Almost all at home

Now that nearly all of the group has gone home I will add one last note. One of our number, Bruce Somerville, unfortunately suffered a mild heart attack in Jerusalem. He was taken to a hospital nearby where he experienced the excellent medical care available in Israel, and was released just before the rest of the group departed for home. So Bruce and his wife Pat are enjoying a few days of peace and quiet in their hotel in Jerusalem before they fly home on Friday. I saw them yesterday and he looks and says he feels very good.

I am staying not in Jerusalem but at Tantur Ecumenical Center, which is just outside of Bethlehem on the road to Jerusalem. Yesterday I met a friend in Jerusalem for dinner, and today I walked through the Israeli checkpoint to visit Rana Khoury at the International Center in Bethlehem. We talked about various projects and partnerships our churches and our travel seminars might be involved in, including a nature reserve they have developed near the Dar al Kalima College. She also answered some questions for me about the refugee camp that they visited--too long and complex to discuss here, but the long and short is that people remain in the refugee camps in the West Bank for a variety of reasons, such as that their entire family and society are there, that they cannot afford to build homes elsewhere, and the fact that it is all they have ever known. Still, she said it was so important not simply to hang onto victim status, but to find ways to survive and thrive even in oppressive situations such as the people in and around Bethlehem face.

Walking through the checkpoint in itself was an enlightening experience, even though I did it not in the busy part of the day but when hardly anyone else was coming through. Several people have told me that in the morning beginning at 4:30 or so, 3000 men are waiting in line to go to work in Jerusalem, so the checkpoint can take hours. Going in was not so intimidating because I walked with a woman from Sweden who lives in Tantur and works in Bethlehem. On the way out, I walked from the Lutheran Church at the top of the hill down to the checkpoint. It meant walking many hundred feet alongside the grey wall, reading the graffiti, till I found the entrance. Then, walking up a long ramp with wire fences on either side, through at least two turnstiles, past two different glass booths in which Israelis sat checking everyone's papers, through a metal detector ("put all your belongings on the conveyor belt, walk through the gate and wait for instructions" from a disembodied voice), and so on through the maze. The Palestinian man in front of me had to put his hand on a machine for his handprint to be identified. Then we were out on the Jerusalem side. What must it be like to have to do that every single day? Because they could see my blue U.S. passport and my definitely western skin, they waved me through as if they didn't have time to check my papers, but all the people around me were checked very carefully, taking off belts, shoes, etc. etc. etc.

Someone commented to me the other day that Jerusalem is above all a very interesting place, and I have to say that is very true. It's all here: history, archaeology, religion, culture, politics, conflict, intense diversity, great beauty, great ugliness. The streets of both Arab East Jerusalem and Jewish West Jerusalem are so alive with people. Where else can you wait on the same street corner with someone dressed as King David trying to sell his harp for eleven sheckels to another person who is dressed as if he just stepped out of an 18th-century shtetl in Poland, as I did yesterday? Where else can you find priests of six different Christian denominations competing with one another for "most colorful vestments," "loudest entrance," and "best bells and smells"? Where else can you find little boys yelling on a soccer fields on top of a building that is built into the side of a 16th century city wall? Where else do people compete for ownership on the basis of their ties to people not simply four generations back but, sometimes four millennia? What greater challenge to peace exists than the city of peace itself?

Several of our speakers told us in a variety of ways that there is no such thing as a "solution" to the political and social problems faced by Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East. Rather than one comprehensive solution, there are rather many many ways of working out partial truces and agreements that can serve to allow people to survive and thrive here. President Obama's new envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, is here in Israel today attempting to extend the recent truce between Israel and Hamas into a longer-term agreement. It is hard to believe anything lasting is possible in a situation in which there is so little trust, much less love, between the two sides, where the extremists on both sides profit by continuing to stir up trouble for the many. But we still have to believe things impossible for humans are possible for God.

My prayer for this group of travellers is that we will continue to seek peace and pursue it, both peace at home where each of us lives and peace around the world, especially in this region that is home to millions and emblematic to billions more who have never even had the opportunity to be here in person. With Isaiah of Jerusalem 2800 years ago we have to share the hope that nations "shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."