Well, I’m home sick today for like the fourth day in a row (thank you, erratic weather changes of Jerusalem) so I figured I may as well blog a bit more about that trip to the West Bank that now feels like it took place a zillion years ago. After this, I will probably watch Pretty in Pink for the seven millionth time. Not good for much else today.

So where were we. Friday morning, my friend Stephanie and I woke up in the nice Palestinian home hospitality people’s homes, wandered downstairs and got fed an large spread for breakfast–pita plus lots of yummy things to put in it on zillions of little plates: avocado, cheeses, eggs, olives, tomatoes, etc. Then, someone from the Holy Land Trust came by to pick us up and take us back to the Bethlehem Hotel for a few hymns and praises to the Holy One.

As might be expected, the whole question of davvening (prayer) on an interdenominational rabbinical students’ trip was not without its issues. Before the trip itself, we were all asked to fill out a registration form indicating what sort of prayer space we preferred, what sort of space we could deal with and in what sort of space we would refuse to participate. The issues were, more or less, about one’s relationship to tradition, and in the end there was a traditional egalitarian minyan, ie one that uses the traditional liturgy but counts women and men as equal participants, and a creative minyan that did not stick to the traditional liturgy but rather incorporated meditation, chanting, stuff like that. There were three guys studying for Orthodox ordination who requested a mehitza minyan, in which men and women are separated and women are not counted as full participants, but they didn’t have the numbers to make it happen. So in the end, all but one of the Ortho boys chose to davven with us in trad egal land, which I appreciated, since it involved going beyond their own comfort level for the sake of pluralism and connection. I sometimes davven in spaces that make liturgical changes to the left of my own comfort/boundaries, and can really appreciate how difficult it can be (and don’t begrudge anything to the guy who chose to follow his understanding of Jewish law, even if I read the stuff differently.) Anyway, showed up to the hotel and people were already on the Prayer Train. So I wrapped myself in tallis, threw on my tefillin, and got my God on.

After that, the day’s official activities began. First thing was a panel by some Holy Land Trust folk called, “A Palestinain Perspective on the Conflict,” presumably an antidote to the Israeli version of the story we’ve heard so many times. Now, I was one of the people coming into this situation with a little more of the lefty background, I think. For a year or two before starting rabbinical school I sort of hung a little bit around the American Jewish peace movement people, and when things got really scary there the spring of ‘02 I stopped a bunch of the classes I was teaching (then, teaching high school Jewish ed in three different places because I was fed up with the freelancing life) and did a class or two on “Why is everybody so mad?” So I knew already about issues of water allocation in the Territories, and about the fact that there was settlement expansion even under Rabin, and cryptically shifting understandings of how much land everybody was supposed to be getting, and so forth. I was, one might say, a sympathetic and slightly informed listener, interested in hearing the perspectives to be shared.

Unfortunately, the guy giving the panel did not get the memo on “How to Talk To People Who Like Judaism So Much They’re Doing It For a Living.”

He used a lot of very inflammatory language, and unlike everyone else that we had met thus far, did not acknowledge that there were multiple ways to view the situation or multiple truths (even as they asserted that specific policies were unjust.) This guy referred to the Jewish “colonies” and very clearly to Israel as the enemy. His maps left me with a lot of questions. On the one hand, they were instructive–if the UN proposal of 1947 had suggested a Palestinian state that was 48% percent of the land in dispute, by 1949 the state mass was 22% of that land and now, with the wall being erected, it might be as little as 12%; That’s worth hearing. And, at the same time, when he kept referring to “historic Palestine” (which was, basically, Israel plus the Territories, like the “maps of Israel” I saw as a kid in Sunday School) I couldn’t help but wonder where this concept came from, and where acknowledgements about the artificiality of this construction where–I mean, what’s the relationship between “historical Palestine” and the creation of the state of Jordan, British Mandate land, the land occupied by the Turks, etc. etc.? There were layers of complexity that were not put forth at all, and if anything’s true about this great, sad mess, it’s that nothing about it is easily dumbed down to simple black and white answers. So it was very difficult for me to stay present and attentive, because I didn’t feel that this was one individual with whom I could comfortably dialogue. Melissa, one of the trip’s organizers, asserted again and again that if he had shared the same information in different language, we all could have heard it a bit better, and that may be true. And even so, I left the session feeling some real dispair, since this guy really is on the left of Palestinian society. And if, as it seems, there’s really a gap in baseline understandings between the Palestinian left and the Jewish/Israeli left, how are we ever going to make this work? No answers.

Anyway, after that we all got on the bus to travel to Anata, a town to the north of Jerusalem that is famous for being partly inside the Israeli wall and partly in the West Bank, which is extremely difficult for folks who live there vis a vis travel, mobility, etc. We had to pass through a checkpoint and wave our pretty American and Canadian passports at the soldier-kid checking us through. Fortunately, there weren’t any problems, even for the one or two people who had funny visa issues. (Like, it’s illegal for Israelis to just come into the Territories, so my friend who entered Israel with his Israeli passport had to wave his American passport and hope that nobody noticed that he didn’t actually have an entry stamp on it….)

What happens in Anata is a lot of house demolitions. The Israeli policy for a while now is, when it pleases, to destroy the houses of Palestinians who build homes without permits. And, of course, it’s mighty difficult to get a permit from the Israeli government, so a lot of people are in a real double bind when it comes to trying to make a place to live, sometimes on their historic family land. One day, soldiers (again, really: children) will come through and tell the family to get out of the building, sometimes give them time to get all of their furniture, belongings, etc. out, and then blow the thing up. Evidently they’ll use like 3 times the amount of expolsive necessary, “just to be sure.”

We met with Salim, a regular working joe who had his house destroyed four times over several years. The story of why he couldn’t get a permit was Kafka at its finest–first they gave him one reason, then they gave him another reason, then they told him that he was missing two signatures on the document but they wouldn’t tell him which two, etc. etc. He went to Herculean efforts to keep resubmitting the permit application at no small financial expense, at one point with 200+ signatures from every homeowner in the village, just to make sure that whatever signatures were missing, he had ‘em. Then they “lost” his file. He decided to keep rebuilding the thing as an act of resistence against the policy and against the occupation. Eventually, the last time, he and some of the nonprofits with which he was working decided to turn the place into a peace center, a place for people to use in their endeavors towards nonviolent advocacy. He and his family now rent rooms somewhere outside of town. For the moment. they have given up on trying to make this space their living quarters, because his children have already had enough upheaval and trauma. It’s not an easy situation.

It was a long couple of days. Not easy, and not even a lot of new information for me, but eminently worthwhile. There’s sometimes a difference between hearing new information and “getting” it, and the latter was definitely the case (as was some of the former, I’m sure.) Any movement from avoidence and denial into engagement and connection and deeper layers of understanding is worth something. What all of this means, still, I dunno. There are some conversations happening among folks in the group about what follow-up might look like, whether volunteering for organizations, arranging similar trips for other groups, or whatnot.

In the end, I still don’t know what I think about a lot of this mess. The more I learn, the more I end up back where I started, which is that a lot of people are hurting and a lot of people are suffering and a lot of people are good people trying to do the best they can with the tools that they have. And there are government policies that are not OK, and things that should be done to change them. And, in the final analysis, a lot of different ways to look at this mess, some of which are mutually exclusive and many of which are true. I don’t know. From what I can tell, the clear work is to relieve some of the suffering. Other than that, I don’t have any answers, at least at the moment. Does anybody, really?