Middle East Travels

A couple weeks ago I completed co-facilitation of a Middle East Jam in Jordan’s exquisitely beautiful southern desert, where 27 young leaders gathered from 14 nations throughout the region for a transformational week. Jam participants built friendships and laid groundwork for vibrant partnerships, and gained support to empower their work for sustainability, peace, localization, community resilience, justice, human rights, interfaith dialogue, social entrepreneurship, youth development and conflict transformation. We met outdoors, and were in a place of deafening silence. We had luscious soft flat sand to meet on, right up against towering pink cliffs that provided shade from the intense sun. It was amazing, and deeply inspiring.

After the Jam I went to Hebron, Palestine, with Tareq, a Jam alumnus who leads nonviolence trainings for Palestinians. I loved the people I met, and was also pretty shocked at the level of brutality and systematic disrespect that is manifest by the Israeli settlers and military there -- it feels like it is beyond security at any price, to the point of at times looking like intentional and systematic dehumanization. There are 400 settlers in Hebron, protected by 2,000 soldiers. They have basically taken people's homes and land, without compensation, forced the closure of thousands of shops, and moved right into the center of town. The settlers live in high-rise apartments built right over the center of Hebron, and dump garbage, throw bricks, and dump waste water, on the heads of the Palestinians. I was told that they can shoot and kill Palestinians at will, and the soldiers will protect them from any retaliation of any kind. The old city has Israeli soldiers in watch towers every half block, and I watched as they pointed their machine guns down at me and my Palestinian host. It was a bit unnerving, to say the least. :)

I was told that if I took any pictures, my camera would be confiscated. Surveilance cameras were everywhere, watching and following us -- Tareq says they will question him next time he comes through because he was there with me -- and they will ask him what he told me. Palestinians like Tareq grew up with sometimes over half the year under curfew (step on the streets and get shot, period). When he could attend Palestinian school, he got an education that was written as propaganda by the Israeli military. Freedom of expression wasn't even a concept -- the Israeli's could arrest anyone, any time, with or without cause, and imprison them for any amount of time. Flying a Palestinian flag was illegal until 16 years ago. It is only pretty recently that Palestinians have been allowed to operate their own radio stations, or given access to any television that was not produced by the state of Israel. And yet I experienced many people, trying to live with dignity in the midst of this, deciding that love and friendship and even smiling were acts of resistance, and clearly valuing nonviolence as a political strategy and as an expression of morality. Tareq seemed to have hundreds of friends, in fact as far as I could tell he knew everyone in town. I commented on this, and he said, "when you don't have a lot of money, sometimes you measure your wealth in friends."

A part of me felt the pull to the "victim-demon-hero" triangle, and saw how morally simple it would be to demonize the Israelis, and see myself as the noble hero who would try to save the poor helpless Palestinians. But I also knew this was no answer. So, as an American Jew, I walked through settlement territory and saw Jewish babies, eight year old kids holding machine guns, heard beautiful singing of Jewish songs, and exchanged smiles with people who looked a lot like me. I saw the American teenage Jews on their "birthright" tours getting their Zionest education, and overheard them being told that thousands of years ago, Hebron was for the Jews, so the settlers were reclaiming the land from occupation. I travelled also to Jerusalem, where I dined in a lovely organic vegetarian restaurant and felt comfortable and at home in an economically thriving democracy in the heart of the Middle East. Here too, I was greeted with warm smiles and enthusiastic welcomes.

So the complexities and contradictions deepened.

There is no way to tell a whole story of this multi-faceted region in a few paragraphs, or indeed in a lifetime. But I wanted to share a few glimpses of my own experience, as it touched me deeply.