North London Interfaith Events

Our aim is to break through barriers of ignorance and prejudice so that harmonious living in a multifaith society becomes a reality.

A visit to Israel & Palestine accompanying a Christian peacemaker team

Dora-Marie Goulet and Kathy Thiessen are both Mennonites who went on a ten-day visit in November 2006.

A talk given at a North London Interfaith meeting on 17 April 2007

First, Dora-Marie’s account

It’s a desert in the Holy Land, and there are a lot of stones.

I like to play around with the ideas that the desert environment plays a role in the zero-sum conflicts going on there. When people know what a scarcity of resources is like, their whole world view is shaped by scarcity. Only one of us can win.

And stones aren’t just central, they are foundational. They are the weapon of choice of the powerless, they are used in construction, they determine where and how much can be plowed.

Kathy and I spent 10 days with Christian Peacemaker Team in Jerusalem and the West Bank, and then four more days in Jerusalem and Nazareth.

CPT has an ongoing presence in a Palestinian quarter of the city of Hebron and in a small town called At-Tuwani. They were invited by the community to help with violence reduction efforts. This includes accompanying school children, acting as international observers when farmers are plowing or shepherds are grazing their flocks. It can also include activities like working with local groups to set up a football club for young boys in the Old City, to give them something to do other than join a political faction.

Delegations like the one Kathy and I were on come four times a year. Delegates work a bit with the long-term team members, but we also simply learn a lot, by hearing from NGOs in Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Hebron. After 10 intense days we walked away with a profound sense of the complexity of the situation, and an awareness that we’d only begun to scratch the surface. We cannot even begin to do justice to the situation, but it is important for us to share some of what we saw, because as Elie Wiesel says, “Who ever listens to a witness, becomes a witness.” This is especially significant given the implicitly of Britain (and other external powers) not only in laying the foundations for this intractable situation, but also for playing a role in its ongoing exacerbation. We have a responsibility to know the consequences on the lives of others due to the actions of our governments. CPT works on the ground in conflict areas all over the world, but a key part of its mission is also to change the policies in the west that allow these situations to continue. (website www.cpt.org).

Here’s an exert from my journal after a tour on the first day of our delegation:

Angela, from the Israeli Committee Against Housing Demolition (ICAHD) spoke to us and took us on a tour of east Jerusalem and some settlements just 10 minutes out of the city. I really appreciated some of her one-liners. For instance, a woman who was a soldier during a war in the Sinai saw things then that made her realize how much the government was covering up, she testified that “once you start to know things, it all comes undone.” And Angela spoke repeatedly about the ordinary Israeli not knowing and not wanting to know what was happening in Palestine.

A lot of settlers are Americans buying a home in a quiet, separate, community, their Jerusalem dream home. 85% of settlers were economically, not ideologically motivated ,going for the quality of life they couldn’t have in Israel. (Teachers, nurses, students, young married couples.) The 85% economic settlers hit me the most, especially in light of my recent personal attempt to boycott sweatshop clothing, of how often in the past the cheap way has been the best way, the obvious choice. But that isn’t justice and that is often unsustainable. She talked about shocking things becoming banal, like the wall, how at first they protested, but now it’s just normal life.

Angela seemed angry and on the verge of burnout. She talked about politicians not wanting peace, so peace continues to be impossible. She talked about Palestinians and Israelis being burned out, and that the international community needs to step in with creative solutions for peace. Another great analogy Angela used, Israeli peace workers are a small group of people trying to put out a forest fire while there are pyromaniacs still running around lighting more fires.

She talked about the need for trauma healing for the Israeli people in terms of the Holocaust, as it continues to be used to justify anything and everything. When I brought up a friend’s argument that the Jewish people need a state to protect them, she pointed out that Jewish people are less safe in Israel than anywhere else in the world, and that their standard of life is better in North America.

We got to spend a night in At-Tuwani with Palestinian families. Here’s another exert from my journal:

We’re in Hafez’ home in At-Tuwani, so strange to think that I’m where so many CPT updates have originated. Everything I’ve experienced here has been peaceful and pastoral, except Hafez’ after dinner story of his recent arrest, beating and imprisonment following a peaceful demonstration (the toilet paper is the record he wrote of events while he was in prison). It’s crazy how many official “terrorist suspects” we’ve met with, eaten with , stayed with, and all of them committed or practicing different forms of non-violent resistance to the occupation.

I would really dig some escapism right now. …Of course that always brings me back to the people who live with this occupation all the time, for whom there is no escape, not even a holiday.

There is very little water in Tuwani. No water to wash my hands. No water to flush the toilet. No water to brush my teeth or wash my face. Or at least, not enough to do those things as much as I would like or am used to. This was also striking. Water.

We went on school patrol, which again, was blessedly uneventful. Maureen made the point that when things are quiet we know we are doing our job well. To give a brief background, children coming from the village of Tuba to go to school in another town have to pass by a Jewish Settlement, and the children were regularly being harassed by stones, eggs, and verbal abuse amongst other things when CPT started doing accompaniment work with them. The CPTers were also harrassed, and as I understand it, the Israeli government (perhaps embarrassed at the need for an international presence), eventually assigned soldiers to accompany the children. Given regular slip ups on the part of the soldiers though, the CPTers still keep an eye on things to keep them accountable.

We left for Hebron then and met with Zaleeka, a woman running a kindergarten program in the old city. The most interesting part of the Kindergarten visit was what she shared about trauma, and anger problems, and domestic violence. One of the consequences of an Occupation where men have trouble getting work and are regularly humiliated in front of their wives and children, is problems of anger and violence in the home.

Easily the most hopeful presentation for me was from the Parents’ Circle. We spoke with Rami El-Hanan, son of holocaust survivor, 57 years old, Jerusalemite, graphic designer.

“I am a Jew, I am an Israeli, and before anything else, I am a human being.” Left army 1973, bitter, tried to live in a bubble. In 1983 his daughter was born. On Sept. 4th, 1997, two suicide bombers killed five people, including his daughter.

“What are you going to do with this new and unbearable pain you have to live with?” Vengeance is the first human choice, but eventually you ask, “why would someone do this?”

A year later he met a man who started this organization of people who had lost loved ones and still wanted peace. For the first time in his life, he met Palestinians.

“We are not doomed. This is not our destiny to keep dying in this Holy Land forever. We can break it and there is only one way to do it, to listen to each other, to the other ‘s pain and which will lead to reconciliation.” If we who paid the highest price possible can talk to each other, anyone can.

There are about 500 families in the organization. Some have given blood to the opposite side during a conflict. They lecture at high schools, always travel in pairs (more than 1000 each year), and see this as highly important. There is a “Hello Peace” phone line, so an Israeli can call up and talk to a Palestinian and vice-versa. Summer camps are run by a related organization, “Combatants for Peace.” They gave a presentation a month ago to a group of settlers. (“amazingly successful”)

What Ibraheem Khalid said.

You are influenced by the stories you hear as a child, by a personal realization that throwing stones only increases misery on both sides, it’s not enough to be personally peaceful, you have to work for it.

Three years ago in August he got a call that his son was “injured.” Arrived and discovered his son was dying. Also spoke about vengeance as natural (eye for an eye.) Hamas and Fatah representatives came and asked him what he was going to do (not just an individual choice, affects entire community.) A long, hard journey, even for someone already committed to peace.

“The pain is the same pain” no matter what your religion. It’s importance that today’s children don’t grow up to teach their children to hate others. 6000 Palestinians and 1500 Israelis have been killed in this Intifada.

On the last day of four our delegation visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial museum in Jerusalem. This was profoundly significant for me in trying to make sense of what feels like an utterly mad situation:

Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, is the Jewish people’s memorial to the murdered Six Million and symbolizes the ongoing confrontation with the rupture engendered by the Holocaust. Containing the world’s largest repository of information on the Holocaust, Yad Vashem is a leader in Shoah education, commemoration, research and documentation.The first few rooms describe anti-semitism and the lead up to the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. It was quite upsetting in the light of what we'd recently witnessed. I don't understand how the policy makers in Israel do not see the parallels with what they are now doing. The later rooms, documenting the horrors of Hitler's final solution, were upsetting in and of themselves, and once again I wonder how on earth an entire people can find the healing they need.

Getting to the end of the main story-display, I was waiting for the conclusion: “and because this terrible thing happened, we must all work hard to make sure such horrendous things never happen again to anyone.” And instead the conclusion was, “and because this terrible thing happened, thank God we now have the state of Israel to protect us. And we must never ever forget that we aren’t safe anywhere.” This bothered me, but brought home just as Angela’s talk the first day had, that Israel is founded on unhealed wounds and trauma, which must be addressed. As our two German team members commented, “the Palestinians are pay for what the Nazis did to the Jews.”

All this just leaves me with many questions. How is it possible to remember and heal? And how can healing be sought for an entire traumatized people group? And what will be the consequences in 10, 60, or 100 years of the daily trauma Palestinian children are growing up with today?

I was so thankful to be heading home. Weeks later I would still spontaneously stop and give thanks to God that I couldn’t see a gun in sight. Like many Israelis, I spend a lot of time intentionally not thinking about what I saw and learned, simply so I can go on with my own life.

Why did we go? There is deep injustice here, and deep injury being done to the Palestinian people, and I think it is caused at least in part by another deep injury that was done to the Jewish people (and which the Israeli state has chosen to capitalize on with all its talk of "security," rather than attempt to heal.) And I fear that a lot of healing will be required for peace but I have no idea how such healing could take place. And I think Israel is now creating its own worst nightmare through the fear and powerlessness and indignity being suffered by the Palestinian people. And this makes me very, very sad for everyone.

You know, before I came here I talked to a number of people who had recently been here and each and everyone of them prefaced their statements with "it's complicated." And it most definitely is.

Kathy Thiessen’s account

Day 2- Jerusalem: We visited Breaking the Silence and Rabbis for Human Rights

Michael represented Breaking the Silence, an organization made up of former Israeli soldiers who have realized that some of the actions they participated in and saw on their tour of duty in the West Bank, violated the human rights of the Palestinian people. They now take testimonies from soldiers and document these. They talk to young people who are just going into the service about what it is like to be a soldier and what can happen to your head to be put into that situation.

Imagine with me that you are an 18 year old male. Every man must serve 3 years in the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) and every woman 2 years. Most of the soldiers who serve in the West Bank are male. Going into this situation you are handed machine gun and the authority that goes with it at a time when your hormones are raging and you are leaving home for the first time We were told that Hebron is a dreaded assignment. The young men are very afraid of the settlers who tend to not have any respect for the soldiers whom they see as looking after the Palestinians. However, every Palestinian is a potential terrorist so they are to be kept under control too. Add to that the fact that Hebron is a very boring place for an 18-21 year old young man. The result is many young soldiers taking their authority to the maximum degree.

One way that they do this is by home invasions.(home invasion) Whether due to boredom, or some reported threat, they enter the homes, often at night and go through closets, drawers and computers to find some incriminating evidence. Usually the family is barricaded in one room or put outside while this is happening.

‘Breaking the Silence’ hopes to instill the idea into these soldiers that the Palestinians are human beings and need to be treated as such. One young man came to this realization after he came upon a scene of children playing ‘soldier and Palestinian’. He realized that they were imitating actions that he had taken himself many times. He needed to tell his story and change his ways. So he came to ‘Breaking the Silence’.

Michael Swarz spoke to us at Rabbis for Human Rights, another Israeli organization that we visited. This is a group of 90 rabbis who believe that the Israeli people are not listening to rules that God set down on how to treat their neighbors. They began their work in 1988 during the first uprising (Intifada). They want to remind both the religious and the non-religious sectors of the public that human rights abuses are not compatible with the age-old Jewish tradition of humaneness and moral responsibility or the Biblical concern for “The stranger in your midst.”

This was the delegation’s first exposure to someone who strongly believed that the security barrier was needed for the protection of the Jewish people. He was certain that the safety of his small children depended on it. However, he said that the barrier should be on the Green Line (the line that had created a border in 1948.). One of the things that this organisation does is fight court battles to get the wall moved back to the green line.

An action that the rabbis take very frequently is to go out to houses that are going to be demolished. They have put themselves in the way of bulldozers and fought legal battles in order to save houses If they don’t succeed in stopping the destruction they provide person power to help rebuilt the houses.

They respond to calls from Palestinian farmers who are being oppressed by militant Israeli settlers. Their olive trees may have been destroyed, they are not allowed to plant, weed or harvest their crops. They have a little more leverage then CPT in that they are Israelis. They call the IDF and insist that they do their job to keep the settlers under control. Then again, if the crops are destroyed, they are there to help the villagers replant.

Day 4- Bethlehem

There is often a long queue of Palestinians at the checkpoint between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The checkpoint is the only entrance through the wall-the wall that will soon almost surround the citizens of this town. Bethlehem was peaceful the day we visited. Too peaceful. I compared the push and shove of the pilgrims in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to the tomb-like peace of the Church of the Nativity. Because they are told that the town is a dangerous place, this church is now a place for westerners to avoid, or to zoom through in ½ hour and head back to Jerusalem. Unemployment is 65% and the place is hurting.

Bethlehem is the site of several refugee camps. At Deheisheh camp we met Atallah Salem. His grandparents came to Bethlehem around 1948. The date was a victorious one for the Jews- a homeland at last, but a catastrophe for the Palestinians. Thousands of people were forcibly moved off their land and came to tents in refugee camps. The land given to the camp is ½ acre square on which 20,000 people now live. After the tents the UN built 9ftx 9ft houses for each family. As the families grew they began to build up.The camp no longer looks like a temporary estate. Three generations later they are now living there permanently.

At age 14 Atallah crossed the road to see his uncle during curfew. He was arrested and held in prison for 3 months. Now whenever he shows his id card the computer points out that he is a potential terrorist. Not only that, but every family member is seen as having potential for violence too. It is virtually impossible for him to travel at all..

Some of our other visits in Bethlehem gave reason for hope. Holy Land Trust led by Sami Awad is training Palestinians in non-violent resistance. In the last year the number of trainings has over doubled to 40. The organization Wi’am looks at restoring relationships through restorative justice. They also work at job creation and at trauma coping program for children. Badil does legal research and campaigns for human rights. They are teaching youth what their rights are and advocating for them. They also look at the issues of the Palestinian refugees who are spread out in camps in Palestine, many Arabic countries as well as other countries all over the world. Lastly in Bethlehem we visited the Bethlehem International Centre . This centre is based in a Lutheran church. They use the facilities to train people in the traditional arts as well as new forms of art creation. This is a way of job creation to help ease the unemployment.

Day 5- Hebron

Finally we reached Hebron. This city is the home of the largest CPT unit in the West Bank. Everything we had learned up until now seemed to be in preparation for this visit. Hebron is a divided city –explain H1 and H2. A permanent CPTer was there to meet us and guide us out of the chaos of the market to the quiet of the old city. The covered market there is not supposed to be quiet, but the economy and constraints of the soldiers are so bad that most of the steel doors of the tiny shops are closed. The CPT apartments are in a house of flats in the old city. They used to be able to walk out of their door to the main shopping street, but that road is now classified as ‘Israelis only’. The way is blocked by huge concrete barriers. The shops are all closed and any Palestinian who has a front door onto that street must use a back way- even if it means using a ladder. Internationals such as CPTers can walk on that road most of the time, although on some days some commanders tell them that this will not be allowed anymore.

Our first visit took place on the Jewish Shabbat. As we walked on the Israeli only road, Shuhada Street, we passed young families walking to the synagogue. The young fathers carried their machine guns as they pushed the strollers containing their tiny children. We could feel the tension of the CPT reservists as they tried to persuade our Palestinian interpreter to bury himself in the center of our group.

Our first visit was to the Dana family enclave. Seventy members of this extended family live in a number of houses on the very edge of the large Israeli settlement, Kiryat Arba. The Israeli settlers in Hebron are quite radical. They really would like the Palestinians to totally leave so they can live on the land that they believe that God gave to them. To prove their point they have destroyed 550 olive trees to build a road and a high fence. The razor wire comes right up to the edge of the families’ houses. Three of their dwellings have been slated for demolition. The Danas have appealed in the courts and so far the houses are safe. However, regularly settlers come down to the houses, pick up stones that are lying everywhere and stone the roofs of the houses. The water tanks on the roofs have holes shot in them and have to be replaced very frequently. But the family is determined to stay. This has been their land for generations and they must not be driven off of it. Anyway, where would they go?

In the whole 10 days we were never in real danger. But the walk home from the Dana house was the most disturbing for me. We were walking along seeing the occasional soldier standing at his post. All of a sudden we were surrounded by soldiers who came out of the alleys and pointed their machine guns at us. I knew that it was very unlikely that they would shoot me, but I could feel the authority that a gun holds and the authority that a young man with a gun knows that he holds. It turned out that they were protecting a group of settler children who were playing in the park just below the Al Ibrahimi mosque and synagogue. I was quite shook up. But I only had to experience this once- the Palestinian citizens of this city live with it day after day.

Day 7

I spent a beautiful Middle Eastern morning watching a Palestinian farmer plow his field way down in the valley below. Two days earlier with his permission papers in hand, he had tried to plow and settlers from a very radical settlement on the hill above his stony field came down and beat him up. He called “Rabbis for Human Rights” and they agreed to send out a delegation to give him aid.

There is an old law which states that if land is not worked for 3 years, the ownership reverts to the state which is Israel. If the settlers can scare him enough to keep him away it will be another few dunums (a quarter of an acre) of land to add to their property. On this day, they were out of luck. The rabbi with our group tried to make friendly overtures to the group that spilled out of the mobile homes on the hill. The response was “you get this bus out of here in 3 seconds or we will begin to bash it”. So we moved out of the way and he called the Israeli Defence Force (soldiers). It was really quite amazing. The soldiers came onto to hill and kept the settlers controlled.

We stayed on the rocks up above the work. The soldiers told us that they feared that we would incite the settlers if we were to go down. So we didn’t and it did work. We watched the red shirt of the farmer’s son as he guided the donkey back and forth over the little pieces of ground. The moisture underneath showed as he turned each row, letting us recognize his progress.

Near to lunch time the farmer and son made their way up the hill. They were so full of gratitude for our morning of sitting in the sun discussing philosophy. He brought us some warm flat bread to sustain us and told us that he was feeling secure. He had ½ hour left of work and that we could depart. As we drove off in the bus we could see the settlers coming out of their houses again. I felt that maybe he was wrong. But he had told us and we needed to listen to his instincts. He had been around a lot longer than us.

We went to Hani Abu Haikal’s house. As we entered it was obvious that his wife Meena had not been told that we were staying the night. But she welcomed us in anyway. Hani would be home soon from his tea shop. His understanding of English would help the situation.

Hani is a fortunate man. He owns his own tea shop in the Old City of Hebron. It had done very well. Men would come to sit and drink Turkish coffee, smoke a water pipe and watch football on a large screen TV. But since the 2nd Intifada most of shops of the Old City are closed. People are scared to come to his shop for fear of being cornered by soldiers. He now brings the coffee and sweet tea he makes out into the market and sells them directly to his customers.

The Abu Haikal’s house is on a hill just above the Al Rumeida settlement. The area had been designated as historical significance as it was probably the site of ancient Hebron, but before long the temporary mobile homes of the settlers arrived, to be replaced by permanent structures right on Hani’s doorstep.

Life now is very unpredictable.They never know when the idea will strike the settlers to harass the children on their way to school or bulldoze down the existing olive trees. Already 100 olive and fruit trees have been poisoned and chopped down. But it is pretty likely that the Jewish Shabbat/Sabbath afternoon will be spent listening to rocks pounding down on the flat roof.

Another thing that the family has to deal with is the IDF soldiers. Because the settlement is so close, the soldier force is strong. Roads and access points are blocked with cement blocks. To get to other parts of the city they have to go through a checkpoint. At any time the soldiers can decide to ask for ID cards which can be held for minutes to hours. The soldiers are a matter of daily life for his 3 older children (as it is for all children in the Old City of Hebron. Even the boys can be held up on the way to school by soldiers, wanting to search them for strapped on bombs.

Palestinians are not allowed to bring their vehicles into the area H2. Two years ago when Meena was in labour with their baby, Yara, it took the ambulance 14 hours to pass the checkpoints. When they finally decided to try to drive to the hospital, the soldiers would not allow Hani and Meena to walk down the street in front of their house. They had to spend ½ hour on a January night, walking through rugged ground up the side of the hill and back down to get to their car in the H1. Yara was born 10 minutes after they arrived at the hospital.

As we left their house, after having a quiet night with no screaming, rock throwing settlers and no home invasion by soldiers I looked at the Abu Haikal garden. It was peaceful with a child’s swing and birds singing. But I knew that the swing would not hold a laughing child and the vegetable garden would not grow healthy food to supplement their meagre income unless drastic change happens.