Palestine

You wouldn’t know it from the photo, but the girl and guy above don’t care for each other much. The scene is the West Bank village of Bil’in, and the protestor (probably from Europe or the U.S.) is trying to take a shield away from an Israeli soldier. The picture almost seems gentle, and so it is not representative of what was actually happening. On the other hand, it reminds me of Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam,” and so maybe it actually is representative of what was happening. What do the Sistine Chapel and the outskirts of a Palestinian village have in common? They are places where hands create.

Speaking of hands, just a few miles from Bil’in and many centuries earlier we’re told that Jesus, during a confrontation of his own, used his hands to create. Face to face with religious leaders and an adulterous woman they had cornered, Jesus listened as they said, “In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?”

What the men said was true; the law commanded that a stone, perhaps many stones, fly at this woman until she was a bloody corpse. In response Jesus bent down and used his finger to write in the earth. Straightening up a moment later he said to the leaders something like, “If any of you have lived a pure life, go ahead and hurl a rock at her.” He then bent back down and continued writing. We’re never told what he wrote, but when one by one the religious leaders had walked off and only he and the woman remained, he asked the woman, “Has no one condemned you?” No one had, and so Jesus continued, “Neither do I. Go now and leave your life of sin.”

Throughout the ages and in every place, the movements of hands—and sometimes their stillness—have left lines in sand, in history, and on people’s faces. Like the soldier and the protestor, or Jesus and the adulterer, all of us are participants in an ongoing creation, which is to say that there is a little Michelangelo in all of us. Or maybe there is a lot?

In any case, our hands create, and they are at their best when connected to a mind and heart that cares. Just ask a 2,000-year-old adulterer.

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For an image of a man throwing a stone, this one a Palestinian in the village of Bil'in, click on "Anger"

Walking through the Nablus Casbah, or Old City, was an eerie undertaking in late 2006.  The reasons for this are too complex to flesh out in a photoblog, but suffice it to say that here, in the West Bank’s largest city, six years of the second Palestinian intifada and Israel’s response—on top of four decades of abusive military occupation—had left the city tense and broken.  The years of violence made the air heavy, and the ingredients for the next storm—a shooting, a kidnapping, or a lethal military raid—could be felt on one’s skin.  One local man bemoaned that Israel had imprisoned or killed all the “clean” fighters.  Now there was no real resistance, he said, and those gun-carrying Palestinians you did see during the day were more about showing off for girls than anything.  When Israeli solders entered town, they always melted away.

This photograph, taken in the heart of the old city, shows a memorial to recent “martyrs,” including men who had been involved in terrorist operations against Israel.  An armed man initially refused my request to take a picture but then agreed, so long as he was not included in the frame.  For numerous reasons I didn’t like this memorial.  For one, the multi-dimensional humanity of the dead had, to me, been obscured by a one-dimensional glorification.

But even more I didn’t like it because it said nothing about peace, and when you are visiting a city like Nablus you yearn for things that give hope for peace, which includes (to say the least) an amount of moderation in the celebration of death, killing, and brutality.  This memorial was part of a spiral, whirling around with its counterparts on the Israeli side, driving deep into the gut of one who walks streets in both Israel and Palestine.  The acceptance and even extolling of violence plagues both communities.  The Israeli writer David Grossman, for example, recounts in his book The Yellow Wind the following conversation with a fellow Israeli in the late 1980s:

Once, when I was on reserve duty, there was a terrorist attack in the Old City in Jerusalem, near the Rockefeller Museum, and we set up a detainment area for Arab suspects in the police headquarters.  We picked up all the Arabs we caught.  We brought entire truckloads.  How I beat them that night!  There was another reservist, a young guy, with me, and I saw that every Arab he catches, he bites hard on the ear.  Actually takes a piece.  I ask him why he did it, and he answered me: “So that I’ll know them next time we meet.”

And in the Israeli paper Ha’aretz earlier this year there was an article that included this paragraph:

Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children's graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques—these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty. The slogans accompanying the drawings are not exactly anemic either: A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription "Better use Durex," next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A sharpshooter's T-shirt from the Givati Brigade's Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, "1 shot, 2 kills." A "graduation" shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, "No matter how it begins, we'll put an end to it."

If interested in the multi-dimensional, check out the film Paradise Now, which was released in 2005 and is actually set in Nablus.  Click here to see the Paradise Now trailer.

No American novel makes me think of Israel/Palestine like John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. The smoldering anger of the Joads as they are displaced from their land and forced into exile captures the emotions of many Palestinians I've met.  Ma Joad, for example, struggling to keep the family together always makes me think of a woman named Om Rajah in Jenin Refugee Camp, and her son Tom reminds me of so many young Palestinian men, not least when he says things like, "Why, Jesus Christ, Ma, they comes a time when the on'y way a fella can keep his decency is by takin' a sock at a cop.  They're workin' on our decency."

But much of the book, like much of life in Israel/Palestine and every other place, is full of family wisdom and brokenness and love that isn't necessarily all that connected to the politics and history of one's setting.  Some things are just universally shared among us.  And so when the mother and daughter in this photograph passed me in Jerusalem's Old City and stopped for a moment to reply to my sabah il-xher (good morning) and to ask where I was from, I then listened as they continued on up the steps and talked with each other about the ordinary things in life.  They -- through their physical movement, their voices, their relating to each other -- gave life to these aging alley walls.  It was they, not the stones and arches and steps, which comprised the heart of this city.

I don't know what kind of wisdom Jerusalem's mothers pass on to daughters, but I bet that sometimes it isn't too unlike the following passage, in which Ma Joad is talking to her daughter Rose of Sharon:

When you’re young, Rosasharn, ever’thing that happens is a thing all by itself.  It’s a lonely thing.  I know, I ‘member, Rosasharn.” … And Ma went on, “They’s a time of change, an’ when that comes, dyin is a piece of all dyin’, and bearin’ is a piece of all bearin’, an’ bearin’ and dyin’ is two pieces of the same thing.  An’ then things ain’t lonely any more.  An’ then a hurt don’t hurt so bad, ‘cause it ain’t a lonely hurt no more, Rosasharn.  I wisht I could tell you so you’d know, but I can’t.”  And her voice was so soft, so full of love, that tears crowded into Rose of Sharon’s eyes, and flowed over her eyes and blinded her.

If interested in another short vignette from Jerusalem, this one about two Palestinian men dancing to a Whitney Houston song hours after a suicide bombing, click on "A Dance in Jerusalem." 

Protests and demonstrations can at times be a little extreme in both method and message.  For example, there are sometimes tragically far right Christians on street corners who spew verbal manure into bullhorns, the better to amplify their messages of judgment (and nothing else).  Or sometimes, like at a 1995 NOW rally on the National Mall in Washington DC, there are women who display loud slogans on bare breasts—which has the effect of sending at least one other woman, who didn’t know she would stumble upon this while on family vacation, scurrying for a detour as she covers her children’s eyes.

Perhaps placards make for better mediums than bullhorns or breasts, but here too things can go array.   A demonstration becomes more a spectacle than a message when jutting above the crowd are placards exclaiming “Exterminate Terrorists” (at a pro-Israel rally) or “2-4-6-8, Israel is a terrorist state!” (at a pro-Palestinian rally).  Such demonstrations become pep rallies for those who already embrace the cause, but they don’t reach those outside.

And then there is the occasional placard that is factually problematic.  This photograph, taken at a demonstration in the Palestinian village of Bil’in, offers an example.  Mandela, unlike King and Gandhi, didn’t believe nonviolence was a moral imperative, and he was willing to employ violence when he thought it more effective.  He writes in his book Long Walk to Freedom:

In India, Gandhi had been dealing with a foreign power that ultimately was more realistic and farsighted.  That was not the case with the Afrikaners in South Africa.  Nonviolent passive resistance is effective as long as your opposition adheres to the same rules as you do….For me, nonviolence was not a moral principle but a strategy; there is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon.

Mandela had much respect for Gandhi, even choosing him when Time magazine asked him to write about one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.  In 2007 he would even say that “Gandhi's message of peace and nonviolence holds the key to human survival in the 21st century.”  But I wonder what he’d say about this placard?

In Barack Obama’s landmark speech in Cairo today, after rightly chastising those in the Muslim world who deny the Holocaust and peddle harmful stereotypes about Jews, he went on to say this:

On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people—Muslims and Christians—have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations—large and small—that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.

This speech was a breath of fresh air.  It marks not only the first time I heard a President describe the situation for Palestinians as “intolerable”; it also is the first time I saw a President who really seemed to mean it.  Obama’s words will have ruffled the feathers of hundreds of thousands of hard-line Israelis (and not a few U.S. Congressmen).  But these Israelis—and this is important to understand—are not the only Jews in Israel.  There are other Jews who have been yearning for an American President to say just such a thing (and to mean it).  There are others who have refused, as Obama says the U.S. has refused, “to turn their backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.”

One such person is Olga Ginzbourg, who you see in this photograph pleading with Israeli soldiers in the West Bank village of Bil’in.  The village is an example of why Israel’s ongoing occupation is intolerable: half of Bil'in's agricultural land has been stripped from it in order for Israel to build an illegal settlement and a separation barrier; it has lost the ability to sleep soundly because of frequent midnight raids meant to harass its residents; and just a few weeks ago it lost a son, who was protesting nonviolently, when a solider slammed a teargas canister directly into his chest.

To read an article I wrote about Olga, recently published in Tikkun magazine, click on "An Israeli in Bil'in".  Voices like hers are brave, essential, and in urgent need of buttressing by balanced U.S. policy.  They also illustrate the power of travel—even journeys of only a few miles, especially when they take you from places like Tel Aviv to a tiny Palestinian village. 

For a four-minute YouTube video narrated by an Israeli woman who also yearns for a more balanced U.S. policy and which shows scenes of occupation, click on "Letter to Obama"

Among the many sacred sites in Jerusalem’s Old City is the Holy Sepulchre, best known as the traditional burial place of Jesus.  Here you can find pilgrims weeping, candles burning, history hovering.  And occasionally, particularly around Easter, you can even find monks and other Christians engaged in fistfights with rival factions.

Whatever one’s faith, all can agree that Jesus’ life and death shaped and continues to shape a lot of what goes on in the world, not least in the realm of literature.  One of my favorite examples is found in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, in which a visitor from outer space looks at the story of Jesus' execution and makes an observation about human nature and violence: 

The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.

But the Gospels actually taught this:

Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.

The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being of the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again:

Oh, boy -- they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!

And then that thought had a brother: "There are right people to lynch." Who? People not well connected. So it goes.

The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.

So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn't possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.

And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!

Their numbers have been small in recent years, and understandably so.  Not only does peace feel remote, but they sometimes get cursed at, spat at, or shown a variety of crude hand gestures. They are routinely called naïve and accused of being unpatriotic.  A few have even experienced the sting of rubber bullets and tear gas.

I’m describing Israelis who actively oppose their government’s actions and policies in Gaza and the West Bank.  These people were upset long before rockets began falling on Israel.  To them, it was and is no less upsetting when Palestinians are dispossessed of their land in villages like Bil’in and Ni’lin.  To them, condemnation is called for not only when Hamas perpetrates violence against Israel; it is also necessary when Israeli soldiers stage mock executions or beat civilians at checkpoints, or when Israel’s own extremist settlers terrorize and even murder Palestinians.   (And so on.)

Most of us only get indignant and angry when wrong is done to us, not when we are doing wrong to another.  People like the woman in this photo, however, are an exception.  She was one of maybe 100 Israelis demonstrating at Israel’s border with Gaza in November 2006, angry at both the blockade and Israel’s firing of missiles into the Strip.   Given the degree to which she was going against the grain of her society by simply standing with such a sign at the Gaza border, I suspect she would have resonated with the words of Oscar Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador from 1977 to 1980.  For Romero, violence wasn’t just that which caused physical harm; it was also a government’s twisting of societal structures and law so that the powerless were kept down and oppressed. He said:

I will not tire of declaring that if we really want an effective end to violence we must remove the violence that lies at the root of all violence: structural violence, social injustice, exclusion of citizens from the management of the country, repression. All this is what constitutes the primal cause, from which the rest flows naturally."

Romero was assassinated while celebrating Mass in 1980, the day after preaching a sermon in which he called upon Salvadoran soldiers to stop participating in government repression.

I received an email this morning from a Venezuelan friend who had been celebrating New Year’s Eve at a nice hotel in Panama City, Panama.  She wrote, “The dinner was great, a lot lot lot lot of food it was, but at the moment I ate my food I just can´t stop thinking about the 400 people killed in Palestina, and how it was the new year for that families. The party was awful…I just can´t imagine that the rest of the world were celebrating yesterday while a lot of moms, dads, and sons were crying about their lost in Palestina.”

She writes about a tension with which many of us are familiar.  How does one celebrate while knowing that at the same moment someone else is mourning, or living in absolute fear?

There is no space here to delve into that question.  But like her, the events in Gaza and Israel have been on my mind in recent days.  Of all the places I’ve traveled, none were as difficult as Gaza.  I thought it an often claustrophobic strip of land (at least in the cities and refugee camps) that had taken not only the lives of Gazans but also amazing (and controversial) people like Rachel Corrie—and where one afternoon, in my desire for a photograph, I had feared it might take mine as well.  I had never been to a place where even for a mere 72 hours it was so hard to stay sane.  Unless you’ve been there, you simply have no idea what it means to live in Gaza, to live in a cage.

The photograph above was taken in the West Bank town of Ramallah in late 2006.  The Palestinian boy was part of a protest against Palestinian-on-Palestinian violence, which the day before had left three Palestinian children dead in Gaza City.  Some eyes on this Earth take in an incredible amount of suffering.  They take it in, even while many of us celebrate.

These are the hands of Abdullah Sharqawi, a Palestinian farmer in the West Bank village of Aboud.  Sharqawi is also Roman Catholic (almost half of Aboud’s 2200 people are Christian).  In late 2006 I spoke with both Sharqawi and his priest, Father Aridah, and learned that Sharqawi was losing much of his land to Israel’s controversial separation barrier, and how some of his olive trees had recently been uprooted and taken to Israel.  Sharqawi was struggling to cope.  With tears in his eyes, he told the priest, “My father said a family can afford to lose a son, but nobody can afford to lose his land.  Tell me, what am I to do?”

The words, Father Aridah explained, were not meant to devalue the life of a son; they were meant to emphasize the crucial role land plays in Palestinian life and culture.  “Some olive trees in Aboud are 1000 years old,” the priest said.  “Family identity is connected to the care and cultivation of these fields.”  In other words, the loss of a child may be tragic, but the loss of one’s land is worse, for it is the loss of a family’s heritage, sustenance, identity, and hope.

In visiting a village like Aboud, you speak with distraught farmers who watch powerlessly as bulldozers rip through their land, and you know these mammoth machines are driven by people and guarded by armed men who at the end of the day will return to homes unconnected to the land they maul and confiscate.  And then later, in reading The Grapes of Wrath and seeing how the Joads relate to the loss of their Oklahoma fields, you think the Joads and the people of Aboud would have something in common.  Here is an excerpt from Steinbeck’s excellent book, in which the displaced Joads reflect on the foreign machinery and people who have taken their land and made them homeless:

All this is easy and efficient.  So easy that the wonder goes out of work, so efficient that the wonder goes out of land and the working of it, and with the wonder the deep understanding and the relation.  And in the tractor man there grows the contempt that comes only to a stranger who has little understanding and no relation.  For nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates; and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land.  Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor water no calcium.  He is all these, but he is much, much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis.  The man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis.  But the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he does not know and love, understands only chemistry; and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself.  When the corrugated iron doors are shut, he goes home, and his home is not the land.

After World War I, while stationed in what is now Pakistan, TE Lawrence wrote to a friend back home, “I do not want to meet my past, round some future turn in the road.”

Lawrence, better known by many as Lawrence of Arabia, didn’t much care for his past; he certainly didn’t want to be reminded of it.  One of the few things he liked about being stationed in Pakistan was that it kept him out of England, where he cringed before – if not outright despised – the way people viewed him as the famed “Lawrence of Arabia” who performed legendary feats during the Great War.  He wanted those years in Arabia to be behind him, not to define him.

Fame and disillusionment plagued Lawrence, but less famous individuals can also wish to not meet their past round some bend in the road.  The things, people, and ideas to which we give our bodies, energy, and time will often greet us again.  This is part of what gives weight to our choices.   This is why what we do now will always be part of tomorrow.

I took this photograph shortly after sunrise while walking among olive trees belonging to the West Bank village of Yanoun.  In Israel/Palestine, one walks through a terrain where both peoples routinely meet their pasts (which is full of hurt, abuse, violence, and dehumanization) in the present.  But as I walked down this quiet village lane, I thought not of social/political realities but of my own life, and I hoped that in the future, in those moments when I meet my past around a bend, that it might mostly be a good thing.