Bet Lechem 1 (Bethlehem- two days there)

So far since making aliyah, I've had a real hard time feeling "Israeli," to the point of blowing off the question when people ask me how it feels. I'm american, a Jersey girl, a New Yorker, a musician, a traveler, anything but Israeli! I'm here for the work.
But.
I feel it now. I just spent two days in Bethlehem on an Encounter trip with 50-something other American Jews, and I see how Israeli I am. I live here, and there's so much work to be done, and me with my special privilege: and American passport, I'm perfectly situated to do something, any thing, even while I'm so frustrated that Israelis just don't see how much work there is, the gaping whole that needs to be filled in, completed and explained to their children. I'm devastated but I'm also ecstatic that I'm HERE! That I know people I want to spend time with on the other side of the wall, that I have family there who were almost waiting for me, and whom I'm dying to host in My home in Tel Aviv, to return the favor, but of course they're stuck there, with absolutely NO freedom of movement, and that's not going to change for a long time. so I have to go back.
We started off at the Hope Flowers school, in Area C (=Israel-controlled) part of Betlehem. Our bus drove on a bypass road, normally used by Israeli settlers, and we walked up a hill, over a huge dirt-pile roadblock, to get in via back way into the city. The school specializes in non-violence and conflict-resolution training. There are students- 4th graders!- trained to be counselors and mediators within their own class to resolve the fights that arise from tense, traumatized children who are not unused to soldiers waking them in the middle of the night. We heard plenty of stories about this kind of trauma. The head of the school, Ibrahim Issa, spoke to us about the hard going since the second Intifada began in 2000, how while they used to have sister cities in Israel, now Israeli children aren't even allowed anywhere near it, so their sister city is Frankfurt. We heard things along these lines many times- how Frankfurt (as an example, since they often have to fly through its huge airport, via Jordan and then via Egypt, to get BACK to places they want to visit, places like, oh, say.. Gaza!) is closer to tham than places 10 km away. Issa spoke to us about how much money they need, how none of the teachers have been paid in a while- but when he spoke numbers, we all were shocked at how small they were really. One woman said she paid more for 4 years of college than the school's operating budget.
We heard a lot of speakers on Thursday. The point of the trip was to listen. If it were to engage in discussion, it would have needed to be many days longer. A lot of the people had problems with what they heard, not on an emotional level, because you couldn't argue with the fact that their situations suck and they have plenty of horrible devastating stories to prove it. But with some of the speakers' use of Holocaust stories and terminology, as if that was the only thing we'd understand as Jews. Things like, "we're the victims of the victims," or "We're the indirect victims of WW2" or "Israel is building walled ghettoes of its own after Jews were made to build their own ghettos in Warsaw and elsewhere..." I didn't feel the same way as those who were offended by these statements, though. I mean, I'm sorry, but we tell these stories many, many times, and loudly, as defining moments for us. The Palestinians, if anything, I thought, were trying to show that THEY have compassion for what WE went through, not to throw it in our faces in an attempt to elicit guilt. The need for a safe place for Jews was clear long before 1939, as were Zionist efforts. The fact is that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced in 1948, and for them the Hagana (the freedom fighters, precursors to today's Israel Defense Forces, or IDF) isn't something to name a street in every town after. Our speaker after Ibrahim Issa was Zougby Zougby, at his Wiam Center for Conflict Resolution and Mediation on a main street in Betlehem, and he spoke to us about how whatever the history and the painful gaps in our respective narratives of the conflict, neither group is going anywhere, so resolution has to be inevitable. But he was the first to say what we would hear many times over on this trip: "The problem is the Occupation."
I saw firsthand, from looking out the window and from looking at maps, how right he was. On land that used to be the only forested part of Betlehem, which Palestinians had been kept from building on because it was "environmentally protected" rose the fortress-looking identical white buildings of Har Homa, an Israeli settlement. It was cleared during the famous Oslo peace accords in '93, and by looking at it, you could forgive Palestinians for accusing Israel of talking out of both corners of its mouth. All around Betlehem (and all of the West Bank) writhes the Partition Wall, usually hundreds of meters from any buildings, often cutting into land owned and harvested by members of the town in surrounds. "See? They want the land and they don't want us," Betlehem residents pointed out over and over. It's impossible, utterly impossible, not to see the blatant land-grab in the twist-turny path of this Wall, which when you stand near, you get a very, very different, yet almost as powerful energy from as when you stand near our beloved Kotel (Western Wall) in Jerusalem. Wow. It's ugly. I'll put some pictures up so you can see. Zougby Zougby rode with us for a little while after his speech to point out some of the newer areas. For example, on November 15- Palestinian "Independence Day," (really made me wonder, the optimism of that holiday!) the checkpoint through which we were planning on passing had been closed, forcing more and more people to use fewer and fewer cross-ways to get to work, family, school, or wherever. Next to this former checkpoint were huge fresco-like graffiti art, with slogans like "To exist is to resist!" which, Zougby told us, had been painted by a group of Mexicans from Chiapas!
The next panel of speakers we had included a woman named Teri, and we all fell in love with her. She was a smart, outspoken heroine out of any number of hard-scrabble movies we've seen, but she's been working tirelessly at her cause since she was 13, and her anger is real. Chairman of the board of the Palestinian Womens Organization, she outlined for us the personal affronts of this wall- how it helped in ruining her marriage, how she had to run after this event to pick up her daughters, whom her husband would have to pass through a small hole in the wall they found so she could get them to their music lesson on time (I asked her afterwards what they played: one plays violin, the other a- shoot I forget the word- a Palestinian instrument with lots of strings that you pluck I guess)...
I'm getting tired of writing. I'll skip to the end of Thursday, the most fresh and meaningful part of this Encounter for me. We drove to "The Tent" restaurant to meet the host families we'd be staying with. I was staying with another girl from Tel Aviv (yay!! we were the only ones- everyone else lives in Jerusalem or studies at Yeshiva), Olivia, a med student at TA University. Linda, our host momma, greeted us with huge, enveloping eyes, and an immediate eagerness and happiness that "we were hers." We sat at the table with her sister and her two sons, and chit-chatted. She loves to party, knew everyone in the Tent (which really looked from the inside like a real Bedouin tent)... when the waiter came to take drink orders, she looked at me conspiratorially and said, "you want a beer, right? I want a beer. Let's drink together!" And as he went away to retrieve them, she held her two index fingers together and said to me, "You and me, I can tell, we're like this... we're the same in here," and then she touched her heart. "We like to enjoy life." The only way I could answer was to hold up my hand, and say, "Linda, we really need to high five right now. Do you know what that is?" "Like what you do with little kids?" "Exactly," I said.
Linda's a nurse, and teaches health classes to schools all over Betlehem and Bet Sahur, the adjoining village where she lives in an apartment building (owned by the Greek Orthodox Church, she told me- I never asked which sect of Christianity she belonged to) with her two sons, Ouhad and Basel. Her mother's name was Amelia!- she was born in Santiago, Chile! Linda's sister, Lemya, sat to Olivia's right, and Linda to my left, so we were bookended by them, and on either side of them by their sons. At one point a drum started going around, and Lemya picked it up and just rocked out on it. It was.... a mazing!!!! Olivia and I were dancing in our seats, our booties moving as much as they could as we chowed down on a rainbow of salads. Linda and her sons chanted songs, and soon had our whole corner of the Tent singing too, then Linda herself took the drum from Lemya, and rocked my world even harder!! Noah and Yedidya, two guys from our group who were staying with Lemya and so were also sitting at our table, shouted to everyone from the group to come over and check it out, bragging, "We're staying with the rocking Bubbe's!! We've got the coolest families." the chanted songs everyone was singing reminded me of that great scene in Monsoon Wedding when all the women sit together having their hands painted with Henna, singing and chanting call-and-response hilarious tunes. After a while, I couldn't take it anymore and had to stand to dance. Linda shouted at me that when we got home she was going to teach me how to REALLY dance, that hip-shaking bellydancer thing that 8-year old Palestinian girls all around me were executing with house-bringin-down spirit and precision, and I felt like Mr Rogers trying to hula-hoop imitating!
When we got to her place, though, the mood was much more somber. Well, no, there was still dancing. Basel, who's eleven, whispered something to his mom, and she translated that he wanted to show us the four traditional Palestinian dances, which he did. At 12:30 at night in his kitchen. I was most definitely mentally photographing that moment! All over the apartment were huge paintings of a man with a mustache, most of them with Arabic at the bottom of them- clearly tributes. I haltingly asked, "Is that your husband?" (Later, Olivia and I shared with each other that we both were afraid that maybe he was a victim of the Conflict) Yes, it was: Elias Jeraysay. He died in 1999, but not in the Intifada or anything conflict-related. It was a flash flood that took him, and two Jewish friends he was hiking with in Ein Gedi, that beautiful oasis we visited on the Livnot trip. She pulled out a yellowed newspaper: and there, on the front page of "Le Monde," was the story. Olivia and I sat and read it, she helping me with the French I didn't understand. They all had been members of the Alternative Information Center. He'd been in government- and in jail. For seven years. She tells her sons stories about his life all the time. And as of this May, she's in government, too. She ran for "the municipality" (I think it's like City Council) and won.
I'm going to write more about Linda. I promise. She's deep in my heart and clear in my mind. But I'm written out now. I need a break. So... more to come.