Editor's note: We begin a recurring series featuring reflections from EPF PIN members, friends and colleagues coming out of their experiences on the ground in Palestine. Here are three.
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At the time of John the Baptist, the region which we now call the Middle East was a seething cauldron of controversy. The Roman Empire had arrived about 40 years before the birth of Jesus. The brutality of the Roman occupation was personified in the person of Herod the Great who was a great builder. He built the temple in Jerusalem, the coastal city of Caesarea, the fortress at Masada, the Herodion where the discovery of his plundered tomb was discovered seven years ago.
Herod set the stage for cruelty by killing his own son and his own wife because he suspected them of disloyalty. He ordered all the high officials of the temple in Jerusalem to be killed upon his death. Thankfully, his orders were disobeyed.
John the Baptist was born into a world seething with injustice and brutality. Occupation is an ugly thing to observe and John stood out among those who were trying to discover a way to live through what was being experienced. The violent uprisings in Galilee and Judea were put down quickly and brutally. The desert was one of the few places of refuge for John. But people found him in the desert and they flocked down to the Jordan River to hear him speak. Jesus became one of his admirers and was baptized by him in the River Jordan. I was at that site three weeks ago on a Sabeel trip. It ended in Jericho, the lowest point below sea level in the world. The setting is beautiful. The river is ugly, shallow and dirty as raw sewage rolls down the river.
And now in today’s gospel we find John in prison. He will soon be dead. Jesus affirms him, affirms his witness, affirms his prophetic voice.
Jesus entered into the seething cauldron and began to teach, preach and heal. The cauldron was in danger of boiling over with violence and it did boil over 30 years after Jesus was crucified. In order to put down the rebellion in the year 67, Jerusalem was destroyed along with the temple.
We often fail to recognize that Jesus was born into an occupation that was brutal, ugly, violent, and his entire life was spent under Roman occupation. He died a violent death under the occupation. His teachings come from the core values of his understanding of scripture -- scripture he had received from the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, the Psalms, and the ancient stories of Moses and salvation. He drew together these experiences of scripture and spoke to the people with love and compassion about the kingdom of God -- not an empire or a kingdom as we know it but a kingdom built on values and relationships -- relationships with each other and with God. Jesus taught and preached nonviolence in the midst of a world seething with violence. His message was listened to. He was heard by the followers of John the Baptist. He was heard by the oppressed, the sick and the lonely, those who were in prison. He was heard, responded to -- and a movement began with his disciples moving out in all directions to speak of the kingdom of God.
I returned from Jerusalem and Bethlehem on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving having attended a Sabeel conference in Jerusalem with over 200 people from 15 countries. The subject of the conference was “The Misuse and Abuse of the Bible within the Palestine and Israel Conflict.” The Friday after Thanksgiving I awoke at 3 o’clock in the morning and I was crying, weeping and I could not stop. I had been dreaming about conversations I had had with Palestine Christians who were living under military occupation. I was hearing their voices and feeling helpless… so I cried.
I listened to the voice of a woman whose shop I used to shop in 20 years ago in Bethlehem. The 28 foot separation wall goes down the road that used to be the main entrance to Bethlehem. Her relatives’ shop is across the street and is on the Israeli side of the wall and it is closed. Their land was confiscated by the wall. The wall is on three sides of her shop and few tourists are able to find her shop which is the way she makes her living.
She recounted the story of putting out her laundry on the top of her home and noting a red dot on her chest. She was being targeted by a sniper in the sniper tower of the wall. She looked over and saw a very young soldier grinning at her through his rifle site. Her neighbor had been killed by a sniper recently so she did not know if her time had come.
I listened to the voice of a 12 year old, arrested at 2 in the morning in his parents’ home, he was blindfolded, shackled and put in a van and taken for interrogation. His parents were not allowed to be with him. He was charged and later found guilty of throwing rocks. 99.6% of all Palestine children arrested are found guilty of throwing rocks and are placed in prison for days, weeks and even months. When they come home, they wet their beds and admit to confessing to anything the police want them to. Wouldn’t you if you were 12 or 13?
I would go on but what I have seen from my trips over the past 30 years to the occupied territories is that the occupation is getting worse, more brutal, more land confiscations, more settlements. The occupation is killing the soul of the Israelis as well as killing the culture of the Palestinians. We as Christians are complicit in this occupation. We are paying for it though our taxes. We are funding settlements, the wall, bypass roads -- all with our tax dollars.
My first visit to Bethlehem was in 1983. 87% of Bethlehem since then has been confiscated for the walls, settlements, bypass roads and military installations. When you sing or hear “O Little Town of Bethlehem” this Christmas season, it is very little today.
Jesus wept over Jerusalem on his final visit there before his crucifixion.
I wept when I returned from Jerusalem last month. I will continue to try in my own way to help heal a sore spot in God’s creation that is so much in need of healing. I will pray, I will preach, I will teach and most of all, I will pray for you to open your eyes and ears to any injustice that you confront or experience. The gospel story can only be lived out by people like you and me who discover that we are the ones called to action. Nelson Mandela is an example of how one person can make a difference. We are all called to make a difference so the world can move in the ways of the kingdom of God.
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I had the privilege of being in Atlanta GA on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday and to visit the MLK Historic Site. During the Civil Rights Movement in the US, I was a young child. I had no idea of the wisdom behind the movement. One day a small lady named Rosa Parks was too tired to give up her seat on the bus -- which led to a boycott that shut down and bankrupted a bus service.
I wish that I could convey this hope to my Palestinian students that non-violent protest will win in the end. Siham is in the twelfth grade. She lives in Jerusalem and goes to school in Ramallah. Before the wall was built -- that would have been a twenty minute drive. Today she must get up at five in the morning and leave her house by six in order to be at school on time. The Episcopal Technological Vocational Taining Center (ETVTC) classes begin at 7:50 am. She must use Qalandia Border Crossing which can take up to two hours to pass. School ends at 1:20 pm and she will not arrive at home until four pm. At the border she must cross on foot. She will have to pass through a cattle chute that has four revolving gates. She will have her backpack searched, go through a metal detector, show her Palestinian ID, and be fingerprinted. The Israelis are not efficient in this process. She may stand for hours waiting her turn.
I want her story to be told so that she can have hope that life can be better once the Occupation has ended. She deserves to live in her own FREE country. Her father calls her several times a day with the same question, "Where are you?” The fear is that she could at any moment be arrested and detained for just being a Palestinian. The Israeli soldiers do not need a reason. They can literally kill her and not be convicted of a crime. All Siham wants -- is go to school!
Siham in her own words said, "Life is very stressful. Everything is so hard to do.” Yet each day she gets up at five knowing that she will not return home until four in the afternoon.
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| THE glories of our blood and state | |
| Are shadows, not substantial things; | |
| There is no armour against Fate; | |
| Death lays his icy hand on kings. |
A Palestinian friend of mine quoted this to me tonight. It’s a poem written by James Shirley entitled “Death the Leveller,” written in the early 17th Century. Its words seem very appropriate now as word has just come of the death of Dr. Jim Ridgway, Founder and Director of Educational Opportunities, the travel company that most of us who are United Methodists have been blessed by in our travels to the Holy Land and all over the world. In many ways, I have been able to be here in Jerusalem because of Dr. Ridgway and because of EO. With guides and staff here, I join in sending the family my deepest condolences. To tourism in the Holy Land, Dr. Ridgway was indeed a king.
But I also experienced another death tonight. A young man in his early 40’s, a Palestinian, a Muslim whom I’d never met. Let me share the story with you.
Every day after work I take a bus to East Jerusalem and walk to the “coffee” where I meet a friend for tea. It’s not a café or restaurant, but the men who come there just refer to it as “the coffee.” And every day the same half dozen men can be found at tables, smoking their water pipes, drinking tea or coffee, reading the newspaper, playing cards or just sitting alone. Although I don’t know them, or even know their names, I recognize most of them and they recognize me. Not really too difficult as I’m the only woman there, the only Westerner, and probably the only Christian.
Usually after sitting for a while, we leave, get into a waiting car and go to Ramallah. Tonight, though, I was told that we were going to pay our condolences to a family whose son had died last night. He had been arrested for driving without a license and put in jail. While there, the police fired tear gas into his cell and he passed out. He never regained consciousness and died shortly afterwards. In the Muslim culture, the funeral is within 24 hours, so the son whose name I found out was Jihad, had been buried just this morning. My friend told me that I knew the father, that he was one of the men who frequented the “coffee” and so it was appropriate that I come to pay my respects.
We drove up the Mt. of Olives, parked the car and walked down a steep road and through a narrow passageway until we arrived at the room where the men were congregating. A man was reading what I learned was a letter of condolence from President Abbas of the Palestinian Authority. I was very uncomfortable being the only woman present and decided to stay outside while my friend entered. I watched him go to the front of the room and speak to the man who I assumed was the father. I saw him turn and point to me, and then both of them came back to greet me. The man had a red and white checkered keffiya wrapped around his head and as soon as I saw his face I recognized him. What surprised me the most was the warmth in his expression as he took my hand and thanked me for coming. He then escorted me to another room where the women were gathered. I felt so very awkward, not wanting to intrude upon their time of grief, but a woman who must have been Jihad’s wife, greeted me and ushered me to a seat and brought me coffee. She introduced me to an older woman, who again I could only presume was his mother.
His wife brought over a plate of dates and offered them to me. It’s a custom at Palestinian funerals to drink the unsweetened Arabic coffee as a symbol of the bitterness of death, but to follow it with the sweetness of the date as a sign of the goodness of God and of life. The women sat around the room while one woman read constantly from the Qur’an. No one else spoke.
After about 15 minutes, Abu Jihad, the father, came and motioned to me that it was time to leave. I embraced Jihad’s wife, not knowing what to say, in English or in Arabic, and again shook hands with the father. I later learned that their younger son had been killed a year ago by Israeli police. Both sons lost to violence in a short time.
So much tragedy in this land. It’s getting harder to see beyond these daily tragedies and retain a sense of hope that life will get better, that peace will come, that justice will triumph. How many more senseless deaths will have to be endured? How many more families will have to grieve?
I am thankful and humbled for opportunities like I had tonight to show solidarity with these people. I am constantly amazed at their graciousness in welcoming me and letting me be part of their lives. I am blessed to be here.
