Can There Be Peace In Palestine?

This was written in response to a trip I was lucky to be part of in 2007.  I thought I would repost it as we witness renewed violence in in the Holy Land.  Regardless of what one thinks of the theology, the details remain true.

"Can There Be Peace in Palestine?

- reflections on my trip to Israel"

Alison Longstaff, August 26^th, 2007

Church of the Good Shepherd

Psalm 122: 1-9; Matthew 24:1-13

                                                                                                     

            As many of you know, I went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land this past Spring.   Because the Holy Land is not the most stable of regions, preparation for the trip included a day-long session on culture shock, cultural sensitivity and diversity, and post-traumatic-stress disorder, among other things.  In our information packets we found articles on how to recognize post-traumatic-stress disorder, both in ourselves and in our fellow travellers.  We learned that we could be affected by the general atmosphere of trauma-survival among the peoples we would be visiting.  We discussed how we should care for ourselves and each other should violence occur.  It was sobering.

            Above all, we were taught, "The situation in Palestine is complicated."  We must try to withhold judgment.  We must avoid taking sides, and instead, simply keep our eyes and ears open. Apparently, westerners characteristically assume that the problems over there could be easily fixed if someone just said the right thing or took charge the right way.   It is not so.

            I was immediately struck by the warmth with which the Israelis in the airport greeted us.  They welcome all visitors.  The arrival of tourists helps them not feel so isolated nor so judged and feared and cut-off from the rest of the world.  We also met our tour guide at the airport, a Palestinian Arab Christian Israeli.

(picture: The Lion's Gate in Jerusalem. Notice how bullet-riddled it is.)

            His name was Husam, not Hussein  but Husam.  He advised us to call him "Who? Sam?" to remember the correct pronunciation.  His name was as unfamiliar in my mouth as his identity was to grasp in my brain.  An Arab Christian Palestinian Israeli. He was an Arab, which is a blood-line or ethnicity, but he was not Muslim, like many Arabs are.  He was a Christian.  There are many Christians in the Holy land still, Christians descended from the Christians who have been there since the time of Jesus.  He is Palestinian, which means his family has lived in the Palestinian territories for centuries, but he is not a terrorist.  It is terribly unfortunate that the western media has somehow gotten many of us in the Western world to equate "Palestinian" with "terrorist." It is an emotional and fearful association and entirely uneducated.  There are so many good and peaceful Palestinians. To think every Palestinian is a terrorist is as accurate as thinking that, because I am a woman and a seminarian, all women are seminarians.  (Picture: Husam [white hat] talks to some of us on the school steps. See the clear, brilliant blue of the sky.)

            And, Husam was an Israeli.  Both a Palestinian and an Israeli?  At the same time?  Yes.  He was born to a Palestinian family in Palestinian territory, but he is one of the lucky few to have an Israeli passport.  He is recognized as a citizen of Israel.  Many Palestinians are not, for all sorts of reasons, which is a huge part of the problem over there.  But he is.  So He is an Arab Israeli Palestinian Christian.  Even he doesn't know where he fits.

            There are so many ways I could describe our travels over there.  I could speak of the land, the light, and the locations.  I could describe all the many churches vying to be sitting on the "original spot where" something religious maybe happened.  I could describe the crazy mix of old and new, and the march of time in a place nearly older than time.

            But I choose to describe my observations of the people of the land, the desperate religious sincerity, and the age-old battles for dominance and control.  I choose to describe both the beauty and courage, the resilience and hope in the face of the repeated failures of the peace efforts.  And the heart-breaking violence that seems to have a life of its own.  

(Next two pictures: school children, Christian and Muslim, playing soccer together in Ramallah. Will they also grow up to kill or be killed?) 

            At no time did we witness open violence.  We were never exposed to any real danger, ever.  But we witnessed evidence of the tension everywhere we looked.  From the thick razor-wire topped walls that Israel is unremittingly erecting around section after section of Palestinian territory, to the machine gun toting soldiers, to the bullet holes riddling the walls of Jerusalem, we could not help but be aware of the tension.

            These people have lived through things I can't even imagine.  We had to pass through heavily guarded check points.  We had our bus driver yelled at by an angry Israeli guard at one check point.  We had soldiers barely out of their teens march through our bus, examining our passports, machine guns slung on their hips.  One pulled off his sunglasses, and looked just like our neighbour's son, except he had darker hair. 

            Israel is a military state, and every young person must spend two years in the army.   Imagine if we lived there.  That would be every young person you know, taught to handle guns. To shoot to kill.  To obey orders.  To see violence as a common occurrence.  Jake and Sam, Stephanie, and Megan and Kate, Heather and Joshua. . . .  Both my girls, and eventually, Jordan.  And this, not in Canada, but in a country born in the holocaust, and shaped by a lifetime of hatred and oppression.  I simply can't comprehend it.

(picture: overlooking the school's playground in Ramallah) 

            We stayed in Bethlehem first, beyond the wall.  The Palestinians nearest Jerusalem live in some of the worst conditions.  Though our hostel was spacious, clean, and quiet, we saw the rubble and neglect in the streets.  The severe water restrictions were evident in the bathrooms though never shoved in our faces.  Some of us blithely and ignorantly took our long western showers, not realizing the desperate need for every drop behind the walls.  You see,  Bethlehem, a scarce five miles from Jerusalem, is Palestinian.  It is the distance of about eight kilometres from here to the St Jacobs farmers market or from here to Sports World.  For that matter, from here to the Carmel Church, our Swedenborgian cousins.  By now, development is as continuous between Jerusalem and Bethlehem as it is between Good Shepherd and St Jacobs.  It could be one big city except the Israelis have been and still are erecting a wall all around Bethlehem, and all around Ramallah, and around many other places.  Imagine having friends who lived near the St. Jacob's farmer's market who were walled in, and never allowed to leave.  Imagine them cut off from their jobs, their doctors, their families.  Imagine trying to invite them to a wedding or a funeral, and them being refused permission to come.  This is the reality of many Palestinians in Israel.  No wonder many have resorted to violence.  Some are cut off from their family vineyards which have been their livelihood for centuries.  It is arbitrary, cruel, and they are completely powerless.  There is 70% unemployment within these walled areas.

            Seeing the conditions behind the wall and hearing the stories, it was hard not to take sides against the Israelis.  On the first day, a group of us went to visit a Christian school in Ramallah.  Because our bus and tour company had all the right passes and papers, and because tourists bring welcome dollars to Israel, our bus was allowed to traverse the two heavily guarded check points in order to make this trip.  Ramallah, yes, the Ramallah in the news, is another stone's throw out the other side of Jerusalem.  We travelled from the dusty, broken, and run-down Palestinian streets of Bethlehem into the clean, new, well watered and beautifully landscaped Israeli neighbourhoods on the right side of the wall, and then back into the pock-marked, rubble-strewn, and neglected streets of Ramallah.

            We met some of the most courageous and called teachers and volunteers at this school, as in the many other Christian centres we visited.  The school in Ramallah has several hundred pupils from Kindergarten to about grade eight.  They are Muslim and Christian.  Yes, this school welcomes Muslim children, and educates them as Muslims.  The Muslims have separate religion classes from the Christians, but also, all the children have religion together once a week, where they learn about each other's religions as well as the many other religions of the world.  The Christian and Muslim families in these Palestinian territories are bound together by their shared hardship.  They want only peace, and for their suffering to end.

(Picture: Children cluster around Debbie Lou and others of us, including our tall photographer)

            Everything looked normal.  The children's happy voices rang out from the recess yard as we sat and spoke with the head teachers.  Debbie Lou, one of our group who is a music instructor at Wilfrid Laurier, went out to mingle with the children.  When the children learned that she loved music, they wanted to sing her their songs.  One little boy sang her "his song."  The interpreter described the story to Debbie Lou as the little boy happily performed his long composition.  It was a song about his grandfather, who was taken in the night from their home, by soldiers with guns.  It was about how he would never see his grandfather again, and it went on and on.

(Picture: in the crowd is the little boy singing to Debbie Lou.)

            The teachers told us that this type of song is a form of trauma therapy for the children.  That the primary task the teachers face, daily, is helping the children deal with the precariousness of their lives.  Almost nightly, Israeli soldiers come into some part of Ramallah and arrest someone or shoot up a home, occasionally just because they can.  It is a form of intimidation.  It is meant to keep the Palestinians off balance.

            The children come to school chattering about the soldiers being on their street in the night, much the way our kids might chatter about an extra violent thunderstorm or a tornado scare.  This is normal for them.  The safest place these children have is the school.  The teachers do everything they can to help the children, Christian and Muslim together, to feel safe and loved and cared for by God.  Even so, in 2002, the soldiers came to the school during the day. They blasted open the doors and shot up the walls.  When the teachers complained to Isreali officials afterwards they were told, "No one was hurt."

            "No one was hurt."  Imagine if a huge explosion rocketed those doors off their hinges and a mass of armed soldiers stormed in screaming and ordering everyone onto the floor, and then proceeded to shoot up our walls and windows.  Then after yelling at us all and calling us names like filthy terrorists, vile English, dirty Canadians, and threatening to kill us and our families, for several hours, they left. ? !  "No one was hurt," simply doesn't adequately describe the shock we all would have sustained

(picture: One of our Canadian peace-workers, one of the seminary professors, and the brave head teacher of the school.)

            Just looking at the blast-blackened and twisted front doors would be enough to bring all of the emotional trauma back.  And we would be left to pick up the shattered glass, and see our dear sanctuary all bullet-riddled, and try to decide how to go on.

            This is one tiny piece of one tiny reality in all of the stories and sights we heard.  I haven't even told you about the three empty dialysis chairs awaiting children who would never show up that day at the hospital.  The guards at the check-points refused three children permission to come get their dialysis treatments at the hospital.  It makes no sense.  Three children, who would be dead in two days if they are not allowed through the wall to the hospital for their treatments.  That was four months ago.  Are any of them still alive?

            If I think too much about it all, I get choked up.

(picture: The head teacher and some students.)

            The same day that we visited that hospital, we went to the holocaust museum.  We only had a half-hour for the museum, which needed at least three.  I could barely take it in.  I sat and wept and wept.  That night, tempers erupted in our group.  There was shouting and accusations resulting in withdrawal and tears.  We were all dealing with more than we could handle.  The scope of the human on human abuse and horror was more than we were capable of comprehending.  We were shattered.

(Picture:The school pastor looks on and our Canadian tour director talks to the head teacher.)

            We are very sheltered here in Canada.  And we kid ourselves if we think we are incapable of the behaviours we heard of and saw in Israel.  Everyone of us, under the same conditions, would exhibit much the same behaviours.  Just witness the small violence of barking, hurtful accusations that arose in our tiny, peaceful, Canadian group after the one day of witnessing the hospital and the holocaust museum.  We were overwhelmed.  The helplessness and grief had to pour out somehow.  We were able to apologize and heal within 24 hours.  These people are dealing with a legacy of trauma and violence that spans generations, crosses cultures, and touches every one of us.  It's not going to be a simple fix.

            Though it is understandable, the fact of the holocaust does not give Israel a right to bully and oppress the Palestinians.  A battered wife will take a long time, a LONG time before she will trust a man to treat her kindly.  How much more is Israel a battered wife?  The horror of the generations of abuse must work its way out somehow, and it will take time.

            "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem. . . .  How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not ready." (Matt 23:27)

            Before we become too depressed by the stories we've explored together today, before we decide that it is all hopeless and horrible, let's remember that God was born into this very place.  He did not and will not give up on us, though He himself, his beauty and love and truth was spoken into this darkness and treated much the same way.  Standing with and bearing the horror, and still staying open to love is the way out.  And I need not go to Israel to do this work.  I can find it readily in my own family and neighbourhood, and yes, even in our church.

            When you and I work to face and, without passing on the harm, express and release the hurts and little traumas and small betrayals we face within our lives here and now, we are helping to strengthen the great global consciousness of peace and forgiveness.  It has long been known that abuse will be passed on and on until someone is strong enough to stop the transmission.  The abuse will stop when the human race is ready and strong enough and conscious enough to stop it.  AND, what you and I do in our hearts, here and now, today, makes a difference.  Forgiving my brother, my sister, my father, for abuses and hurts in my family, is the way I help the world move toward forgiveness. (picture: watching the children at play)

            Yes, there are many active and hands-on ways we can try to help in Israel.  They need help.  They particularly need volunteers who speak Arabic.  I can put you in touch with any number of ways to provide support and caring if you feel called.

            But more than that, you and I can stand, hand in hand, and believe in peace and forgiveness.  You and I can look fearlessly into the horror and hopelessness and speak love into the darkness.  We are not alone in the desire for peace.  We have God on our side.  And God is infinitely patient and infinitely healing.  If our hearts break at the sights and stories, God's heart breaks a thousand times more.  But while we become weighed down by hopelessness, God has never given up and never will give up.  He knows what He's doing.  Nothing, absolutely nothing is hopeless in God's care.

            As we read in Jeremiah:

For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord,

plans for your welfare and not for harm,

to give you a future with hope. (Jeremiah 29:11)

            Thank you for listening.  Amen.

Special music  Calling All Angels    by Jane Siberry