Holy Trifecta and a Homestay

A touristic trifecta of holy sites:  While Jim and I participate in a specific spiritual community, we embrace and respect the spiritual traditions of all.  Typically, victorious religions choose the holy spots of those they vanquish, so Jerusalem’s 3 big ones are in close proximity.  Visiting them, we noticed that a palpable and vulnerable humility emanates from a group of people when they acknowledge the power of, and seek communion with, that which is larger than themselves.

We had a minor drama visiting the Western Wall.  We passed through the security gate just before a visitor left a backpack unattended and they shut the place down.  Entering the vast plaza, we were ushered to its edges.  From the shaded top of a staircase we watched the bomb squad swiftly determine a lack of threat.  Jim had watched The Foot Locker on the flight to Tel Aviv and was disgusted with its lack of authenticity -- so was giving me a play-by-play of the Israeli operation.  All clear, we proceeded to our separate sections of the Wall, (2/3 of the length for men who were comfortably spaced and seated along the Wall and 1/3 for women who were stacked, mostly standing,  3-deep).  Standing at a speakers podium out in the sizzling and glaring sun, I wrote my two deepest wishes on small scraps of paper which I folded into tiny tablets and stuffed into divots and crevices the Wall. Watching women tentatively walking backwards, I then backed 30 paces out of the sacred area.  The government respects the devotions of the pilgrims, so clears the papers crammed into the cracks several times a year and buries them in a Jewish cemetery.

In the Church of the Holy Sepulcher we climbed the steep stone steps of Golgotha, to the ornately Byzantine-style Greek Orthodox chapel of the Calvary, the place of Jesus’ death on the cross.  This time I sent those prayers on the wings of wisping smoke from the candles we bought from the attending monk.  Those candles have a name, but recovering-Catholic Jim doesn't remember it.

While the building exteriors of the Haram esh Sharif (aka The Temple Mount) are exquisite, I was sad to be excluded, as a non-Muslim, from the masterfully beautiful interiors of the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

A homestay:  We stayed with a Palestinian family in Bethlehem for 3 nights.  Marina and Omer (not their real names) are a couple about our age, with 3 grown sons.  Their Arab style stone house is over 100 years old, with walls two feet thick.  Though the temperature during the day is in the 90s, inside it is in the low 70s without air conditioning. While we paid for our stay, we felt like invited guests.  I kept forgetting that maybe we should get out of their hair so they could live their lives,  and instead,  hung out like I was there just to visit with them.  Marina cooked splendidly for us, and stoked Jim's sweet tooth to a fine fury.  We tried to bring a gift representative of California and settled on a box of See's lollipops--wrapped in its 4th of July sleeve, the last of which she is hoarding for her Greek grandchildren's visit to their cousin's baptism later this month.  We had a lot in common and great fun swapping life stories at the dinner and breakfast tables.

Living with them was painfully illuminating.  They are well educated middle class Christian Arabs, with extended family that lives all over the world, and at least one of their sons has a graduate degree from the US.  Their, and all Palestinian’s, lives since the separation wall have become wracked with emotional and economic insecurity.

Marina and Omer are religious, and one of their treasured rituals was to walk the Via Dolorosa (the stations of the cross) in Jerusalem at Christmas.  It is so difficult to get a permit from the Israeli government to go to Jerusalem, and so challenging and utterly humiliating to cross the checkpoints that they no longer live the familiar rhythms of their lives.  Fundamentally disrupted also, are their work lives..  Tourists are disinclined to visit Bethlehem -- they are told it is dangerous, so arrive in tour buses, descend on the limited tourist shops in Manger Square and then re-board to be sanitarily whisked back to their hotels in Jerusalem.  Many shops are shuttered, and Omer no longer has work.  He now does day labor when the olive wood factories need extra help.  We have walked all over the beautiful, vibrant, yet challenged, city of Bethlehem.  It does not feel dangerous, although we did get tagged for $10 for a kilo of fresh cherries.  Caveat emptor.

Through the course of our stay, Marina and Omer’s extended family passed through the house.  Their eldest son’s baby had the biggest smile I've ever seen on an infant, and he amused and exercised himself by pumping his legs to vigorously rock his portable cradle.  Their adult niece guided us through the Nativity Church complex.  The next day as we finished the shawerma we had to pantomine to order, she joined us to walk along the  Israeli (so-called) security wall.  When I was in New York in April, I viewed South African born Marlene Dumas’ exhibition entitled Against the Wall, http://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/206/ which she had painted from news photos. Seeing the actual wall and then looking again at her paintings on the web, it is my guess that if she had visited here, she probably would have painted them differently.

Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, who have earned the right to define an apartheid state, have deemed Israel one.  We visited the family whose Bethlehem (central within the West Bank, not along the UN’s legally recognized 1967 borders) lands were illegally confiscated by Israel to build the wall, and which locks in their home on 3 sides.  This concrete wall is more than 50 feet high, so the family that lives in that home sees nothing but concrete outside all of their windows.  They are backed into a resulting cul de sac and their children’s friends will not visit because they do not trust that the Israeli military will not arrive to harass them. They owned five hectares of land which the wall split in half.  An uncle lives on their land on the other side of the wall, and they cannot visit each other without hard-to-come-by permits to get through the checkpoints.  They stay because it is their land, and if they leave they will lose it to Israel.  This part of the wall was built in 2004.  The family still visibly shakes when they recount the terror of its building and what it did to their lives and family.

Israel’s confiscation of Palestinian land under the pretense-of-the-moment is like our law of imminent domain run amuck.  It would be like San Francisco unilaterally, arbitrarily and illegally deciding to annex Foster City (25 miles to the south), and to surround it with a wall.  Just accidentally-on-purpose all land and local municipalities from South San Francisco to Foster City would now be controlled by San Francisco too.  Then, because I’m tenacious and refuse to let them have my house, the wall surrounds it and my view has become like an airshaft in Manhattan.  Accessing my house now requires driving ten times further to get to the land across the canal, where I then must load my Costco shopping into a dinghy and cross the water to my backyard.  This is the new “normal”, assumes no arbitrary (but frequent) random road blocks or closures -- and also assumes I haven’t dropped my identification papers in the water as I off-load my Kirkland bulk paper towels and toilet paper.  I'm not joking.