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10th March 2004
A few days before writing this, I was with a group of about 20 Palestinian teenagers who have come to the US to present their history in music and dance. They radiate youth and beauty and grace and friendliness, but they are angry too. Some of them were unwilling to carry on talking with a friend of mine when they heard she was an Israeli. So much mistrust, so much sadness.
I was in Israel and Palestine a year ago, invited by the same Israeli friend, Ayellot. I started my stay with her family in the kibbutz where she had grown up.
They showed me many historic places: beautiful Jaffa on the Mediterranean, from which Jonah sailed on his fateful voyage; Ashkelon where Samson fought the Philistines till he was betrayed by Delilah, then pulled down a temple on himself and his enemies gathered there - an act of suicide terrorism.
I visited the Old City in East Jerusalem, where the Temple once stood and where the Al Aqsa Mosque still dominates the landscape, golden domed, majestic and serene.
A guide took me on a whirlwind tour of the Via Dolorosa and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, also in the Old City.
At first it was 'madame this' and 'madame that'. I felt more at ease when my guide changed my name to 'sister'. He left me in a small convent built over layers of excavated sites, going back to Roman times. It seems likely that this is where Jesus was tormented by Roman soldiers before his crucifixion. How glad I was to meditate there in a cool, quiet place.
I later learned that soon after I'd left, an Israeli soldier had been shot at, and an innocent Arab bystander killed in the crossfire. War was never far away.
Ayellot's brother-in-law, Avner, took me on several remarkable tours in the wilderness and desert. He showed me remnants of a Roman road and a massive cistern carved in the rock by their legionnaires, and even more ancient olive and wine presses, also carved in the rock when the area was inhabited. Now it is uninhabited wilderness - we hardly saw another car.
We spent another day in the desert which Avner knows well and loves; went by the Essene monastery at Qumran; took a floating dip in the Dead Sea; and went to Masada, the rock fortress rising straight from the desert floor, last stronghold of Jewish zealots when the Temple was destroyed. We saw many Bedouin settlements in the desert, very poor people, no longer allowed to be nomadic. We stopped to give some water to a troubled Bedouin man by the roadside and were rewarded with a smile of pure delight.
Avner also took me on a walk in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood at the start of Sabbath. Everyone was hurrying to the synagogue, though many children stayed in the streets to play. They pretended to ignore us but kept stealing curious looks our way. I liked the peace and otherworldliness.
I went twice to Bethlehem in the West Bank, part of the occupied territories, first as a pilgrim/tourist. Getting there was an adventure. I went from East Jerusalem in a taxi-van with about six Palestinians. Because they are not allowed through the Israeli military checkpoint outside of Bethlehem, we went around it, down a steep goat path on a boulder-strewn hillside. The van got stuck on a boulder and the men got out to rock it back and forth. We all became more friendly after taking part together in this small act of resistance.
The Church of the Nativity had been the scene of intense fighting a couple of weeks earlier, but was quiet when I visited. No foreign tourists, unlike normal times. I prayed and chanted with a group of local people, Catholic Arabs. An Arab nun said to me in anguish, "So much suffering. Please pray for peace".
The second time in Bethlehem was at the Dheisheh refugee camp. I stayed for three days at the Ibdaa Center, which works with children and young people from the camp. The young dancers whom I saw last week in Santa Cruz come from there. Ibdaa means 'making something out of nothing'. They have built a comfortable guest house and encourage sympathetic foreigners to stay and work with them a few days, a few weeks, a few months.
I knew there would be a curfew a few hours after my arrival and, as usual, no one knew when it would be lifted. I decided to stay anyway.
Before the curfew, two young men took me on a tour of the camp. I saw homes which had been demolished by the Israeli army and families living in tents. "Refugees within the refugee camp", my escort said. I saw a print shop which had been smashed to smithereens quite recently. A teddy bear, belonging to the owner's son, had been grotesquely decapitated. I told the owner, still in shock, that I was sad about my own government's support of such destruction. There was a community center, also in ruins. Whenever the curfew is lifted, people quickly go about their most urgent business. Here a group of men were out rebuilding the center with a will: they will not give up.
As we toured the camp, my guides pointed out in a number of places photos and shrines honoring their martyrs and suicide bombers from the camp. "This one was my neighbor; this one my close friend..." said the guides.
There were murals within Ibdaa too. One large wall next to the staircase displayed nothing but keys, maybe a hundred, the huge old fashioned kind, hanging on vines. Someone explained that such keys are all the refugees have left of the homes they fled from when the Israelis took over. Israelis have occupied their former lands for almost three generations, but still the refugees yearn for the past and hand down the keys from generation to generation.
They are two brother people, both claiming Abraham as their father, and locked in a bitter blood feud for this small land. The Israelis came after 2,000 years of longing and a history of persecutions, thinking they would be safe at last in a state of their own. Palestinians, bitter about having had to flee, their lives increasingly controlled by a crushing military presence, retaliate in desperation.
The curfew started at 3pm. The streets were suddenly drained of movement, except for enormous tanks which rumbled around the camp, a few feet from our center. I wanted to go out to see better, naively thinking I might talk to the soldiers, but an alarmed Ibdaa person said "Don't, you'll be shot at." So I went to the top floor of the center.
I watched young boys lurking in alleyways till a tank came by, darting out to throw their stones, running back to the alleys, pursued by teargas: David fighting Goliath, their war game, a very dangerous one.
The curfew lasted three days. We were a group of Italians, a couple of French people and Americans all at the camp to show our support and to work with the young people in various ways, and a number of Palestinians staying with us. We spent our time cooking and eating and talking and singing, and sending out e-mails from the well-equipped computer room, and of course watching the action outside, taking photos, to let the world know.
I returned to West Jerusalem when the curfew was lifted. Later, I went to a community near Bethlehem - so close that only a valley separated Palestinian Bethlehem from the home of an Israeli friend where I then stayed. Her neighborhood has been the target of gunfire and of a suicide bombing in the nearby community center where Arab and Jewish women used to meet. Like everyone in Israel she is traumatized.
"It feels like a bolt of electricity going through me every time there's an attack anywhere. Danger is ever present." I too felt it whenever I rode a bus or walked in a crowded street. It is hard for traumatized Israelis to acknowledge the injustices being committed against Palestinians.
Still there are many Israelis protesting the occupation, not only because it is oppressing the Palestinians, but also because it is corroding their own society, often brutalizing the young people who have to serve there. They are too young to have so much armed power. Some courageous groups are encouraging and supporting draft resistance. I met a woman whose son is a resister. The family had a hard time finding a lawyer, even among the liberals, willing to defend him.
There are 'Women in Black' who keep protesting the occupation all over Israel. I stood for a few hours with one small group at a well-traveled crossroads in the countryside. The same women have stood there every Friday afternoon since 1988 with signs and banners. They have been shot at, their families and friends tell them they are accomplishing nothing, but they keep coming back: tough women, angry women, angry at their own government.
There are groups on both sides of the conflict advocating non-violence, and they are in touch with each other. A brave woman journalist, Amira Haas, has lived in Gaza and in the West Bank for years. She has written a book about daily life there, Drinking the Sea in Gaza, and writes often for the liberal Israeli paper, Haaretz.Thoughtful people have said that if enough Arabs and Jews get to know each other , one by one, peace will come.
This is what Ibrahim and Eliyahu are doing, bringing people together to talk about their sufferings and their hopes; to listen, to pray, to forgive. I support them with all my heart.
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