Sometimes it is hard to be impartial, hard to listen to two sides of an argument. But being in Bethlehem and Jerusalem today makes the apparent intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict depressingly real.
I am leading a group of 37 people from England on a visit to Israel-Palestine. I last brought a group just over two years ago and this time we are putting more effort into listening to those trying to live in this small land peacefully.
This morning we visited Bethlehem. These pictures are of the wall you have to go through to get in to the town.
Most residents of Bethlehem cannot get permits to leave the town. This wall is more than twice the height of the Berlin Wall.
In Bethlehem we listened to stories of hope. One project (located right up against the wall) we visited was absolutely clear on several points:
- Don’t just curse the darkness – light a candle. Being bitter about the ‘imprisonment’ will not change the situation, but will do damage to those who are bitter as well as their enemies.
- Create spaces for children to play and for olive trees to grow – speaking of a fertile future.
- These Palestinian Christians (who also work among Muslims) wish to live alongside Jews in Israel, sharing the land. They are not against Israel, but they are against the occupation of their land.
- There should be no hierarchies of pain or victimhood – these create only a vicious circle of hate and resentment and the circle must be broken.
- It is vital to work with young people and women, helping them cope with trauma and work for a dignified future.
Claiming, “we have an incurable malady called ‘hope'”, these people had one major complaint about the ‘west’:
Your media ignore the hundreds of constructive, positive and hopeful projects being run in difficult conditions, but a single molotov cocktail thrown by a young man will bring blanket coverage in your media. Why?
In the afternoon we visited the archaeaological sites at the City of David. This is run by Zionists. It was great to see Warren’s Shaft and Hezekiah’s Tunnel (which I realise sound like medical complaints) and see the work done to uncover these ancient ruins. But the preceding 3-D film presentation and accompanying guide narrative were shocking to many in our group who had come here with sympathetic and open minds.
We were given a perfect example of teleological story telling: start with your conclusion (the land belongs to the Jews and Jerusalem was, is and always shall be the ‘eternal capital city’), then fit the story to justify your end point. Not only was history re-written, the Bible selectively appropriated and political assumptions dripped in throughout, but there was a startling blindness to the inconsistencies in front of our eyes.
Jerusalem is a city of peace and a city of justice, we were repeatedly told. Yet, in all the hours we were there, not one mention was made of the Palestinians on the other side of the valley, those who had been removed from their homes in order to allow the excavations to be done or the injustices being done to Palestinians in relation to their land
If the people do not live justly, they will lose their city, said our guide – without either a hint of irony or any awareness of what was obvious to us observers.
This is just the first day and we are encouraging the group not to make too many judgements until we have seen, heard and experienced more. But, as we looked out over Bethlehem and saw the city-sized settlements (‘new facts on the ground’) dominating the lands, many in our group wondered why this is allowed to happen, why international agreements can be simply ignored and why people who have suffered grievously can be so willing to inflict suffering on others.
We had a de-brief session this evening to begin to process some of these questions and reactions. But, there is a long way still to go.
‘Pray for the peace of Jerusalem’ (Psalm 122) has taken on new meaning and urgency for many in our group.
Nick Baines's Blog 
February 2, 2010 at 10:01 pm
I wonder what inconsistencies I’m blind to.
February 3, 2010 at 8:19 am
Fascinating to hear first-hand. Our thoughts are with the Christians trying to live there, as well as with everyone else. Please tell them that.
February 3, 2010 at 9:43 am
Great post Nick and a fantastic quote: ‘we have an incurable malady called hope..’.
I went to visit the City of David dig (Advent 2008), but gave up as it was packed with school children accompanied by teachers and armed minders. I understand that many of the Palestinian homes that I photographed there have now gone along with the people who lived there. If you think the film at the dig was shocking you really don’t want to see the one at Massada; I expected to find recruiting officers waiting outside to sign people up.
February 3, 2010 at 9:57 am
Years ago, Terry Waite returned from his years as a hostage in the Lebanon talking of the need to ‘redeem suffering’. This is so very different to railing against it or wallowing in it. I was reminded of it again with the advice here to “light a candle” in the darkness, rather than complaining about it.
I look forward to more incisive blog posts from a puzzling land which sits uncomfortably with its label of ‘holy’.
February 3, 2010 at 2:43 pm
…. many in our group wondered why this is allowed to happen, why international agreements can be simply ignored and why people who have suffered grievously can be so willing to inflict suffering on others. …
I don’t have an answer to the second of these questions – although if pushed I could have a try. But the first? Well surely it’s to do with having an ally in a part of the world made hostile by the ‘west’ to the ‘west’; and the political clout of a pro-Israel lobby in US politics.
February 3, 2010 at 6:29 pm
[…] infuriate some nearly as much as others have been inflamed by Tony Blair himself. But we need to read / hear it. Especially this year. And maybe a quick trip round to our local (whichever) party office with an […]
February 5, 2010 at 7:13 am
Learning a little history would temper and illuminate some judgments. Tere wouldn’t be a standoff or a wall and all these grievances if:
1. the Arabs hadn’t tried to destroy Israel repeatedly since 1948 (Egypt and Jordan had to learn the hard way)
2. the UN had maintained these so-called “refugee camps” for the grandchildren of those who fled their homes in 1948 – they should have been resettled just as a quarter of Europe had to find new homes after 1945 (Sudeten and Silesian Germans, Poles etc etc)
3. – if the
Palestinian ‘leadership; wasn’t one of the most corrupt and criminal in the world, either great kleptocrats like Arafat or insane jihadis like Hamas.
4. if the Arab nations hadn’t expelled 750,000 Jews after 1948 ….
The ‘wall’ (most of it is a fence) has hugely reduced terrorist attacks.
If the ‘Palestinians’ (a concept not really known prior to 1965) knew how to adopt some israeli values and ways, they would be a happier and healthier people. But sadly the dead hand of Islam is felt everywhere. This is the real reason great numbers of Palestinian Christians have sought new homes Down Under.
And I’ll say nothing here about ex-bishop Riah ….
February 5, 2010 at 3:17 pm
Tom, that smacks to me of the selective ‘memory’ and ideological appropriation of history that I was questioning.
February 6, 2010 at 5:52 am
‘memory’? Why the speech marks? Every one of my points is historically true, whatever you think of Israel. That the Arabs of the former Britsh Mandate of Palestine have suffered a lot cannot be questioned, either. But I maintain that is largely because the antidemocratic Arab states and the UN, and then the forces of jihadism have used them as pawns, in their zeal to destroy Israel in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973, and subsequently.
Do you think Silesia should be returned to Germany? Or Alsace-Lorraine?
May 27, 2010 at 5:18 pm
[…] propagandised at the so-called City of David. You can read my thoughts and detect my discomfort in this and other subsequent […]
July 13, 2012 at 1:21 pm
Before the reestablishment of the Jewish state, the normative, historical Christian narrative was that the Jews were exiled for their rejection of Jesus and the prophets, and the land inherited by strangers/gentiles in their place, first pagan, then Christian. The conquest of Islam upset that assumption, which is partly why the crusades sought to reverse it.
But, even so, Palestinian Christians could point to Palestinian Jews being far fewer than they, and kept to an even lower position under Islam. Palestinian Muslims and Christians managed to join in the earliest Palestinian Arab national/nationalist institutions, the Muslim-Christian Associations, with certain common, imperious/imperial assumptions about Jews and how they were to remain i.e. a people largely displaced/dispossessed from the land, as per both Christian and Islamic metanarratives of Jews’ exile for their sins.
The bishop of Bradford can apply the Deuteronomistic principle of sin and exile to Jews, past and present, but seemingly unconsciously abstracts from the equation Palestinian Arab Christians (and perhaps Muslims), for, if Jews can be exiled for their sins, why not Palestinian Arab Christians or Muslims? But the possibility seems not to occur to him, any more than the possibility that Jews might be restored in divine mercy, and that there might have been some measure of injustice in trying to continue to largely keep Jews out.
The implication is that Palestinian Arab Christians and Muslims are ‘above’ those Deuteronomistic principles of sin and exile, repentance and restoration, that they are special, in fact, a Chosen People, whose innate virtue precludes their being assessed in those Deuteronomistic terms.
Unconsciously, it seems, the bishop betrays himself to be a Christian tribalist or nationalist, who confuses Christian ethnicity with an innate Christian ethical virtue (and seems to extend the principle to the Muslims concerned, too): thus Jews were and may be exiled for their sins; Palestinian Arab Christians and Muslims are only exiled, not for their sins, but the sins of the Jews concerned, too
i.e. heads I win, tails you lose.
His is a loading of the theological dice: they are rigged so the Jews concerned lose, the Christians and Muslims concerned win.
What is odd is that professed ethical as opposed ethnical Christians seem entirely oblivious to such a glaring inconsistency.
July 13, 2012 at 1:45 pm
[If the people do not live justly, they will lose their city, said our guide – without either a hint of irony or any awareness of what was obvious to us observers.]
Do you apply that principle to Palestinian Arab Muslims or Christians, I wonder?
July 13, 2012 at 2:02 pm
[as we looked out over Bethlehem and saw the city-sized settlements (‘new facts on the ground’) dominating the lands, many in our group wondered why this is allowed to happen, why international agreements can be simply ignored and why people who have suffered grievously can be so willing to inflict suffering on others.]
For 2000 years (especially Palestinian) Christians have said Jews suffered justly for their sins: their exile was entirely merited.
When Jews began to slip in through the cracks of the crumbling Ottoman Islamic empire in increasing numbers from the late 19th century, Palestinian Christians and Muslims resisted Jews living in the land in above the tiny numbers imperial Christian and Islamic apartheid allowed or decreed.
Palestinian and other Arab Muslim and Christian nationalism evolved from being exclusivist towards Jews (banning all Jewish immigration to the land in 1882; all land sales in 1892) to being expulsionist or eliminationist towards Palestinian, Israeli and sometimes other Jews.
The 1968 P.L.O. charter only allowed Jews resident in Palestine before 1917 to become Palestinian citizens; it only accepted the principle of partition and international law in 1988, by which time the clock couldn’t go back to 1947 or 1967: all developments subsequent had to be negotiated.
You can’t fight international law for at least 40 yeas and expect the clock to go back to the last, best opportunity you missed.
The way you tell it, Your Grace, one would conclude you see a kind of crucifixion, of a Christ in Palestinian Arab Muslim and Christian national incarnation, crucified anew by (surprise, surprise) ‘Zionists’ (again).
One would never know, as I said, that Palestinian Arab Muslims and Christians have resisted Jews living in the land in above the tiny numbers imperial Christian and Islamic apartheid allowed or decreed, for most of the last 100 years.
‘Moats and Planks’ spring to mind.
As for the Old City, when Jordan conquered it, in 1948, all Jews were expelled. Jews only had access to it again from 1967, likewise to Hebron, which have been purged of Jews by Palestinian Arab Muslims from 1929.
I suggest that, for all its faults, Israel allows more access to and sovereignty over their holy sites to Christians and Muslims than Palestinian Arab Muslims or Christians +ever+ allowed Jews.
(even under the British, Jews could only reach the seventh step of the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, for instance; for all the problems of Hebron today, Muslims have more access than they ever allowed Jews)
Nevertheless, i support a Geneva Accord type settlement: two states, for two peoples, division of Jerusalem, old and new, borders on the 67 lines, or with territorial swap.
Such a deal (touted by editorial in the Guardian in 2003) Ehud Olmert offered in 2008, with no response from Mahmoud Abbas.
I hope you support such a settlement too.
July 13, 2012 at 2:38 pm
‘These Palestinian Christians (who also work among Muslims) wish to live alongside Jews in Israel, sharing the land. They are not against Israel, but they are against the occupation of their land.’
Your ability to remove context is extraordinary. In 2001, the P.A. decided to go to war rather than resume negotiations. The decision to built a barrier was made at its height, in 2003, after hundreds of Israeli Jews (mostly) had been killed by Palestinian Arab Muslims from the West Bank and Gaza.
You can’t fight a war against an enemy and expect your enemy to show you the mercy appropriate to a declaration of peace. And, if you lose the war, you can’t expect him to return to the status quo ante +without offering something in return+.
I suggest the best option is the Geneva Accord.