Chasing the Divine in the Holy Land (14 page)

Jihad has no trouble projecting his voice over the group. It's obvious that he has given this tour many times. The statistics flow, well-rehearsed, but emotion makes his voice raw. He's talking about medication. Basically, it isn't available. Sixty percent of the people living in this camp are children — 6,000 of them. There are fifty students per classroom. In spite of that dismal statistic, Deheshieh is the most educated of the camps. I notice that many people have their faces scrunched up. I realize that mine is scrunched up too, from the sun, from concentrating on such crude facts.

“Do people here work?” someone asks.

“Basically, no,” Jihad answers. “There are no jobs, and you can't get to Jerusalem.”

“But isn't it only a few miles away?”

“Isolationism by the Israelis!” Jihad shouts, then walks on.

We pass walls covered with posters picturing young men, like mug shots only more flattering. “Martyrs,” Jihad calls out, gesturing to them. He stops and assembles the group to announce, “During the First Intifada, there were thirteen martyrs from this camp. During the Second Intifada, thirty-five martyrs.”

He recites these statistics in the automatic way that I recite my daughters' birthdates when necessary — facts so much a part of me that I don't need to think about them.

“What, exactly, is a martyr?” Ashley asks me. It sounds like an
elementary question, but I don't know how Jihad would answer. Another pilgrim repeats Ashley's question in a loud voice.

Jihad answers, “A martyr is any person killed by an Israeli soldier.”

I wonder whether this definition includes suicide bombers. I'm sympathetic toward the Palestinians, yet it seems obvious that for the Israelis this definition could be reversed.

“Martyrs are killed in cold blood, including children. They lose everything, even the hope.”

Jihad's use of the article “the” in front of “hope” feels profound. It underscores that hope is a commodity: it can be given and taken away. It is a necessity, like water and food and medical care. It is precious. It is the one commodity that the church has a unique mandate to dispense.

Jihad talks about curfews. During curfew no one can leave home. Soldiers come and impose the curfew with loudspeakers. Curfew can last for twenty-four hours, or a week, or a month — they never say. It is imposed until it is lifted. The longest curfew was imposed in 1991, during the First Gulf War, when there were forty-eight consecutive days of curfew.

“During the Church of the Nativity invasion,” Jihad continues, “there was a forty-day curfew. All of that time, people could not get food. An old man getting a basket of bread was killed by thirty-six bullets from a tank.”

I can see the old man in my mind, clutching his loaf of bread, gunned down by Israeli soldiers. I can taste the hatred that pours from Jihad.

Children are following us, curious, and we pilgrims take pictures. They mug for the cameras. Two boys stick particularly close. One boy is skinny, the other round, like any American twosome. Jihad describes the ball games that children play in the streets, and how they adapt because the streets are narrow, the buildings close.

“There are no playgrounds,” he tells us. “There are soldiers and checkpoints. There is no childhood.”

An old woman stands and watches us. She wears a scarf on her
head like a babushka and carries an empty tin basin. She catches my eye and waves. I wave back, snap her picture. The pastor in me wants to sit down for a home visit. A cup of tea would be lovely. I'd ask about her kids and grandkids, read a Psalm, pray with her. I can imagine her soft, worn hands in mine.

“We didn't choose to be political people. Politics chose us,” Jihad says.

Now he talks about water. There is no water in the summer, and no electricity in the winter. There are five wells in Bethlehem, yet all water is controlled by the Israelis, and most goes to the Israeli settlers, even though they are building on Palestinian land. The allotments are grossly inequitable: a five-liter allotment per Palestinian, a five-cubic-meter allotment per Israeli. What does that look like? Five liters meets basic needs. Five cubic meters means swimming pools and gardens.

“What about electricity?” someone asks.

“It is available,” Jihad answers. “The problem is where to get the money to pay for it.”

Someone asks about the relationships with the Israelis, especially the Orthodox Jews.

Jihad spits. “Hasidim treat Palestinians lower than dogs.”

Perhaps that's why he begins talking about toilets. There are no toilets in the housing. Instead, there is one public toilet for every twenty-five rooms. There is one family in each room, no matter the size of the family. So there are at least a hundred people using each toilet. Virtually everyone in this camp is Muslim, and the women are conservative. They do not want to be seen walking to the public toilet. I don't understand all the nuances, but comprehend the result: Women do not use the toilets in the afternoon. This causes more health problems.

“Everything about the housing is a problem — especially that the Israelis like to destroy it!”

The Israelis believe in collective punishment, an atrocity they learned from the British, who imposed it during the years of the British Mandate. For each Palestinian who acts in defiance, the punishments ripple out against dozens and even hundreds of
people. When a home is destroyed by soldiers, it doesn't affect just one family — it affects a whole neighborhood.

“Do they use bulldozers?” someone asks.

I appreciate her question. The Episcopalians, like the Presbyterians, are debating whether to divest in certain companies that sell to Israel. One company is Caterpillar, which makes heavy equipment. It feels good to be part of a progressive denomination that seeks justice.

“No,” Jihad replies. “Explosives.”

So it doesn't even matter. My denomination tries to do one thing for justice for the Palestinians, and that one thing is beside the point.

“The soldiers come with loudspeakers. ‘You have thirty minutes to get out!' Then they blow the house up. They do this to anyone they don't like. They punish many people instead of one.”

“What do you think of the United States?” someone asks.

“In general, government is bullshit,” Jihad answers.

“What about Europe?”

“The U.S. shows solidarity with Europe, and they are all controlled by the media,” he replies. “The media hate us.”

“What about the churches?”

“We are not looking for charity. We are looking for solidarity.” Jihad stops, seeming to notice that Ashley is crying. He looks right at her, contemptuously, and says, “Crying is not enough. If you want to help, challenge the policy of your government, and we will achieve our rights.”

Ashley wipes her tears, hardens her face.

I wish Jihad hadn't said that. I wish he would realize that he's telling us things we'd rather not know, would understand that tears are part of the process of building solidarity. Before people take on a cause, they must be convicted of its importance, and the gateway to that conviction is emotion. Each of us pilgrims must decide if we will carry a burden for Jihad and his people. I roll his name over in my mouth again so I can make peace with it. Jihad. I look around this un-temporary camp of concrete-block buildings, tiny alleyways, and graffiti
proclaiming “Stop the Wall!” Who knows who I would be if I had grown up here.

We return to the same building where we began — it is the only public building — and enter the first floor. We file into a single room that's smaller than most of the classrooms I know. It cannot handle our group. There is already a small group of medical students present, who are introduced to us. They're part of an international team here to work with the children. They look haggard and dusty.

We're here to see an exhibit about what Palestine used to look like. “This was created to educate the children,” Jihad explains. The entire exhibit is maybe one-fifth the size of my daughter's eighth-grade science fair. A few posters describe land formations and native species of birds, animals, and plants. My eye catches on a map of “depopulated villages” that poses the question: “Is there room now for the Palestinians to return home?”

The answer is in bold type: “Yes.”

All of a sudden it strikes me: This conflict is about land. Holy land. How have I not fully comprehended this before? This is the on-the-ground problem that I only thought about theoretically before I made this pilgrimage. That I barely dared to think about theoretically! But it is an unavoidable problem.

The pilgrims are looking at the exhibits and some embroidered items that are for sale, which the women and girls of the camp make. The prices seem very low, so I select two embroidered shoulder bags for 60 shekels ($15) each. They will make nice gifts, and I want to support the camp. I don't know how else to respond to this entrenched suffering. Some women in our group dicker with Jihad, who has pulled a pad with carbon copies from his back pocket, and is writing up receipts. One woman raises her voice, trying to get him to lower a price. Eventually she shakes her head and stalks away angry.

Ashley whispers to me, “Do you think she mixed up shekels and dollars?”

“I wonder,” I say. “Why else?”

After a day full of heat and heated words, I'm eager for a few
minutes alone in the air-conditioned bus. As I exit the building, a Palestinian man lays his hand on my forearm. I pause, and he plunks a hat on my head, then gestures for payment. I shake my head No and move away. He stops me again, touching my arm. As I take the hat off, he plunks another on my head. Now I have one hat on my head and another in my hand. The man talks and gestures loudly, as if I have wronged him. I am immobilized.

From the bus, Camera Michael notices my dilemma. He approaches the man and speaks roughly. The man ignores him, and Michael repeats himself, his voice escalating. The man won't take the hats back, so I throw them in the dust, even though I'd rather not. But I must play my part in this game. Michael takes my arm and escorts me to the bus. I'm flooded with relief. It's been years since I felt so vulnerable.

People are straggling back onto the bus. Someone wonders aloud whether we'll have the opportunity to buy ice cream. The conversation veers to ice cream's companion food: pizza.

I don't volunteer anything. My mind stays fixed on the encounter in the dust.

The bus finally begins to move. As we head to the checkpoint in the Wall, Stephen points out a brand-new Israeli settlement taking up a whole hilltop in the distance, white and clean in the sun. There's a historical site he would like to show us: the tomb of Rachel, who is buried here because she died giving birth to Benjamin on the road to Bethlehem. Unfortunately, the tomb is between two sections of the wall, and is politically difficult — so we cannot stop.

Instead, Stephen reads a poem aloud: “Journey of the Magi” by T. S. Eliot. One line becomes imprinted on my memory: “I had seen birth and death. But had thought they were different.” Stephen clicks the microphone off, and I'm glad for a time to be silent and consider birth and death. Swaddling cloths, wrapping both a newborn and a corpse. Rock — cold, yet generative. Palestinian families multiplying in the confines of tiny housing units. Rachel, giving birth to Benjamin before she died.

Sometimes I wish the kingdom of God would just come
already. Maybe then we'd be done with all this mess of incarnation! Unless incarnation itself will be made perfect. That's a lovely possibility, a world where birth and death will roll along in perfect rhythm, as they do in the plant world. Today we paused on the threshold between this life and the life that is to come. I'm still heady with that brief glimpse of liminal space. Maybe the kingdom of God is pure liminality, straddling the past and the future with such beauty and simplicity that our vision will be unobstructed in both directions. Our joy will be without end.

Stephen picks up the microphone and begins to sing “Ten Measures of Beauty” by Garth Hewitt. The words are simple enough, and we all join him on the chorus:

This afternoon Brian wants to do a group interview, on-camera. He wants us to discuss our reactions to Bethlehem, the refugee camp, the political realities of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and how all that affects our faith. The last time he tried to film a group interview, it became a rather heated debate over how we interpret Scripture, so I give him credit for being willing to try again, especially with such a charged subject.

The cameramen set up under a couple of flowering trees on Saint George's campus. Michael and Charlie show up late, in a very silly mood. They crack jokes as the boom microphone is adjusted over their heads. When everything is ready, Brian asks if anyone has an opening comment.