It was 3am when they came barreling into town – Israeli jeeps and tanks preempting the dawn and hollering menacing messages over their loudspeakers. ‘Wake up you Arab dogs’ they would exclaim as our team gathered to prepare our nonviolent direct response to the impending threat of violence. What do we do? Planning a course of action as a member of the International Solidarity Movement entails its own process, one that not always dovetails with the ethos of being a member of the body of Christ. For those of us who have been led to Palestine by our love for Jesus, for God and for humanity, we inexorably find ourselves asking, like Christoper Dickey in his article in Newsweek, what would Jesus do in Palestine? As followers of Jesus, our answer is crafted from the loving words and actions of the Good Shepherd who is both Jewish and Palestinian.
Side by side with self-proclaimed atheist anarchists, I found myself at times unnerved by the cavalier attitude of tank-chasers and the hostility of those who sought to provoke violence for the sake of their own aggrandizement. This is not to devalue or dismiss the legitimacy of others’ motivations for being there but to honestly convey my own perception of existing ranks within the organization. In fact, it was on this day that despite the disparity in our spiritual and political motivations we were able to act in concert for the betterment of the Palestinian people. Why? Because we let love be our guide. We assessed the situation and determined that our highest priority were the humanitarian concerns of those Palestinians who were unable to access food and essential provisions because of the curfew. The team member in charge of facilitating communication was an Israeli-Jew fluent in Hebrew and English. In all humility, he put himself in harm’s way on behalf of people he never met because he believed that those who shared his religion and ethnicity were perpetuating a grave injustice. To me, this is what Jesus did during His time, and this is what Jesus would do today.
A nonviolent revolution is well underway in Palestine, one in which native Palestinians protest, boycott and divest alongside Israeli and international partners. We strive for the end of military occupation, to end the appropriation and destruction of Palestinian land, an end to the bloodshed and adherence to international law. Yet for all this to happen one very important thing must happen. Israeli Jews and Arab Palestinians must come to love and respect each other. I heard Palestinians tell me that the conflict will only end when the Jews were pushed into the sea and obliterated. I saw first hand how ruthless Israeli Jews and settlers could be towards Palestinians. This is why I believe that recent efforts like those of B’Tselem are on target to address the conflict at its roots and are aimed at creating understanding, respect and tolerance amongst those at war with each other. The conflict must be transformed by building bridges that showcase culture, through dialogue, by sharing hopes, dreams, tears and aspirations.
In short, Jews and Arabs must fall in love with each other. Barriers and walls, rockets and arbitrary detentions only dash the hopes of a lasting peace built on a foundation of respect for mutual sanctity. Palestinians must continue to tell their stories, for the very right to tell their own history is under threat. In the midst of such an asymmetrical conflict, we must stand in solidarity with those who are in jeopardy of losing it all. And, like Jesus, one who perfectly embodies a Jewish-Palestinian identity, we must call into unity and awareness all who are blinded by hate, power and greed. We can and will do this with the simplicity of our impartial loving concern.
Very nice article. Having been from Gaza to Lebanon several times with late physician husband,
it’s difficult to know that things are much worse than when we were there in the late 80s and early
90s. Our group raised the funds to move the Albert E. Glock library from a Jerusalem apartment to Beirzeit University. Dr. Glock was assassinated in the West Bank as he went to visit an assistant. Dr. Glock was an American citizen, archaeologist. His wife moved from the apartment to be with relatives in the United States. She tried to get the State Department to help solve the murder but nothing much was done for that American citizen.
The movie – we experienced that violence. Staying in Bethlehem one time, at predawn, we heard children and motors and sirens. We looked out from 2nd floor. A military jeep with two IDFs in it, kept circling a building where small children were getting sesame bread off a cart before school. Parents would push them against the wall when the jeeps came back around very fast, no purpose except to terrify, coming very close to the children. Grammar school age. We were shocked. That would never happen in the US and yet our country sent billions of dollars to Israel and this was Bethlehem, illegally occupied. That was just one horror we experienced – there were many others. It was also shocking that the IDF had to know many people had come to Bethlehem from the U.S. and other places, and yet they didn’t seem to care at all if anyone saw what they were doing. We came to find out what was happening because we kept hearing stories that were not in the US news reports. We never thought the situation would get worse because it was horrible when we were there. We went to several concentration camps, raw sewage running in narrow trenches through the narrow streets where children had to walk. Shacks put together with what they could find. Very little furniture as many of the homes had been bulldozed furnished when Israel confiscated them and forced people into those camps. We had to sit on the floor most of the time in those areas. We experienced several dangerous situations, visited the hospitals where many children were dying or badly injured by “rubber” bullets, thin rubber coating over a lead ball. Deadly. Husband, a radiologist read x-rays, seeing those bullets in bodies. We saw many on the ground where we’d walk where children had been shot at.