A Half Century and Counting . . .

July 4, 1989. Our bus moved slowly and carefully through the steep, narrow streets of the village. It was summer, and small children ran ahead of us, laughing and chasing goats out of our way, their bare feet raising clouds of dust that glittered in the brilliant sunlight. The houses around us were mostly one-storied stucco'd rectangles, and many of them had grape arbors on the roofs.

Shefar'am is a little village in the northwest of Israel, near Haifa and the Lebanese border, and most of its residents are Palestinians, some Christian, some Muslim. Almost no one outside of Israel had ever heard of Shefar'am then. Two weeks ago, though, the whole world heard about it; a deserter from the Israeli Defense Forces went to Shefar'am and killed four residents who were riding on a bus, injuring twelve others. That this should happen in Shefar'am is a painful irony.

We went to Shefar'am to visit "The House of Hope", a center of The Community of the Cross of Nails (CCN). CCN is an organization founded in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral during WWII. They believe that "Truth + Forgiveness = Reconciliation". The House of Hope was run at the time by a man named Elias Jabor, a Palestinian Maronnite Catholic whose family has lived in the region practically since the days of Ur. His mission, in his words, was "to bring Palestinian teenagers and Israeli Jewish teenagers together and let them scream at each other until they get tired enough to listen to each other." Elias' family and staff welcomed us with the boundless hospitality that represents Middle Eastern culture at its best, presenting us with a sheet cake decorated with the U. S. flag, in honor of "America's birthday".

The highlight of the trip, though, was a visit to the synagogue. There are no Jews living in Shefar'am. During the days of Turkish occupation, before WWI, Jews were not allowed to live in Haifa, and there were Jews in Shefar'am. When Britain kicked the Turks out of Palestine, the ban was lifted and virtually all of the Jews in Shefar'am moved to Haifa. The last Jews who left Shefar'am gave the keys of the synagogue to the Muslim family that lived next door, and for more than 90 years, that family has handed down the keys to synagogue -- and the responsibility for maintaining it -- from generation to generation.

The synagogue is beautifully kept: the stucco was freshly whitewashed; inside was swept and dusted; the Torah was properly and respectfully stored in the Ark. The Muslim family considered themselves honor-bound to maintain the building in the condition in which it was turned over to them. And every year, on the High Holy Days, the descendants of the Jews who left Shefar'am return and get the keys to the synagogue from the Muslim family, confident that all will be as it should be.

The powerful reality here, is that in 1915, the Jews who moved to Haifa knew that they could trust and rely on the Muslims of Shefar'am to honor and maintain the synagogue. As that realization dawned on us, we all just started to cry. It's all so simple. For thousands of years, Jews and Muslims and Christians had lived together in Palestine, and it had all been so simple. Why do we make things so hard?

1989 was in the middle of the first intifada, and even then, this town was a model of what all of the Middle East could be (and more or less had been for centuries). And this was the town where, in his rage, 19-year old Natan Eden Zada chose to go to kill Arabs.

This morning, Miles O'Brien on CNN was speaking with an Iraqi diplomat, a Sunni, about the development of the Iraqi Constitution. Showing a map of Iraq, O'Brien pointed out the boundaries drawn by the British when Iraq was created, designating areas of control for Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds. The Ambassador commented that these boundaries were really rather arbitrary: "We have all been living here together for hundreds of years."

It used to be very simple. Now, people whose grandparents lived as neighbors now hate each other, just because of who they are and where they are, even though neither of these things has changed. We've made it very hard.

Posted by Jeanne Edna Thelwell at 12:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

individual people suffer.

It has always difficult to watch the situation in the Middle East detachedly; the suffering of the people is universal and apolitical. And it is difficult to write or speak about the situation without stepping on the deeply-held beliefs of sincere people. But as I watch the forced evacuations of Israeli Jews from the Gaza Strip, and trying to consider it in an historic context, I am struck by how short-sighted nationalist leaders can be, and how long the mistakes of government rulers outlive them, and cause suffering well into the second and third and fourth generations (and beyond)

I used to think about this a lot when I was much younger, when the Arab states still believed they could "push Israel into the Sea." It always seemed to me that, just as the roots of WWII can be found in the Treaty of Versailles that ended WWI, the last 60 years of pain and death in the Middle East flow directly from decisions made by those in power at the end of the 1948. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, between 520,000 and 900,000 Palestinians became refugees, some expelled, some leaving the newly created State of Israel voluntarily, expecting that, in short order, the combined Arab nations would overcome the fledgling Israel Defenses Forces, and they could return home. (In fact, Field Marshall Montgomery, the British hero of El Alamein) predicted that Israel would be defeated within two weeks.) They were wrong. The War dragged on and ultimately, the Arab States had to accept that they had failed to destroy Israel. Ralph Bunche negotiated the 1949 Armistice Agreements, officially ending a War that actually continues to this day.

During the Lausanne Conferences which led to that Armistice:

Israel proposed to allow 100,000 refugees to return, this number including an alleged 25,000 who had returned already surreptitiously and 10,000 projected family-reunion cases. The offer was conditional on a full peace treaty that allowed Israel to keep all the territory it had captured and on the Arab states agreeing to absorb the remaining refugees. The offer was rejected by the Arab states. Wikipedia, "The Palestinian Exodus"

These people -- and their decendants -- have remained refugees for more than 50 years, because, with the exception of Jordan, the Arab states refused to absorbed them, convinced that Israel could be forced to accept them, even after the Six Day War which was really the last time it was viable for an Arab leader to pretend that Israel could be destroyed.

That's half the equation. The other half is the belief of Israeli leaders that Israel could truly become the home for all the world's Jews, and once more occupy and control "Eretz Israel" -- the geographic biblical homeland of the Jews. As pointed out in this article in last week's New York Times Week in Review, Why 'Greater Israel' Never Came to Be, (free registration required) similar unfulfilled assumptions about the likelihood that Israel would become the center of the world's Jewish population have led to the suffering we see on the news today.

David Kimche, who was director general of Israel's foreign ministry in the 1980's, noted: "The old Zionist nationalists' anthem was a state on 'the two banks of the River Jordan.' When that became impractical, we talked about 'greater Israel,' from the Jordan to the sea. But people now realize that this, too, is something we won't be able to achieve."

The failure has two main sources. First, contrary to the expectations of the early Zionists, . . . most of the world's Jews have not joined their brethren to live in Israel. Of the world's 13 million to 14 million Jews, a minority - 5.26 million - make their home in Israel, and immigration has largely dried up. Last year, a record low 21,000 Jews immigrated to Israel.

Old dreams die hard, and the cost is paid in the misery and pain of individual people's lies. For more than 50 years, Palestinians have lived in camps, because the Arab leaders led them to believe that Israel would vanish and they could go home in triumph. Today, Israel settlers are losing their homes, being carried onto buses by Israel settlers, because Israeli leaders encouraged them to settle in occupied areas.
And (with due respect to Spider Robinson) "God is an iron, which is why irony is the ruling principle of the Universe": It is not Shimon Peres, or some other Labour Party liberal who orders the evacuations. It is unwavering hawk Ariel Sharon. It may be that this is part of a bid to keep more of the West Bank (part of Eretz Israel) by giving up Gaza (which is not). BeliefNet presents an interesting discussion of this perspective by "an Orthodox Jew, [who believes] God gave [the Jews] the land of Israel" and says, "That's why I know we must pull out of the occupied territories."

Still, it was sobering to hear an Israeli woman saying that Sharon's actions will be written into the lamentations of Tisha Bav, the three weeks during which Jews mourn the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the "resultant physical and spiritual displacement" of the Jewish people.

[Wikipedia is a good starting point for reading more on the history of the conflict in the Middle East, with references to external sources reflecting varying views.]

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