[May 2005 after my first trip to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories]
The return trip last month to Israel and the Occupied Territories took Dr. McRay and me nearer the realities being experienced by the Palestinians. We spent time in Bethlehem, in Gaza, in Ramallah, in Qalqiliya, in a remote West Bank village with a mobile clinic, and in a refugee camp north of Jerusalem. These experiences in combination with a deeper reading into Zionism and the past century’s history re the establishment of the State of Israel have left us with a mixture of conflicting impressions/emotions. Is it possible that the empathy I feel deeply for the victims of the Holocaust is the empathy I now feel for the Palestinians? Dr. McRay and I are looking into ways to sponsor one of the many remote maternity clinics in the West Bank being cut off from hospital care by the Israeli authorities’ ‘security wall/fence’.
