Existence is Resistance

Under steamy summer skies, Fiona and I found our way to Silwan this morning, a crowded East Jerusalem community just a stone's throw from the Al Aqsa Mosque and Temple Mount in the Old City.  In ancient times, pilgrims would wash in the pools at Siloam--deep in the valley here--before making their pilgrimage up the steep slope to the Temple.  Later, according to John's gospel at least, Jesus healed a man born blind here (John 9) in the same pools.  Today, Silwan is a Palestinian neighborhood, its families stressed by conflict with aggressive settlers, demolition orders and a handcuffed economy.  We got just a little lost, Fiona and I, before a generous man in the street redirected us.  You're looking for the Center, he said.  Up there.

We were encouraged by US colleagues to visit Sahar Abbasi at the Wadi Hilweh Information Center, founded a decade ago to help families meet the intense challenges of occupation, intimidation and police harassment.  Sahar's work with children and families offers support and encouragement in a climate of extreme frustration and despair.  Her people ache. 

Fiona and Sahar, by the Mural created by Silwan's Children

Sahar notes the disturbing presence, in these crowded streets, of ideological settlers, brazen religious folk with no interest in coexistence or mutual respect.  She describes police raiding Palestinian homes at 2 am in the morning, banging on Palestinian doors, terrorizing women, imprisoning children as young as 8 years old.  She tells us of mothers who have no idea where their children are taken, nor how to find out.  And she says it's only getting worse.  The level of frustration is rising fast.

I'm struck by Sahar's own frustration.  This is a decent, kind, soft-spoken and compassionate woman.  She devotes her waking hours to children and parents: imagining ways to support and encourage them.  She reaches out, gently and warmly, to each teenager arriving for the day's activities.  It's so clear that she cares--in a deep, spiritual, connected way--for these young people.  And.  And she's frustrated and demoralized.  The raids continue.  The arrests and imprisonment of young people continue.  Sahar understands--in a painful and brutal way--that it's a project of "transfer," an attempt to scare (frighten, terrorize, intimidate) her people into leaving their homes and homeland.  And how much can they take?  Where does this end?  Once they called the policy "silent transfer"--forced relocation through administrative policy--but there's really nothing "silent" about it now.  Nakba goes on here.  It's everyday life.

Out of a very deep place, Sahar smiles and says: "Violence will get us nowhere.  Violence will only come back to hurt my people and do us unimaginable harm."  And your alternatives? we ask.  "To survive," she says with hurt and pain beyond our imagining.  "To raise our children with dignity and art and love."  And then she offers the line I will take home with me and think on for days to come: "For us," Sahar says, "existence is resistance."  The municipality could care less about Silwan.  The municipality refuses to pick up their garbage regularly, refuses to provide meaningful education for their kids (40% don't have schools to go to).  The municipality engages in what can only be called "collective punishment."  So, of course, she's frustrated.  "Existence is resistance."  And then: "We will not be moved."

We shall not, we shall not be moved.
We shall not, we shall lnot be moved.
Just like a tree that's planted by the water,
We shall not be moved.

A Child's Rendering of Demolition, Occupation and Violence in Silwan

In the latest issue of "Tikkun," devoted to "Israel's Occupation at 50," Jonathan Kuttab sketches a vision of justice, reconciliation and democracy here.  It's a hard sell, perhaps, on all sides.  But Kuttab--a Palestinian attorney and human rights activist--knows what he's up against.

The article's available on line (with a subscription), though I'm moved to offer pieces of it here.  It may be the most hopeful piece I've come across in a long, long time.  Kuttab describes, in detail, the demise of the so-called "two-state solution" and the necessity of something better, something more visionary, something more enduring.  Here's how that works:

"The changes that were created by the settlement movement [after 1967, accelerating now] were sufficient to render the two-state solution no longer tenable.  The physical facts on the ground, the transfer of over half a million Jews into what was to be an Arab Palestinian state, the creation of an elaborate legal, administrative, psychological, and physical structure on the ground in the 'Occupied Territories' as well as the thorough integration of the Occupied Territories into the Israeli system, made such a geographical separation no longer feasible.  At the same time, it slowly became evident that despite the huge disparity in power between the two antagonists, neither side was going to disappear, and that a solution needed to be found within the unitary totality of the Land that accommodates both parties.  The attempt to fragment the Palestinian people into disparate and disjointed communities, while physically successful, has failed to obliterate their sense of identity as a people, or to dissipate their national ardor."

Wadi Hilweh Information Center, Silwan

"Facts on the ground" make a "two-state solution" unimaginable now.  Realities across the West Bank--where settlements expand month to month, year to year--make a "geographical separation" (Israel over here, Palestine over there) no longer feasible.  The many families of Silwan, the dear children Sahar loves and protects with every waking breath--these human beings must be full citizens in democratic system, a national project that honors their humanity and protects their human rights.  That project, that country has to provide an education for them, equal to the kids in other parts of Jerusalem.  That project, that country has to protect them against police violence, military over-reach and judicial malpractice.  Equality and democracy.  Only these can make Silwan (and Israel) safe and prosperous for Palestinians and Jews alike.  

Of the challenges and sacrifices required for peace, Jonathan Kuttab writes:

"Those who are willing in any way to step out of their narrative, to listen to, and attempt to, accommodate the 'other' rather than ignore, deny, attempt to obliterate, delegitimize, and demonize the Other are faced with a genuine need to adjust their own ideology to somehow incorporate, embrace, or at least account for the hopes, desires and aspirations of the other party."

This may be the most complicated (and impressive) sentence in the whole piece.  Am I willing to "adjust [my] own ideology to somehow incorporate...the hopes, desires and aspirations of the other"?  What kind of maturity might that require of me?  What kinds of sacrifice am I willing to make?  Can this happen here, where conflict runs so deep, where facts on the ground are so grotesque, where kids are taken from their parents in the dark of the night?

It's taken me a long time to fully grasp (not just a little, but fully) that the issue here in Israel-Palestine is not a religious one, not a matter of Jews against Muslims and Christians, not a matter of anti-Semitism or bigotry.  It's about justice and land.  It's about fear and class.  At some level, it's about race.  But it's not about religion and doctrine and three faith traditions at odds with one another.

Still, reading Kuttab's piece in "Tikkun," it strikes me that spiritual wisdom, religious wisdom may yet orient these decent people and their institutions toward justice.  For the great traditions of this land speak boldly of making sacrifices for the common good.  And they insist on respecting and even embracing the genuine humanness in the "other."  In fact, to be Jewish or Christian or Muslim comes down that that, I think.  Do we open the doors of our hearts, the windows of our minds, the gates of our homes to the "other," to the neighbor who worships in a different way, to the stranger who needs our generosity and compassion?  Do we love?  That's the fundamental question for a Jew, for a Christian, for a Muslim.  So maybe these ancient traditions can--somehow--offer hope and wisdom to those who ache for imagination and new ideas.  Will they sacrifice something...to see peace emerge in a new and unexpected form, in a new and reimagined land?

Art Center, East Jerusalem

"For Palestinians, this means that they need to radically alter their nationalism.  They will need to abandon their claim that Palestine is exclusively Arab ('Falasin Arabiyyeh') and their belief that Israeli Jews are nothing but foreign settler-colonialists who have no right to remain in their stolen homeland, with the exception of those 'Palestinian Jews' who were indigenous to the land from before 1948.  Their goal of the Liberation of Palestine (as opposed to Ending the Occupation) must now recognize that that in the liberated Palestine will live about 7 million Jews who consider it their home, and, liberation or not, their future state will have to be binational.

"For Israelis, the Zionist dream of a Jewish state will need to be modified to recognize, finally, that their state will have to accommodate a local indigenous population of almost equal number to the Jews, who will never accept permanent dispossession and disenfranchisement.  The Zionist dream, which fired the imagination of many Jews and non-Jews, will finally be forced to come to terms with a reality that massive military, financial, scientific and international power has failed to eclipse.  The Jewish state they attempted to create must somehow come to terms with the indigenous non-Jews inhabiting the Land.  They need to answer the query of whether a state can be Jewish and still accommodate and provide genuine belonging to non-Jews, or must it forever abandon the claim that they can be democratic, and progressive, while being a Jewish state."

Jonathan Kuttab's proposal demands the deepest kind of reflection, the most profound kind of courage--and it demands these things of all sides, all peoples in this holy and beautiful land.  It seeks not to shame one side or another.  It seeks not to re-litigate the past.  But it requires that Jews and Palestinians alike "account for the hopes, desires and aspirations" of others here; and therein lies the religious challenge, the spiritual opportunity and the political nub.  I pray--with all that I am, and with every fiber of my being--that these marvelous peoples can rise to that challenge.  That kind of rising will lift them all. 

Morgie and me.  August 2017.  Jerusalem.

And so I finish, for tonight at least, with prayer.  I pray for Morgie Morgenstern, my dear and trusted Israeli friend, whose Jewish roots run deep and whose faith cultivates more strength than I could ever hope for.  I pray for Sahar Abbasi, a new friend, a kind and determined leader in her Palestinian neighborhood.  I pray that these two women may someday meet, that they may someday build a country together and a future together, for all the children in their lives.  I know--in my heart, I know--that they would enjoy one another.  I know that they would respect one another.  And I know that what they want is the same: a country to call home, a Land to love and explore, a future free from tyranny and midnight raids.

God of our many contradictions, God of our hopes: bless these two friends with peace tonight, with a quiet rest and the deep assurance of grace.  Gather the children they love in your mercy and protect them from harm and injustice.  And rise with all of us tomorrow to build a better world, a more inclusive and just world, for all.  In this work, you will always be with us.  With Morgie.  With Sahar.  With us.  Amen and amen.