The outbreak of war in Israel/Palestine on October 7, 2023 prompted me to post these reflections based on a visit to the Holy Land in 2007. A look at the conditions then may help us understand the current tragedy. My most recent post on the war is here. May those who have suffered most find a way to future healing.

My encounter with Safieh encouraged me to read Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid and to visit Israel and Palestine under the auspices of Friends of Sabeel in Colorado. Sabeel is an ecumenical grass roots liberation theology movement among Palestinian Christians. Besides working for justice, peace, nonviolence and reconciliation in Israel and Palestine, Sabeel also works to promote an accurate international awareness of the identity and witness of Palestinian Christians. Safieh, who is Roman Catholic, served on the advisory board of Friends of Sabeel—North America.

A year after my encounter with Safieh, we were on the brink of a new peace initiative, and I felt, on the one hand, like “an optimist with information,” and on the other hand, like someone witnessing the passing of a torch handed down from Gandhi through Martin Luther King, Poland’s Solidarity movement, and South Africa’s elimination of apartheid in the twentieth century to today’s brave Israeli and Palestinian nonviolent peace activists.

My interest in the Middle East reaches back to 1970 when I was a summer exchange student in Afghanistan. I went on to undergraduate studies in Middle Eastern history and Arabic. Wishing to deepen my Christian roots and drawn to the contemplative tradition and interreligious dialogue I discovered reading Thomas Merton, Bede Griffiths and Raimon Panikkar, I spent thirty years in monastic life. I always admired Merton’s integration of contemplative stillness and the hunger and thirst for justice. Since 9/11, I felt a deepening desire to share my own positive experience of Muslim family life and hospitality.

I encountered reflections by Belgian Dominican Edward Schillebeeckx on what he calls “political love.” These two words seem strange bed partners, but then, that’s politics. Schillebeeckx notes that politics without prayer and a sense of the sacred transcendent descends to cruelty, dominance and submission. But prayer and mysticism without a sense of the sacred immanent—what Schillebeeckx calls “political love”—escapes into sentimental, uncommitted fantasy.

My religious formation included a critique of American extroversion, observing that action without contemplative wisdom is dangerous and misguided. Schillebeeckx balances this critique by cautioning against its opposite: contemplative “wisdom” that does not bear fruit in enlightened and liberating action on behalf of the larger community is suspect, sterile and, at worst, delusional. Each of us must find a place along the spectrum. Those of us toward one extreme or the other ignore the opposite pole to our own and the community’s disadvantage and harm.

To this volatile mix, I would add a third danger, based on my experience and study of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: a “spirituality” whose politics take the form of destroying the Other. In this case the extremes touch, and a delusional religiosity weds and attempts to legitimate a barbaric politics, resulting in the loss of human rights and lives. In this reading of the situation, illegal Jewish settlers and Palestinian suicide bombers share the same world view: the Other is not brother or sister or a complementary alternative, but simply Evil.

What I found most moving in our encounters with Israeli and Palestinian peace activists was their refusal to demonize the Other while at the same time being forthright, firm, and justly angry or grief-stricken about the abuses perpetrated or allowed by the Israeli government and its greatest ally, the United States. There are two sides to the story. But, as Tikkun Magazine editor Rabbi Michael Lerner puts it,

Israel’s overwhelming military power, its ability to dictate conditions for any negotiations, its daily abuse of Palestinians (from the road blocks, to the withholding of Palestinian tax monies, to the incarceration without trial of tens of thousands of Palestinians, to the frequent killings of Palestinian civilians so that ten times more Palestinians have been killed in recent years than Israelis), and the testimony of Israeli military experts who can show that in an age of rockets and guided missiles that holding on to the West Bank provided little security advantages—all these contribute to the growing world consensus that makes Israel one of the least respected countries in the entire world …

(Tikkun, May/June 2007, vo. 22, no. 3, p. 12)

I saw evidence and heard stories about some of these abuses, and more. One of the saddest was the story told by a Christian Palestinian health care worker in Bethlehem. Her father was in dire need of health care because of a heart condition. His car was not allowed to pass through the check point that leads to Jerusalem, where hospital care is available. He was turned away because although he had a permit to work in Jerusalem, this permit did not allow him to receive health care there. So he died. His daughter expressed not only grief over this fatal injustice to her father, but she also lamented a military-political structure that places nineteen-year-old soldiers in the position of determining an innocent person’s life or death.

As for the death of innocents, according to the research and information-dissemination institute If Americans Knew, 179 Palestinian children were killed in the Israel-Palestine conflict in 2004. Eight Israeli children were killed during this period. Near Bethlehem, in the Aida refugee camp near Rachel’s Tomb, we saw where seven-year-old Ali Jawariesh was shot by Israeli soldiers on November 11, 1997. Ali died four days later and his organs were donated to Israeli Arabs. His “crime:” throwing stones at Israeli troops. We stood on the spot where Ali was shot and looked up the street at the blue steel door that may open at any moment to admit armed Israeli troops. Across the street loomed the 27-foot high wall that prevented Aida’s children from playing in the olive groves visible now only from Aida’s rooftops. Also visible beyond the groves is an illegal Israeli settlement.

I did not realize the full extent of illegal settlements until I heard Mr. Safieh speak and then read Carter’s book. Even after learning from them, I was unprepared for what I saw. Whereas Aida was an open-air prison, the Ma’ale Adummim settlement, with a population of 32,000, reminded me of Scottsdale, Arizona, where I went to high school. This “settlement” is not a small gathering of pioneers living in shacks or mobile homes. It’s a first world neighborhood built illegally on someone else’s land.

We spoke to one settler from Efrat, a friendly middle-aged Chicagoan, who suggested that it is disingenuous for Americans to dispute this policy. He held that most of the land was purchased from Arabs, and besides, America moved its natives onto reservations. So who are we to take issue? Besides, he said, Palestinians teach their children to hate, but Israeli Jews don’t.

Seeing the separated settlements with their private settlers-only highways was alarming enough. But walking through the bazaar in Hebron brought another kind of shock. Israeli Jewish settlers have moved into old Arab neighborhoods in Hebron, where violence has broken out regularly, especially since 1994, when Baruch Goldstein killed 29 Muslims worshipping at Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque. Goldstein himself was lynched by those who escaped his attack.

As we walked through the narrow streets of the souq that was once far more populous and prosperous, we noticed that some of the open-air market streets are covered with chicken wire. This wire catches the garbage that settlers cast from buildings rising above the bazaar. We met with a Christian Peacekeepers Team in Hebron, whose work includes escorting Palestinian children to school in order to prevent, or at times witness and fall prey to, attacks that usually come from settler children.

Another thoroughfare, Shuhada Street, feels like a ghost town. Store fronts are welded shut and we foreign visitors were the only folks outside. But the street’s center is marked by a yellow line indicating that it is safe for settlers to travel it.

We saw demolished homes and visited Qalqilya and Jayyous, two towns choked by the “security wall” that severely limits Jayyous’s olive growers’ access to their orchards. Qalqilya itself is nearly surrounded by the wall. Only one street yields access to the town. As for the wall itself, it, combined with a double “security fence,” is nearly four hundred miles long and built mostly on Palestinian land, sometimes kilometers from the Green Line (the armistice line established in 1949) that is supposed to mark the border between Israel and the West Bank.

The wall has intruded deeply into Jerusalem, displacing 23,000 Arab citizens between 2002 and 2005. The path of the wall is clearly influenced by demographics and the protection of settlements. But when asking about the location and use of water in Israel and the West Bank, we found that “Many of the most important underground wellsprings in the West Bank are located just to the east of the Green Line dividing Israel from Palestine,” according to If Americans Knew. “Israel has built the Wall not only to annex land but also to annex many of these wells in order to divert water to Israel and illegal West Bank settlements.”

If Americans Knew also claims that “Of the water available from West Bank aquifers, Israel uses 73%, West Bank Palestinians use 17%, and illegal Jewish settlers use 10%.” According to B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories whom we visited during our trip, Israelis use an average of 339 liters of water per day. Palestinians use 60. The World Health Organization and the US Agency for International Development recommend 100 liters per day as a minimum.

The greatest hope I saw in Israel and Palestine lay in the lives of those unsung peacemakers who make daily gestures, such as the Women in Black who stand weekly at a busy intersection in West Jerusalem, quietly protesting the occupation, or the women of Machsom Watch, Israeli citizens who carry cameras and monitor the behavior of Israeli soldiers and settlers at check points.

Under the auspices of The Parents Circle-Families Forum, we met one evening with Omar, a Muslim physician from Ramallah and Guy, an Ashkenazi Jew from West Jerusalem. Omar’s father was killed in 1972 by the Israeli Defense Force, which Palestinians call the Israeli Occupation Force. Later his home was demolished and he spent time in a refugee camp. His older brother was killed by the Israel Defense Force and Omar spent twenty years in exile in Jordan. Guy’s sister was killed by a suicide bomber.

Both men became completely disillusioned with all forms of violence and have devoted themselves to dialogue. “We don’t die of listening,” as Guy put it. Cut off from your neighbors, he noted, you fear them more. Since 1995 bereaved families, Israeli and Palestinian, have worked for an end to hostility and for reconciliation. These two men demonstrated what looks to me like the Kingdom.

I wish to support Israel and Palestine by supporting the non-violent peacemakers we met. I am haunted by the words of Jeremiah:

Only if you thoroughly reform your ways and your deeds; if each of you deals justly with his neighbor, if you no longer oppress the resident alien, the orphan, and the widow; if you no longer shed innocent blood in this place, or follow strange gods to your own harm, will I remain with you in this place, in the land which I gave your fathers long ago and forever (7:5-7).

Those are big ifs. Many peacemakers, including Israelis, believe that justice and peace will include the end of the occupation, two states, and acknowledgement of the right of return. Nonviolent means to such an end include boycott, divestment, and sanctions.

After my visit to Israel and Palestine, I was concerned that a two-state solution was necessary. But is it viable? Palestine is carved into an unsustainable patchwork of districts choked by settlements, walls, and check points. Must one neighbor rise by crushing the other? Is it possible for them to rise together?

Mr. Safieh may smile at my “optimism,” but I remember standing in the shower on a Sunday morning in February 1990 while listening to the news: Nelson Mandela had walked out of prison. Strange things happen.

Photo courtesy of Parents Circle-Families Forum