O-hi-o

Yes, we're still here! 

My brain is still half in Palestine, but my body and the rest of my brain are here! Dan has also just accepted a job here as part of the voice and movement faculty in the theater department, so - we will continue to be here for a while longer! We are feeling excited, relieved and summer is running up to greet us with thunderstorms, sunshine and green, green, green...

I still have so much to say about my trip, but I'm trying to be patient with myself and take my time.  In the meantime...

Year-round activities are starting to come to a finish.  Eliza had her last piano performance. 

Choir is over, and this coming week will be the last for our homeschool coop.  We are ready for a break.  Not a moment too soon, our beloveds from Texas have come home for a visit.  The boat job will keep them in Texas for many more months, so it is sweet to have them for this short window.

The week has been all about coffee and talking and beer and talking and cards and talking, and of course - golf in the woods.

The ball's got to be in there somewhere.

Or maybe in there?

So, welcome to early summer in Ohio. Here is what Poor Will's Almanack has to say for this week:

When you notice that August's ragweed has grown above your knees, then you know most of the nation's potatoes are in the ground. Flea beetles and leafhoppers become active and crickets sing as snapping turtles lay their eggs. 

Well, all right then.

American Toad

still planting olive trees

I started this post the day after we visited Hebron, which I wrote about briefly in an earlier post.  

It was our second day in the West Bank.  We had spent the morning in Hebron, immersed in the tension of a Palestinian city threaded with Israeli settlements.  We now sat around a table in the cool dim light of a cave, escaping the brilliant sun bouncing off of the white stone of the road, the white stone of the fences, the white stone of the buildings on the surrounding hills.  The dark and the cool felt like balm to our day.

Entering the cave

Our host at the table, a man fluent in at least four languages, grew up on the land above and around the cave.  In fact, he grew up in another cave a hundred paces away with his family of nine siblings, parents, and an uncle, who remained living in that cave until he died at 93.  Our host's life still revolves around this land.  He tends olive trees and harvests apricots, almonds, and figs.  He laughs as he tells us how he brought home a braying donkey, who is whining just outside of the cave, in his bright orange VW bus because he knew it could help with the tilling, and, besides, it would be so much fun for his kids.  He built a composting toilet and talked solar power and gray water systems, bio-gas and rain barrels.  He could have been a friend of ours in Ohio, striving for sustainability and self-sufficiency.  But he is a Palestinian struggling to remain on his family's land, in spite of years of harassment from the Israeli government to give up his right to his home, from which he can see  settlements encroaching on all sides of his hill.

His words reinforced the message that I have heard every time a Palestinian has spoken to us about "the conflict" this week:

We do not hate the Israelis. We hate the occupation.

We refuse to be their enemy.  

We are not asking you to choose sides, 
but to seek out justice where you see injustice. 

His message was frank, direct, and full of compassion.

I will tell you that the things I have seen these past few days make me so angry.  They make me desperately sad.  I feel despair and hopelessness.  The Israeli movement to occupy Palestine is huge and well-funded, thanks in part to the U.S. government.  The combination of economic motivation and religious zeal on the part of the settlers is daunting.  I would understand if the message we got from the Palestinians we met with was one of revenge, retribution, and retaliation, but it was so far from that.

Move forward.  

Don't dwell on the past.  

Focus on hope.   

Death is not an option. 

We arrived at Daher's Vineyard, home of the educational organic farm called Tent of Nations in time for lunch. Our driver brought us as close as he could to the farm, but Israeli soldiers, in their attempt to intimidate the family off of their land, have placed large boulders in the road that leads to the farm and continues to the village beyond, so we got off the bus and walked the last bit down the dirt road.  We passed vineyards and olive tree groves as we walked.  A young boy tilled the ground between vines with a horse-drawn plow.  The hill across from the road was topped with a bright white settlement, looking out-of-place above the valley of old stone walls and fields.

Israeli settlement and Palestinian farmland

Daoud met us at the locked gate, and we joined a group of Germans and Americans for a delicious lunch prepared by Daoud's in-laws before heading on a tour of the farm.  His father-in-law noticed me photographing the plants and tried to give me seeds of this beautiful succulent to bring home with me. He called it "Ha Noon."  It was brilliant against the dry earth.

Daoud's family has lived on this land since 1916 and has been fighting a legal battle to stay on the land since 1991.  There are many forms of harassment that the family has endured, from the blockading of their road to eviction notices posted to trees on the edges of the property, where they could easily be missed.  Daoud's family is not permitted to build at all and have had to remove simple temporary shelters for their animals.  Daoud is getting around this particular obstacle by renovating the many caves on his land, turning them into living quarters and classrooms.

Inside the cave classroom

The 100-acre farm is surrounded on nearly all sides by Israeli settlements.  At one point settlers came and cut 250 olive trees from the land.  (European Jews for Justice in Palestine donated new trees for planting.)  They have been issued a cultivation stop order.  When Palestinians are separated from their land  (for instance, by the apartheid wall) and are unable to work it, or when they are given a cultivation stop order, it puts in motion an old Ottoman law that says that when land is not worked for three years, it can be confiscated.

The farm has become self-sufficient.  They are totally dependant on rain water, their electricity is completely solar, they grow most of their own food.  The programs they provide enable them to continue their legal fight and put energy into empowering the local community.  Tree-planting (you can sponsor a tree), a children's summer camp, and a project run by Daoud's wife that teaches computer skills, English, and first aid to women in the nearby village are some of the efforts that come from this farm. If you wanted to, you could travel there to harvest apricots in June, almonds in July, grapes in August, figs in September, and olives in October.  Don't think I'm not dreaming about that...

Almond trees

The farm also strives to become a vocational training center, offering education in alternative energy and organic farming.  Daoud spoke about how the younger generations of Palestinians are becoming understandably disconnected from the land, dumping garbage, not taking care of what they still have. He has a strong interest in reversing this trend by teaching children about the land where their food comes from.

Cave entrance

Daoud's original family cave home

Daoud's presence on the land is his non-violent resistance.  By staying, he is declaring himself.  He said that Tent of Nations is a great threat to the Israeli government because they have hope.  They refuse to make the Israelis the enemy.

Compost toilet in the foreground, settlement in the back

Daoud told a story of his wife meeting - somehow - a recent immigrant to one of the nearby settlements, a woman from Eastern Europe.  This woman had never met a Palestinian before, and she was invited to the farm, where she was greeted warmly and hospitably, surprising and delighting her.  She returned the invitation and asked them to visit her in the settlement.  The naivete of this woman was such that she did not realize all of the restrictions put upon her neighbors, whom she could see across the valley, but who would be harassed and possibly physically threatened if they came to visit her in the Israeli settlement.  The divisions imposed on the people living on this land make the human instinct of connecting with a neighbor nearly impossible.

Our tour - past chickens and ducks, goats, and the donkey, now quiet in the shade - ended in a small outdoor theater, whose seats faced the settlement on the opposing hill.  Daoud, who has the large grin of a small boy, said that during the summer children's camp they will perform in this theater, and he hopes that if they sing very loud the settlers won't be able to help but hear them.

Standing in the outdoor theater

My notes from this day, written during the evening call to prayer, are punctuated by a few key sentences that Daoud emphasized several times during our visit:

Decide for yourself, but be on the side of peace and justice.  

There is still hope.  

Tell people we are hopeful.  

We are planting olive trees!  

We have not given up.

Syrian thistle

PS - Daoud is on a speaking tour of the United States this summer - go hear him speak about life "From the Other Side of the Wall".  For dates and locations, click here.

Come and see

The "official" focus of our trip to Palestine and Israel was on strong women of the holy lands - stories of women from the old testament and living women whose strength is evident in the way they serve their people and their communities. The less official but more pressing business was in finding the places where peace is being carved out of the stones, where people are affected in their everyday lives by injustice, where we could see the lay of the land with our own eyes.

We sat in a cool, dark cave, listening to an impassioned Palestinian Christian farmer, engaged in non-violent resistance to the occupation encroaching upon his family's land, tell his story, and his message was clear:  "Please, come and see.  And then, go and tell.  Don't tell what you've heard or what you've read.  Tell what you have seen." 

I am overwhelmed about where to begin with the telling.  There is so much, and I am bound to get some of it wrong, but it all feels so important on so many levels.  So, I will start with simply telling you what I saw.  It is selective, because it was my experience, afterall.  And it is a place to begin.

When we approached Bethlehem on our first night, I saw the wall.  They call it the separation wall.  The apartheid wall.  It keeps the Palestinians out of the rest of their country.  Passing through the checkpoint to Bethlehem, we were now in the West Bank.

From the Israeli side it is colored in a way that makes it blend into the surrounding stones of the countryside.  From the Palestinian side it is grey.  It looks like a forbidding concrete wall.  It has been covered in many places by graffitti and art from people all over the world.

I am not telling you how I felt.  I am not telling you what to feel.  I am showing you what I saw.

We traveled to Hebron, also in the West Bank, and south of Bethlehem.  Several Israeli settlements have been built in and around the city, which, again, lies on Palestinian land, in the West Bank.  Our small bus had trouble with the narrow, winding streets, and stopped when we saw that several of the roads had been "temporarily" blockaded.

We saw checkpoints for pedestrians traveling through the old city of Hebron, towards the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, or the Ibrahimi Mosque.  We saw how the small turnstiles did not accomodate a man attempting to travel with his small cart of goods to sell.  We saw no soldiers attending this particular checkpoint, but heard them through a loudspeaker, over the loud beeping of the turnstiles.

We passed through a second checkpoint as we got closer, and we saw soldiers all around the mosque. We saw bullet-proof glass around the tomb of Abraham. We saw separate entrances for Jews and Muslims.  Our articulate, knowledgeable Palestinian guide was not allowed to accompany us to the synagogue side of the tombs.

We saw something I wish we could all erase from our memories.  Enjoying a small glass of coffee outside a shop on the other side of the mosque, we saw, with our own eyes, a car speeding up the street hit a small Palestinian boy, knocking him to the side, where he lay, minus his shoe which was still under the car.  The woman who jumped from the car, yelling, was a settler, and we watched as she tried to engage the nearby Israeli soldiers, who sauntered over to the scene. We watched as the Palestinian shopkeepers gathered around the boy, yelling at him and each other. (We later learned - I'm veering here from what I saw, because I can't leave these bits out - this same woman has had four such accidents involving children, and she has not nor will be prosecuted.  The boy thankfully "only" suffered a leg fracture.)  In all the chaos, I could not stop looking at his shoe.

We saw barbed wire everywhere, and wire netting over the busiest market street left open.  We saw garbage, glass bottles, large stones, and a crow bar laying on the netting.

We saw people living their lives, selling things, buying things.

Class in session on the Temple Mount, Jerusalem

Picking grapes on a rooftop, Jerusalem

We saw and felt hospitality.  The ubiquitous trays of cardamom coffee and mint tea.

This is a country of stones.  Stone walls, separating farmers' fields.  Old stones of temples and tombs.  A monastery carved out of stone, in the middle of the desert.

Monastery in the Judean wilderness

We saw stones set to block the road to a village where Palestinians live.  

We saw the Israeli settlements - on Palestinian land -  that surround the village on all sides.

Continuing by foot

We saw children - Israeli children and Palestinian children - Christian, Jewish, Muslim, playing soccer, giggling, trying out their English.

We saw the most beautiful roses...

...and the most beguiling treats...

We saw more soldiers and guns than I've ever seen before in my life.  I saw cameras trained on the streets in Hebron and Jerusalem, and watchtowers and outposts dotting the farmland of the West Bank.

I can't forget to mention that I saw camels...

I saw Bedouin encampments by the side of the highway. Their sheep roam land that looks barren and dry.

And, it being the holy land, I saw everywhere signs of deep belief and faith - I saw Muslim and Jewish women wearing very conservative, traditional clothing. I saw men wearing black hats and long, curling sidelocks.  I saw people kneeling and kissing a rock where Jesus is said to have walked.  And I saw, everywhere, prayers tucked in crevices in the rock.  

The Wailing Wall, Jerusalem

I wished I could see what people were praying for.