The people of Palestine are desperate to tell their story. My host family, those who gave us academic lectures, our tour guides, even the pastor at a local church we visited - all urgently added to a painful narrative.
Why is there such a drive to tell us about their lives and share their story? Because they are rarely heard. On the oppressed side of an occupation, their voices are often drowned out. The perceived danger in Palestine prevents most visitors from staying more than a few hours - just enough time to snap a picture of the Nativity Church and the Shepherd's Field before piling back into the bus and hiding once again behind the wall. In the driest lands, Palestinians are left drowning in their own story.
The people of Israel are also desperate to share their narrative. They push scriptures and personal accounts at me like a protective wall, keeping them safe from the judgement and discrimination they are now used to after hundreds of years of being outcasts. Neither group of people is well-represented by the media, because only terrorists and crazy settlers make the news. Only tiny fraction of the story is what is broadcast to the world.
"...no matter how wide you stretch your fingers, your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal." -Sarah Kay
A personality test designates me as a helper. This means that I focus on other's emotions and feel them deeply. Living, even temporarily, in a place so filled with pain is hard to handle. It is a struggle to balance the value of growth during discomfort, and being immobilized by empathy. How do I not sidestep pain, but also not become paralyzed by it?
"Tell them what you see."
This was the simple request of a student at Bethlehem University. Our peers here ask only this of us. So let me tell you about this land.
The concrete slabs that form a wall, twenty-six feet high, as far as I can see. This is the barrier that Israel has built for unspecified "security reasons". It separates: Israel from Palestine, farmers from their olive groves, aquifers from thirsty families, holy sites from worshipers, animals from migratory paths. Standing in front the wall for the first time, I take in the prolific graffiti that seems to cover the cold hostility of concrete with some form of desperate humanity. My eyes fill with tears. I have never encountered an object so saturated with pain.
The stones scattered across the fields where it is thought that shepherds once grazed their flocks on a certain starry night. Here, stories tell us, the heavenly hosts surrounded them in a song, proclaiming the birth of the savior of the world. Their song proclaimed peace on earth and goodwill to all men.
The stone wall that encloses the tombs of Abraham and Rachel. These are pivotal figures in the story of both Islam and Judaism, so both demand to have access to the tombs, even in Hebron, where massacres color the history between these religions and clashes happen in a daily basis. So we file past the window in the stone wall, first inside the synagogue, then in the mosque on the other side. The sight of bullet proof glass covering the space between the opposing windows is a keen reminder that places of worship are not off-limits to violence, and my American passport and Christian identity give me an uncomfortable privilege here.
The stone walls of a cave, dimly lit by an array of lamps and a lone fluorescent light bulb. Shining in this light is a star-shaped shrine on the floor. This is the site where Jesus is thought to have been born. People flock from around the globe to touch and kiss this sacred piece of floor where the Prince of Peace came to earth.
The stones that I pick away from the dry dirt at the base of a thorny bush. I raise my pick ax one more time and let out a whoop of triumph as the bramble comes loose. We are working at the Tent of Nations for a day, a farm surrounded by five Jewish settlements. In an effort to prevent the Israeli army from seizing their land, the family is constantly planting olive and fruit trees. If the farm is ever deemed unused, the Israeli authority claims the right to seize it - something they are very keen to do in order to connect the settlements that circle this hilltop. They have even gone as far as bulldozing and burying 1,500 apple and apricot trees just a few months before the harvest. Despite this attempt to break their spirit, the family maintains the motto "we refuse to be enemies", and continues to nonviolently resist. "However many trees they destroy, we will plant the double!" So I joyfully pull thorny weeds from the land and dig holes in the stony earth, because in a land of complicated issues and seemingly unanswerable questions, I have found a problem that I know I can fix if I just work hard enough.
The bricks that I feel resting on my chest every time I close my eyes. We have now traveled to both sides of the wall, and my experience has confirmed what I knew to be true: the pain is everywhere. On both sides. In the present and the past. It has seeped into the very stones of this land, beautiful and desolate, a land that two people love dearly and feel a strong connection to. The answers are not on one side. The violence is not on one side. The suffering is not on one side.
But humanity is not on one side either. On both sides there are smiles and laughter, babies and heart-warming meals, hearts filled with the love of God. On both sides, there are people with the will to believe there can be something more in this land than pain and loss. And that is the solid rock that I choose to believe in.
