Israel-Palestine
This past January, I had the honor and privilege of going to Israel and Palestine as a delegation member of a group put together by the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship, working with Interfaith Peace Builders to promote peace and active engagement in what is going on in this volatile region. Our Presbytery financially supported me in this endeavor, so I must begin by saying thank you. I would not have been able to go on what I can only describe as a transformational trip without the support of this church and so many churches in our Presbytery. It’s a privilege to share my experience with you today.
How do you take an emotional, visceral, personal experience and communicate it in a clear, passionate way? I’ve struggled since January to put my experience into clear words and inspiring sentences; what I want to share with you today is simply a step on a journey. Having had time to reflect now, 9 months later, and with new events to reflect on, my sermon today will be quite different than the one I shared 8 months ago at my home church in Baker. Perhaps that’s the point: after all, faith is hardly a destination and much more the journey to get there, and nothing illustrates a journey like traveling halfway around the world.
To say there are a lot of politics involved in this conversation would be an understatement. I’m aware of the context that we come from, or at least that I have come from as a middle-class American. But to be honest, I left on this trip mostly ignorant. I’m sure some of you come into this topic with a great deal more knowledge than I had before I left, and some of you probably still have more knowledge than I have now. I’ll try not to get political. Operative word here being “try.” Honestly, the intersections of politics and religion here are so tightly wound together that trying to detangle them is to drastically oversimplify the complexity of what we’re talking about. My promise to you today is to try to use “I” language as best as I can, and to acknowledge that this is my experience alone. By no means am I the one who knows what is “right” solely because I spent a couple weeks there.
I went to the Holy Land searching for the holy. Simple enough, yeah? Now, I might have tried to tell myself that my delegation was based on becoming more aware of the struggles that are taking place, that I was going to educate myself as a peacemaker, but really, I was seeking the Divine. I was looking for where God was in this holy mess, searching for God in the deserts of the Holy Land, seeking guidance both for my own life and for the lives of everyone in this region.
Problem is, I left on the trip with a single story of what I was going to see. I knew things were bad. I expected to see oppression, to witness living conditions and situations I could barely even imagine. I tiptoed around my desire to be SHAKEN and my fear of what my reaction to these circumstances might be.
Single stories, however, aren’t the full stories. Let’s look at our Gospel lesson today, from the book of John:
Then they all went home, but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.
At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts; where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.
But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.
At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
“No one, sir,” she said.
“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and sin no more.”
Jesus shows the Pharisees that this woman is much more than a single story of adultery. We never hear her version of the story, or learn her circumstances. But Jesus points out the danger of reducing someone to one identity. This woman cannot solely be described as an adulteress. She is a woman. She comes from a family. She lives somewhere. And Jesus sends her off, “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.”
You start to see the danger of the single story? Let me tell you my single stories of the two predominant viewpoints in this conflict.
My very first exposure to the events that led to the foundation of Israel came from the historical fiction of Leon Uris. The book Exodus spurred a great movement in me as I read it. It led me to do a report on Israel in high school in 2003. I still remember pieces of today. In it, we learn of a persecuted people, fleeing horrific events in the Holocaust and seeking a homeland where they could be safe. The narrative is gripping and real. Our humanity reaches out to their humanity. Everyone deserves a home.
My second major experience came at the Presbyterian Youth Triennium in 2004. I was fortunate enough to be placed in a small group with a young man named Jiries, from Palestine. Jiries was and is a Palestinian Christian passionate about music. Today he serves as a prolific piano instructor at a couple different music institutes in Jerusalem. But what Jiries started talking in 2004 about the wall being built down the center of Israel and Palestine, I knew something wasn’t right. Walls breed exclusivism. Walls lead to us/them dynamics. Walls, indeed, lead to single stories of another people.
You can probably sense my desire to break those walls down, both literally and metaphorically. Single stories can never contain the fullness of humanity. Humanity as it is: beautiful, compassionate, broken, flawed. I want to give you a couple snapshots from my trip to break down some of the single stories rampant about this region.
Our second morning in Jerusalem, we met with Ruth, an Israeli citizen working with the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions. Ruth took us to an overlook on the outskirts of town where we could look over the city held holy in three different religions. From this perspective, we could look at the wall and talk about the border issues that lie so much at the root of this conflict.
For education’s sake, and we can look at this map after church, Israel’s borders have been expanding ever since 1948. This took place in a major way in 1967, with the war in which Israel captured Jerusalem, but continues to happen every day, as Israeli settlers move onto what is internationally recognized as Palestinian land and take it over with the protection of the Israeli Defense Force. Couple that with the fact that the wall itself fails to follow any internationally recognized boundary, and you can start to understand the confusion and bitterness these border issues create.
Our tour with Ruth finished with a visit to a home demolition site, where a Palestinian building was destroyed by contractors working for the Israeli government (I want to note that I will try to be very careful in my language as I define Israeli, referring to the political governmental body, and those of the Jewish faith. While Israel’s desire is to be the homeland of the Jewish people, there are many Israeli citizens that claim other faith traditions). West Jerusalem, the new, Israeli part of the city has a huge construction economy and constant building taking place, but no building or expansion permits are issued in East Jerusalem, and therefor entire neighborhoods of Palestinian housing are falling apart, or are not big enough to support the families living there. Since 1967, over 28,000 homes in the Palestinian territories have been destroyed, thousands in East Jerusalem, with reasons for destruction being cited as everything from a threat to public safety, or that building took place without proper permits. That’s almost three times La Grande’s population losing their homes over the course of the last 47 years.
My heart was heavy after our tour with Ruth. She took us through some checkpoints, as we watched Palestinian people (typically darker in skin color than their Israeli counterparts) wait in chutes uncannily similar to cattle chutes wait to be allowed through, usually for the purpose of work. We visited an Israeli settlement just outside Jerusalem, perfect landscaping and grass in the desert, complete with olive trees transplanted in roundabouts to create an image of permanence. My heart was angry. This was injustice, blatant injustice taking place, mostly through military force.
I have to flash forward a little bit now, to a young man we met in Bethlehem by the name of Muhammad. Muhammad has spent his whole life in the AIDA refugee camp, one of the refugee camps set up after the 1948 war that led to the displacement of over 700,000 Palestinians. That is more people than the entire city of Portland evicted and displaced. Aida doesn’t look like a refugee camp as I at least, picture it. It is not tents and temporary structures. This is a community that has existed since 1948, and the camp now consists of many permanent buildings, all built right within the shadow of the wall. That wall keeps a constant eye on the refugee camp…the day we were there we had to hurriedly leave because soldiers were getting ready to come in for a sweep (they use it - the AIDA refugee camp- for training new soldiers). As we left Bethlehem later that day, we saw the smoke from tear gas billowing up into the air from the wall near the refugee camp where we had enjoyed tea, hospitality, and a tour just hours earlier.
Muhammad now serves as the director of youth activities at the local community center. Muhammad said something I’ll never forget: He said, “You, as Americans, have more rights in my homeland than I do. You can come here, then go to Jerusalem. Another day you might go to the sea. Most of the youth who live here will never see Jerusalem, will never see the sea. We are prisoners inside these walls.” As two friends and I walked the 7 miles from Bethlehem to Jerusalem later that day, we passed through the checkpoint that essentially keeps Bethlehem a completely walled-in city. When we needed to produce our passports to gain entry into Israel, the guard took one look at us and waved us through without even glancing at our papers. Indeed, we had more freedom in Muhammad’s land than he did.
Three weeks after we left, Muhammad was struck in the head by a rubber bullet during an IDF sweep of the camp. He was leaning out the window of the community center, urging youth to empty the streets, when an IDF soldier shot him in the head. When his cohorts in the community center tried to rush him to the hospital, IDF forces in the streets prevented them from leaving, citing safety concerns. Thankfully, Muhammad lived to tell the story. And Muhammad’s message for us made me brutally aware of the privilege I carry as an American strutting through the Holy Land.
So here I was, faced with injustice, unfairness, inequality. Much of what I saw only furthered my single stories of this conflict and this area. I want to tell you about the place that pushed me beyond single stories to a bigger, more complex, but more compassionate view of the region.
One of our last days, we visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in West Jerusalem. It was absolutely heartbreaking. Reading, learning about the atrocities of the Shoa (the Hebrew name for the Holocaust), it gave me a broader understanding of the historical narrative that led to the creation of Israel. And I realized that in my anger, in my frustration, and my sadness, I was at risk of blaming too heavily, of once again reducing a people to a single story.
There is graffiti on the separation wall outside Bethlehem that reads, “One wall, two jails.” The problem with single stories is that in the eagerness to label oppressed and oppressor, we fail to ask questions of whether the oppressor themselves is lost, stuck in a single story of injustice they cannot escape from. If your identity is given to you a certain way, how do you break free? Martin Luther King Jr writes that we must pray for and love those who oppress us, that we don’t become oppressors ourselves.
So I look at Israel and Palestine and see two peoples that have been caught in a narrative pitting their single stories against one another, with the opportunity for only one story to be heard. Therefore, it becomes our obligation and holy responsibility to bring voice to the voices that aren’t being heard. How do you change a single story? You learn more stories. You hear from more viewpoints. You break down that wall of fear and love even those that are scary to love, love those that might even hurt you. But if we are going to take that proclamation from God in Genesis seriously, that these people might be a blessing to ALL peoples, we have to live into a new story.
I don’t like a sermon without a call to action. It’s just not in my DNA. And while this is my journey, I recognize that it might not be your own. Your story, your understanding, your narrative is going to look different than mine. That’s great. I’ll willingly admit I bring more questions than answers, and I invite and implore you to explore your own understanding. Go read on these issues. Try to find viewpoints from all over the spectrum. Pray for wisdom. Pray for peace. I hope we can be a church that can pray for peace in the midst of turmoil.
But it gets bigger than that. It’s not just about Israel and Palestine anymore. I look around and I see constant single stories I create for those around me in my own context. The homeless. The migrant. The incarcerated. Gang members. The elderly. Young people. Republicans, democrats, you name it. We write our neighbors into single stories every day. The problem is that those single stories deprive us of our humanity. I had to go halfway around the world to see the walls of fear that I put up each and every day.
The good news? Friends, we are followers of a God of resurrection. We believe in a Redeemer that can take what is broken and flawed and make it whole. We worship a Lord that sees past our own single stories and meets us only with love.
So today, I pray for peace in Israel and Palestine. I pray for Ruth and the other activists we met. I pray for Muhammad and the refugees of the AIDA refugee camp. And I also pray for the legislators and lawmakers of the Israeli government. I pray for the members of the Israeli Defense Force that are compelled by law to take up arms against their neighbors. Prayers for peace, and prayers for courage to fight injustice when we see it.
Let us pray to the God that tears down walls, that we might each be freed from our own prisons, that we might see past the single stories to love courageously and love freely and love abundantly and love joyfully and love recklessly, to be God’s hands and feet, a blessing in the world around us. Amen.
