Thursday, 10:40 am local time

Tomorrow.

Once upon a time. All the best stories start with once upon a time, and this one does too. Once upon a time. In the beginning. B’rashit bara eloheinu. Every story starts in time, actually: once upon some time that is not this time. There’s a story in the Godly Play curriculum about the way the Church counts time, and it starts with Christmas, the “end that is a beginning, or maybe the beginning that’s an ending.” Time is circular. We come back to that once upon a time, sometimes.

But time is also linear. It marches on, like a Christian soldier, or a line of Roman columns. We cannot recover what is lost, no matter how hard we try: words, memories, peace, time; they won’t come back the way they looked before. Sometimes they look better. We rode the same bus with the same people two weeks ago, and we are the same as we ever were, but there is more conversation now. More laughter. More. There are many ways to tell the story, each equally valid, each equally wanting. Nobody’s perfect, but the story might be, in the telling of it.

So.

Once upon a time, fourteen students and two professors left and went to a different place, to figure out what was wrong. They came back changed, but not in the way you think. Once upon a time, a group from a seminary went to the Holy Land to walk the footsteps of their Savior, and ended up noticing the footsteps of others, The Other. Once upon a time, we died and rose again in Christ and nothing was ever the same. Once.

It’s hard not to be over-emotional about leaving Israel today, so I ask that you excuse the maudlin a little bit. A true story is not a list of facts, it’s the emotions and feelings and everything else that goes into it. And this story is true, as true as anything else I’ve experienced in the last three years at Princeton. Truer, maybe. It has characters, sure, and a plot and a setting and a lot of facts about rocks and words, but that’s not what makes it true.

Gordon and Chip say that the purpose of the trip was to explore contested geography, which, what? That’s a nonsensical phrase, like drive-thru window or justification through faith. How do you contest geography? A hill is a hill; a river is a river; a building is a building no matter which way you look at it. If you’re contesting these things, you’re not paying attention, because hills and rivers and buildings don’t change. It’s like looking at a common word and saying, “No, wait, I’m going to redefine that for everyone now.” You don’t contest language any more than you contest geography.

For instance, in Hebrew, the preposition leh’ – a lamed, for those in the know – means ‘to’ or ‘for’ in English. I learned it that way in college for modern Hebrew; I learned it that way in seminary for Biblical Hebrew. Christianity is continuity, says Samir. Leh’ is one of those things that makes sense in context: “Ani holech leh’yahm” means “I walk to the sea,” not “I walk for the sea.” See? Simple. If you know the context.

Once of the seminary’s buzz-phrases is “context is king,” at least according to Dr. Charlesworth. I think he’s right, in both senses. Taking a story out of its context is the best way to misunderstand it, to ruin it. Our story cannot be read or told in isolation. We are a group of upper-middle class, fairly privileged graduate students in a higher education setting. (I don’t care what humble beginnings you had – once you get to Princeton, you’re upper-middle class and fairly privileged. Try and deny it.) Everything we’ve written, then, every picture we’ve posted must be read through that lens. I am a white male; read what I’ve written through that lens. I’m also a children’s minister, a videogamer, unmarried, and from the South, so go ahead and throw those lenses in there too. There is no such thing as an unbiased story. There are very few stories that transcend their lenses.

Except, you know, The Story, but that’s a post for a completely different writer.

There’s a blog I read about television shows (stopping judging me – they’re stories, too), and this guy named Jacob writes about the British show Doctor Who, and he talks about the grace that cuts. Grace is the story that saves us, that connects us to The Story, but it’s not cheap. It’s a grace that cuts off the unworthy branches, the branches that sap the life out of us. It’s a grace that burns us in purifying fire that is agonizingly beautiful. The Beautiful Letdown is that Christ came for the sinful, for the broken, for the rejects. Christ came for us. Connect the dots.

The grace that cuts allows us to hear, though, because it includes all of us and cuts all of us. It lets me listen to the Israeli city council member and the Palestinian cartographer both talk about a city that is divided in its unity from completely opposite angles, and it lets me hold those two voices in tension. The grace that cuts does not cut off conversation but rather cuts out all that would distract from the hearing of that conversation. The contested geography is important because it gives us a place to have these conversations, to see these sites; it is important because it gives birth to people from whom we can learn other stories that helps us to better articulate our own story. Contested language is equally as important because it is the words that those people speak, and each person defines their words differently. Jerusalem means something different in Haifa and in Jericho.

I learned a song years ago in Hebrew class, the lyrics to which are:
Yavo shalom aleinu
Od yavo shalom aleinu
Yavo shalom aleinu, ve’al-kulam.
Salaam, aleinu ve’al-kol ha’olam
Salaam, salaam

Peace will come to us
Peace will come again to us
Peace will come to us, and everyone
Peace, to us and to the whole world
Peace, peace
The beauty of the song is that it combines two stories, the symbols of which are ‘shalom’ and ‘salaam’. Peace, in two languages. Grace connects them. It’s not an easy peace, though, because they are symbols. This whole contest is about symbolic victories and symbolic defeats. The adjective for the Wall is either Security or Segregation, depending on which story you’re a part of. Mount Moriah-the Temple Mount-Harim al-Sharif symbolizes different things through different lenses. And as we heard at the Tent of the Nations, if you confuse the symbol with the truth, the result is fratricide.

I cannot wrap this trip up. I can’t package it prettily for you with some nice group shots in the airport and tie it all together with a big blog-ribbon and a tag that says “Kum-by-yah.” That’s not the way this story works. Once upon a time doesn’t stop when you close the book; it’s still there, even if you’ve placed a cover over it. This blog might continue, for a while at least. We’ve all learned a lot, we’ve gained some insight, but it’s not over. The conflict still rages. Grace still cuts. Change hurts because it must, and we’re all hurting as we prepare to board the plane.

But the hope is the story that we carry, the small bits of it that are ours and the small bits that are not. We are not the voice that will speak into this country and save it, but our voices still matter. Our stories still matter. And yours do too. The point of the trip is that you can fight over geography, but people remain. The point of the trip is that place doesn’t matter so much as the stories we tell in it and about it.

Mai. Madees. Elias. Samir.

Gordon. Chip. Kathy. Daniel.

Kris. Leslie. Jeremy. Iain.

It’s been 14 days, if you count jet leg. A fortnight, and now we’re coming home. To what, we don’t know; for what, we don’t know. Leh’. But we’ll see. Tomorrow is as important as yesterday, because we don’t know what’ll happen when we turn the page. So let’s find out.

Once upon a time.

Wednesday, 11:58 pm local time

Memory.

The number six million means nothing to me. It is incomprehensible. I’m a math/science guy at heart, so I appreciate the quantifiable, but to contemplate the extermination of six million people…it’s unthinkable. Literally – I cannot think about it, I cannot wrap my head around it. Even visiting Yad Va’Shem today, the Israeli memorial to the victims of the Holocaust – in Hebrew, the Shoah – it doesn’t help. I’ve been to Holocaust museums. I know the history, both the geopolitical and the religious, and it only does so much.

There are many ways to remember. I’m a grad student, memorizing things is my entire job. You can create lists of facts, like the walk through the central Yad Va’Shem museum. You can group like things together, as with the Valley of the Communities – a maze of rock walls (that look eerily similar to some of the archeological sites we’ve visited, like Masada and Mamshit) 40 feet high, on which are inscribed the names of the towns destroyed and affected during the Second World War. Yad Va’Shem certainly does an excellent job of engaging kinesthetic memory, as the whole place is a giant park, and the different memorials are unique and require different kinds of movement: the Garden of the Righteous among the Nations has a slow, sedate pace, while the Children’s Memorial stops you in your tracks completely. An event like the Shoah is unquantifiable, and so it requires that you engage different sorts of memories.

This place is filled with memories of the past. The Shrine of the Book at the Israel museum helps us remember the Masoretes who helped codify the Biblical text for us. The Western Wall is a memory of a Temple that once existed. Hezekiah’s Tunnel reminds us that some of this stuff really, actually happened. Millions upon millions of people have been through the city, through this country, all remembering their experiences slightly differently. We will be no different.

As is my idiom, my final post will probably be tomorrow from the airport, if Ben Gurion has wi-fi, as I look back and try to wrap the trip up in a single statement. I won’t be able to do it, just so you know. But as the group held its final session this afternoon, beginning the long journey of processing the trip, it occurred to me that I’m going to forget. I had a conversation in Hebrew with a street vendor today, my first full-Hebrew conversation in years, and one of the few sentences I could say was, “Shahakti harbeh milim” – I have forgotten many words. This trip has only been 12 days long, and yet I can barely remember what we did yesterday, much less back in Arad. The blessing of the blog is that it forced me to write down some of my memories; the curse is that I can never write down everything.

So this is where you come in. Remembering is a communal activity – memories are personal, but remembering is communal. My memories matter to me, yes, but they only matter to the world if I share them, I think. The best thing Kathy did for me last summer was made me tell her the story of my mission trip to Thailand, in extensive detail, in multiple parts, over the course of weeks. And I remembered a lot more than I thought, but only because she listened, because she asked, because she questioned.

Make us tell you our story. Our stories. We’ll try to sum it all up in a few sentences in an attempt to make pleasant conversation, but really so that we don’t bore you. Resist that. Make us go into detail. Sit with us in the silence of thinking. Ask us to share – because it’s going to be hard for us to do so. Our trip will have failed if we don’t create the spaces back home to share this story, even if the spaces we enter into are contested. Help us create that space. Help us remember.

It is early in the morning of our last day in Israel, in Palestine, in the Holy Land, in the Levant, in the space between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, between the Sinai Peninsula and the mountains of Lebanon. It is still dark out. Dawn has not yet broken.

But it will soon.

Wednesday, 7:15 am local time

Light.

A trip like this takes a toll on you. There’s so much to say, but never enough time to say it. I’m a seminarian, so I’m used to staying up late writing and waking up early for lectures, but the intensity of this journey has made me tired – has made all of tired. We’ve listened to six passionate people in the last two days talk about their struggles and joys and woes and fears and it’s getting to me. This is our last full day in Israel, though. The space between now and our first jaunt to Tel Lakish is simultaneously too vast and too narrow to measure, and much has fallen through the cracks. And we’re not done yet.

We met a man named Daoud – the Arabic spelling of David – outside Bethlehem yesterday. He owns about 100 acres of farmland on the top of a hill outside the city. On a clear day, you can see the Mediterraean Sea over the hills to the west of his land. You can also see Israeli settlements in a circle around its perimeter; Daoud is being systematically penned in by illegal housing developments. The land has been in his family for generations, since 1919, and yet Daoud has spent over $140,000 since the Six Day War trying to prove his family’s ownership of the land. The government, it seems, is desperate to take the land that he works, and the fact that he holds ownership papers that go back all the way to the days of the Ottoman Empire seems not to matter.

Caroline remarked afterward, as we were standing atop the hill and commenting on the urban sprawl below us, that she would have given up years ago. I concurred; Daoud is not allowed to build even a tent on his land, he has been shut off from the electricity and water given to the settlements, and the cisterns that he keeps to collect rainwater have been deemed illegal. He’s had settlers uproot trees on his property and tell him to his face that, though he has ownership papers from the Ottomans, they have ownership papers from God – this said while holding up the Bible. And Daoud is Christian. And he stays, and fights.

There is a stone on his property that says, “We refuse to be enemies,” and Daoud is doing everything humanly possible to live up to that. He started an organization called ‘Tent of the Nations’ that brings people together on his land in order to start the process of reconciliation – even as he still fights in court to prove his legitimacy – because Daoud will not give up. Period. It is a land issue, yes, and maybe even something akin to the Palestinian pride that we saw in Taybeh, but it’s also something much more than that: Daoud has hope that goodness shall still prevail.

Last night, Debbie from Kefillit Yadidiah, the synagogue that hosted us for Shabbat, brought one of her congregants to talk to us, a reporter named Gershom Gorenberg. I will to being a little skeptical (not to mention tired); we’d heard the hard-line Jewish perspective from Edna the City Council member, and the stark tennis match between Israeli justification and Palestinian anger was starting to make my head hurt. And then Gershom spoke, and I’m sitting here now with his book next to my computer.

Gershom is an Orthodox Jew who has written books and newspaper articles, and keeps up a blog called South Jerusalem – and after two weeks of having Gordon and Chip look at me sideways everytime I’ve said the word ‘blog,’ I was impressed that someone over 30 had even heard of blogging, much less kept up with it – that he says is a “progressive, skeptical blog on Israel, Judaism, culture, politics, and literature.” Gershom talked to us about the history of the conflict, but from the perspective of shared spiritual space. Interestingly – and I didn’t know this – Jerusalem exists not because it’s on any major trade routes (it isn’t), or because it’s easily defended (it’s not), or because it has a great water source (it doesn’t); the only thing that’s ever made it significant, dating back archaeologically before even David, is the spiritual significance of the place.

Gershom acknowledges that both sides of the conflict have made mistakes, awful mistakes. The book that sits next to me is about the history of the Jewish settlements, and it looks decidedly anti-settler, but he won’t allow the Palestinian side to escape responsibility for their acts of violence under the guise of freedom fighting. He seems to want to hold the differences in the conflict in tension and allow them to speak to one another rather than trying to parse them all out.

As a reporter, Gershom covered Pope John Paul II’s visit to the Western Wall in 2000. A group of Ultra-Orthodox Jews protested, saying the Pope should convert to Judaism in order to pray there, citing Micah 4 – “My house shall be a house of prayer for all the nations.” When the Pope finally did visit, one of the Israeli Cabinet Ministers – who also happened to be a rabbi – welcomed him with open arms, citing the exact same verse. Gershom pointed out to us that the differences in this conflict aren’t just between Israelis and Palestinians – they’re between and among Israelis and Palestinians themselves. The situation is complicated, he said, but there is still work to be done.

Being here has made me tired, and I’ve only been here 12 days; I can’t imagine what it’s like for those who actually live this. We leave tomorrow, and while I’ll be said, I’ll also be grateful for the rest. It’s hard to keep holding the different perspectives we meet in tension with one another, and my tendency is to dismiss the more hard-line voices. I’m indebted to Jeremy Hutton for calling me out on this; having seminary professor who take the time to teach even through blog comments is amazing. Jeremy pointed out that the Biblical witness is full of angry voices, of laments that give no credence to the other side. These voices deserve to be heard, and to be understood, and for me to dismiss the tiredness of Dr. Raheb or the anger of the ARI-J is to miss the point of reconciliation entirely.

What I appreciate about Daoud and Gershom, though, is the unabashed hope that they have. Even in a land that continually beats them down, in different yet oddly similar ways, they keep fighting. They keep trying. They keep looking for another way. It’s impossible to maintain such a perspective long-term – Dr. Raheb is evidence enough, but so am I. I am tired. I am weary. I don’t think I can keep this up much longer.

But I don’t have to.

The point of reconciliation is that you lift up all sides, that sometimes we need to carry each other for a time. Right now, Daoud is carrying a family that wants to quit; Gershom is carrying a synagogue that would rather not think. One day, they will fall, and the best that we can do is lift them up. They’ve certainly done the same for me.

More on this later. Which is the point, I think.

Tuesday, 12:30 am local time

This morning we headed out on the bus for Bethlehem. The drive is just about a 10-minutes from Jerusalem and yet Jewish Israeli Citizens cannot cross into Bethlehem. Bethlehem is in the West Bank and cars filled with tourists and Palestinians (Arab speakers from the West Bank) must go through a series of checkpoints to enter Jerusalem from Bethlehem. The newly erected 25-foot wall between these two cities effectively makes these neighboring cities feel and interact like two separate countries.

The first place we arrived in the morning was the Applied Research Institute in Bethlehem (www.arij.org) and we spoke with Suhail Khalilieh who is the head of the Israeli Settlement Monitoring Department. Suhail gave a detailed description of the struggle for land in the West Bank since 1948 when Israel declared itself a country and the UN divided the land between Israel and what they called Palestine. Prior to the UN Partition Plan of 1947, Arab’s owned 94% of the land and constituted 70% of the population. Others in the country included Christians and Jews among others. Yet, the UN land partition gave Palentine only 43% of the land (Gaza & the West Bank). With the 1967 war between Israel and Jordan and Egypt, Israel took effective ‘security control’ over the West Bank and have effectively occupied it with military ever since. After the war a ‘Green Line’ was established which continued to give Palestinians the West Bank and Gaza. This territory is being threatened each day by Israeli settlements in the West Bank that continue to encroach on Palestinian land. Though graphs, satellite images, and municipal data, Suhail described a situation in which the Israeli government takes over mountain top regions in the West Bank in the name of ‘security measures.’ They build watchtowers, roads, road block, checkpoints, and water systems. When they leave, they sell the ‘newly acquired land’ cheaply to Israeli citizens and those immigrating to the country as Jews. These new settlements are scattered throughout the West Bank. The government subsidizes the cost of their homes, cars, education…just to make the move enticing. Then with enough settlers (say a dozen), the Israeli military moves a few soldiers in to ‘protect them.’ Why do these settlers need protection? Why does the Israeli government encourage settlements each year in Palestinian West Bank? How can they do this while saying they are working for peace with their neighbors? How does this encroachment of settlements in land that belongs to the Palestinians give them any measure of peace with their neighbors?

To talk about being ‘lawful,’ we must recognize that the Israeli government is the only government with full power in the West Bank. Since the Oslo Accord in 1995, Israel was suppose to withdraw from the West Bank and turn control over to the democratically elected PLO. Yet, the Israeli government divided the Palestinian land into three sections: A,B, C. C land is controlled fully by Israel; Palestinians have no autonomy here to build, start businesses, govern, police or tax. C land makes up 60% of the West Bank. In B lands Palestinians can govern locally but they cannot have their own internal security (19% of the land). In A lands (such as Jericho), Palestinians can have their own local governing system and internal policing system (21% of the land). On July 9, 2004 the ICJ of the UN declared that the Segragation Wall Israel wanted to build to separate the West Bank from Israel was contrary to International Law and that Israel must make reparations to damages to Palestinians for land they have taken behind the Green Line. However, Israel ignored this and increased the length of the wall by 16% in order to annex more settlements built inside the West Bank behind the Green Line. This is a simple land grab. My friend Michelle who is studying to be a rabbi and who lives here said that if Israel simply built the wall on the Green Line it might have been a good thing but instead the Israeli government used the wall to take more land and this has become a threatening problem. The wall zig zags its way through the West Bank and isolated entire cities from its neighboring fields and towns. Visually, with the growing illegal Israeli Settlements, the West Bank is becoming more like Swiss Cheese and the Palestinians are left with the wholes. How can Palestine ever have an effective, viable state with pockets of land dotted across only 12% of the land (down from 43%)? It is impossible and the Israeli government knows this. Israel controls the roadways and determines which roads Palestinians can and cannot use to get from one city to another. They enclose entire cities with a wall because they have allowed the development of settlements to enclose the Palestinian area and force all transportation and export to go through one road and checkpoint for the town. Imagine being able to take only one road to go to your neighboring town and having to wait at a checkpoint where 18 year old who are forced into the army carry M-16s paid for by another country (the US) who search your car and do not speak to you but merely point (a dehumanizing system in the military protocol).

Why must the US care about the Israeli Palestinian Conflict? Because we fund it with our tax dollars. Each citizen contributes their tax dollars to this growing epidemic each year. We have tons of Jewish lobbyist in the US but where are those who speak up for the Palestinian voice? Last year the US gave 14 Billion dollars in funding to Israel; that’s 11 million dollars a day. Though we give 5 Billion dollars a year in our nice weapons deal to Israel, the rest of the money is not designated. In effect, if Palestine becomes a state (as they have every right to be), the US taxpayer will be paying twice: once to subsidize the creation of the settlements and a second time to remove the Israeli Jews living in these settlements. Imagine the PR nightmare of seeing hundreds of thousands of Jews forced out of their settlements in the West Bank. We don’t want to see this and the Israeli government knows it. If they build more settlements, it secures their ‘claim’ on the land even if it is illegal in international law. The cry will be that the international community has never supported Israel or the plight of the Jews in history and our guilt will allow for the creation of the most sophisticated apartheid regime in the world. How bad can things get on the ground until the Palestinians give up their land, throw in their claim to their homeland, and move to other countries (particularly Arab countries where many unjustly say they belong)? What does this say for our Abrahamic faiths that we are not blessed to be a blessing? That we do not care for the rights for the alien, nay even the neighbor, the brother in our midst? What does this say about our own zealot religious fundamentalism that we are willing to persecute our neighbor so badly that they are stripped of all human life, liberty, and dignity in the name of our religious zeal? Is God proud of God’s children? Are we acting in righteousness with our neighbor?

The Israeli government in shrude, they have allowed for the building of upwards of 39 small settlements they know will not be viable in any agreement with Palestine and these settlements will look like their ‘goodwill’ offering; they will serve as their bargaining chips. Not only that, all major sources of water are being annexed from the Palestinian people. The Israeli government has annexed the Eastern half of the West Bank to ‘secure the Jordanian boarder’ and effectively take up more land from Palestinians and separate them from their water source, the Jordan River. Now 42 Palestinian communities lay isolated behind the ‘Eastern Zone’ and are category C land with no local autonomy or control. In Jerusalem a belt of settlements are being started around the Palestinian East Jerusalem and boundary lines are being redrawn to secure the voting majority to be Israeli Jews and not Palestinian Arabs or Christians. How do you raise a generation of effective leaders from such parched land?
Later in the afternoon we visited a refugee camp on the outskirts of Bethlehem called Deheisheh. First, we had to lose our image of a refugee camp; there are no tent dwellings. Remember this place has been around for 60 years. They have buildings though the first refugee kicked off their land to make way for the new Israeli state lived in a 9×9 room for each family. For the first few years in the camp 125 families shared one toilet. The refugees were not allowed to build and were not given rights to add plumbing for waste and water until the mid 1990s. Even with new allowances to build after the Oslo Accord, healthcare is dismal and classrooms cram in 60-70 children per teacher. Why would the people remain in the hell? Why not try to immigrate to another country? The fact is if they leave they give up their right to return. Isareli government finally said the refugees have the right to return but not the right to enact that right. This means nothing. The refugees refuse to acquiesce to rules of the game as dictated to them and shrink off into historical amnesia. They are refugees participating in the harsh and necessary political act of protest. This is their non-violent protest. We need to see these refugees as non-violent, peaceful, lawful protestors who long to return to their homeland and who refuse to succumb to despair and desolation. In their non-violent act of living in these camps they protest the injustice they live through every day and call the global world to stand up and take notice, to not forget them, to not move on and call it ‘democratic progress.’

In the backyard of one of these ‘homes’ I met Mai, a young girl living in the camp. Many of the children were very friendly to us saying ‘hello’ and ‘welcome’ to us. They need the world to see what is going on (though I’m sure the kids may not think this political part through). I asked if I could take Mai’s picture and when I noticed her goats we spoke as much as we both could with my non-existent Arabic. I remembered hearing and witnessing how connected Palestinians are to their land. They are farmers, artists, craftsmen and women. They belong to the land and know themselves as they are attached to their land and culture. Seeing 8 goats in a 5×7 pin, I thought of the utter preposterous plight of the Palestinian people who live in land prisons-no freedom to roam, to start business or build without Israeli permits (worse than a Guatemalan trying to receive a visa to enter the US…permits go to the Israeli’s and very few to Palestinians). What will Mai’s life be like? This beautiful girl who welcomes me as an American while my government does little to raise awareness of her plight. Who will she become? What will she do with her intellectual and creative boredom? How will she respond to all the discrimination she will face in her lifetime? How will she deal with the demoralizing dehumanization she will face in the name of securing her Israeli neighbor? Will she ever be able to walk through Jerusalem since she is neither a citizen of the town nor a tourist? What does her future possibly hold for her in her own land?

Where can we look for a Palestinian leader who can raise up a non-violent generation of peacemakers and say I forgive and let us make this right? Maybe our security comes not from building more walls but more opportunities for self-development, creativity, and opportunity on the ground for these young people. May we capture their imagination that life is worth living and abundance can come from life lived together.

Monday, 1:10 pm local time

Sadness.

We met this morning with two groups working on the Palestinian problem in the town of Bethlehem. Christians know Bethlehem as the site of the birth of Christ, and we will indeed be visiting the Church of the Nativity later this afternoon, but for many Palestinians, Bethlehem is merely another part of the Occupied Territories.

In 1948, the United Nations partitioned the British Mandate in the Middle East into two states – 54% of the land for the Jewish settlers, many of whom were European refugees of the Holocaust, and 46% for the Palestinian Arabs already living there. When Israel declared its independence – its right to that state, at it were – the Arab nations immediately went to war. At the end of the war, Jordan occupied the land that had been for the Palestinian state, and what is known as the 1948 Armistice Line was set up: the border between Israel and Jordan, in effect.

In 1967, during the Six Day War, the Israelis captured the Jordanian occupied land, now known as the West Bank of the Jordan River, as well as the Gaza Strip from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria. The people living in those areas reverted to Israelis control.

In 1994, the Oslo Accords established a process by which the displaced Palestinians could begin to establish a state of their own. The Accords designated three types of lands within the West Bank: Area A, which would be completely controlled by Palestinian administration and security; Area C, which would be completely controlled by Israeli administration and security; and Area B, which would be lightly administrated under Palestinian authority supplemented by Israeli security measures.

In 2002, Israel began building a wall around the Palestinian Occupied Territory. This wall does not follow the Green Line, the name given to the 1948 Armistice Line after the Six Day War, but instead snakes its way into the territory in multiple places, putting Jewish settlements on the Israeli side of the wall, but also Palestinian-owned lands,

This (very) brief history of the exchange of lands in this area over the last 60 years does not do the situation justice; for that, you might want to have a conversation with the first group with whom we met, the Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem. We sat through a 90-minute talk that presented statistics I had never before heard. For instance, there are over 200 Israeli outposts or settlements inside the borders of the West Bank, in direct violation of international law; this after the Annapolis summit at which former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon promised that no more outposts would be built.

It’s a genius strategy, if you think about it. The outposts and settlements are not huge; on maps, it may look like a large area, but in reality, these settlements are moving block by block, street by street, until suddenly a sizable community has grown up, and then, where are they supposed to go? You’re really going to kick them out of their homes? Never mind the illegality of their actions or the actions of the Israeli government – it’s hard to displace people from their homes. You think.

I’ll be honest, the presentation from ARI-J was a little off-putting for me. I understand that the situation is complex, and that the Palestinians often get the shaft in diplomatic negotiations, but the presentation tried to put the Israelis in an evil light. The Israelis are not evil. Militaristic, yes, land-grabbers, yes, but they are not evil – they are reacting to an awful situation as much as anyone else. They don’t want war; one of the snide comments during the presentation was that the Israelis actually want a nuclear war, and that’s just plain stupid.

I’m finding as I talk to more and more people in this region that I believe someone’s credibility only insofar as they give credit to the other side of the argument – even if the other side is utterly, completely wrong. I connected with Elias’ anger in Ibillin because he was able to say that Israel shouldn’t be destroyed; I sympathized with Sharon’s fear on Shabbat because she was able to say that the Palestinians deserved to move freely within the country. The presentation from ARI-J, though, amounted to the same type of propaganda as the advertisement I saw in the Jerusalem Post last night, calling on Prime Minister Netanyahu by way of Judges 2 not to negotiate with “the inhabitants of this land”; such propaganda is always false and never helpful, no matter how ‘true’ the information presented is. The narrative is important. A true story isn’t always a list of facts.

Our second meeting of the morning was with the director of a Lutheran ministry in Bethlehem called the Diyar Consortium named Dr. Mitri Raheb. The Diyar complex is the third largest employer in Bethlehem, and their main goal is to empower Palestinians in the area. His presentation started out well, but he quickly succumbed to something I couldn’t name. It wasn’t until later that Miriam was able to name for me why exactly this meeting was just as uncomfortable as the first, just in a different way: Dr. Raheb was tired, overcome by sadness.

I can understand. 61 years of occupation has got to be disheartening. Looking around the city as we ride the bus, there’s very little of the vibrancy that we experience in Jerusalem, even in the Old City. A situation like this has to beat you down…but especially for a Christian in this context, letting hope shine through is so important. Dr. Raheb, like many of the Palestinians we’ve talked to, are absolutely against participating in the political process, viewing the whole “peace talking” as he calls it a waste of time. And it might look that way, but surely small steps have been taken, and in a conflict like this, maybe small steps are all we have.

I was angry enough at the Church of the Holy Whatever yesterday to be distracted during Semaj’s message to us, but not so distracted that I don’t remember what he was trying to communicate: as Christians, we have a hope that transcends situations. This is not the hope of someone like Joel Osteen, the hope that only comes with wealth and power and leaves you when you’re down on your luck. No, this is a hope that stretches across the centuries, a hope that holds this broken land together, in a sense.

And, before Chip can yell at me, this hope isn’t an ineffectual religious ideal – it’s a vital part of maintaining the dialogue here in this country. A solution to this problem will only be found if we keep looking. ARI-J, it seems, would rather rant about broken promises and displaced lands, and Dr. Raheb is too hurt and sad to talk above a grassroots level – and while both of those positions need to be recognized and validated, we can’t stop there. I keep hoping for the voice of a generation that might speak to these issues, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. Surely, there’s more to the issue than Israelis on one side of the fence and Palestinians on the other. Surely, there’s more to opening up dialogue than screaming at the top of your lungs or whispering in defeat. Surely, as Noa and Mira Awad – the Israeli and Arab duo in the Eurovision American-Idol-eque competition – sang in Moscow, there must be another way.

Surely.

Sunday, 11:59 pm local time

Centuries.

Two things need to be noted: first, the header for this post is a picture of the group in front of Qumran Cave 11; Emma and Matt unfortunately got cropped out of this shot, but you will be able to see the whole picture on the Day 9 pictures page. Second, I’ve waited to post pictures from Days 7, 8, and 9 in anticipation of contributions from other people. It’s been a long trip, and we’ve all been going to sleep earlier in the last few days. I’ll post all three days’ worth of pictures tomorrow.

After worshiping outside the Church of the Holy Whatever, we met up with the rest of the group in the American Colony and headed to explore Qumran with Dr. Jim Charlesworth, New Testament scholar and sometime professor at Princeton Seminary, as our expert guide. Dr. Charlesworth described the living conditions at Qumran and walked us through the ruins of the Essene community that produced what we call the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The most fascinating part of the tour was the long hike up to Cave 11, which is about 2 kilometers north of the official Qumran site. It was here that some of the largest and most important scrolls and scroll fragments were found. Chip commented that the scroll called Q 11 Psalm A (I think I got that right) contains significant differences from the Psalter found in our modern Bibles, including whole new Psalms. The site is fascinating, and I hope to describe it more at length later on.

After Qumran, we had the opportunity to visit the Temple Mount, or Harim al-Sharif, in the Old City. I’ll be honest, I didn’t think we were going to be able to get up there; the site is one of the holiest in the city, particularly to Muslims at the moment, and I was sure that non-believers would be unwelcome to the site. I was wrong. I was also wrong about what it would look like – for all intents and purposes, it’s a giant, rectangular, mostly concrete park. The al-Aqsa Mosque stands at the southern end of the park, and a set of steps leads up to the Dome of the Rock, the building with the golden dome that is most prominent in any picture of Jerusalem.

Non-believers actually used to be allowed inside al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock; Matt visited there when he was last in Jerusalem 11 years ago. The site is impressive for its architecture, its religious significance, and its solitude; there were hardly any people up there. Chip commented that before the intifada, the place was just as lively as any other part of the Old City; now, it’s as quiet as a national park. Both Chip and Gordon lamented this action; if nothing else, it’s a bad PR move. It illustrates the same problem that runs throughout the Old City, though, from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on down.

The whole country is afraid. You can see it on the faces of people in the street. I could hear it in the voices of Sharon and Martin, of Elias, even of the three women who sat on the interfaith panel we attended tonight. They closed the Dome of the Rock for fear of violence from The Other; the security checkpoints in and out of the West Bank serve the same purpose. Fear drives every decision, every bit of dialogue, every action taken.

I will endeavour to write more later, but for now: what is fear? Why is it so hard to overcome in a land that produced some of the most powerful writings on hope and love? What are we to do in the face of overwhelming fear? I welcome your insight, as this land holds little of its own.

Sunday, 11:45 pm local time

After we visited the Temple Mount, we had some free time, so a few of us went to see the Western Wall. I could not imagine a visit to Jerusalem without seeing this most sacred place. My feet hurt, I was thirsty, and really wanted to go home, but I did not want to take it for granted that I would get another chance before we leave on Thursday morning. When we arrived in Jerusalem it felt like we had all the time in the world to see the city, but now I am counting the hours and thinking of all the things I still want to do.

We left the rest of the group at the St. Stephen Gate (the sight of the first Christian martyr) and walked through the Muslim Quarter. After a drink stop, we turned left, traveling parallel to the Temple Mount. To get to the Western Wall we had to go through a security checkpoint, complete with metal detector and armed guards. This deposited us into the courtyard of the Western Wall. The whole courtyard is maybe 100 x 200 yds, and is divided into two areas, one for men and one for women. Hundreds of people had come to pray. They touched the wall, kissed it, prayed in front of it, stuffed laments and prayers in its many cracks. Most striking was the dozens of young Israeli soldiers who had come to see the wall, praying with automatic rifles slung across their backs.

The wall itself runs the length of the courtyard, forming part of the western barrier of the Mount. There is great disagreement as to the identity of the Wall itself. In popular imagination, this is the only remaining vestige of the Second Temple after it was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. Evidence suggests, however, that the Wall was actually built along side of the temple as a retaining wall to give structural integrity to the Mount.

Either way, the Western Wall is a holy place. The temple is the center of Jewish faith and life. Without it, we are in a sense a people of diaspora. Even though we have been granted a homeland with international sovereignty, there yet remains a brokenness signified by the broken wall of the temple. The wall itself is a lament. It cries out to God, that not yet are His people whole. We still suffer injustice and violence. The Wall encapsulates all the despair and pain of a people who have lived in chaos and fear. There is a reason it is also called the ‘Wailing Wall,’ for at times you can hear the loud cries of the people who have come here to pour their hearts before God. Ignoring for a second the current political situation between Israelis and Palestinians, we can say that the Jewish people have seen terrible things for the past decades, centuries, millennia. Looking at the Wall, and the many people who had gathered to pray before it, I could not help but think of the Shoah. I could not help but think of the pain of a people being threatened with extinction. I could not help to think of the ways in which the community is threatened today, and with it how so many other communities are threatened.

At the same time, however, I could not help but think of the resilience and strength of the Jewish community. This, perhaps, is just as touching to me as thinking of the pain and hardship. In the faces of the people I saw hope as well as sadness. I saw people who trust that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is still present with His people.

Even as a Jew, I was not expecting the Wall to be as emotional as it was. When we got there, we set a time to meet. Then, one of the other folks in the group looked at me and asked if I was going to need more time. I didn’t really know what to say. I had been thinking about it along the way to the Wall, but when they asked me that, it began to sink in just how much it meant for me to visit the Wall. And what did it mean? I’m not exactly sure. I got emotional at two other sites – Masada, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The reason I did at those places was because I was able to envision some significant event that had taken place where I was standing. Not so at the Wailing Wall. It was more a feeling of great burden for a people who mean so very much to me. My heart ached with all the pain, beauty, and hope that is wrapped up in Judaism. It is difficult to describe. At the Wall, I saw so much brokenness. For much of the trip, I have been learning about the experience of Palestinians in the West Bank, and in East Jerusalem. This is one of the reasons that I was wandering if I would have as much of an emotional reaction to the Wailing Wall. But when I got there, it was not a matter of who was right and who was wrong. It was merely a fact that people are suffering. How badly I want peace for Jerusalem, peace for Jews, for Muslims, for Christians, Israelis, Palestinians! Like the Wall, my brothers and sisters are broken. In God’s grace, we will be restored.

Sunday, 8:40 am local time

Anger.

Brace yourselves, I feel a rant coming on.

Today is Sunday, and some of us elected to worship at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher this morning. The church houses some of the most important sites in the Christian narrative, including Golgotha and the Empty Tomb. Pretty holy, right? The church is humongous, too, encompassing at least as much square footage as Princeton’s quad. Thousands of worshipers visit every day; we saw the church yesterday, remember, but we decided to come back early this morning – 7 am – to view some of its sites before we worshiped on our own. Fewer people, more room – good idea.

As we walked in and around to the chapel that commemorates the Empty Tomb and the site of the Resurrection, I noticed a small worship service concluding with communion in front of it. Catholic, I think, based on the way the priests were serving wafers to the worshipers. In the background was organ music, but I immediately noticed a dissonant sound. I turned my head.

Let me define the space for you for a moment. You walk in the front door, and the narthex towers at least three stories above you. The Stone of Unction lies immediately ahead. You walk around the curved wall to the left and come upon a large circular room – at least 100 feet in diameter – in the center of which is a large square chapel, about 50 feet to a side. The chapel dominates the room, and is, in fact, the point of the room.

So there, in front of the entrance to the chapel, which faces east, were the Catholic worshipers taking communion to their organ music, and at the back of the chapel, I found the source of the dissonance – a group of Armenian monks, conducting their own worship service. At the same time. While trying to drown out the Catholics. This first irked me a little; the Armenian chanting would soften for a moment, but then hit a particularly high and loud note – and the Catholic priest would twitch a little, but continue distributing the host – and so for a moment, I sympathized with the Catholics. Until I realized something.

The point of the organ music was the drown the Armenians out.

I don’t think I can explain to you the depths of my furiousness at the moment. How pleasing it is when Christians dwell together in unity! What a joke. Two worship services conducted simultaneously, not to give Christians a range of choices or to join together in harmonious glorification of God, but specifically to compete with each other and drown each other out. After Mass, one of the Catholic monks took the benches on which the worshipers were sitting – all the while, the Armenians were chanting – and stacked them in a corner and chained them up. I saw this stack yesterday, thinking that this was to prevent theft by tourists, but no: it’s to keep any of the other sects occupying the church from taking them!

Lest you think I’m exaggerating the situation in my anger, this is the same place where two groups of monks actually came to violence late last year as one group tried to march through another group during their worship processional. Watch the linked video, you’ll actually get to see a monk hit another monk.

I walked out of the church so angry that I barely listened to Semaj’s wonderful word on hope during our little worship service. This is what Christians in the Holy Land have been reduced to? Fighting over a space the size of my apartment because it’s where Jesus once was? C’mon! He is not here – he is risen! Risen! And this is what Jesus wanted from us, to pray loudly over each other? To pray simultaneously not in unity but in cacophony?

There is no part of this that goes with Christian teaching. Nothing. Dying for Christ, turning the other cheek, all being one in the body of Christ – do they read the Bible? Have they heard the Sermon on the Mount? And the best part about this: Western Christians are so easily critical of the Israel-Palestine conflict, saying that it’s because these two religions just can’t be tolerant of each other, that they put too much focus on the land and not enough focus on the people, and yet here’s a perfect example of Christians that can’t even get along with each other!

Humility. Sacrifice. Understanding. Reconciliation. All things that the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection of Christ represent to me. None of which are present at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. It’s a place that’s driven by fear and intolerance, not love, and we as Christians are nothing if our love cannot stand up to fear and intolerance. I will avoid that place for the remainder of my time in Jerusalem, because it still makes me so angry, just to think about it.

If you’ve got any input, I’m all ears. Ranting is good for the soul, but dialogue is better.

Saturday, 9:56 pm local time

Sovereignty.

The city of Jerusalem has been destroyed twice, besieged twenty-three times, attacked fifty-two times, and captured or recaptured forty-four times. In 1948, it became the capital of the new state of Israel; in 1967, Israel annexed divided East Jerusalem. The city covers 125 square kilometers; the Old City covers less than one square kilometer. It is a holy place, and a wholly other place, and a place that yearns to be whole. It is, in name – but not in spirit.

We’ve been spiraling around Jerusalem since the beginning of our trip, and we completed the last arm of the spiral today. Samir started by telling us of the four mountains that surround the city: Mount Scopus, Mount Zion, Mount Moriah, and the Mount of Olives. From Mount Scopus, upon which part of the Hebrew University sits, we could see the entire city from the Kidron Valley on up. From there, we moved to the Mount of Olives, and saw three sites on our way down to the foot of the mountain:
– The Church of the Lord’s Prayer, commemorating Jesus’ teaching of the Lord’s Prayer to the disciples. The Prayer has been translated into 150 languages, mosaics of which surround the area.
– Dominus Flavius, or the place where Jesus wept over Jerusalem.
– The Church of Gethsemane, memorializing Jesus’ time in the garden on Maundy Thursday.
I hadn’t realized that all of those sites were so close together; my Godbrother can throw footballs longer distances.

From the foot of the Mount of Olives, we bussed up to the Southern Gate of the Old City, stopping briefly at the burial place of King David, and walked through the Armenian Quarter to the heart of the city. We broke for lunch, and a group of us stayed with Gordon and walked the Via Dolorosa, along which we saw:
– St. Anne’s Church, which commemorates the birth of the Virgin Mary.
– The Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, from the top of which you can see the whole city.
– The Church of the Holy Sepulcher (or, as I affectionately call it, the Church of the Holy Whatever, as I cannot pronounce that word to save my life).

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher enshrines Golgotha, the Stone of Unction where they prepared Jesus’ body for burial, and the tomb in which they laid him and from which he rose – again, all within less than 100 yards of each other. In my head, these places were great distances from each other, but if they have it right, Mary Magdelene and Mary the mother of Christ could see the place where Jesus was crucified from the site of his burial. There’s a lot that’ll preach in there.

What might also preach, in a negative context, is the sad situation of the church itself. The site of the church is so holy that no less than six Christian sects – including the Greek Orthodox, the Catholics, the Armenians, and the Ethiopians – have each laid claim to a particular section of the church and will not leave. They sleep there, knowing that if they vacate a room, someone else will take ownership of it. The situation is so bad that when monks from certain sects process through other rooms during worship times, they will literally come to blows with their fellow Christian brothers. A Muslim keeps the key to the front door of the church because the sects have all agreed that none of them can be trusted to keep it. Take from that what you will.

We wandered a bit of the Old City today, and will wander more in the coming days, but we stopped and had a early dinner because tonight, we were invited into the home of Ed Greenstein and Beverly Gribetz to discuss Israel along with a member of the Jerusalem City Council named Edna. The discussion was fascinating, with topics ranging from the steps taken to encourage environmentalism to the creating of a committee on Women’s Issues. As always, though, the conversation turned to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

In Edna’s view, it is a question of safety and security. She, like my Shabbat host Sharon, feels she cannot trust Palestinian overtures anymore because of so many broken promises and shattered hopes over the years. She is frustrated by the lack of Palestinian voices in the Israeli political process, for instance; Arabs living in annexed East Jerusalem, while choosing not to be citizens of the state of Israel, are citizens of the municipality of Jerusalem and therefore have the right to vote. Edna says that they choose not to exercise that right, whether due to pressure from Hamas or just sheer stubbornness, and because of that there is not a single Palestinian on the Jerusalem City Council when sheer demographics would give them fully a third of the 31 seats. Ed points out that they would be willing to dialogue with a Palestinian partner if only such a voice would emerge.

Miriam seemed to get a little frustrated during the conversation at Edna’s lack of ability or will to articulate the Palestinian side of the argument, but for Edna, this is an issue of national sovereignty, of Israel’s right to control its own destiny. Jerusalem gives Arabs the right to vote, but will not force them (or encourage them, maybe?) to exercise it; Arab Palestinians give Israel nothing but harsh words and violent actions in return, it seems. Articulating the other side of the argument isn’t helpful because the other side isn’t willing to acknowledge that you should even exist, much less the fact that you have an argument to articulate. Israel has a primary right to defend itself; articulation is secondary.

There’s a conversation to be had here between the process of political dialogue and the education of children and people in general, I think. Part of our discussion turned toward education in Jerusalem, and the tendency to split between religious and secular schools, or the right of parents to choose schools and so the tendency towards a core of ‘elite’ schools. Arab schools in East Jerusalem are under Jerusalemite control and enjoy tax dollars and resources from Jerusalem’s Ministry of Education, but the separation is clear. I wonder if it’s fair to expect a Palestinian voice to emerge that is able to articulate both sides of the argument if Palestinian children are not given the right kind of education. Ed made the very good point that any Arab educated by Israel automatically has no credibility in Palestinians eyes, but it seems to me that there should be a way for Israel to resource the opposition side of the argument in order to give the opposition a voice. The danger is that the voice will turn against them; the hope is that voice will become a partner in dialogue.

We are here in Jerusalem until we leave on Thursday, and I hope that we will be able to add many more voices to this conversation. I leave you with a question: at what point does educating the “enemy” become problematic? Is it ever helpful, particularly if you identify the other as an enemy? Can an Israeli-educated Palestinian possibly be the voice for a generation? I don’t know, but I intend to keep my voice in the conversation.

Friday, 11:58 pm local time

Sabbath.

Now we’re on the other side.

Kefillit Yadidiah is a modern Orthodox synagogue about 20 minutes from the Jaffa Gate of the Old City, a 15 minute walk from where we’re staying here at St. Andrews. “Modern” Orthodox means that, although they seek to follow the laws of the Torah, they try to be more egalitarian than their ultra-Orthodox brethren. Women are separated from men by a screen down the middle of the synagogue, but it separates left and right rather than front and back; women are equidistant from the holy ark that holds the Torah and from the ‘pulpit’ from which most of the praying is done. Women give sermons and pray and sing, so as far as Orthodox synagogues go, this is pretty feminist, says our guide Debbie. Debbie is the president of the council on Jewish-Christian relations here in Jerusalem; we will be meeting with her more in depth later in the week.

Sitting in the synagogue was a fascinating experience. The entire Shabbat service is a continuous prayer, whether for the dead or to praise God or to lament through a Psalm, and what is not mumbled in the fastest voice you can muster is sung. Beautifully. Without music. When I was in Thailand, I had the experience of going to a Thai-English worship service conducted in both languages; the sermon was sentence in English-sentence in Thai, but the singing was Thai and English simultaneously. The cacophony of voices was more harmonious than it was distracting, and the singing-praying tonight was much the same. There seemed to be a basic melody for each part of the Shabbat service, but people improvised harmonies and yelled out additional words and created a symphony of sound in which I could lose myself.

After the service, we split into pairs and went with various families to their homes for Shabbat dinner. Kathy and I were immediately adopted by Natan, an 11 year old self-described ‘troublemaker’ with a British accent who grabbed my hand and didn’t let go (and didn’t stop talking) until we got back to his home. His brother Yishai (16), his sister Noah (14), and their parents Sharon and Martin delightfully awesome to be around. They welcomed us into their home without hesitation, provided books so that Kathy and I could follow along as they sang, and made way too much food. We spent at least three hours talking about everything from sites to see in Jerusalem to the popularity of President Obama to the difference between tornadoes and hurricanes.

Most interestingly, though, as Sharon and Martin were walking us back to St. Andrews afterward, I finally got up the courage to ask them the Palestinian question. Sharon’s response was telling as she looked at me sadly and said simply, “I was naive.” She voted for Ehud Barak in the 90s; she voted for the two-state solution, as did a majority of Israelis. And yet, the cafe a few blocks from her house was the site of a suicide bombing not too long after. She said this as we walked past a marble plaque memorializing the place where the #14 bus exploded in 2004, killing 8 Israelis. For Sharon, it’s as simple as safety. “Nobody likes the wall,” she said, “nobody likes what’s happening to the Palestinians on the other side. But the simple fact is, with all of the checkpoints and all of the fencing, we can know with a degree of certainty that things like this won’t happen again.”

For Martin, it’s a deeper ideological difference. “Nobody seems to realize that there are people whose whole goal is total domination of the land, total Palestinian domination of the land,” he said, implicitly asking, What will happen to us? Yishai mentioned during dinner that he wasn’t afraid to be serving in the army in two years’ time, and hadn’t really thought about it. As he said, “People have been protecting me all this time; it’s my turn.” If Sharon winced a bit at that, he didn’t seem to notice.

I want to put Sharon and Elias from Ibillin in a room together. To hear the conversation that would take place…I mean, neither of them is wrong, are they? Elias wants to be free, to have true freedom, to be recognized as a citizen and as a human who isn’t targeted for marginalization; Sharon wants to be free, to have true freedom, to be recognized as a citizen and as a human who isn’t targeted for destruction. They both want the same thing, but the anger in Elias’ voice, the utter sadness in Sharon’s, it makes me wonder: is it possible?

What does reconciliation look like? Surely it doesn’t mean Sharon having to put her children’s lives in danger, and surely it doesn’t mean Elias having to live a life that is less than it should be. Surely there’s a third way.

Surely.

We are in Jerusalem for the next five days, and will be speaking with many more Israelis. My writing so far has been as through Palestinian eyes, but I am on the other side of the wall now, and I am hearing through Israeli ears. Would that I would be discerning enough to filter out the noise and hear the voice of God.

Shabbat shalom.