I’m realizing that in my final days here in Israel and Palestine my words now have a certain weight they will lose later. Me, a random guy trying to learn and see in a totally foreign situation, doesn’t really have much of a place in this mess beyond being a caring human being. I know from experience that especially when I get home, people will qualify my perspective of this place based on my “perceived sympathies.” Though I am more hurt and broken now than before I came in many ways, I feel a certain calm and resolve about my answers to their challenge.
The questions I might ask to questions are these: What does a 60 year old refugee camp mean to you? When you walk down the winding streets of a place that really looks quite nice by many standards of the city here, clean streets, pleasant balconies and folks milling through the streets, what difference does it make that signs painted all over the walls still bear the names of the villages these people came from 60 years ago? What do you think about a child who can diligently describe the feel of village life but has never actually been outside the city his parent’s were forced to live in?
What do you make of a the son of survivors of Auschwitz whose daughter was killed in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem? What if he shares his story to promote peace beside his “brother in grief,” a Palestinian man whose son was killed by a Israeli settler? I certainly didn’t have much to say to them besides thanking them for their courage.
Am I too optimistic to think these people would just like to see peace? The people I have spoken with here are cynical and sad, to be sure. However, the imagination to look past tragic circumstances to keep working for justice is amazingly inspiring. Everyone has assured my that sympathies and sides are clearly part of the “facts on the ground” but a remarkably large number of them seem basically fed up. May we all reach that tipping point where we become so fed up with violence we decide to lower our weapons. Inshallah
Our group shuffles into a beautiful home in a neighborhood much like a suburb of Pheonix. The roof is made of imported pine and bookshelves full of beautifully bound religious texts line the walls. Our group sits and speaks with two Israeli settlers who live within the occupied territory of Palestine in the South Hebron hills. The men tell us about how they want to follow God’s will in the land, practice civil disobedience if necessary in order to follow His command, and are seeking to keep “their feet on the ground and their heart to heaven” in order to live in their settlement with the protection of a secular military in a land not quite ligitmately theirs… yet.
and an aromatic tranquility through the steel fence and across a small collection of tents just meters away. These tents are the site of the village of Uum Khader, demolished just weeks ago by the military. The villagers, their homes freshly piled in twisted bundles of steel and masonry, invite us into a tent that doesn’t even stand up to the small breeze that picks up as we trundle inside. They offer us bread and tea, these people with absolutely nothing but bread and tea, and tell us about their college degrees, how they tell their children this is all a game, and of their faith and hope in God. I weep as they arrange a ride for us home down a road it is illegal for them to travel on.
them tell a very similar story of the hardships of occupation. When one man’s house was occupied, he very luckily won the rights to return to it in an Israeli court but was never given the key to open its military-installed gate. One woman took us on a tour of the mosque where Abraham and Sarah are buried. She showed us spackled bullet holes in the walls of the inner sanctum where Baruch Goldstein gunned down worshippers during prayers in 1994 while she was in a back room. As a result of this action the once complete mosque is now one half mosque and one half temple seperated right in the middle by a steel door.
Evan Welkin 