The Wall

What is easy to ignore about the state of Israel while enjoying life inside the Old City or West Jerusalem is that within the geographic borders of this country that is roughly the size of New Jersey there are two bitterly cut out regions that don’t belong.

Crossing into the Palestinian controlled territories of the West Bank or Gaza it’s as though you are leaving a western European country and plunging into the depths of the third world. It’s easy to have a lot of opinions about the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and to easily fall in line behind Israel as I always have. My foundations of thoughts and feelings on the entire matter were shaken spending the last 48 hours in the West Bank.

Quick history: seven years ago during the second intifada (when Palestinian authorities authorized essentially terrorism and war at all cost against what they call the Israeli occupiers) there were a number of terrorist attacks in Jerusalem. Suicide bombers on buses, in coffee shops and in crowded areas just after Shabbat ended killed dozens of Israelis. The Israeli army pinpointed where they thought most of these suicide bombers were coming from and decided to literally build a wall to keep them out.

A fifteen foot high cement barricade now snakes its way through the countryside blockading off the West Bank areas (which are located on the west bank of the Jordan river and dead sea). Israel says this policy is working and there have not been as many terrorist attacks since it went up (it’s about 80% complete). Palestinians say they have created a ghetto that further ostracizes them from their societies, culture and land. Indeed, while Israelis call the separation barrier “the fence” most Palestinians call it the “ghetto wall.” For the purpose of this I’m going to call it the wall – because when you’re standing on the ground looking at 15 feet of cement that cuts its way across the country, sometimes straight through the middle of neighborhoods, it looks like a wall.

To cross from one side of the wall to the other you have to go through Israeli controlled checkpoints. Israelites are not permitted into the west bank areas and most Palestinians have greatly restricted crossing privileges. When we went across into Palestinian controlled territories we were waved straight though, on our way back to Israel it was a different story. Our car was stopped twice, the first time just to ask who we were and what we were doing then a second time an Israeli soldier stuck his head and AK-47 through our window and asked us all to step out and show identification. Once our US passports revealed that we were harmless we were allowed to pass. The woman in front of us was not so fortunate. They searched her car and belongings and after finding nothing they turned her back anyways.

Crossing the wall is strange. Experiencing life on either side of the wall is even stranger. Israel restricts electricity, water and municipal services within Palestinian controlled territories… and by restrict I mean they basically cut them off completely. Most Palestinian homes have a large black water tank on their roof both to collect water and to heat it in the sunlight. They don’t have trash services and so they literally just throw their trash out on the street – the West Bank is filthy dirty. They live in rundown apartment buildings and old mishmash homes and can’t get permits to build new ones.

I don’t mean to sound overly sympathetic towards the Palestinian plight, because they certainly are not without fault. The answer cannot be terrorism and blowing themselves and other people up. But don’t we get the command to love God and to love our neighbor from the Torah? I don’t see a lot of that happening between the Jews and Palestinians.

It’s difficult to understand the height of emotions than run through this conflict. As a Christian my hope and promise from my God is glory in heaven – a new heaven and a new earth. For a Jewish person, their hope and their promise is in this land, this physical land where I sit right now. God gave it to their fathers Abraham and Moses and the patriarchs and kings of Israel fought to keep it. In their eyes all other peoples who settle here are the true occupiers because no human law trumps the promise of God. If that was my hope, I think I’d fight to keep this land too.

The political situation ultimately stems from this. There is no separation of church and state in Israel – the politics and policies are based on the Jewish faith. To expand their borders and claims on the land Israelis build what they call neighborhoods (what Palestinians call settlements) in Palestinian controlled areas. From buying up properties on the hills of East Jerusalem to creating small cities to its south that hold hundreds of thousands of residents, establishing “facts on the ground” is a big part of their policy. Some Rabbis here even go so far as to say it is unlawful to work on Shabbat BUT it is permissible to build settlements on Shabbat. The purpose of these is to push out the borders of Israeli controlled land so that if a two state solution happens the borders of the Israeli state are larger and larger - it would be too hard to displace the hundreds of thousands of people who live in the settlements. (As a side note, you might remember the news from a few years ago when Israeli authorities tried to pull Jewish settlers out of their homes to cede control of the land to the Palestinians. It was a mess. People literally chained themselves to their rooftops to avoid being moved. Most everyone feels that passionate about their claim to this land).

It seems like a two state solution is what most people want – although I did speak with a Jewish woman just outside the walls of the old city who told me she thinks all Palestinians should just move to Egypt or Jordan and she doesn’t understand why they stay here anyways.

It has been a whirlwind for me as my sympathies have shifted from Israeli to Palestinian depending on which side of the wall I happen to be on. The fact that the majority of Christians in this land happen to be Palestinian adds a whole new dynamic to my thought. Ultimately it’s hard to see a peaceful solution. In manger square outside of the Church of the Nativity in Palestinian controlled Bethlehem earlier this week I spoke with a Muslim man about what he thinks. His name was Yousef and he was a delight and made a point of telling me that in Palestine the Muslims and the Christians live together in peace, he told me that he loves his Christian coworkers and visits their homes often (a sign of true friendship here in the middle east). He has seven children and works three jobs to put them through school – including three through University in Jerusalem. While he certainly had a bias towards his people and his claim to this land, he shed a lot of light on Palestinian thought for me. I asked him what he thought the future would hold and he said; “I look forward and all I see is black. There will be no peace.”