fully supportive of Israel and the narrative that goes with the settlers of Israel. When she was 20 she visited South Africa for the first time and began to question the version of history that she had learned about Israel growing up in Israeli schools. Her recitation of her journey was spellbinding as we learned how she began to probe, to ask questions, to critique the version of history that had been told to her and as she learned more she became an activist working for Palestinian rights because she loves Israel and wants it to be the kind of democracy it says it wants to be. She was very eloquent, well spoken, courageous and engaging. She does speaking tours all over the world and I can see why. It was fascinating to hear from her how and why many Israelis manage to grow up here really clueless about some of the less admirable pieces of their history and blind to the issues of discrimination against Palestinians. Once again I saw parallels to the United States. How many white suburban Americans grow up clueless about the conditions in which African Americans in the cities live their lives or of how Mexican immigrants have to survive in a country that wants their labor but won't make it possible for them to provide it legally? This trip is as informative about United States culture as it is about Israel, because I am seeing in Israel many of the same blindnesses and obsessions and misguided ideologies as are part of our American culture.
We then went to the offices of Gisha, an Israeli human rights organization that is working on behalf of Palestinians in the Gaza strip. They are bringing lawsuits against the Israeli government to contest the barriers that the Israeli government puts up against Palestinian students who want to travel abroad to study. The famous recent case of the Fulbright Scholars is just one of many that this organization takes on.
From there we drove to a kibbutz, where we met with three amazing women who have founded an NGO called New Profiles, which helps Israeli youth who do not want to serve in the Israeli army. All Israeli Jews are required to serve in the Army - three years for boys, two years for girls. Orthodox Jews are exempted and Israeli Arabs (Christians and Muslims) are exempt, but everyone else must serve. These women spoke eloquently of their journeys from committed Zionists to political activists, challenging the military machinery of the Israeli government. The founder of the organization, Ruth Hiller, got into this when her 15 year old son told her he did not want to serve in the military because he was morally opposed to it. Israel has nothing close to the Conscientious Objector status that the United States offers, and to go against the very core of Israeli identity and culture by refusing to serve in the military is a major step for any young Israeli to take. When the organization was founded 10 years ago, there was not even any forum to discuss the idea of not serving in the military. As Ruth explained to us, the people who live on the kibbutz are died in the wool Zionists and military service is an inherent piece of that identity. When she agreed to help her son find a way to avoid military service and then went on to found this organization she put herself on the outs with the others in her kibbutz. It was clear as she told her story that she has taken the steps she has taken on this issue at great personal cost. We looked at some literature that her organization has written about the militarism that is woven into the fabric of Israeli life and again I was struck with how congruent that is to me as an American. It's no wonder the US and Israel are such close allies. We are remarkably and uncomfortably alike!
At this point, we are all beginning to suffer from "compassion fatigue" or emotional overload. We are exhausted because the schedule is grueling and the issues so intense and emotional that we are drained at the end of every day. Not to mention, we aren't getting much sleep either!
Tomorrow we leave for Jerusalem and travel to Hebron, and Bethlehem. We will spend tomorrow night in a tent on a Palestinian farm, the land of a Palestinian family surrounded by hostile, Israeli settlement residents. In the early part of the day we are meeting with a settler, so that we can hear that perspective which will be hard for many in the group to do with any sense of respect or patience. I'm praying for the Holy Spirit to imbue us with compassionate, listening hearts as we enter that meeting.
The next day we will be in Bethlehem and end the day at the Deheisha Refugee Camp where we will spend the night. If electricity is working there, I should be able to get on the internet and post to this blog (which will not happen tomorrow night from the tent!). If not, it will be Wednesday evening before I can report again.
Overall, this trip is proving to be intense, incredibly informative, but difficult and challenging, emotionally, spiritually and physically. We are all suffering from exhaustion and the accompanying frayed nerves at this point, but are committed to our mission of listening and learning as we move ahead.
More on Tuesday (?) or Wednesday!
After leaving the church we drove to Tel Aviv and then to Jaffa (also known as Joppa, the town in which St. Peter had the dream of the net descending with all the forbidden foods and from which he left for Rome to be crucified) where we had lunch (delicious, abundant and vegetarian!) in a little dive where we had the pleasure of meeting one of Jake's friends (Jake is one of the leaders of this trip) Tal Door, who is an Israeli, first generation, born here, who is now pursuing a Master's degree in France but who works with human rights organizations here in Israel trying to further the cause of human and equal rights for Palestinians, both in the Occupied Territories and in Israel proper. Her story was very moving. Born to parents who immigrated here from South Africa, she grew up a Zionist Jew in Israel, fully supportive of Israel and the narrative that goes with the settlers of Israel. When she was 20 she visited South Africa for the first time and began to question the version of history that she had learned about Israel growing up in Israeli schools. Her recitation of her journey was spellbinding as we learned how she began to probe, to ask questions, to critique the version of history that had been told to her and as she learned more she became an activist working for Palestinian rights because she loves Israel and wants it to be the kind of democracy it says it wants to be. She was very eloquent, well spoken, courageous and engaging. She does speaking tours all over the world and I can see why. It was fascinating to hear from her how and why many Israelis manage to grow up here really clueless about some of the less admirable pieces of their history and blind to the issues of discrimination against Palestinians. Once again I saw parallels to the United States. How many white suburban Americans grow up clueless about the conditions in which African Americans in the cities live their lives or of how Mexican immigrants have to survive in a country that wants their labor but won't make it possible for them to provide it legally? This trip is as informative about United States culture as it is about Israel, because I am seeing in Israel many of the same blindnesses and obsessions and misguided ideologies as are part of our American culture.
We then went to the offices of Gisha, an Israeli human rights organization that is working on behalf of Palestinians in the Gaza strip. They are bringing lawsuits against the Israeli government to contest the barriers that the Israeli government puts up against Palestinian students who want to travel abroad to study. The famous recent case of the Fulbright Scholars is just one of many that this organization takes on.
From there we drove to a kibbutz, where we met with three amazing women who have founded an NGO called New Profiles, which helps Israeli youth who do not want to serve in the Israeli army. All Israeli Jews are required to serve in the Army - three years for boys, two years for girls. Orthodox Jews are exempted and Israeli Arabs (Christians and Muslims) are exempt, but everyone else must serve. These women spoke eloquently of their journeys from committed Zionists to political activists, challenging the military machinery of the Israeli government. The founder of the organization, Ruth Hiller, got into this when her 15 year old son told her he did not want to serve in the military because he was morally opposed to it. Israel has nothing close to the Conscientious Objector status that the United States offers, and to go against the very core of Israeli identity and culture by refusing to serve in the military is a major step for any young Israeli to take. When the organization was founded 10 years ago, there was not even any forum to discuss the idea of not serving in the military. As Ruth explained to us, the people who live on the kibbutz are died in the wool Zionists and military service is an inherent piece of that identity. When she agreed to help her son find a way to avoid military service and then went on to found this organization she put herself on the outs with the others in her kibbutz. It was clear as she told her story that she has taken the steps she has taken on this issue at great personal cost. We looked at some literature that her organization has written about the militarism that is woven into the fabric of Israeli life and again I was struck with how congruent that is to me as an American. It's no wonder the US and Israel are such close allies. We are remarkably and uncomfortably alike!
At this point, we are all beginning to suffer from "compassion fatigue" or emotional overload. We are exhausted because the schedule is grueling and the issues so intense and emotional that we are drained at the end of every day. Not to mention, we aren't getting much sleep either!
Tomorrow we leave for Jerusalem and travel to Hebron, and Bethlehem. We will spend tomorrow night in a tent on a Palestinian farm, the land of a Palestinian family surrounded by hostile, Israeli settlement residents. In the early part of the day we are meeting with a settler, so that we can hear that perspective which will be hard for many in the group to do with any sense of respect or patience. I'm praying for the Holy Spirit to imbue us with compassionate, listening hearts as we enter that meeting.
The next day we will be in Bethlehem and end the day at the Deheisha Refugee Camp where we will spend the night. If electricity is working there, I should be able to get on the internet and post to this blog (which will not happen tomorrow night from the tent!). If not, it will be Wednesday evening before I can report again.
Overall, this trip is proving to be intense, incredibly informative, but difficult and challenging, emotionally, spiritually and physically. We are all suffering from exhaustion and the accompanying frayed nerves at this point, but are committed to our mission of listening and learning as we move ahead.
More on Tuesday (?) or Wednesday!
Saturday, August 2, 2008
Nakba -The Catastrophe
Today we travelled to Nazareth, in the north, and met with Palestinians who live within the borders of the state of Israel. They are known as “Israeli Arabs” or “Israeli Palestinians.” Unlike their brothers and sisters in the West Bank and Gaza, they are Israeli citizens, so to some extent they are better off that those Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories. However, they are nonetheless victims of systematic discrimination by Israeli authorities who want to completely eliminate any Arabs from the State of Israel. Although they are citizens, they are second class citizens. They face considerable discrimination in all walks of life.
We met first with Amir, a young Palestinian activist who spoke of the challenges of being an Arab in Israel. She documented various forms of discrimination that Arabs face in this Jewish state in every aspect of their lives from housing to education to freedom of movement to laws regarding who they can marry. When asked what she dreamed of as a solution to this intractable conflict, she said a one state solution, but that she believed the one binational state was the final end goal which would have to be arrived at in stages, with a two state solution as an interim step, to give the Palestinians time to become a self governing, autonomous body that could then move into a combined one state with Israel. She expressed no animosity toward Israeli Jews and a willingness to live together with them in this land, but was clear that she does not countenance their apparent mission to drive all Arabs out of this land. This is their land too and they are not going to be driven out by the Israelis. She is young and vibrant and committed to her work for human rights for Palestinians and she lives with hope in spite of the clear commitment by the Israelis to drive her people from their country.
In the afternoon we met with an Arab Israeli named Ali and a number of his friends from this area who took us on a hike through the hills of the Galilee to see Palestinian villages that were destroyed by the Zionists in May 1948 when the State of Israel was founded. May 15, 1948 is Israeli Independence Day but for Palestinians it is known as the Nakba, “Catastrophe” because it is the day thousands of them were driven, permanently, from their lands.
We first met with two older men, in their late 70s who were living in nearby villages in 1948 when the Zionists came to power. Mohammad and Abu Ahmed, both in their seventies remember vividly fleeing their villages knowing that the Zionists were on their way and fearing for their safety if they remained in their homes. They had heard of atrocities in other villages and knew that they needed to flee if they were to survive. They told us how they packed up a few belongings, just what they could carry, including the keys to their homes and, in the case of Abu Ahmed the papers showing his ownership of his land, and they fled. They expected that in a few weeks they would be able to return. They remember being told by the authorities at the time that they would be able to return, but that never happened. In fact what happened was that for fully two years they were simply refused permission to return to their village, and then in 1950 the State of Israel declared that the lands on which these villages had stood were state lands and the Palestinian residents of those villages were denied any access to their homes and villages. In fact, the villages were ultimately bulldozed by the Israelis. We walked through the rubble of what was once their village. We spoke to Mohammad and Abu Ahmed under a tree on the land that Abu Ahmed’s home had stood. They walked us all around the ruins of their village, from which we could see the Jewish settlement that now claims the land. The Israeli government is in the process of completely bulldozing the village to build a stable for cows to support a kibbutz nearby. Mohammad took us through the brambles and brush to the schoolhouse in which he had received his elementary education, which stands in ruins now in the shadow of the settlement and the construction site for the new animal stables. The old Muslim cemetery in which the ancestors of his village are buried is becoming a dumping ground for manure and other agricultural products. Next Tuesday, the former villagers are going before the High Court of Israel in Jerusalem trying to stop the desecration of these cemeteries. The complete commitment of these men to getting their land back was remarkable to me. The land means everything to them and so the right of return is a non-negotiable part of any reconciliation with Israel. I am learning that for the Palestinian people there is a primal connection with the land and with the village and being able to live in the place that your ancestors lived is a crucial piece of their sense of identity and wholeness. When I think of how we in the United States move around so frequently, how many of us move not only from our childhood home but often move several times during our adult lives, how, in fact, young people often dream of doing better than their parents, of moving to a new and better place, I realize that we have fundamentally different values with respect to home and land which can make the Palestinian commitment to their lost land sometimes seem overdone.
Our guide for the day, Ali took us to his home in Sikhrin for dinner. He has a tent in his backyard, called the Freedom and Culture Tent, where he frequently has gatherings of Palestinians and people working for Palestinian rights. His wife, Therese, is a Dutch woman who has become a resident of Israel. She spoke of the discrimination that Arabs face in this land and of the struggles they go through with the Israeli authorities. She and Ali have a beautiful home that they built themselves. They Israeli authorities refused to give them a permit to build so ultimately Ali built the home without the permit. He then got a demolition notice from the Israeli government. On the day of the scheduled demolition, several hundred supporters showed up and formed a human barricade around the house and the Israeli bulldozers ultimately went away. Ali and his wife live always in the shadow of the potential of the arrival of a bulldozer, although they think that the strong show of support they mustered the last time will make it less likely that the government will try again with them. They will go after people who are less well connected, who cannot muster the same amount of popular support. During our conversation we learned that Ali had spent 6 years in an Israeli prison. When asked why, the replied simply, “Political reasons.” His wife then said, “All Arabs in this country spend some time in prison, it’s just part of life here.”
I should mention that our dinner at Ali and Therese’s house was typical Palestinian hospitality. The food was plentiful and delicious – babaganoush, hummos, tabouli, flatbread, couscous with lentils, cole slaw, corn salad, grilled beef kabobs and chicken kabobs and a few other dishes that I didn’t have room to sample!! There was enough food for an army and we ate our fill and were almost too tired to get up and leave.
This has been a day for being immersed in the other narrative that accompanies the founding of the State of Israel. In contrast to the Israeli narrative of coming home to the Promised Land after the tragedy of the holocaust and years of wandering and persecution before that, this is a narrative of a people being stripped of their culture, their land and their identity for reasons that have nothing to do with them. The suffering of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis and European Christians for centuries before that results in the annihilation of Palestinian villages and the peasant farming culture that goes with it, followed by years of systematic discrimination against people who were not responsible for the pain inflicted upon the Jews for centuries. It is indeed a “catastrophe.” I cannot help but think of the parallels in the Palestinian narrative to the narrative of the systematic annihilation of the Native Americans who inhabited the United States before the arrival of European immigrants. We too come from a country built on the blood of another culture and on the destruction of an indigenous people along with the taking of their land. When we criticize Israel for what they have done to Palestinians, I can’t help but think that we have to account for our own history as well. The words of Shehadeh Shehadeh, the Anglican priest I met on my first day here continues to ring in my ears – “God has provided enough for everyone’s need. God has not supplied enough for everyone’s greed.”
We met first with Amir, a young Palestinian activist who spoke of the challenges of being an Arab in Israel. She documented various forms of discrimination that Arabs face in this Jewish state in every aspect of their lives from housing to education to freedom of movement to laws regarding who they can marry. When asked what she dreamed of as a solution to this intractable conflict, she said a one state solution, but that she believed the one binational state was the final end goal which would have to be arrived at in stages, with a two state solution as an interim step, to give the Palestinians time to become a self governing, autonomous body that could then move into a combined one state with Israel. She expressed no animosity toward Israeli Jews and a willingness to live together with them in this land, but was clear that she does not countenance their apparent mission to drive all Arabs out of this land. This is their land too and they are not going to be driven out by the Israelis. She is young and vibrant and committed to her work for human rights for Palestinians and she lives with hope in spite of the clear commitment by the Israelis to drive her people from their country.
In the afternoon we met with an Arab Israeli named Ali and a number of his friends from this area who took us on a hike through the hills of the Galilee to see Palestinian villages that were destroyed by the Zionists in May 1948 when the State of Israel was founded. May 15, 1948 is Israeli Independence Day but for Palestinians it is known as the Nakba, “Catastrophe” because it is the day thousands of them were driven, permanently, from their lands.
We first met with two older men, in their late 70s who were living in nearby villages in 1948 when the Zionists came to power. Mohammad and Abu Ahmed, both in their seventies remember vividly fleeing their villages knowing that the Zionists were on their way and fearing for their safety if they remained in their homes. They had heard of atrocities in other villages and knew that they needed to flee if they were to survive. They told us how they packed up a few belongings, just what they could carry, including the keys to their homes and, in the case of Abu Ahmed the papers showing his ownership of his land, and they fled. They expected that in a few weeks they would be able to return. They remember being told by the authorities at the time that they would be able to return, but that never happened. In fact what happened was that for fully two years they were simply refused permission to return to their village, and then in 1950 the State of Israel declared that the lands on which these villages had stood were state lands and the Palestinian residents of those villages were denied any access to their homes and villages. In fact, the villages were ultimately bulldozed by the Israelis. We walked through the rubble of what was once their village. We spoke to Mohammad and Abu Ahmed under a tree on the land that Abu Ahmed’s home had stood. They walked us all around the ruins of their village, from which we could see the Jewish settlement that now claims the land. The Israeli government is in the process of completely bulldozing the village to build a stable for cows to support a kibbutz nearby. Mohammad took us through the brambles and brush to the schoolhouse in which he had received his elementary education, which stands in ruins now in the shadow of the settlement and the construction site for the new animal stables. The old Muslim cemetery in which the ancestors of his village are buried is becoming a dumping ground for manure and other agricultural products. Next Tuesday, the former villagers are going before the High Court of Israel in Jerusalem trying to stop the desecration of these cemeteries. The complete commitment of these men to getting their land back was remarkable to me. The land means everything to them and so the right of return is a non-negotiable part of any reconciliation with Israel. I am learning that for the Palestinian people there is a primal connection with the land and with the village and being able to live in the place that your ancestors lived is a crucial piece of their sense of identity and wholeness. When I think of how we in the United States move around so frequently, how many of us move not only from our childhood home but often move several times during our adult lives, how, in fact, young people often dream of doing better than their parents, of moving to a new and better place, I realize that we have fundamentally different values with respect to home and land which can make the Palestinian commitment to their lost land sometimes seem overdone.
Our guide for the day, Ali took us to his home in Sikhrin for dinner. He has a tent in his backyard, called the Freedom and Culture Tent, where he frequently has gatherings of Palestinians and people working for Palestinian rights. His wife, Therese, is a Dutch woman who has become a resident of Israel. She spoke of the discrimination that Arabs face in this land and of the struggles they go through with the Israeli authorities. She and Ali have a beautiful home that they built themselves. They Israeli authorities refused to give them a permit to build so ultimately Ali built the home without the permit. He then got a demolition notice from the Israeli government. On the day of the scheduled demolition, several hundred supporters showed up and formed a human barricade around the house and the Israeli bulldozers ultimately went away. Ali and his wife live always in the shadow of the potential of the arrival of a bulldozer, although they think that the strong show of support they mustered the last time will make it less likely that the government will try again with them. They will go after people who are less well connected, who cannot muster the same amount of popular support. During our conversation we learned that Ali had spent 6 years in an Israeli prison. When asked why, the replied simply, “Political reasons.” His wife then said, “All Arabs in this country spend some time in prison, it’s just part of life here.”
I should mention that our dinner at Ali and Therese’s house was typical Palestinian hospitality. The food was plentiful and delicious – babaganoush, hummos, tabouli, flatbread, couscous with lentils, cole slaw, corn salad, grilled beef kabobs and chicken kabobs and a few other dishes that I didn’t have room to sample!! There was enough food for an army and we ate our fill and were almost too tired to get up and leave.
This has been a day for being immersed in the other narrative that accompanies the founding of the State of Israel. In contrast to the Israeli narrative of coming home to the Promised Land after the tragedy of the holocaust and years of wandering and persecution before that, this is a narrative of a people being stripped of their culture, their land and their identity for reasons that have nothing to do with them. The suffering of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis and European Christians for centuries before that results in the annihilation of Palestinian villages and the peasant farming culture that goes with it, followed by years of systematic discrimination against people who were not responsible for the pain inflicted upon the Jews for centuries. It is indeed a “catastrophe.” I cannot help but think of the parallels in the Palestinian narrative to the narrative of the systematic annihilation of the Native Americans who inhabited the United States before the arrival of European immigrants. We too come from a country built on the blood of another culture and on the destruction of an indigenous people along with the taking of their land. When we criticize Israel for what they have done to Palestinians, I can’t help but think that we have to account for our own history as well. The words of Shehadeh Shehadeh, the Anglican priest I met on my first day here continues to ring in my ears – “God has provided enough for everyone’s need. God has not supplied enough for everyone’s greed.”
Friday, August 1, 2008
Create Hope
Today was the most emotional day so far for all of us. We started out going to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum. Needless to say, it is impossible to go through that museum and memorial without being profoundly moved. The museum is beautifully done – with photographs, video footage from the war, video footage of Holocaust survivors telling their stories, artifacts from the Holocaust – clothing, personal items, letters, passports and identity cards, prayer books, religious items from synagogues and homes, postcards, re-creations of the camps and the train cars. It is a wonderfully executed montage of the entire experience, starting with the rise of Nazism in Germany and going systematically through the years of the World War II through every country of Europe. Needless to say, it is heartbreaking to see the images of the camps, the ghettos, the anti Jewish propaganda of those years. It is tasteful, complete and bone chilling all at the same time. I have studied the holocaust in some depth, especially during my college years, and growing up in a very Jewish town, I saw hours of footage of film that the Nazis left behind as they so carefully documented their activities so I did not expect to be particularly impacted because I’ve done this before. But there is simply no way to immerse yourself in that experience for several hours without being profoundly saddened. What was so different for me was that this time, I kept seeing all that was done to the Jews in Europe through the lens of what is happening to the Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories now and had that sinking sense that history is repeating itself. Just yesterday we met with Omar Baghouti whose organization is calling for “divestment, boycott and sanctions” with respect to Israeli goods, and today we saw advertisements, photographs and film footage of calls to boycott Jewish businesses in Germany prior to the war. “Don’t buy Jewish goods” was all over Nazi posters plastered in pre war Germany, and here we are sixty plus years later saying “Boycott Israeli products.” It’s eerie, to say the least. (Of course it is possible to distinguish the two – the call for boycott now is aimed at Israeli political and economic policy, not at the Jewish people as a people or Judaism as a religion, but still, it made me pause.) Similarly, seeing the camps, the walls of the ghettos, was uncomfortably similar to the concrete wall dividing East Jerusalem from the West Bank and cutting through Palestinian territories, and the images of the camps bore an uncanny resemblance to the prison-like checkpoint that we walked through yesterday. Those who are abused grow up to become abusers, and that principle is being played out on a national scale in this conflict. I found myself grieving the endless cycle of violence that is being perpetuated from generation to generation – “the sins of the fathers being visited upon the sons” in a very real sense.
The holocaust museum reinforced my own empathy for the Jewish commitment to the State of Israel and the desperation of many Jews to preserve it as a refuge and sanctuary for Jewish people the world over. But I found myself struggling to find a way for Israel to be that place of sanctuary and safety for Jews without becoming a place of destruction and annihilation for the Palestinian Christians and Muslims who also live in this place. Trying to find a way to bridge the narratives of pain that these different groups have is proving difficult for me.
The Holocaust Museum trip ended with a visit to the Children’s Memorial which is by far one of the most moving memorials I’ve ever seen anywhere. You enter into a darkened room lit by a candle which is reflected in mirrors that go from floor to ceiling. The effect is that of millions of single candles burning in the room. You walk around the room in darkness, pierced only by the flames of these candles and hear the names of the children who died in the camps (1.5 million of them) read aloud in English and Hebrew, with their age and country of origin. Listening to that litany of names was heartbreaking. Several members of our group collapsed in sobs against the wall and had to stay there for a while to recover from the experience. The slaughter of the innocents – such a painful part of human history – “Rachel weeping for her children” - the Biblical accounts of children slaughtered by Pharoah, by Herod, children dying today in Darfur, the children lost in other ethnic cleansing wars like Bosnia and Rwanda, the children of Iraq who have died in this pointless war – the list goes on and on. One wonders when we will stop creating a world in which our children die as a result of adult stupidity.
After that heart wrenching experience, we went for lunch in East Jerusalem and had a few moments to re-enter the modern world. Then we went to Sabeel, an ecumenical Christian organization that works for peace, justice and reconciliation between Palestinian Christians and Israelis. The word “sabeel” means “the way” in Arabic. Sabeel calls itself a Palestinian Liberation Theology center and it works hard to build bridges between the Israeli Jews and the Palestinian Christians and Muslims here in the holy land. The woman who spoke with us, Cedar, is a 62 year old Palestinian Christian (an Anglican to boot!) who lived in Haifa with her family and was forced to leave their home in 1948 when the Zionists took over what is now the State of Israel. Cedar is a passionate and articulate woman. She remembers vividly what the Palestinians call the “Nakba” (the catastrophe) in 1948 when they were forced to leave their homes because the country was being turned over to the Zionists. Her family fled to Nazareth and it was 10 years before they could get a permit to return to Haifa. When they went back to their house, there were three Jewish families, refugees from Europe living in it. She described the sense of loss and shock that Palestinians went through at that time. They had no idea when they left that they wouldn’t be back in a matter of days or maybe weeks. They never dreamed they were leaving their homes forever. Her childhood home had been built by her grandfather and it was simply taken by Jewish settlers after she and her family fled. And they fled because they feared for their lives. She described for us vividly what it felt like to go through that experience – she said, “In May of 1948, one night I went to bed in Palestine and woke up in Israel.” She added that upon Israeli independence, she and all other Palestinians became “present absent people.” Their history, their narrative was removed from history books and not taught in school. They had no rights, they could not move freely about the country, they could not return to their homes and in many cases their jobs, they who are citizens of this land suddenly are not citizens because they are “non-Jews.” Her story was particularly poignant as she spoke about the theological and faith struggles she had after the Nakba. Did God really want the Jews to have this land? Did God want the Palestinians to leave? Does God favor one group of people over another? How do I read the Bible, which seems to say that God gave this land to the Jews as “the promised land for the chosen people.” She spoke eloquently about her struggle to integrate her identity as a Palestinian, with cultural and ethnic roots in this land, with her identity as an Anglican Christian. She struggled for many years to discern whether she could be both Christian and Palestinian. As she spoke and described the British missionary schools in which she was educated and raised, I realized that she had been subjected to a considerable amount of Christian Zionist theology and that much of her spiritual and theological struggle centered around working that out for herself.
Cedar echoed what every other Palestinian we have met so far has also said – before 1948 Christians, Muslims and Jews in Palestine lived peaceably with one another. They were friends, they lived in the same communities, shopped in the same markets, socialized with one another, respected one another’s differences. It was only with the advent of the Zionist Jewish State that these groups became enemies in this region of the world. She believes it is possible for the three groups to co-exist peacefully with one another as they once did, but not until Israel recognizes the rights of the Palestinians as whole people with rights equal to those of Israeli Jews. She repeated what others we have talked to this week also said, that they have a hard time swallowing the fact that they have fewer rights and privileges as citizens of Israel than do Jews who have never lived here. Rights and privileges do not go to “citizens” in this state but to “nationals” which means anyone, anywhere in the world who is Jewish.
Cedar spoke so eloquently and passionately about her hopes for a country where everyone is treated equally and where Palestinian Christians could live their faith and their secular lives on an equal par with Jews. She admits that the situation is deteriorating but holds on to hope that somehow God can bring people who long for peace to find a way to get there. When she finished speaking our group gave her a standing ovation. She inspired all of us with her words of hope and compassion.
Then we went to the offices of Rabbis for Human Rights, an activist organization of rabbis in Israel and around the world who work hard to protest and address human rights violations committed by the Israeli government and by Palestinians. These folks are the ones who stand in front of bulldozers that are threatening a Palestinian home, who accompany Palestinian farmers into their olive groves at harvest time so that the right wing Jewish settlers don’t shoot them or otherwise interfere with their ability to harvest their crops, who go out and rebuild demolished homes and fight in court for the Palestinians who are suffering human rights abuses. Rabbi Avit Ascherman, the Executive Director of RHR spoke to us and he was an eloquent speaker about his cause. He spoke theologically about his vision of a Judaism that operates out of the prophetic tradition of social justice. He was very passionate about God’s call to Jews to be people who care for those in the world whom no one else is caring for, to be hospitable to strangers and neighbors, to work with God to bring about “tikkun olam” the healing of the world. He reminded me so much of Rabbi Michael Lerner. So very passionate and committed both to the State of Israel and his Jewish faith, but also to doing the right thing by all the people who live in this land. He brought me and many others in the room to tears as he described an incident where he was called to a checkpoint where a Palestinian boy, 13 years old, had been grabbed by Israeli soldiers and tied to a military vehicle as a human shield. He went up to those soldiers and ordered them to release the child, which they did not do immediately but ultimately he prevailed. He recounted how later, when the child who was traumatized by the entire experience was interviewed about it, he said that he didn’t hate Jews despite what happened to him, because “a tall man in a kippah came and saved me and told me not to be afraid.” Rabbi Ascherman wants to spend his life being “a tall man in a kippah” who “saves” people who are being threatened and helps them not to be afraid. He is truly someone who walks the walk. He’s been arrested and jailed numerous times and has gone to court many times suing the Israeli government for human rights violations. He concluded his talk by exhorting all of us to “create hope” in whatever way we can in our own communities so that someday Israel can be the land it is called to be by God and all people can live in peace with one another. When he was done, he too got a standing ovation from our group, and, as the saying goes, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
All in all, this was an emotionally draining day. The sadness and grief at the perpetuation of violence from one generation to another is almost enough to make one want to give up and just live for the moment, forget about all this stuff and retreat into our cocoon of safety, which we privileged Americans can certainly do. But talking to people like those we met today is a reminder to me that God calls all of us to be better than that, to reach out to help bring healing and reconciliation to our world in whatever arena we happen to be living and working in. The work of “tikkun olam” calls us to work with God and for the brief time we have on this earth we have a job to do. In Christian terms its called “bringing in the kingdom” – or as the words of the Lord’s Prayer put it “your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.” We have work to do for that “on earth” part. Along with my travel companions I hope for the courage and commitment to share in this struggle with the amazing people we are meeting over here. This land is the birthplace of three major world religions, including my own. We cannot allow it to simply disintegrate into a theater of violence and oppression.
Create hope. That’s the job description.
Amen.
(Note: Tomorrow we leave Jerusalem for Nazareth for an overnight stay. We are told there is wi-fi in our guest house, but if there are connectivity issues, I won't be able to post again until Sunday night.)
The holocaust museum reinforced my own empathy for the Jewish commitment to the State of Israel and the desperation of many Jews to preserve it as a refuge and sanctuary for Jewish people the world over. But I found myself struggling to find a way for Israel to be that place of sanctuary and safety for Jews without becoming a place of destruction and annihilation for the Palestinian Christians and Muslims who also live in this place. Trying to find a way to bridge the narratives of pain that these different groups have is proving difficult for me.
The Holocaust Museum trip ended with a visit to the Children’s Memorial which is by far one of the most moving memorials I’ve ever seen anywhere. You enter into a darkened room lit by a candle which is reflected in mirrors that go from floor to ceiling. The effect is that of millions of single candles burning in the room. You walk around the room in darkness, pierced only by the flames of these candles and hear the names of the children who died in the camps (1.5 million of them) read aloud in English and Hebrew, with their age and country of origin. Listening to that litany of names was heartbreaking. Several members of our group collapsed in sobs against the wall and had to stay there for a while to recover from the experience. The slaughter of the innocents – such a painful part of human history – “Rachel weeping for her children” - the Biblical accounts of children slaughtered by Pharoah, by Herod, children dying today in Darfur, the children lost in other ethnic cleansing wars like Bosnia and Rwanda, the children of Iraq who have died in this pointless war – the list goes on and on. One wonders when we will stop creating a world in which our children die as a result of adult stupidity.
After that heart wrenching experience, we went for lunch in East Jerusalem and had a few moments to re-enter the modern world. Then we went to Sabeel, an ecumenical Christian organization that works for peace, justice and reconciliation between Palestinian Christians and Israelis. The word “sabeel” means “the way” in Arabic. Sabeel calls itself a Palestinian Liberation Theology center and it works hard to build bridges between the Israeli Jews and the Palestinian Christians and Muslims here in the holy land. The woman who spoke with us, Cedar, is a 62 year old Palestinian Christian (an Anglican to boot!) who lived in Haifa with her family and was forced to leave their home in 1948 when the Zionists took over what is now the State of Israel. Cedar is a passionate and articulate woman. She remembers vividly what the Palestinians call the “Nakba” (the catastrophe) in 1948 when they were forced to leave their homes because the country was being turned over to the Zionists. Her family fled to Nazareth and it was 10 years before they could get a permit to return to Haifa. When they went back to their house, there were three Jewish families, refugees from Europe living in it. She described the sense of loss and shock that Palestinians went through at that time. They had no idea when they left that they wouldn’t be back in a matter of days or maybe weeks. They never dreamed they were leaving their homes forever. Her childhood home had been built by her grandfather and it was simply taken by Jewish settlers after she and her family fled. And they fled because they feared for their lives. She described for us vividly what it felt like to go through that experience – she said, “In May of 1948, one night I went to bed in Palestine and woke up in Israel.” She added that upon Israeli independence, she and all other Palestinians became “present absent people.” Their history, their narrative was removed from history books and not taught in school. They had no rights, they could not move freely about the country, they could not return to their homes and in many cases their jobs, they who are citizens of this land suddenly are not citizens because they are “non-Jews.” Her story was particularly poignant as she spoke about the theological and faith struggles she had after the Nakba. Did God really want the Jews to have this land? Did God want the Palestinians to leave? Does God favor one group of people over another? How do I read the Bible, which seems to say that God gave this land to the Jews as “the promised land for the chosen people.” She spoke eloquently about her struggle to integrate her identity as a Palestinian, with cultural and ethnic roots in this land, with her identity as an Anglican Christian. She struggled for many years to discern whether she could be both Christian and Palestinian. As she spoke and described the British missionary schools in which she was educated and raised, I realized that she had been subjected to a considerable amount of Christian Zionist theology and that much of her spiritual and theological struggle centered around working that out for herself.
Cedar echoed what every other Palestinian we have met so far has also said – before 1948 Christians, Muslims and Jews in Palestine lived peaceably with one another. They were friends, they lived in the same communities, shopped in the same markets, socialized with one another, respected one another’s differences. It was only with the advent of the Zionist Jewish State that these groups became enemies in this region of the world. She believes it is possible for the three groups to co-exist peacefully with one another as they once did, but not until Israel recognizes the rights of the Palestinians as whole people with rights equal to those of Israeli Jews. She repeated what others we have talked to this week also said, that they have a hard time swallowing the fact that they have fewer rights and privileges as citizens of Israel than do Jews who have never lived here. Rights and privileges do not go to “citizens” in this state but to “nationals” which means anyone, anywhere in the world who is Jewish.
Cedar spoke so eloquently and passionately about her hopes for a country where everyone is treated equally and where Palestinian Christians could live their faith and their secular lives on an equal par with Jews. She admits that the situation is deteriorating but holds on to hope that somehow God can bring people who long for peace to find a way to get there. When she finished speaking our group gave her a standing ovation. She inspired all of us with her words of hope and compassion.
Then we went to the offices of Rabbis for Human Rights, an activist organization of rabbis in Israel and around the world who work hard to protest and address human rights violations committed by the Israeli government and by Palestinians. These folks are the ones who stand in front of bulldozers that are threatening a Palestinian home, who accompany Palestinian farmers into their olive groves at harvest time so that the right wing Jewish settlers don’t shoot them or otherwise interfere with their ability to harvest their crops, who go out and rebuild demolished homes and fight in court for the Palestinians who are suffering human rights abuses. Rabbi Avit Ascherman, the Executive Director of RHR spoke to us and he was an eloquent speaker about his cause. He spoke theologically about his vision of a Judaism that operates out of the prophetic tradition of social justice. He was very passionate about God’s call to Jews to be people who care for those in the world whom no one else is caring for, to be hospitable to strangers and neighbors, to work with God to bring about “tikkun olam” the healing of the world. He reminded me so much of Rabbi Michael Lerner. So very passionate and committed both to the State of Israel and his Jewish faith, but also to doing the right thing by all the people who live in this land. He brought me and many others in the room to tears as he described an incident where he was called to a checkpoint where a Palestinian boy, 13 years old, had been grabbed by Israeli soldiers and tied to a military vehicle as a human shield. He went up to those soldiers and ordered them to release the child, which they did not do immediately but ultimately he prevailed. He recounted how later, when the child who was traumatized by the entire experience was interviewed about it, he said that he didn’t hate Jews despite what happened to him, because “a tall man in a kippah came and saved me and told me not to be afraid.” Rabbi Ascherman wants to spend his life being “a tall man in a kippah” who “saves” people who are being threatened and helps them not to be afraid. He is truly someone who walks the walk. He’s been arrested and jailed numerous times and has gone to court many times suing the Israeli government for human rights violations. He concluded his talk by exhorting all of us to “create hope” in whatever way we can in our own communities so that someday Israel can be the land it is called to be by God and all people can live in peace with one another. When he was done, he too got a standing ovation from our group, and, as the saying goes, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
All in all, this was an emotionally draining day. The sadness and grief at the perpetuation of violence from one generation to another is almost enough to make one want to give up and just live for the moment, forget about all this stuff and retreat into our cocoon of safety, which we privileged Americans can certainly do. But talking to people like those we met today is a reminder to me that God calls all of us to be better than that, to reach out to help bring healing and reconciliation to our world in whatever arena we happen to be living and working in. The work of “tikkun olam” calls us to work with God and for the brief time we have on this earth we have a job to do. In Christian terms its called “bringing in the kingdom” – or as the words of the Lord’s Prayer put it “your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.” We have work to do for that “on earth” part. Along with my travel companions I hope for the courage and commitment to share in this struggle with the amazing people we are meeting over here. This land is the birthplace of three major world religions, including my own. We cannot allow it to simply disintegrate into a theater of violence and oppression.
Create hope. That’s the job description.
Amen.
(Note: Tomorrow we leave Jerusalem for Nazareth for an overnight stay. We are told there is wi-fi in our guest house, but if there are connectivity issues, I won't be able to post again until Sunday night.)
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Life Under Occupation
Today we travelled to Ramallah, a bustling and thriving Palestinian city inside the West Bank. We traveled past the separation wall and through “no man’s land”, a buffer zone between E. Jerusalem and the West Bank and on into Ramallah, passing the Qalandria refugee camp on the way. We had a very full day of meetings with a variety of Palestinians.
First we met with Omar Baghouti and Dr. Gabi Baramki, both with the Palestinian Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PCABCI). Dr. Baramki is the retired president of Bisreit University, the premier university in Palestine. He spoke both from his professional experience as the president of a university, trying to run a university in an occupied country and from his personal experience as the son of a Palestinian refugee, whose home was taken by the Israelis in the 1967 war and turned into a museum, with no compensation to the family and no concept of any right of return on the part of that family. Under occupation, the university in Palestine has had a very hard time managing to stay open due to the various ways the Israelis have made it difficult if not impossible for professors and students to get to school. In some cases the Israelis have simply closed the school for periods of time, in others, they have de facto closed it by putting up such complicated and cumbersome and arbitrary roadblocks that neither the professors nor the students can get to school on time for classes and the school has to shut down. Omar Baghouti, a Palestinian who spent many years in the US, getting his undergraduate degree at Columbia, and Dr. Baramki spoke at some length about the way this terrible conflict plays out in academia. Baghouti stated bluntly that there are no “liberal” or “left wing” academics in Israel and, notwithstanding the Jewish value system in which education is revered, the Israelis have done everything to make the operation of the Palestinian university difficult and at times impossible. His organization polled all the academics in Israel shortly after the second Intifada in 2000 regarding the problems students and professors were having crossing the checkpoints to get to school. Many of them lived in E. Jerusalem, not far from Ramallah as the crow flies, but literally light years away once you throw in the ordeal of getting past checkpoints. When they tried to get the support of Israeli academics to institute a policy allowing university students and professors some kind of preferred status for getting through checkpoints, only 400 professors out of 9000 in the country expressed support.
Omar spoke at length about the policies of the Israeli government towards the Palestinians, making a strong case that what is happening is apartheid, plain and simple. The whole foundation of Israeli society as he sees it is based on racism, the privilege and preference for one group of people at the expense of another. He works for an organization that is trying to tackle the apartheid in Palestine much the same way that apartheid in South Africa was handled, by instituting boycotts, sanctions and divestiture. His organization is seeking the support of organizations around the world to boycott Israeli products, to divest from companies doing business in Israel and the imposition of sanctions to pressure the Israelis to begin to honor the human rights of the Palestinians in the occupied territories. The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, which is a co-sponsor of this trip, is spearheading a boycott of Motorola products, since Motorola does a huge amount of business with Israel. The campaign is dubbed “Hang up on Motorola.” Omar exhorted us to participate in the boycott, to go to the website of his organization, www.PACBI.org to find lists of companies to boycott. As I listened to these two men, I heard a lot of frustration and pain, anger at the Israeli policies and no patience whatsoever with the Israeli party line about security concerns. Omar, who lived in the United States for 8 years, also stated quite bluntly that there is no freedom of the press in the US, that US media completely parrot the Israeli party line and never report accurately on what is really going on in Palestine. This was to be a theme echoed by everyone we met today. For me it is becoming the theme of this whole trip – US complicity in the human rights violations being carried out here by Israelis against Palestinians and complete distortion in US media when reporting on the conflict in the Middle East. Americans are basically clueless about what is really happening over here and both our government and our media make sure we don’t know the true story.
Next we met with a Palestinian American businessman, Sam Bahour. He was born and raised in Youngstown, Ohio and moved to Palestine as a young adult because he wanted to reconnect with his family roots and was concerned about the conditions over here for Palestinians. He basically reiterated what we have been hearing from everyone else about the human rights violations carried out by Israel against Palestinians, and as a businessman, the ridiculous number of obstacles, roadblocks (both literal and figurative) that he has to go through to conduct business here and his total disgust with the US where this conflict is concerned.
After lunch we went to Al Haq, a Human Rights activist organization that documents human rights abuses by Israeli and Palestinian authorities and engages in advocacy for Palestinians. We spoke with a young researcher in their office who is writing a paper on the extent to which current Israeli policies constitute a regime of apartheid, as defined in international law. It is a compelling argument and one that is being articulated by academics around the world (outside the US and Israel to be sure).
From there we went to a coffee shop where we had the wonderful experience of meeting with two young Palestinian women. Tala Abu Rahme, a Palestinian student, 24 years old, currently doing a Masters in Fine Arts at American University in Washington DC, an accomplished poet, and Sanabel Hassan, a 26 year old who works for human rights organizations in Palestine, a graduate of Bisreit University in Ramallah. These young women were eloquent in talking about their experiences growing up in Ramallah under Israeli occupation. Both have experienced the humiliation of the checkpoints – Sanabel told us that until two years ago her face was badly scarred from the tear gas an Israeli soldier sprayed on her when she was going through a checkpoint. She has also been used by Israeli soldiers as a “human shield” three times in her short life, standing between the soldiers and Palestinians as bullets whizzed past her face. Both of these girls have experienced a level of violence and humiliation at the hands of a hostile authority the likes of which students their age in the United States could not even imagine. In 2002, shortly after the Second Intifada began, the Israelis invaded Ramallah with tanks and guns and stayed in the city for 28 days during which time the Palestinian citizens were under house arrest 24 hours a day for 28 straight days. Tala was confined to her home with her family, unable to leave except for three hours a day every so often to get food, with Israeli tanks right outside their home and the sound of bombs exploding all around her neighborhood. Sanabel, whose family live close to the E. Jerusalem border, was unable to return home when the invasion began, and wound up spending that 28 days all alone in her student house, cut off from her family, without sufficient food, with no electricity and forced to fend for herself as she spent 28 days in a form of solitary confinement. Tala spoke of her experiences as a student in the US, and of the complete ignorance and insensitivity of American students who have absolutely no idea what her life in Palestine has been like nor any comprehension whatsoever about the Palestinian side of the conflict. She was very eloquent about her rage every time she goes through the checkpoint, and how she constantly tells herself to remember that those Israeli soldiers, who are all of 18 or 19 years old, are human beings and that she must never forget her humanity even as she finds them forgetting hers. We asked these girls about the arguments we heard from the Hebrew University students last night re this conflict and Tala in particular just exclaimed in disgust about the ignorance of these young Israelis who have no idea at all what the Palestinians are going through and no appreciation whatsoever of the privileged status that they enjoy in their own country and the world. She is a remarkable young woman – articulate, smart, funny, artistic, expressive, optimistic and determined not to let the forces of occupation rob her of her humanity and dignity, no matter how hard they try. It was sobering to listen to the experiences these girls and their families have lived with for so many years. In a lot of ways, an entire population is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and they don’t even know it.
Our last event of the day was going through the Qalandria checkpoint on foot. This checkpoint is at the border of East Jerusalem and the road leading to Ramallah, all of which is part of the West Bank. But E. Jerusalem is considered by the Israelis to be part of Israel and so those who have identity cards allowing them to enter are a privileged group. The Wall goes right through this area, cutting Palestinians off from other Palestinians, and making it difficult if not impossible for Palestinians to get to their jobs, or to doctor’s appointments and the like. The Qalandria checkpoint is one of the newest and most up to date checkpoints. When you enter, it looks like the entrance to a prison. You walk through a narrow passage, literally no wider that an average adult, with bars on both sides and a roof of metal bars/slats overhead. It is truly like walking through a cage. You then enter an area where there are a series of iron turnstiles that are electronically operated by Israeli soldiers on the other side of the turnstile, inside soundproof, bulletproof rooms. While waiting to go through the turnstile, you are closed in another prison like room, with metal bars for walls on all sides, penning people in like cattle. Those wanting to go through the checkpoint gather in crowds around these turnstiles which are operated by the guards, whom you cannot see, who only allow three people through at a time. When you get through the turnstile, you put your bags, belt, etc on the belt to go through the scanner like at an airport, you walk through the scanner, (again like at an airport) and put your identity document on the window for the guard to see. Palestinians all have identity cards and only certain kinds of cards permit access into E. Jerusalem. Those who don’t possess the right kind of card can apply for permission to pass on a particular day, but even that pass may not be honored. The checkpoints are supposed to be open at certain hours, but the Israelis will close various checkpoints with no warning, arbitrarily, forcing Palestinians to go miles to another one. If the guard feels so inclined he may detain a person at the checkpoint and interrogate them, holding them sometimes for hours. For us, the experience was painless. With American passports and visas, obviously tourists, the guards had no interest in delaying us at the checkpoint. But when we talked to Palestinians for whom crossing that checkpoint is a twice daily ritual, sometimes taking hours, making them late for work or school or causing them to miss medical appointments, we understood how completely abominable is this system. One member of our group later remarked, “that whole checkpoint has the architectural feel of Auschwitz.” Very true indeed. It was creepy and depressing. We were all so aware of our own privileged status, but heartbroken at the ordeal that these innocent Palestinian civilians deal with every day of their lives. And I could not help but think again, “those who have been abused become abusers” and that is what Israel is doing here. Those checkpoints are like the concentration camps of Europe. They rob Palestinians of human dignity, treat them like cattle or prisoners, make their lives impossible, complicated and stressful and send a constant message to the Palestinians that you are not equally human with us Israelis. It is truly a travesty.
We did have some time during the middle of the day to walk around Ramallah. I must say, it taxed my Manhattanite skills for navigating urban crowds! The streets are very narrow and the crowds are intense. Music blares from shops, merchants call out to passersby, people are coming and going in every direction and the streets are very narrow yet crowded with cars, trucks and buses. The smells and sounds and hustle bustle atmosphere is electric although somewhat exhausting! Ramallah is the most prosperous city in the West Bank and yet to Western eyes, it is dirty, run down looking, gritty, grimy and worn. And yet, despite its less than elegant appearance there is an energy and vitality that is inescapable. There is life and energy and excitement in the city and we found, as tourists, that the people in the city were very interested in welcoming us and engaging us in conversation. A number of women asked us where we were from and welcomed us to their city and wished us a good day. Street vendors bantered with us and we had a great time walking around and soaking up the local atmosphere. We all noticed how very different was the atmosphere from that in Jerusalem. More relaxed, more friendly, more engaging.
So, there was our day. Very full, very rich, really way too much to digest at once. So much to think about. So much to pray about. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, says the psalmist. Amen.
First we met with Omar Baghouti and Dr. Gabi Baramki, both with the Palestinian Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PCABCI). Dr. Baramki is the retired president of Bisreit University, the premier university in Palestine. He spoke both from his professional experience as the president of a university, trying to run a university in an occupied country and from his personal experience as the son of a Palestinian refugee, whose home was taken by the Israelis in the 1967 war and turned into a museum, with no compensation to the family and no concept of any right of return on the part of that family. Under occupation, the university in Palestine has had a very hard time managing to stay open due to the various ways the Israelis have made it difficult if not impossible for professors and students to get to school. In some cases the Israelis have simply closed the school for periods of time, in others, they have de facto closed it by putting up such complicated and cumbersome and arbitrary roadblocks that neither the professors nor the students can get to school on time for classes and the school has to shut down. Omar Baghouti, a Palestinian who spent many years in the US, getting his undergraduate degree at Columbia, and Dr. Baramki spoke at some length about the way this terrible conflict plays out in academia. Baghouti stated bluntly that there are no “liberal” or “left wing” academics in Israel and, notwithstanding the Jewish value system in which education is revered, the Israelis have done everything to make the operation of the Palestinian university difficult and at times impossible. His organization polled all the academics in Israel shortly after the second Intifada in 2000 regarding the problems students and professors were having crossing the checkpoints to get to school. Many of them lived in E. Jerusalem, not far from Ramallah as the crow flies, but literally light years away once you throw in the ordeal of getting past checkpoints. When they tried to get the support of Israeli academics to institute a policy allowing university students and professors some kind of preferred status for getting through checkpoints, only 400 professors out of 9000 in the country expressed support.
Omar spoke at length about the policies of the Israeli government towards the Palestinians, making a strong case that what is happening is apartheid, plain and simple. The whole foundation of Israeli society as he sees it is based on racism, the privilege and preference for one group of people at the expense of another. He works for an organization that is trying to tackle the apartheid in Palestine much the same way that apartheid in South Africa was handled, by instituting boycotts, sanctions and divestiture. His organization is seeking the support of organizations around the world to boycott Israeli products, to divest from companies doing business in Israel and the imposition of sanctions to pressure the Israelis to begin to honor the human rights of the Palestinians in the occupied territories. The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, which is a co-sponsor of this trip, is spearheading a boycott of Motorola products, since Motorola does a huge amount of business with Israel. The campaign is dubbed “Hang up on Motorola.” Omar exhorted us to participate in the boycott, to go to the website of his organization, www.PACBI.org to find lists of companies to boycott. As I listened to these two men, I heard a lot of frustration and pain, anger at the Israeli policies and no patience whatsoever with the Israeli party line about security concerns. Omar, who lived in the United States for 8 years, also stated quite bluntly that there is no freedom of the press in the US, that US media completely parrot the Israeli party line and never report accurately on what is really going on in Palestine. This was to be a theme echoed by everyone we met today. For me it is becoming the theme of this whole trip – US complicity in the human rights violations being carried out here by Israelis against Palestinians and complete distortion in US media when reporting on the conflict in the Middle East. Americans are basically clueless about what is really happening over here and both our government and our media make sure we don’t know the true story.
Next we met with a Palestinian American businessman, Sam Bahour. He was born and raised in Youngstown, Ohio and moved to Palestine as a young adult because he wanted to reconnect with his family roots and was concerned about the conditions over here for Palestinians. He basically reiterated what we have been hearing from everyone else about the human rights violations carried out by Israel against Palestinians, and as a businessman, the ridiculous number of obstacles, roadblocks (both literal and figurative) that he has to go through to conduct business here and his total disgust with the US where this conflict is concerned.
After lunch we went to Al Haq, a Human Rights activist organization that documents human rights abuses by Israeli and Palestinian authorities and engages in advocacy for Palestinians. We spoke with a young researcher in their office who is writing a paper on the extent to which current Israeli policies constitute a regime of apartheid, as defined in international law. It is a compelling argument and one that is being articulated by academics around the world (outside the US and Israel to be sure).
From there we went to a coffee shop where we had the wonderful experience of meeting with two young Palestinian women. Tala Abu Rahme, a Palestinian student, 24 years old, currently doing a Masters in Fine Arts at American University in Washington DC, an accomplished poet, and Sanabel Hassan, a 26 year old who works for human rights organizations in Palestine, a graduate of Bisreit University in Ramallah. These young women were eloquent in talking about their experiences growing up in Ramallah under Israeli occupation. Both have experienced the humiliation of the checkpoints – Sanabel told us that until two years ago her face was badly scarred from the tear gas an Israeli soldier sprayed on her when she was going through a checkpoint. She has also been used by Israeli soldiers as a “human shield” three times in her short life, standing between the soldiers and Palestinians as bullets whizzed past her face. Both of these girls have experienced a level of violence and humiliation at the hands of a hostile authority the likes of which students their age in the United States could not even imagine. In 2002, shortly after the Second Intifada began, the Israelis invaded Ramallah with tanks and guns and stayed in the city for 28 days during which time the Palestinian citizens were under house arrest 24 hours a day for 28 straight days. Tala was confined to her home with her family, unable to leave except for three hours a day every so often to get food, with Israeli tanks right outside their home and the sound of bombs exploding all around her neighborhood. Sanabel, whose family live close to the E. Jerusalem border, was unable to return home when the invasion began, and wound up spending that 28 days all alone in her student house, cut off from her family, without sufficient food, with no electricity and forced to fend for herself as she spent 28 days in a form of solitary confinement. Tala spoke of her experiences as a student in the US, and of the complete ignorance and insensitivity of American students who have absolutely no idea what her life in Palestine has been like nor any comprehension whatsoever about the Palestinian side of the conflict. She was very eloquent about her rage every time she goes through the checkpoint, and how she constantly tells herself to remember that those Israeli soldiers, who are all of 18 or 19 years old, are human beings and that she must never forget her humanity even as she finds them forgetting hers. We asked these girls about the arguments we heard from the Hebrew University students last night re this conflict and Tala in particular just exclaimed in disgust about the ignorance of these young Israelis who have no idea at all what the Palestinians are going through and no appreciation whatsoever of the privileged status that they enjoy in their own country and the world. She is a remarkable young woman – articulate, smart, funny, artistic, expressive, optimistic and determined not to let the forces of occupation rob her of her humanity and dignity, no matter how hard they try. It was sobering to listen to the experiences these girls and their families have lived with for so many years. In a lot of ways, an entire population is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and they don’t even know it.
Our last event of the day was going through the Qalandria checkpoint on foot. This checkpoint is at the border of East Jerusalem and the road leading to Ramallah, all of which is part of the West Bank. But E. Jerusalem is considered by the Israelis to be part of Israel and so those who have identity cards allowing them to enter are a privileged group. The Wall goes right through this area, cutting Palestinians off from other Palestinians, and making it difficult if not impossible for Palestinians to get to their jobs, or to doctor’s appointments and the like. The Qalandria checkpoint is one of the newest and most up to date checkpoints. When you enter, it looks like the entrance to a prison. You walk through a narrow passage, literally no wider that an average adult, with bars on both sides and a roof of metal bars/slats overhead. It is truly like walking through a cage. You then enter an area where there are a series of iron turnstiles that are electronically operated by Israeli soldiers on the other side of the turnstile, inside soundproof, bulletproof rooms. While waiting to go through the turnstile, you are closed in another prison like room, with metal bars for walls on all sides, penning people in like cattle. Those wanting to go through the checkpoint gather in crowds around these turnstiles which are operated by the guards, whom you cannot see, who only allow three people through at a time. When you get through the turnstile, you put your bags, belt, etc on the belt to go through the scanner like at an airport, you walk through the scanner, (again like at an airport) and put your identity document on the window for the guard to see. Palestinians all have identity cards and only certain kinds of cards permit access into E. Jerusalem. Those who don’t possess the right kind of card can apply for permission to pass on a particular day, but even that pass may not be honored. The checkpoints are supposed to be open at certain hours, but the Israelis will close various checkpoints with no warning, arbitrarily, forcing Palestinians to go miles to another one. If the guard feels so inclined he may detain a person at the checkpoint and interrogate them, holding them sometimes for hours. For us, the experience was painless. With American passports and visas, obviously tourists, the guards had no interest in delaying us at the checkpoint. But when we talked to Palestinians for whom crossing that checkpoint is a twice daily ritual, sometimes taking hours, making them late for work or school or causing them to miss medical appointments, we understood how completely abominable is this system. One member of our group later remarked, “that whole checkpoint has the architectural feel of Auschwitz.” Very true indeed. It was creepy and depressing. We were all so aware of our own privileged status, but heartbroken at the ordeal that these innocent Palestinian civilians deal with every day of their lives. And I could not help but think again, “those who have been abused become abusers” and that is what Israel is doing here. Those checkpoints are like the concentration camps of Europe. They rob Palestinians of human dignity, treat them like cattle or prisoners, make their lives impossible, complicated and stressful and send a constant message to the Palestinians that you are not equally human with us Israelis. It is truly a travesty.
We did have some time during the middle of the day to walk around Ramallah. I must say, it taxed my Manhattanite skills for navigating urban crowds! The streets are very narrow and the crowds are intense. Music blares from shops, merchants call out to passersby, people are coming and going in every direction and the streets are very narrow yet crowded with cars, trucks and buses. The smells and sounds and hustle bustle atmosphere is electric although somewhat exhausting! Ramallah is the most prosperous city in the West Bank and yet to Western eyes, it is dirty, run down looking, gritty, grimy and worn. And yet, despite its less than elegant appearance there is an energy and vitality that is inescapable. There is life and energy and excitement in the city and we found, as tourists, that the people in the city were very interested in welcoming us and engaging us in conversation. A number of women asked us where we were from and welcomed us to their city and wished us a good day. Street vendors bantered with us and we had a great time walking around and soaking up the local atmosphere. We all noticed how very different was the atmosphere from that in Jerusalem. More relaxed, more friendly, more engaging.
So, there was our day. Very full, very rich, really way too much to digest at once. So much to think about. So much to pray about. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, says the psalmist. Amen.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Religion and Politics in the Holy Land
Another unbelievably full day. We started our day walking through the Old City of Jerusalem. Behind the ancient walls lies an ancient city, divided into four quarters – Muslim, Jewish, Christian and Armenian. We passed the Israeli guards as we entered through Herod’s gate and made our way through the Muslim quarter. The houses are small and inconspicuous from the outside – indeed, it is often hard to realize that you are standing in front of someone’s home. We saw Muslim homes decorated for those who had returned from the Haj. Of course, this is a typical Middle Eastern city and it is a major tourist attraction so the market is HUGE throughout the Old City. Stalls selling everything imaginable, from dollar store trinkets to textiles, wood carved religious items and electronic games and CDs, underwear and exotic Muslim dresses and headscarves, fruit, vegetables, spices, sweets, baked goods, ecclesiastical accoutrements, Jewish prayer shawls and kippahs, fez’, oriental carpets, prayer rugs and plastic souvenirs. You name it they’ve got it somewhere in the marketplace. I couldn’t help but think about the description of Woman Wisdom in Proverbs who is described as standing on the corner in the marketplace calling out to passersby, calling them to come to her, to come to wisdom. This place gives new meaning to what it means to be in the marketplace. Vendors hawk their wares loudly, young children careen around the crowds somehow managing not to knock anyone over.
We walked to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the church that houses, according to Catholic and Orthodox Christian legend the place where Jesus was crucified and the tomb in which he was laid. We first passed through an Ethiopian Orthodox chapel that is immediately next to Holy Sepulcher. As we were making our way to that church, we could hear a group singing hymns behind us, and shortly an African American church group who were clearly making a pilgrimage appeared, with a woman carrying a cross leading the way as the others followed behind singing, “He went to Calvary for me”. They stopped and their leader read from the passion story and then they moved on again. The walk to Holy Sepulcher goes along the Via Dolorosa where pilgrims come to walk the way of the cross and this group was clearly doing that.
We didn’t have time then to go inside the church, although I went back later with some others from the group and we did go inside. It is an amazing old church, with many small chapels, each maintained by a different sect of Orthodox Christians. The sepulcher itself is right in the middle of the church, very ornately adorned, and pilgrims are allowed in 5 at a time to pray at the place where Jesus was buried. It was wonderful to be in this historic place of Christian pilgrimage, although I was not as moved by it as I was when I visited Rome some years ago and saw the catacombs and St. Peter’s basilica. I think because I am too aware that so much of the story of Holy Sepulcher is legend.
After we left there we went to the Wailing Wall. That did move me almost to tears. To stand next to that wall, the last remaining piece of the Temple that was destroyed in 70 AD had a profound influence on me. Watching the Jews as prayer at that holy place was also very moving. Despite the enormous crowds, it was quiet and reverent at the wall. I had to go to the women’s side, which is smaller than the men’s side, but I was moved to see the women praying at the wall, placing their prayers in the cracks, bringing their children to kiss the wall. I went to the wall, prayed one of the psalms “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, they shall prosper that love thee”, touched the wall and felt strongly the presence of the holy in that place.
After that we had a brief lunch, and then went down a narrow street in the Muslim quarter where we met with Ali Jiddeh, a famous, Afro-Palestinian activist whose story was spellbinding. We entered his home, crowding into his very small living room. I was aware of how very small the homes are in the Old City, where families live in quarters a fraction of the size of what most Americans consider adequate. While Ali was talking to us, his youngest child was darting through the room and Dad ultimately dispatched him and his twelve year old brother out the front door. Ali Jiddeh is a Palestinian of African descent. He is now an older man, but in his youth, at the age of 18, he set off a bomb in Israel in protest against the Israelis and spent 17 years in jail. He has five children and now works for Palestinian freedom and is a leader in the small Afro-Palestinian community. He spoke of the double racism that these black Palestinians face under Israeli occupation. In explaining why he set off the bomb, he said simply that he had suffered years of being robbed of his individual dignity, being treated badly by Israelis as an individual man of African descent, but also because he felt strongly that his people, his heritage was being denied dignity by the Israelis and he wanted to fight back. He admitted that he would not resort to such tactics now, because now he has children, and becoming a father made him unwilling to commit acts of violence because he would not want to take the chance of harming anyone’s child. He pulled no punches whatsoever when speaking about our American government, calling Bush an idiot, Cheney a madman and Condoleeza Rice a “coconut” who is useless! He expressed astonishment and disgust that the American people would even have elected Bush and commented that he couldn’t understand how we could tolerate such an idiot for a president. He noted that under the Bush administration, respect for the United States has plummeted all over the world, and among Arabs hatred for the United States has increased exponentially.
After we left Ali Jiddeh’s home, we took our van to the United Nations OCHA office here in Jerusalem. This is the branch of the United Nations that works on humanitarian issues related to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. We had a briefing by a woman who is now an Israeli citizen, but who is originally from New York. She is a well known lawyer, who some years ago won a landmark human rights case against the Israeli government regarding their torture of certain prisoners. The briefing was an amazing explanation of the extent of the structural oppression of the Palestinians by the Israeli government. OCHA documents all checkpoints, all obstacles to movement within the occupied territories, they monitor all settlements and the continued building thereof. She gave us extensive briefing packets as well as DVDs detailing the effects of the structural barriers that are all over the occupied territories and the humanitarian issues that arise as a result of those Israeli policies. The briefing was remarkable in its detail and specificity, and we were lucky to walk away with briefing packets containing a wealth of detailed information that the UN has accumulated on the ground here. One of our delegation has been video taping all our sessions, but our presenter asked her to turn off the camera, stating that this briefing was “off the record.” We realized that she was giving us the same information she gives high level government and United Nations officials about what is really going on here.
After that meeting we had “free time” and four of us returned to the Old City to spend more time. This was when we made the time to visit Holy Sepulcher. I also managed a little shopping in the marketplace, getting the opportunity to bargain long and hard with a vendor for a mezuzah which reminded me how much I hate bargaining!!
This evening we engaged in dialogue with 5 students at the Hebrew University here in Jerusalem. They were all young Israelis, in their mid 20s with varying opinions about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. It was fascinating to have a chance to challenge some of them about Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza and to ask them what they think might work as a solution. All but one of them stated that they wanted to see a two state solution, one said he’d like a one state/binational state solution, but realizes that it simply will not happen because the level of trust required to make it work isn’t there. It was interesting to hear these young Israelis spouting the version of history that justifies Israel’s violence against Palestinians. One young woman said she would not support a binational state because she would never feel safe as a Jew in a country governed by Palestinians. The numbers work against Jews if the two states were to combine and this young woman wants nothing to do with a state not run by Jews. It’s all she’s ever known, of course, but she has heard a lot about the holocaust and integrated that narrative of “Jews need a safe place, their own country in order to live their lives freely and fully.”
What do I take away from today? Two different narratives – Israeli and Palestinian. A great deal of emotion going along with those narratives. The Israeli government’s actions towards Palestinians bears remarkable resemblance to the human rights abuses of which our own government has been guilty. The American involvement in the situation on the ground here is more critical to the success of the Israeli government than we are allowed to believe. This entire conflict is complex, nuanced and multifaceted. More tomorrow. I’m exhausted at this point – not completely over jet lag yet!
We walked to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the church that houses, according to Catholic and Orthodox Christian legend the place where Jesus was crucified and the tomb in which he was laid. We first passed through an Ethiopian Orthodox chapel that is immediately next to Holy Sepulcher. As we were making our way to that church, we could hear a group singing hymns behind us, and shortly an African American church group who were clearly making a pilgrimage appeared, with a woman carrying a cross leading the way as the others followed behind singing, “He went to Calvary for me”. They stopped and their leader read from the passion story and then they moved on again. The walk to Holy Sepulcher goes along the Via Dolorosa where pilgrims come to walk the way of the cross and this group was clearly doing that.
We didn’t have time then to go inside the church, although I went back later with some others from the group and we did go inside. It is an amazing old church, with many small chapels, each maintained by a different sect of Orthodox Christians. The sepulcher itself is right in the middle of the church, very ornately adorned, and pilgrims are allowed in 5 at a time to pray at the place where Jesus was buried. It was wonderful to be in this historic place of Christian pilgrimage, although I was not as moved by it as I was when I visited Rome some years ago and saw the catacombs and St. Peter’s basilica. I think because I am too aware that so much of the story of Holy Sepulcher is legend.
After we left there we went to the Wailing Wall. That did move me almost to tears. To stand next to that wall, the last remaining piece of the Temple that was destroyed in 70 AD had a profound influence on me. Watching the Jews as prayer at that holy place was also very moving. Despite the enormous crowds, it was quiet and reverent at the wall. I had to go to the women’s side, which is smaller than the men’s side, but I was moved to see the women praying at the wall, placing their prayers in the cracks, bringing their children to kiss the wall. I went to the wall, prayed one of the psalms “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, they shall prosper that love thee”, touched the wall and felt strongly the presence of the holy in that place.
After that we had a brief lunch, and then went down a narrow street in the Muslim quarter where we met with Ali Jiddeh, a famous, Afro-Palestinian activist whose story was spellbinding. We entered his home, crowding into his very small living room. I was aware of how very small the homes are in the Old City, where families live in quarters a fraction of the size of what most Americans consider adequate. While Ali was talking to us, his youngest child was darting through the room and Dad ultimately dispatched him and his twelve year old brother out the front door. Ali Jiddeh is a Palestinian of African descent. He is now an older man, but in his youth, at the age of 18, he set off a bomb in Israel in protest against the Israelis and spent 17 years in jail. He has five children and now works for Palestinian freedom and is a leader in the small Afro-Palestinian community. He spoke of the double racism that these black Palestinians face under Israeli occupation. In explaining why he set off the bomb, he said simply that he had suffered years of being robbed of his individual dignity, being treated badly by Israelis as an individual man of African descent, but also because he felt strongly that his people, his heritage was being denied dignity by the Israelis and he wanted to fight back. He admitted that he would not resort to such tactics now, because now he has children, and becoming a father made him unwilling to commit acts of violence because he would not want to take the chance of harming anyone’s child. He pulled no punches whatsoever when speaking about our American government, calling Bush an idiot, Cheney a madman and Condoleeza Rice a “coconut” who is useless! He expressed astonishment and disgust that the American people would even have elected Bush and commented that he couldn’t understand how we could tolerate such an idiot for a president. He noted that under the Bush administration, respect for the United States has plummeted all over the world, and among Arabs hatred for the United States has increased exponentially.
After we left Ali Jiddeh’s home, we took our van to the United Nations OCHA office here in Jerusalem. This is the branch of the United Nations that works on humanitarian issues related to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. We had a briefing by a woman who is now an Israeli citizen, but who is originally from New York. She is a well known lawyer, who some years ago won a landmark human rights case against the Israeli government regarding their torture of certain prisoners. The briefing was an amazing explanation of the extent of the structural oppression of the Palestinians by the Israeli government. OCHA documents all checkpoints, all obstacles to movement within the occupied territories, they monitor all settlements and the continued building thereof. She gave us extensive briefing packets as well as DVDs detailing the effects of the structural barriers that are all over the occupied territories and the humanitarian issues that arise as a result of those Israeli policies. The briefing was remarkable in its detail and specificity, and we were lucky to walk away with briefing packets containing a wealth of detailed information that the UN has accumulated on the ground here. One of our delegation has been video taping all our sessions, but our presenter asked her to turn off the camera, stating that this briefing was “off the record.” We realized that she was giving us the same information she gives high level government and United Nations officials about what is really going on here.
After that meeting we had “free time” and four of us returned to the Old City to spend more time. This was when we made the time to visit Holy Sepulcher. I also managed a little shopping in the marketplace, getting the opportunity to bargain long and hard with a vendor for a mezuzah which reminded me how much I hate bargaining!!
This evening we engaged in dialogue with 5 students at the Hebrew University here in Jerusalem. They were all young Israelis, in their mid 20s with varying opinions about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. It was fascinating to have a chance to challenge some of them about Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza and to ask them what they think might work as a solution. All but one of them stated that they wanted to see a two state solution, one said he’d like a one state/binational state solution, but realizes that it simply will not happen because the level of trust required to make it work isn’t there. It was interesting to hear these young Israelis spouting the version of history that justifies Israel’s violence against Palestinians. One young woman said she would not support a binational state because she would never feel safe as a Jew in a country governed by Palestinians. The numbers work against Jews if the two states were to combine and this young woman wants nothing to do with a state not run by Jews. It’s all she’s ever known, of course, but she has heard a lot about the holocaust and integrated that narrative of “Jews need a safe place, their own country in order to live their lives freely and fully.”
What do I take away from today? Two different narratives – Israeli and Palestinian. A great deal of emotion going along with those narratives. The Israeli government’s actions towards Palestinians bears remarkable resemblance to the human rights abuses of which our own government has been guilty. The American involvement in the situation on the ground here is more critical to the success of the Israeli government than we are allowed to believe. This entire conflict is complex, nuanced and multifaceted. More tomorrow. I’m exhausted at this point – not completely over jet lag yet!
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Jerusalem
July 29 – First Day in Jerusalem
Well, after our long and exhausting journey, we hit the ground running today. After sleeping in after following a 3:30 am arrival, we took a short tour of the local neighborhood. We are staying at St. George’s Cathedral guesthouse, right in E. Jerusalem, in the Palestinian section of Jerusalem. The city is clearly an old city, with very narrow streets, crowds of pedestrians coming and going in every direction, garbage, graffiti, car horns honking and some white knuckle close calls with trucks and cars on streets not made to accommodate them. As we walked around the neighborhood and over to the Damascus gate to the old city, we passed hundreds of Palestinian Muslims, the women attired in their long dresses and headscarves, some in simple hijabs, others in veiling that covers most of their face. I was reminded of Istanbul. As we are in the height of tourist season, tour buses are everywhere and crowds of visitors pour off them at every turn.
After we had lunch we met with Jeff Halper, founder and Executive Director of Israeli Citizens Against House Demolition (ICAHD). He has written a number of books on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and has been working for peace in this troubled place for going on thirty years. His talk was about what he calls the “matrix of control” meaning the structural ways in which the Israeli government carries out policies of discrimination against Palestinians. He compared current Israeli policies and their effects on the local population to apartheid in South Africa noting that what is happening here is very similar to the apartheid structure of South African society, but also distinguishing this situation. The Israeli “apartheid”, like South Africa, exists because there is both separation of one people from another and also domination of one people by another. Although technically there is not the distinction of “race” in the biological sense as there was in South Africa, the effect here is the same – those of Palestinian, non-Jewish heritage are treated very differently from Jewish Israelis. There is a physical barrier – the Separation Wall or “security barrier” which in Jerusalem cuts Palestinian neighborhoods in half generating problems for those Palestinians who happen to live on one side of the wall and work on the other. Unfortunately the Israelis do not see the Palestinians as people who have a right to self determination and so they do not see a problem walling them off from Israelis. Halper also noted that along with the wall goes control of important and vital resources – water, health care, access to jobs in Jerusalem, identity permits that allow for free travel between East and West Jerusalem and the like. Life for Palestinians on both sides of the wall is immensely and unnecessarily complex. As Halper discussed the second aspect of apartheid as it is applied here, he noted that the domination of one peoples by another is embedded in the very fabric of Israeli society. When the state was founded a fundamental principle was segregation of the Jews from the other people living in this region, both Christian and Muslim. Because segregation is a given, Palestinians who feel discriminated against by Israeli policies have no legal recourse, because the system that administers “justice” is operating from a worldview that sees the separation and the domination as normal and justified.
Halper spoke about what our speaker yesterday in Vienna also observed about the role of the United States in this conflict. Both these men state unequivocally that the continued oppression of the Palestinians by the Israelis could not succeed as it is without the unwavering support of the U.S. Government, particularly the U.S. Congress. Halper said he doesn’t even think it is the President that matters much, rather it is our congress and the extent to which they are, across the board, in a unique bi-partisan way, completely supportive of Israel. This U.S. congressional support of the domination and oppression of Palestinians enables the situation to continue, indeed facilitates the actions of the Israeli government. All the more reason for those of us who find this situation untenable to lobby our congressional representatives to take a different position vis-à-vis Israel.
After meeting with Jeff Halper, a guide from ICAHD took us to see settlements and the Separation Wall. What a trip that was! We first stopped by to visit a Palestinian family in Sheik Jarrah in E. Jerusalem, a small compound where Israeli settlers have moved into a block of buildings belonging to Palestinians, relying on a centuries old claim to the land. Systematically, Palestinian families have been driven out of that compound and Jewish families have moved in. One Palestinian family is still there, having lived in that house since 1956. Just last week, they were issued an eviction order by the Israeli authorities. They are protesting that edict of eviction and their case has spawned a flurry of international media attention. During our visit, there were other tour groups there, and a group of Israeli peace activists were literally camping out on the family’s porch to protect them from violence at the hands of the Israeli army. A Palestinian woman was translating for the family, saying all they want is to stay in their home, to live peaceably with their Jewish neighbors. It was an eerie experience to walk through the compound past apartments that belong to Jewish settlers, adorned with Israeli flags and then to arrive at this Palestinian home, which, thanks to the media attention given to them in the past few weeks is deluged with visitors who want to hear their story and express support. The compound itself is urban and looks like a place that would qualify for some upgrading and renewal. The further irony is the extent of argument and fighting over homes that are far from luxurious. The compound itself looks like a place at war – Israeli flags and Hebrew phrases on the closed doors of the Israeli homes, signs and protest banners plastered all over the walls of the Palestinian home. The Palestinian anguish at the very founding of Israel was expressed in the cries of the Palestinian family to be allowed to keep their home. As the spokeswoman reminded the crowds of us who were there, “The Israelis say that they moved into places that were empty. That is a lie. We were here, we had homes, and we were forced out of them. Now they are still doing it, forcing this woman out of the home she’s been in since 1956, after she was forced out of the home her family originally had in Gaza. Please tell the people back in your country what the government here is doing to innocent people.”
After that emotional experience, we went to the Separation Wall in E. Jerusalem, where Palestinian neighborhoods are sliced in two by the wall. There truly are no words to accurately describe the impact of that enormous, concrete barrier, topped with barbed wire and now covered in graffiti. We all went silent as we gazed at this ugly symbol of the domination and oppression of one people by another. I was saddened at the sight – such a visible symbol of the extent to which human beings are capable of demonizing and dehumanizing one another. The wall is ugly and what it is doing is uglier still.
We then went to a Jewish Settlement, Ma’ale adummin, inside the West Bank, on a hilltop in the desert outside the city. Our guide explained that there are different kinds of settlements in Israel – those that are “economic” in motivation and those that are ideological. The settlement compound in the city that we had just left is an example of ideological settlement activity – motivated by Zionist beliefs and ideology about the destiny of the Jewish people and the role that Israel and Jerusalem play in that destiny. Ma’ale adummin is an economic settlement – Israeli Jews move there to have a better life, to give their children a nice, safe, secure environment in which to grow up. As our guide pointed out, the Jews who move into that settlement are not primarily well to do European or American Jews, but rather Middle Eastern Jews, Ethiopian immigrant Jews and Russian immigrants. These groups of Jews are lower on the economic scale than European Jews, they have less economic opportunity, less money, less education and generally are trying to adapt to a new country and to deal with their own displacement. As he pointed out, any solution to the Israeli/Palestinian crisis has to deal with those settlers and their fate and the fact that it is unlikely that the Israeli government or anyone else will want to have to deal with resettling 40,000 people in that settlement somewhere else. They have homes, shopping centers, medical centers, library, schools – all the elements of a community and ripping that away doesn’t seem likely.
On our way back to the city, we passed a checkpoint and to our surprise our bus was pulled over. We all got out our passports, prepared for the Israeli soldier to come aboard the bus and check us out. Fortunately, our guide was Israeli and he spoke briefly with the soldier and we were released.
Our guide, a young Israeli Jew who served in the Israeli army, but quit before his time was up, a “refusenick”, and who has dedicated his life since then to being a peace activist, talked quite frankly about the role of the United States in this conflict. He reminded us that our country as the most powerful and richest nation on earth leads by example and exports its culture to the rest of the world. Our unwavering support of Israeli policies towards the Palestinians is only a part of the problem – the fact that we as a country do the very things that many of us condemn the Israeli government for doing is even more critical. He noted that the world looks to us as a model of how to be a well to do, affluent, successful modern society. What they see is a country that rules by force, war, domination, economic inequalities, a country that also builds walls to keep out undesirables while exploiting their labor, a country that marginalizes many parts of its own population and sees no way to stop doing so, or simply lacks the will to do so. We support Israel and its policies not only politically but by being the very thing we see Israel having become. If we want Israel to do differently, if we want the world to be different, then we Americans need to change the way we operate in the world, modeling a society built on compassion and justice rather than oppression and violence. I couldn’t help but think of Rabbi Michael Lerner’s Global Marshall Plan as I listened to our young guide.
When we got back to the hotel, I met with Dr. Shehadeh Shehadeh, a Palestinian Episcopal priest who is the Canon to the Bishop for Peace and Reconciliation. He is working here to encourage dialogue and peace activism among those Israeli Jews who want peace and are willing to countenance the existence of the Palestinians in this country and the Palestinian Christians and Muslims who also want to find a peaceful solution so that everyone can live harmoniously together. His stories of his own experiences working for peace in this region underscore the importance of finding ways for people to encounter one another in a personal way, so that the “other” becomes a real person, with a real story and a face and family. He said that the Christian communities do not work all that well together here and that is a problem that Christians need to address here in the Holy Land. He also noted that the Christian communities here need the help and support of Christian communities outside this region if they are to be able to do the peace work that they must do here on the ground.
It was a full and rich day. The complexity and nuance of this situation is more and more apparent to all of us as we listen and observe and hear people’s stories. And the connections between what we are seeing here and what is happening in our own country in different contexts is sobering.
Well, after our long and exhausting journey, we hit the ground running today. After sleeping in after following a 3:30 am arrival, we took a short tour of the local neighborhood. We are staying at St. George’s Cathedral guesthouse, right in E. Jerusalem, in the Palestinian section of Jerusalem. The city is clearly an old city, with very narrow streets, crowds of pedestrians coming and going in every direction, garbage, graffiti, car horns honking and some white knuckle close calls with trucks and cars on streets not made to accommodate them. As we walked around the neighborhood and over to the Damascus gate to the old city, we passed hundreds of Palestinian Muslims, the women attired in their long dresses and headscarves, some in simple hijabs, others in veiling that covers most of their face. I was reminded of Istanbul. As we are in the height of tourist season, tour buses are everywhere and crowds of visitors pour off them at every turn.
After we had lunch we met with Jeff Halper, founder and Executive Director of Israeli Citizens Against House Demolition (ICAHD). He has written a number of books on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and has been working for peace in this troubled place for going on thirty years. His talk was about what he calls the “matrix of control” meaning the structural ways in which the Israeli government carries out policies of discrimination against Palestinians. He compared current Israeli policies and their effects on the local population to apartheid in South Africa noting that what is happening here is very similar to the apartheid structure of South African society, but also distinguishing this situation. The Israeli “apartheid”, like South Africa, exists because there is both separation of one people from another and also domination of one people by another. Although technically there is not the distinction of “race” in the biological sense as there was in South Africa, the effect here is the same – those of Palestinian, non-Jewish heritage are treated very differently from Jewish Israelis. There is a physical barrier – the Separation Wall or “security barrier” which in Jerusalem cuts Palestinian neighborhoods in half generating problems for those Palestinians who happen to live on one side of the wall and work on the other. Unfortunately the Israelis do not see the Palestinians as people who have a right to self determination and so they do not see a problem walling them off from Israelis. Halper also noted that along with the wall goes control of important and vital resources – water, health care, access to jobs in Jerusalem, identity permits that allow for free travel between East and West Jerusalem and the like. Life for Palestinians on both sides of the wall is immensely and unnecessarily complex. As Halper discussed the second aspect of apartheid as it is applied here, he noted that the domination of one peoples by another is embedded in the very fabric of Israeli society. When the state was founded a fundamental principle was segregation of the Jews from the other people living in this region, both Christian and Muslim. Because segregation is a given, Palestinians who feel discriminated against by Israeli policies have no legal recourse, because the system that administers “justice” is operating from a worldview that sees the separation and the domination as normal and justified.
Halper spoke about what our speaker yesterday in Vienna also observed about the role of the United States in this conflict. Both these men state unequivocally that the continued oppression of the Palestinians by the Israelis could not succeed as it is without the unwavering support of the U.S. Government, particularly the U.S. Congress. Halper said he doesn’t even think it is the President that matters much, rather it is our congress and the extent to which they are, across the board, in a unique bi-partisan way, completely supportive of Israel. This U.S. congressional support of the domination and oppression of Palestinians enables the situation to continue, indeed facilitates the actions of the Israeli government. All the more reason for those of us who find this situation untenable to lobby our congressional representatives to take a different position vis-à-vis Israel.
After meeting with Jeff Halper, a guide from ICAHD took us to see settlements and the Separation Wall. What a trip that was! We first stopped by to visit a Palestinian family in Sheik Jarrah in E. Jerusalem, a small compound where Israeli settlers have moved into a block of buildings belonging to Palestinians, relying on a centuries old claim to the land. Systematically, Palestinian families have been driven out of that compound and Jewish families have moved in. One Palestinian family is still there, having lived in that house since 1956. Just last week, they were issued an eviction order by the Israeli authorities. They are protesting that edict of eviction and their case has spawned a flurry of international media attention. During our visit, there were other tour groups there, and a group of Israeli peace activists were literally camping out on the family’s porch to protect them from violence at the hands of the Israeli army. A Palestinian woman was translating for the family, saying all they want is to stay in their home, to live peaceably with their Jewish neighbors. It was an eerie experience to walk through the compound past apartments that belong to Jewish settlers, adorned with Israeli flags and then to arrive at this Palestinian home, which, thanks to the media attention given to them in the past few weeks is deluged with visitors who want to hear their story and express support. The compound itself is urban and looks like a place that would qualify for some upgrading and renewal. The further irony is the extent of argument and fighting over homes that are far from luxurious. The compound itself looks like a place at war – Israeli flags and Hebrew phrases on the closed doors of the Israeli homes, signs and protest banners plastered all over the walls of the Palestinian home. The Palestinian anguish at the very founding of Israel was expressed in the cries of the Palestinian family to be allowed to keep their home. As the spokeswoman reminded the crowds of us who were there, “The Israelis say that they moved into places that were empty. That is a lie. We were here, we had homes, and we were forced out of them. Now they are still doing it, forcing this woman out of the home she’s been in since 1956, after she was forced out of the home her family originally had in Gaza. Please tell the people back in your country what the government here is doing to innocent people.”
After that emotional experience, we went to the Separation Wall in E. Jerusalem, where Palestinian neighborhoods are sliced in two by the wall. There truly are no words to accurately describe the impact of that enormous, concrete barrier, topped with barbed wire and now covered in graffiti. We all went silent as we gazed at this ugly symbol of the domination and oppression of one people by another. I was saddened at the sight – such a visible symbol of the extent to which human beings are capable of demonizing and dehumanizing one another. The wall is ugly and what it is doing is uglier still.
We then went to a Jewish Settlement, Ma’ale adummin, inside the West Bank, on a hilltop in the desert outside the city. Our guide explained that there are different kinds of settlements in Israel – those that are “economic” in motivation and those that are ideological. The settlement compound in the city that we had just left is an example of ideological settlement activity – motivated by Zionist beliefs and ideology about the destiny of the Jewish people and the role that Israel and Jerusalem play in that destiny. Ma’ale adummin is an economic settlement – Israeli Jews move there to have a better life, to give their children a nice, safe, secure environment in which to grow up. As our guide pointed out, the Jews who move into that settlement are not primarily well to do European or American Jews, but rather Middle Eastern Jews, Ethiopian immigrant Jews and Russian immigrants. These groups of Jews are lower on the economic scale than European Jews, they have less economic opportunity, less money, less education and generally are trying to adapt to a new country and to deal with their own displacement. As he pointed out, any solution to the Israeli/Palestinian crisis has to deal with those settlers and their fate and the fact that it is unlikely that the Israeli government or anyone else will want to have to deal with resettling 40,000 people in that settlement somewhere else. They have homes, shopping centers, medical centers, library, schools – all the elements of a community and ripping that away doesn’t seem likely.
On our way back to the city, we passed a checkpoint and to our surprise our bus was pulled over. We all got out our passports, prepared for the Israeli soldier to come aboard the bus and check us out. Fortunately, our guide was Israeli and he spoke briefly with the soldier and we were released.
Our guide, a young Israeli Jew who served in the Israeli army, but quit before his time was up, a “refusenick”, and who has dedicated his life since then to being a peace activist, talked quite frankly about the role of the United States in this conflict. He reminded us that our country as the most powerful and richest nation on earth leads by example and exports its culture to the rest of the world. Our unwavering support of Israeli policies towards the Palestinians is only a part of the problem – the fact that we as a country do the very things that many of us condemn the Israeli government for doing is even more critical. He noted that the world looks to us as a model of how to be a well to do, affluent, successful modern society. What they see is a country that rules by force, war, domination, economic inequalities, a country that also builds walls to keep out undesirables while exploiting their labor, a country that marginalizes many parts of its own population and sees no way to stop doing so, or simply lacks the will to do so. We support Israel and its policies not only politically but by being the very thing we see Israel having become. If we want Israel to do differently, if we want the world to be different, then we Americans need to change the way we operate in the world, modeling a society built on compassion and justice rather than oppression and violence. I couldn’t help but think of Rabbi Michael Lerner’s Global Marshall Plan as I listened to our young guide.
When we got back to the hotel, I met with Dr. Shehadeh Shehadeh, a Palestinian Episcopal priest who is the Canon to the Bishop for Peace and Reconciliation. He is working here to encourage dialogue and peace activism among those Israeli Jews who want peace and are willing to countenance the existence of the Palestinians in this country and the Palestinian Christians and Muslims who also want to find a peaceful solution so that everyone can live harmoniously together. His stories of his own experiences working for peace in this region underscore the importance of finding ways for people to encounter one another in a personal way, so that the “other” becomes a real person, with a real story and a face and family. He said that the Christian communities do not work all that well together here and that is a problem that Christians need to address here in the Holy Land. He also noted that the Christian communities here need the help and support of Christian communities outside this region if they are to be able to do the peace work that they must do here on the ground.
It was a full and rich day. The complexity and nuance of this situation is more and more apparent to all of us as we listen and observe and hear people’s stories. And the connections between what we are seeing here and what is happening in our own country in different contexts is sobering.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Vienna
We've had a long day, arriving in Vienna this morning after flying all night (and not sleeping at all!!). We walked around this beatiful city and visited the Judenplatz where there is a Jewish museum that documents the history of Israel in photographs and where there are ruins of a 14th century Synagogue that was destroyed when the Jews were driven out of Vienna in the late 14th century. Reminds me of why they feel so attached to Israel - they have been chased around the globe rather a lot these past two thousand years!
We met with a man who works with an Austrian NGO on Middle East issues and he had some interesting perspectives on the role of American foreign policy in the continuing conflict in Israel/Palestine. Needless to say, he confirmed what most of us know, that Europeans are looking forward to a change in our administration, and he, and others who are working for a peaceful resolution in Israel/Palestine are hoping against hope that the new President will not fall prey to the AIPAC pressures, although they are skeptical about the likelihood of a candidate turned president being willing to stand up to them.
We are in the departure lounge getting ready to board the flight for Tel Aviv.
More tomorrow when I've had some sleep!
We met with a man who works with an Austrian NGO on Middle East issues and he had some interesting perspectives on the role of American foreign policy in the continuing conflict in Israel/Palestine. Needless to say, he confirmed what most of us know, that Europeans are looking forward to a change in our administration, and he, and others who are working for a peaceful resolution in Israel/Palestine are hoping against hope that the new President will not fall prey to the AIPAC pressures, although they are skeptical about the likelihood of a candidate turned president being willing to stand up to them.
We are in the departure lounge getting ready to board the flight for Tel Aviv.
More tomorrow when I've had some sleep!
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