The boots are back!

Covered with mud and dust and other unmentionable substances, they have tramped through the deserts around the Dead Sea, through pastoral glades inhabited by sheep and settlers with guns; through garbage strewn refugee camps; through the noisy city lit streets into the darkness of Gethsemane; always plodding up yet another hill which nearly always had an icecream dispenser in an open doorway at the top  ..  I wish they could talk...  

I've come back fitter and stronger and stretched  ..  in mind, muscles, soul and spirit. I can never be the same again.

 

We lived on the top of the Mount of Olives, in the guest house of the Augusta Victoria Hospital compound. The front where we daily hurtled out after buses, overlooks the Old City; and the back which has a beautiful wild garden with its own small flock of sheep and a winding track among the olive trees;  overlooks hills and villages and the inevitable Wall snaking between them and the settlement blocks.    On a clear day you can see the Dead Sea and beyond that the Jordanian mountains.

Made you realise what a small country it is ... and made you feel like Moses when he was invited to have a look at the promised land. 

They held the ecumenical Sunrise Service there,  5.30  on Easter morning, very cold very dark, and together we were filled with a sharp joy as the sun burst into life ..

A very good place to go when the soul needed refreshing.

 

 Everywhere one goes one sees olive trees .. on narrow strips of land barely supporting half a dozen to groves covering hillsides. They are everywhere,  in built up suburbs, in wide rural spaces, and edging city streets. The families who own them know them intimately like children. The branches are pruned rigorously, the wood used ..  nothing is wasted. Their fruit is eaten, crushed, made into the olive oil you dip your bread into - it's the very stuff of life.

Many organisations recognise this inner element and use the olive tree as their logos.

 

When I visited Bethlehem, I was jerked into some deep dark place.

As I came up the hill I saw them .. once majestic and venerable .. now with branches and roots trimmed back, the stripped trunks chained separately with padlocks securing them to the pillars of the building fronting the street.  My heart leapt into my throat and hammered away... and I took out my camera to record their shameful end. It was like witnessing a crucifixion.

As I stood there, dodging about for a better angle, a large tour bus stopped and disgorged its passengers, who headed purposefully for Manger Square further up the hill..

The tour guide saw me and shouted impatiently ..

"Do you know why they are there?

            Do you know where they have come from?"

"Yes"  I said, yelling back at him ..   " .. the settlements!"

"No, he shouted, no, no  ..  the Wall!!"

and then moving closer, he saw my face ..  and stopped  ..

and then tapped my shoulder, having recognised the Eappi vest ..

            " .. aaah ..  you're one of those  ..  you know ..."

And disappeared after his crowd of tourists.

 

Yes I did know  ..  but it was a very limited knowledge. 

How could I know how it feels to see the lifeblood of your existence being dragged out of the ground  ..  the bulldozer blind and deaf to all anguish, just hellbent on getting the job done .. clearing the ground of trees and home  .. clearing the ground to make way for the Wall that protects the settlements.

I had been driven through those settlements feeling I was being driven through another planet at the other end of the galaxy, seeing with unbelieving eyes the money and water lavished on beautiful wide tree-shaded streets  ..  and those eye-catching landscaped traffic circles  ..  with a pirated venerable olive tree dominating its centre. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Seeing those olive trees chained and padlocked outside Manger Square was my moment of truth.

As one Lenten preacher put it, Christ is crucified daily in the sufferings of his people.

 Leaving Bethlehem, you have to pass through Gilo, the terminal guarding the only way in. Bethlehem is completely surrounded by a 9m high Wall. It is like no other airport terminal I have seen but it's function is the same. You may only pass through if you have the right permit or in my case a passport (internationals have special privileges).

There is an awful joke doing the rounds, which goes something like this:

When Jesus came the first time he was born in Bethlehem. Well, rumour says that he has come again, again in Bethlehem, but he can't get out,  because they won't give him a permit.

                                  

Metal caged turnstiles and razor wire predominate, and the queues at each successive stage are long and time-consuming. Standing there in those checkpoints was part of our job, watching out for violations of human rights, which was ironic, as  the whole terminal system is a gross violation of human rights in itself. But I learned to fuse checkpoints and cathedrals together, and whether at the barriers or at the communion rails, the presence of Christ was real and tangible, suffering with his people again and again and again.

We talked to people in the queues while they waited .. which was not always tolerated by the soldiers in charge. 

We talked to soldiers too, when they let us, and discovered that they were human beings too, some with apparently no idea of the bigger picture .. like the young girl soldier who envied our job because we "go to so many countries and just watch checkpoints" and others who said "I don't like this job but I do it to the best of my ability, and my time will be up soon"

 

In the short time we were there we saw the restrictions tightening daily .. In  one of the checkpoints we monitored regularly we found a wall made of 2 m high concrete slabs with gaps, running down the middle of the main street.

 

By the time we left this had been flanked by a razor-wire fence with no gaps, virtually cutting the suburb in half. At the bottom of this road a huge 9 m high wall was cutting across at right angles effectually cutting another part of the inhabitants off.. This was in Ar Ram which used to be the main ancient thoroughfare through to Ramallah.  People who used to be literally five minutes away from each other now had to take the long way round through the main Qalandia checkpoint ... an average two and a half hour journey. To get to work in the morning the queues began at 500... and sometimes earlier. We often counted over a 1000 people waiting, advancing one by one, through two turnstiles.

We listened to so many stories.

 

One man ended by saying

 'Today is better
than tomorrow"

 

But in the end what can one say  ..

 

 

I spoke to someone we had got to know quite well as she daily struggled with her permit to get through to her school in the Old City. There seemed to be no logic. Some days she was let through, others she would have to find the long way round which entailed hours of walking on rough terrain. We went to visit her in her school and hear her story .. but that's for another time .

But we asked her "what message must we take home?

                                   what must we tell people .. ?

                        ..  tell them about the Wall?  about the Occupation? about the checkpoints ?

Yes, yes, she said,  you can tell them about that,                    

            But you must tell them we are human people in an open air prison,

            We are ordinary people with dreams and plans for our children..

            and we want to live like ordinary people.

 

I remember listening to a peace activist near the beginning of our time there;

and I remember his words spoken with such quiet intensity and directness  

He said,    "This is the darkest time of our history

                        We have this wall closing in on us                  

                        but there are cracks

            and through the cracks come chinks of light

                        from the world outside.

It is you, the internationals who come here and see what is happening, who bring the light ..

   ...  so tell them (and he used the same words as Nabila)

            tell them that all we want is to live ordinary lives

                        like ordinary people"        

 

 

 

 

 

When I first arrived I felt totally bombarded with sights and sounds and smells and information overload.

And it took several weeks to realise that underneath all the wall to wall training programmes and totally new experiences,  there was a strong underground river of fear.

I couldn't understand what it was .. where it was coming from..

There I was,  living on the West Bank and working with Palestinians, riding quite happily in their buses, visiting their homes, going into their refugee camps, standing inside the dreaded checkpoint terminals; being yelled at;  having guns pointed at me and watching their dogs a bit warily out the corner of my eye ..

I have had my passport taken away from me (scary!) and ordered off a bus (and then allowed back on again); have experienced sound grenades exploding around me; learned to watch for the masks being pulled up preparatory to chucking tear gas grenades .. 

            ....but that wasn't it ..

                        in retrospect I discovered that none of these things frightened me  ..

           

I stood, often, in all these places, unable to pray coherently, yet not afraid ..

..  but aware of something huge and threatening and growing steadily day by day  ..  something I could only label,  as this .. rising tide of premeditated evil.

 

I watched and listened and talked with my shwaai shwaai arabic and learned to let all this become a living breathing prayer of the heart ..

and of course knowing that your prayers were filling me was something to lean back on when I had time to think before plunging back again.

 

Like you I have been reading Albert Nolan's Jesus Today, chapter by chapter, and finding great strength and also, a clue to the larger story happening both there and all around us here ... where he talks about globalisation ..  which is literally "spreading something around the globe"

In the old days this took the form of imperialism and then colonization, all based on power and structures, all helped by our growing materialistic world views based on .. survival of the fittest .. making the rich richer, and the poor poorer ..

then he says ..  (para 2 p 32)

 "Sometimes an empire falls because it is conquered by another more powerful one. Sometimes an empire collapses because of its own internal contradictions. Sometimes its decline and fall is a combination of both. I cannot see another military power conquering the United States. But there are growing internal contradictions and there is another kind of power that is developing extraordinarily quickly and effectively; the power of peace, compassion and justice. It seems to me that there is a real chance that today's mighty empire might be the last of the great empires and that it will go quickly - as the apartheid regime did in South Africa."

 

Then he talks about the new globalisation   .. the globalisation of compassion for victims.., and not just about each country's own, but compassion for those in other countries ..

Think of the world response to HIV/AIDS ,  the tsunami disaster in Dec 2004  The response of sympathisers around the world was phenomenal.

 

He continues: "It is impossible to predict how and when the American Empire (who incidentally gives Israel 1 million US dollars for breakfast every morning to pursue its security measures)  ..

"It is impossible to predict how and when the American Empire will come to an end, but perhaps in the not too distant future the international groundswell of resistance in the name of peace, compassion and justice will undermine and dismantle the structures of power and domination."

 

Only time will tell just how prophetic these words are.

 

Which brings me back to some of the more coherent moments of prayer in all these different places, and perhaps most of all in the checkpoint terminals ..

because rising up from somewhere inside me would come the Taize song ..

 

                        The kingdom of God is justice and peace

                        and joy in the Holy Spirit

                        Come Lord and open in us

                        the gates of your Kingdom  

                                      

 

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