[June 2005 reflections after my first trip to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories]
I want to share some of the comments still echoing in my mind from encounters during the April time Dr. McRay and I spent in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (the comments follow the order of our meetings/activities) --
Koheleth seems tormented, paralyzed, uncertain, hesitant, frustrated, disillusioned. I do not think the author had found a way to stay focused on ‘life under the sun’ when he wrote Ecclesiastes. Perhaps my journal entries illustrate a sequel to Ecclesiastes, an interpretation of attempting to remain ‘with the world face to face’.
The office manager for a medical practice in the Israeli settlement Gush Katif in Gaza who, along with her husband, was in 1983 among the original civilian settlers -- “We (Israelis residing in the Gush Katif settlement in Gaza) are here legally.”I feel more keenly/painfully than ever an identification with Koheleth (in the Ecclesiastes essay) as he wrestled with being aware of the human misery just beyond the edges of his affluence. My American citizenship makes me complicit with the Israeli government’s oppression of the Palestinian people. . . . Refugee camps filled with hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinian families – many homeless since 1948 – dot the map. . . . How can I want/expect to be delivered from any personal loss/discomfort – however severe – when I know the depth/breadth of human pain/misery occurring ‘under the sun’ among the powerless, the marginalized, the desperate, the forgotten? . . . Where, across a lifestyle spectrum with one end being ‘utter misery’ and the other end being ‘utter affluence’, is the lifestyle that does not necessitate colonizing, exploiting, oppressing, impoverishing? where none would have reason to say, “I would not live my life over”? The standard of living experienced or sought in the United States is far toward the ‘utter affluence’ end of the spectrum. A serious move toward the point of a just lifestyle on the spectrum will be hard and complicated. Is it possible? . . . I must resist the enticements/sanctions – social, professional, religious – to turn away from seeing, to be distracted, to try to forget.
The senior physician for the above-mentioned medical practice (who resides in Gush Katif and also has a faculty appointment with Ben Gurion University’s Family Medicine Department in Be’er Sheva) -- “We must hit them (the Palestinians) with everything we have. If we had done so from the beginning, we would not have the problem we have today. . . . What more do they (the Palestinians) want from us?”
The same physician, commenting on Gaza before the Gush Katif settlement was founded -- “There was nothing here.”
A mid-40s antiquities dealer in Old Jerusalem (a ‘Jerusalemite’, as Palestinians who remained in Jerusalem with no citizen rights after the 1967 War are classified) -- “You do not respond to one people’s tragedy (i.e., Jews slaughtered during the Nazi Holocaust) by imposing a tragedy on another people (i.e., hundreds of thousands of Palestinians driven from their homes/villages in the creation and expansion of the state of Israel).”
A mid-30s Israeli woman who emigrated from Russia -- “There will be no political solution. Israelis and Palestinians are too mixed in their locations. . . . ‘Refugee Camp’ is an inaccurate image. It is self-imposed. They could take the initiative. . . . If one suicide bomber is stopped, ‘the wall’ is worth it.”
A late-50s Internal Medicine faculty member at Hadassah School of Medicine in Jerusalem -- “25% of Israelis are religious/orthodox, 25% are observing, 50% are secular. The percentages shift toward the observing and the secular categories among medical students at Hadassah. . . . Israeli Arabs who meet the entrance criteria can go to Hadassah’s medical school with no problems. . . . If there had been no Holocaust, there would have been no State of Israel.”
A ‘Messianic Jew’ -- “The Mount of Olives is infested with Arabs.”
A late-30s Palestinian woman who guided us through/around the walled-off Palestinian city of Qalqiliya, as she pointed to a map that highlighted the Israeli government’s confiscation of Palestinian land in the West Bank – “Whose finger is sticking into whose pie?”
The same woman, challenging Israeli checkpoint soldiers who had referred to the confiscated land around the checkpoint as ‘Israel’ – “That is not Israel! That is Palestine! That land over there is my father’s land.”
The same woman -- “The next elections – municipal elections – will go 80% Hamas. 70% of Qalqiliya residents are refugees, three times separated from their homes. When there is no hope, you turn to the right.”
A farmer/teacher in Qalqiliya -- “Sixty years are enough. . . . I am 59 years old. I retire next year. . . . They (Israel) steal our farms, our land, our lives. . . . I may blow myself up.”
A school principal in Ramallah – “Who has a life here?”
An American Consulate official -- “We took Secretary of State Rice on the ground to Ramallah, but not through the Qalandiya checkpoint. They (Israeli authorities) did remove some of the barriers to make it easier for her. But I made sure she understood the situation.”
A young boy in a remote West Bank village – “I want to be a doctor.”
An early-30s Palestinian man living on the Mount of Olives -- “I work every day with the priests at a Franciscan printing press in Old Jerusalem. I see who they really are. It is all about money. The people see them in their vestments, at Mass, and are impressed. I do not like the priests. I do not go to church often.”
An early-60s Palestinian man in Bethlehem who founded a work shelter for mentally disabled children and adults -- “Palestinians are between the hammer and the rock. . . . Many Palestinians in refugee camps still – after sixty years -- have the keys to their confiscated homes!”
A late-40s Palestinian man who chairs the planning committee in the Shu’fat Refugee Camp near Jerusalem – “I have lived here all my life. . . . When my parents were relocated here in 1948 after having been driven from their village just a few kilometers to the west of Jerusalem, they were given a seven-meter by fifteen-meter plot for their family of four. Now the family has grown beyond fifty members, all living on that same plot of land. Our only option is up.”
Koheleth seems tormented, paralyzed, uncertain, hesitant, frustrated, disillusioned. I do not think the author had found a way to stay focused on ‘life under the sun’ when he wrote Ecclesiastes. Perhaps my journal entries illustrate a sequel to Ecclesiastes, an interpretation of attempting to remain ‘with the world face to face’.
