There Are Stories Behind Every Story

It’s 5:28 in the morning right now. The sun is slowly getting out of bed to warm up Tel Aviv and soon the people will rise to do the same. At this point, however, only Daniel and I are awake as we sort through the different croissant options and swap stories over coffee. He hands me a chocolate bun with some purple object that awkwardly rests on the top. He assures me it’s edible, I decline all the same.

Daniel is running the show here at the Blue Sea Marble Hotel, managing the phone and the pastries and the customers who come in with bed heads full of complaints. I’ve only known him for the past 15 minutes, but I’m already convinced that he’s completely fascinating—a rare blend of charisma and composure, extraverted enough to execute a conversation and yet disciplined enough to maintain a mystery.

“What have you guys been doing with your time here in Israel?”

In a cliff notes kind of fashion I share with him the nature of our trip. I tell him about how together we have embarked on a study of the conflict, meeting with people from all over the place in hopes of trying to learn what it means to be peacemakers in a violent world. Throughout the week when other Israelis have asked me a similar sounding question, I’ve been less forthright, withholding from them the details of our time spent with a wounded father in the Balata Refugee Camp or the late night dancing and drinking with Palestinian friends in the West Bank. I’ve held up the veil of secrecy out of respect for them—I didn’t want to offend or hurt their feelings. Or maybe it was just a case of fear. Either way, this morning I’ve grown fatigued from this facade; these cards are getting too heavy to hold so close. I let it all come out.

He nods his head as I walk through him our itinerary. I can tell that his mind is spinning. 

“That’s very interesting, very interesting. You are a good people. This is then some kind of lefty American operation?"

I smile and laugh behind my teethe, as certain faces come to mind of people in our group who would despise being labeled as lefty.

“From your vantage point—as an everyday Israeli and not just a visitor like us, what do you make of all of this madness?” I asked, wincing from trying to choke down the Turkish coffee that Daniel has brewed (he swears that the Turkish have “taken coffee to the next level.” I've yet to be convinced.)

“You have to remember that everything has a history to it—there are stories behind every story. The story behind every Israeli’s story is a history of being hated, with the Holocaust as the exclamation mark on this history. We are scared of the Arabs because the Arabs are angry about the stories behind their stories. People in poverty and hard situations can do desperate things. We’ve seen them do desperate things. And that’s scary…."

Daniel keeps talking but between the Turkish coffee and his opening words, I’ve lost pace with him.

There are stories behind every story.

This is my second time in Israel studying the conflict. I remember leaving Israel last time feeling so tangled and frustrated by the incongruent narratives that everyone seemed to hold up as the Truth, that for them, explains why peace is fictitious in the land and far from being established. While there hasn’t been a smooth synthesizing of these stories to send me on my way this time, I’ll be less burdened by the tangled complications of it all and will leave this trip remembering that there are stories behind every story. 

As lucrative and perhaps soothing as it would be to live in a world filled with absolute rights and wrongs and blacks and whites, Israel and Palestine remind us that such a simplistic world doesn’t exist and to behave as if it does is damning of the world that actually does exist, the world that paints with grey more often than black or white. For the Israeli Jew, they obsess over security because they have a history of insecurity—of being brutalized and vulnerable with no one coming to their rescue. For the Palestinian, they have lost their dreams for tomorrow as 1948’s Nakba (“catastrophe”) still reminds them that life is fragile and only to be enjoyed by a few. This is a land stacked tall with stories—nothing is as it seems.

Clearly a morning person, Daniel rarely pauses and wraps up his words by letting me see his fear and his resolve to rise above it.

“I am afraid every morning when I am the first one up in the hotel and I see all of these trucks go past with Arabs behind the wheel. How do I know that they won’t come out and start stabbing? My father used to tell me that if I wanted money and a good life, I should come live in America. But if I want to have a fulfilled life and to feel good inside, then I should stay in Israel. Israel is not just a place for me, this land is my home. I love this Israel like a father loves a son."

And there it is. This is the the story that has a consensus voice to it—shared between both the Palestinians and the Israelis. The parental bond of love between the people and the land is intensely strong, a paradigm that the western world will struggle to understand. As a father who loves his son very much, through this angle I can begin to empathize further, recognizing that in many ways, this conflict is a conflict over parental rights. It’s a custody battle filled with many parents who want to live in the same house as their child. For the Palestinians, they feel like their child was stolen from them. For the Israelis, they feel like their child has returned to them. Is shared custody a possibility between the kidnappers and the family?

I thank Daniel for the coffee and the conversation, grateful that he’s let me get a glimpse into his world. 

“Keep working for peace,” he says as I finally cave and eat the purple object that he offered me earlier.

I nodded, grateful to be a part of a team and a community at home that will continue to wage peace in the world.

Matt

Love your neighbor as yourself.

This is my first blog post so hopefully you can stay with me as I stumble through trying to tell a story that needs to be told. A couple days ago I spent the day with one of the most impressive people I have ever met. Her name is Amal and she is a Palestinian women who lives in the West Bank. She is a woman whose bravery you can see in her eyes, her hard work on her hands and her love in her actions.

Here is a brief look into her story which I will surely not do justice. She was born on a piece of land that her family has owned since the Ottoman Empire. This land is precious, this land is holy, this land is her land and she has had to defend it for the last 30 years. Amal’s grandfather had the wisdom to get legal documents from the Ottoman Empire, which stated that they had legally purchased this land, which unfortunately many Palestinians did not do. In the early 90’s Israelis began flooding Palestine to take what God had deemed theirs, claiming that while the Palestinians didn’t have the papers for their land, the scriptures would stand as evidence for this to be Israel’s land. They began pushing Amal’s neighbors out of the area with bulldozers and the Israeli Army at their back. They set up settlements around her family’s land that covered the hills in every direction. The Israelis soon set their eyes on Amal’s land, which lied in the center.

When we pulled up to her families land we couldn’t drive all the way up to her house because there were huge boulders that blocked her driveway. I thought they were put there to keep Israelis out but then was informed that Israeli “Settlers” had put the boulders there to make their life difficult. They went out of their way to move thousand pound stones to block their driveway in hopes that it would break them into leaving. To be honest, when they told me this, I wasn’t very surprised. I thought to myself, “Of course they would”. We walked the long driveway up to her farmstead and were met there by her brother Daher who unlocked the large gate that entered to their family’s paradise. I wish I could describe this land to you in words but that would be stupid to attempt, but let me tell you that this land is beautiful and dangerous. The beauty is in the valleys it overlooks and the danger is in the “Settlers” mansions that salivate over their land.

We met with Amal in a cave that had a large wooden table that sat all 25 of us. As soon as she opened her mouth she broke us with her story and inspired us with her response to the injustice. She told us stories of spending her days pleading with both Israeli judges and Israelis bulldozers that attempt to prey over her land. As stories rolled off her tongue I got angry, full of hate and tears filled my eyes. I cringed as she told us about the time when the “Settlers” came down from their hilltops to surround her land with guns to inform them that they had to leave. She brought her legal documents to the Israelis to show the proof of purchase from the Ottoman Empire and they told her it didn’t matter because God had given them ownership. She didn’t budge. The Israelis left which meant they survived another day but the worst was yet to come. She went on to explain how a week later the “Settlers” came in the middle of the night to bulldoze 1500 fruitful 30-100 year old olive trees while they slept. What did she do when they did this? She planted 3000 trees… They made the decision to love their neighbor, regardless of their actions. She told us how Jesus called us to love our neighbor and that Jesus did not specify on what type of neighbor.

What did I take away from these stories? How can I become more like Amal? My hope is that I don’t react to conflict but act in a positive way. I hope to love as Amal loves. 

So grateful for being able to hear her story. 

In His grip,

Jordan

Crossing the Lines

Maddie and Annie here. We decided to tag team this entry-- we are both inexperienced bloggers and the pressure that Matt placed on us was too great to do it alone. This blog entry covers the events of yesterday the 29^th.

Yesterday we immersed ourselves into a different part of the West Bank. For most of the day we spent our time in the city of Hebron. Hebron is a mostly Palestinian town divided by two Israeli settlements. As explained to us by our guide, Husam, Hebron is one of the epicenters of the conflict. This dates back to 1929 when a violent attack by Palestinians (believed not to be from Hebron) began a cycle of tension and division in the town. Before this incident, Hebron was a place where Palestinians and Israelis lived in community together. As years have gone by tension has grown and other incidents have contributed to the separation of Israelis and Palestinians in Hebron.  As we walked through a deserted street coined the “ghost town”  the realities of this division was palpable. Our tour guide, a Palestinian Muslim, was not allowed to walk this street with us.  Passing through another check point we entered into the bustling Palestinian portion of the town.  We spoke with a Palestinian shop keeper here, who spoke of what it was like living below the Israeli settlers. We stood on his roof as he told of the fears of his six young girls who have been threatened, injured by rocks thrown at them, and who watch the Israeli children playing on the field below them (the Palestinian children have no space like this to play).

It was interesting to feel  a “lightness” in this day in comparison to the previous day in the refugee camp of Balata. I guess it speaks to the reality here—that a place like Hebron, bursting with division, can seem mild.  After walking through the markets and eating lunch, we went to the Mosque in the town, the Ibrahemi Mosque. Here,  the women of our group were told to cover their entire body. As we entered, we were handed dusty blue and brown robes (robes that you might picture monks wearing). Deb/Mom looked particularly funny as she refused to take off her backpack underneath her robe—she had a hunch-back sort of look.

After an full day, the highlight of yesterday came that night--the time that we spent with two people from the bereaved family group. Both people had lost loved ones to the conflict. Ben, an Israeli Jew, lost his daughter in a Palestinian suicide attack outside her military base, and Moira, a Palestinian Muslim, lost her husband when he was murdered by an Israeli soldier.  It was obvious and inspiring that these two people, who experienced the worst of the conflict and were seemingly on opposite sides, were friends. Ben said it best, “the color of blood is the same on both sides, and the taste of the tears that I have are the same taste shared by someone who is Palestinian”.

We finished up the night, our last night in East Jerusalem, with a wonderful trip to a Gelato shop.  The Gelato was homemade by a Palestinian family. Looking forward to Jordan, Matt’s little  brother, posting today.  Its been a godsend to have Jordan on the trip as we had no idea how much time and attention it would take to keep Matt in line.

Sending love from Israel,

Annie and Maddie.

It Takes an Army

 Yesterday we realized it takes an army of Peacemakers to bring God’s reconciliation to the world, and they all look different.

We started our day with Mahmoud Subuh, a Palestinian who runs the Yafa Cultural Center in the Balata refuge camp. A world so far from our own that it was an experience that none of us will forget.

The Balata refuge camp a quarter square kilometer (about 100 acres), located in the West bank was started by the United Nations in 1950 as a temporary home for 5,000 Palestinian refugees forced from their homes after World War II. Sixty six years later 30,000 Palestinians live in the same space.

What does it look like when you have no land  and no money? In Balata 60-70 people share a house. Privacy does not exist.

The overcrowding and lack of resources lead to no space at all –no playgrounds, no parks.

How does care look when there is 1 medical clinic, 2 doctors, 10 nurses and 1 dentist for all 30,000 people? Or education when there are 40-45 kids in a class, 50% illiteracy and 35% skip class and drop out? What happens when 70% of the population is under the age of 29 and the unemployment rate 61%? What’s scary is that people are behind these numbers. People just like you and me.

What do you do when your home, your business, your history, your life and your identity are all taken from you?

The years of despair and anger, frustration and fear have turned into something far more frightening. According to Mahmoud, people simply don’t care. They don’t believe in anything; not faith, not family, not a future. In the years of negotiations and conversations, in the Arab world as well as the international community, the Palestinians have always been left out of the equation.

They are the forgotten. Isn’t that who Jesus came for? The lost, the least, the forgotten? I guess it’s our mission too.                               

Mahmoud said, “what we need is rights and justice and real peace for everyone.” What’s real peace? Basic human rights and a real chance for life. That’s just what Mahmoud does through the Yafa Cultural Center. Through great personal sacrifice and risk to his family, he brings together youth giving them someone who cares about them as well as a place to belong. He reminds them that they’re not forgotten.

From there we headed to the Taybeh Brewery, close to Ramallah. In the midst of oppression and poverty sat a successful brewery, the only one in the West Bank. This Brewery and it’s success  represents hope and a future for Palestine.  Their mission is to produce premium high quality hand crafted beer that contributes to the Palestinian economy, widens an international market presence and elevates tourism. Light in the darkness. Remarkable in this story is that the master brewer, Madees Khoury,  is the first female brewer in Palestine, breaking through not only political barriers for Palestinians but the barriers for women as well. Madees is part of the army of Peacemakers.

Late afternoon, in the city of Taybeh, we all got to experience the ultimate act of peace, as we partook in Communion together. We stood on top of the ruins of a Byzantine Church, overlooking what  was known as Ephraim and we broke bread and shared in the cup  of reconciliation. Singing and praying together we experienced a holy moment as the church bells rang in the distance.

Our day ended with an incredible experience with a Palestinian Christian couple, Manar and Milad. Manar and Milad run the House of Hope, a place that’s mission is to achieve freedom, independence and justice by increasing cultural awareness of Palestinian children youth and women under occupation. The highlight was an evening with our new Palestinian friends at their home. What an eye opener to witness the dance amongst the Table contingency. Where we thought Matt would excel, we were sorely disappointed. While Jordan won the vote for best effort, Ryan lead the way with his “sassy hips”. Amongst the conversation and laughter,  the music and dancing, the separation wall, standing 20 feet tall, in their backyard couldn’t be ignored; a continual reminder of the everyday reality of our friends lives. Despite the restrictions on their lives they continue on in the army of peace.

At the end of the day the question we asked ourselves is what does it mean to be part of the army of peace?

Love and prayers to you all -Debbie

Break My Heart For What Breaks Yours

"Inspiring, heartbreaking and eye opening." These are the three words Maddie used to describe our day to her mom while Skyping this evening (I overhead this through the thin wall-lining that shuts our bathroom off from our double twin-bed room; most people call this a door, but here it is not quite that). Inspiring, indeed. Heartbreaking, absolutely. Eye opening, no doubt.  Today was heavy.

"Peacemaking was never intended to cease fire, rather to create a space where the kingdom can be fulfilled." - Sami Awad, a Palestinian Christian

Today, January 27th, is National Holocaust Remembrance Day, and what better way to reflect on the Holocaust than to experience it through a visit to Yad VaSheem. We traveled to the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem with warnings that this would be a lot to process. It was advised that we do so alone with our headsets, and notebooks, with the intention of seeking to understand rather than being understood. The 15 massive tour groups prevented just that. A rush of people from all over the world surrounded us as we tried to get started. For some this caused a bit of a rush in the early exhibits, for others a patience waiting for groups to pass. As we walked through the museum we read stories of the German leaders, heard the pain of the Jews who were oppressed and saw through writing the suffering of mothers separated from their children. For many, indescribable emotions surfaced at unpredictable times. A story in our history of brilliant evil.

We ate lunch in the basement of the Yad VaSheem and called into question the reason for memorializing pain. Is it simply to justify the actions we are taking? Do we do it to honor and remember the lives lost? Are we attempting to find ways to prevent history from repeating itself?

We then traveled into West Bank where we met with Sami Awad and Shaul Judelman, who planted seeds to reflect on these questions through a different lens.

It was a moment of unity amidst conflict. Sami Awad, a Palestinian Christian, and Shaul Judelman, a Jewish Peacemaking Settler, shared with us essential strategies behind peacemaking; the kind of peacemaking Jesus invited us into. "Loving your enemy means understanding your enemy. Celebrate with them their joys, and process with them their sorrows."

To wrap up our day, we ate dinner at "the best restaurant in the world," according to our fearless leader, Jer Swigart, not to be confused with Matt Moberg, who is just a leader and by no means fearless as made evident by his irrational convolution to the stray cat who joined us. Looking forward to seeing what tomorrow brings...and how Debbie handles the increasing stress of what it means to be a "guest blogger."

Love peacefully,

Kate Mathison

Day 1: Monday - Jerusalem

Guest blogger Ryan Corcoran here. While Matt's compelling dialogue may be worth waiting for, his jet lag and picky eating have robbed him of adequate creative juices for the evening. He claims he will have one ready for tomorrow morning, but I hold that expectation about as loosely as he was holding his jacket in Hezekaih's tunnel.

For those of you who were not there for that inside joke: Matt dropped his favorite flannel jacket hundreds of feet underground, in a 3000 year old tunnel of flowing water that comes up to your waist in places, built by ancient Israeli's who were preparing the walled city for an attack by the Assyrians.  This tunnel spills out into the Silaom pool, where it is believed Jesus healed a blind man by rubbing the mud from the bottom of the pool over his eyes. The scope of this site was incredible, but in comparison to the multitude of other amazing things we were seeing all day, we wrote it off as a disappointment after it swallowed up such a sentimental jacket.

We started the tour aspect of the day by walking the ramparts of the Old City in Jerusalem and saw the four districts that the city is divided into, and started to gain a perspective of the historical complexity and ongoing tension that exists here. After a classic Mediterranean lunch near the Damascus gate, we walked to the Western Wall and observed the holiest location in all of Judaism. Followed up by a stroll up to the Temple mount to view Islam's 3rd most sacred site: the Al-Asqa mosque. Along with the Dome on the Rock, whose iconic gold dome can be seen from most of Jerusalem, this site is deeply embedded in conflict and turmoil as it was built on the site of the most sacred Jewish Temple which was destroyed in the 70 AD.  A story riddled with occupation, destruction, and rebuilding makes three millennia of history for this very sacred site complicated, to say the least.

If our minds hadn't been overwhelmed by the complexity and awe of what we had seen inside the walls of the Old Town, a stroll outside the wall really drives home the point that everywhere you look is something historically famous and emotionally jarring. Upon the Mount of Olives lie countless burial sites and graves in the Jewish cemetery, holding extreme significance in their faith. Further up the Mount is the Garden of Gethsemane, where it is believed that Jesus is to have prayed regularly with his disciples and most famously the night before his crucifixion.  Before we immersed ourselves in the wonder of the Garden and the accompanying Basilica, we walked even further up the hill to what I took to be the most powerful moment of the day, at a simple lookout high upon the Mount of Olives.  We began to reflect on the significance of everything we saw today, and what we are preparing ourselves to see. Then we read Luke 19:28-44, where Jesus spoke to a crowd from the same hilltop, weeping as he looked over Jerusalem and saw how the people have continued to deny the practices of peace and kept shalom hidden from their eyes. We were struck by the significance that those words hold today, on this land right before our eyes and in our neighborhoods at home.  As our heads were bowed in silence and reverence at the significance of this moment, the hills started to ring with the Muslim call to afternoon prayer. Words don't do that moment justice.

And then Matt lost his favorite jacket in a 3000 year old tunnel. 

Almost There

After spending the last few months studying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the myriad of complicating layers that await us when we land in Tel Aviv, we have been preparing as a team to hold our plans loosely—to come to terms with the fact that much throughout the week will feel chaotic and our agendas are more flimsy than fully formed. We had accepted and were ready to embrace this reality in Israel, we just didn’t expect to experience it on our way.

Perhaps it was naive of me to assume that our travel itineraries would go off without a hitch, especially with how infamous the reliability of international traveling can be, but we have stumbled our way towards Israel. Despite our intentions of skipping from Minneapolis to Chicago to Newark to Tel Aviv, we have instead tripped from Minneapolis to Chicago and overshot Newark by about thousand or so miles and ended up in Germany. Yes, we are in Germany—Frankfurt to be exact. 

At the risk of boring the uninterested trip follower to death with an overdramatic rant, let me pass along a few of our travel woes from yesterday...or was it today? Fog. My mind is a fog.

When we arrived in Chicago yesterday, each of us were flagged in the system for informational error or another (for example, United was convinced from the paperwork that Debbie was a male. Thankfully, after much dialogue and careful reasoning, we were able to convince them that she indeed was not). Our biggest challenge came, however, not with proving that Debbie was a female or that Maddie’s birthday was indeed this past week, but instead with Chad Amour and the incorrect middle name that he’d been assigned. While apparently this oversight wasn’t a serious enough infraction to keep Chad from flying from Minneapolis to Chicago, we were told that if we were to proceed, while they might let Chad into Israel there's a high chance that he will not be allowed to fly back home when all is said in done. Because we love Chad and despise the idea of an America without him, we pressed and hit the phones for the next hour or so. After getting a hold of the White House and the United Nations (and by that I mean a supervisor at Cheap Air and Paul Tshihamba), we were able to clarify the matter and move on. 

For the sake of giving credit where credit is due, let me acknowledge how amazing the women at United's customer service were. They rallied their troops, endured the persecution of an angsty growing line, and stuck in the fight with us to make sure that our favorite filmmaker made it to Israel. Out of the overflow of his heart, Chad then compensated each of the heroines with a warm hug, a gift that I’m sure will forever alter the course of their lives. I’ve been told that everything in life changes when Chad wraps his arms around you. New colors suddenly seem to emerge.

Shortly after that storm found it’s calm, our flight to Newark got bumped which means that we would no longer land in time to catch our flight to Tel Aviv which is why we are now in Frankfurt, Germany, where we have been sitting for the past 5 hours waiting for our flight to Tel Aviv to finally take off and no one can remember what it feels like to smile. Annie came close to cracking a grin, but I think she was wincing.

Despite all of this, the morale seems high and we are all pretty excited that we will be in Israel shortly. 

Stay tuned as the journey continues to unfold.