Earlier this week I met Marisa, a member of the Society of Friends (Quakers). She is involved with the Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel that Quakers run on behalf of the World Council of Churches. In a nutshell “The Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI) seeks to support local and international efforts to end the Israeli occupation and bring a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a just peace, based on international law and relevant United Nations resolutions.” (See www.eappi.org and www.quaker.org.uk/eappi.) Volunteers, mostly from churches world-wide, spend time in Israel/Palestine standing alongside and supporting Palestinian people, and Marisa did this herself three years ago. Her work was to monitor checkpoints in East Jerusalem and to support Israeli peace and human rights organisations. The 30th group of accompaniers are just starting their work. Marisa has kindly let me reproduce here the last entry in her journal as she looked back on her visit. As I try to understand the situation in Gaza and the whole area, I find personal stories like this very helpful to set alongside the reporting in the media.
Saying Goodbye
At 3 o’clock tomorrow afternoon, Wednesday 1st March, Group 15 and Group 16 of the EAPPI programme will gather at the church of the Redeemer in the old city, in the lovely chapel on the first floor, which overlooks the beautiful shady courtyard, full of flowering climbers and birds. At the ceremony we will formally hand over our task of providing a presence in this troubled land, offering a measure of protection to vulnerable communities and individuals, solidarity and advocacy, to the new Accompaniers. With the phones, the visiting cards, the cameras, the laptops and the memory sticks, we shall entrust to those who have come to take over from us precious relationships and enduring hope, even in the face of much uncertainty, many setbacks, hostility and indifference. I remember very vividly the feeling of owe and the great sense of privilege and responsibility I felt when we took on from Group 14 the EAPPI torch, that has been burning with commitment, imagination and faith for almost three and a half years now.
It is good to know that the work will go on, and that new people with renewed courage and enthusiasm are eager to take our place, because the task is far from over. 15 groups have come and gone, but the situation on the ground has got steadily worse – when the programme first started it had a placement in Gaza, and the wall was just an alarming idea. No-one would have thought it possible then that Hamas would win the Palestinian elections. It is hard to imagine what a Group 30 may have to deal with.
It is also hard to let go, to say goodbye to so many people with whom strong bonds have been formed, even in such a short period of time, and from places that, for all the pain and hardship we have witnessed, have a unique and beguiling charm.
The new Jerusalem team will have three people, Bettina from Switzerland, Christiane from Germany (who served in Yanoun with Group 15) and Goran from Sweden (who also served in Yanoun previously, but with Group 14). Yesterday we said goodbye to Tore, who had to leave for Norway early, because his grandfather is very ill. He will come back, though, to serve a turn in Hebron. I will miss his delicious pizzas, his youthful energy (more evident late at night than early in the morning…), and his cheerful text messages. And then there were two….
Yesterday Osten and I introduced the new team to Abu Omar, whose house in the Shu’fat Refugee Camp is in the path of the wall. We found him much more depressed than we had last seen him – as we visited, the huge construction machinery was drilling the rock just 2 metres from his house, causing it to shake like a cardboard box. The excavations had severed the sewerage pipes, and effluent was dripping from them, just in what used to be his front garden. He showed us the medication he is having to take, for his nerves, and for the skin irritations caused by the dust created by the construction work. The Court case to stop his house from being demolished is on-going. “Please, please, when you get back, tell the people we want the peace, the Palestinian people want the peace. We want work, to feed our children, to send them to school. Where can we go?”. I will tell your story, Abu Omar, I promise.
On Thursday last week I went to Ramallah to meet Salwa, a Palestinian teacher from Nablus who had been in Cambridge last summer with the UNIPAL programme, and had been the guest of my Quaker friend Liz. I met her, her 9-year old niece Leila and her brother Mohammad in the busy main square of the town, festooned with colourful posters, and guarded by the Palestinian Authority police – sporting arms. We went to the brother’s apartment in a recently built block not far from the Mukkata, Arafat’s old headquarters where he is now buried. At Mohammad’s home, over some delicious lemonade, Salwa showed me some pictures of their wrecked apartment in Nablus, which apparently used to get taken over regularly by the army when they were carrying out incursions in the nearby Refugee Camp of Balata (which incidentally had been the scene of daily incursions the previous week, and even made it to the news eventually when five people were killed, and many others injured, in just one day). “They just come and take over the house. They set themselves up on the roof so they can control the street below. They just thrash every room, shoot at the water tanks on the terrace.” The photos were apparently some three years old. I was not entirely sure of why I was being shown them, until Salwa brought out her mobile phone and showed me the picture of a lovely girl in a white hijab. “This was Zenab, Leila’s sister.” she said. It took me a while to take it all in, but what she was telling me was that Zenab was a “martyr” – on 22nd September 2004, just 10 days after her 17th birthday, and one month after passing her end of school exams with good grades, she had travelled to French Hill (a settlement in Jerusalem deemed illegal under international law) and had blown herself up, killing two border policemen and injuring dozens of people. I could hardly take it in. Apparently Zenab, the fourth child in a family of ten – eight girls and two boys – was quiet and reserved, and had never been active in politics. The family had been shocked. After her suicide “operation” the army put explosives into the family home and blew it up. The empty shell of the gutted house, before it was flattened, had been adorned by local neighbours and supporters with flags and banners praising her sacrifice. I was shown a picture of this. After seeing and hearing so much since I have been here, I was shaken to the core and absolutely haunted for days by this chance encounter which brought me so close to the reality of this particular form of terror.
Last week I also said good-bye to Sabeel, the Centre for Palestinian Liberation Theology, where I attended as regularly as I could the weekly Eucharist service, always an intimate and inspiring occasion. The reading on the day was 1 Corinthians Chapter 13, the passage about love, which I have always associated with weddings and personal relationships, but could now see in a new light, understanding it for the first time in the context of service to our community and fellow human beings – “love bears all things, believes all things, endures all things, hopes all things”. It is this kind of love that the programme was set up to bring – we do not always manage to live up to the ideal, as Paul knew only too well, but it is our commitment to try and fulfil this call nevertheless. An example of such dedication and love in action is the witness of the wonderful Rabbis for Human Rights, who have just been awarded a prestigious prize by the Japanese Niwano foundation. Yesterday I went to the press conference held by Rabbis for Human Rights to publicise this achievement, so I could take my leave of Arik Ashermann, and his fellow workers, who have inspired us so much with their brave determination to re-assert the profound roots of justice and human rights within Judaism.
This morning we went to Abu Dis early to meet the Tuesday team from Machsom Watch – Michaela, Yael and Hanna. They have all shown me great kindness and friendship, and I shall miss them all very much. As I was having lunch last Sunday with Hanna, who is 87 and came to live in Israel in 1933, aged 14, from Germany, she told me with great emphasis: “Never forget, never forget that we did not have a choice, that we had to fight for our lives, just for survival. We had nowhere to go, nobody wanted us, the ships fleeing Germany could not dock anywhere, they were sent back. This was the only place we could come. We would not be here, if there had not been Israel. Never forget.” I will not forget, Hanna, as I cannot forget the images and evidence gathered at Yad Vashem, or the names of the children spoken in the darkness faintly lit by small points of light.
At lunchtime we took one last look at the foundations of the wall being built to seal off the area that we have spent so much time at. At one point, the crazy path takes a 90 degree turn to the right, then another 90 degrees to the left, between two homes, then again, 90 degrees to the right, passing in front of the empty block of flats whose ownership remains shrouded in mystery, then again 90 degrees to the left, alongside the block, thus keeping it in Jerusalem, and up through a raw of shops, across the gardens of the Comboni sisters and the Passionista brothers, neighbouring convents until now connected by a small gate, but in future to be separated, one in the West Bank, the other in Jerusalem. When the construction is completed, Ali and his small companions will no longer be able to come and wait for the bus to take them to the school for deaf children in Jerusalem, the services drivers will no longer hang around on the hill organising transport, and Ahmed will no longer come and offer coffee or tea to the EAs on duty – all traffic will have to go through the brand new Olive “terminal” at the bottom of the valley, which opened on Sunday – at least 30 minutes walk up and down a very steep hill.
Later this afternoon I went and sat for an hour in the Garden Tomb, my favourite spot in Jerusalem, full of cool shade and spring colour, quiet, in spite of several large groups of tourists milling around, such a contrast from the darkness, busyness and elaborate icons of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the other site which claims to be the place where Jesus was crucified, buried and where the resurrection took place. I am drawn by the simple, bare rock cave marked by the inscription “He is not here”. Indeed, he is not there, he is not in a place, or a time, or a tradition. He is in the faces of those who suffer, who fear, who mourn, who stand up to injustice, who seek to understand, to explain, to tell the truth, even when it hurts. I know I have met him here, and I am so deeply grateful to have had this chance, and to take with me the quiet assurance that he will stay with us all, whether we are coming, staying or going, even until the end of time. And this knowledge makes it possible to say goodbye, to entrust ourselves and each other to the care of that God that is not loyal to any tribe or any narrow interest, but made us all in his image.
Marisa Johnson
28th February 2006
Filed under: Current affairs, Wisdom from others!, Gaza, Holy Land, Quakers, WCC
