In the Image of God

"God created humankind in God’s own image, in the image of God God created them; male and female God created them." –Genesis 1:27

I’ve been with the CPT delegation for the past few days. We spent time with organizations and individuals in Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Now we're back in Hebron. We're learning and seeing a lot, and meeting many beautiful people. A common theme in our meetings seems to have been what it means to be fully human. And who do we consider fully human? Do we limit our definition of humanity to those like us?

We began the delegation on Friday May 26 with a visit to Yad Vasham, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. Stumbling through the immense suffering, one is left somewhat numb- confessing the blood that is on the Chruch’s hands- that is on my hands. The Church desecrated God’s image by actively and passively contributing to the torture and death of millions of Jews.

... And we continue to desecrate God’s image by actively and passively contributing to the suffering in the world.

Friday afternoon we met with Rabbi Arik Ascherman from Rabbis for Human Rights. He works tirelessly to uphold the human rights of Israelis and Palestinians. His work is based in the belief that “God created humankind in God’s image.” Rabbi Ascherman believes that it is not ok to demolish Palestinian homes. It is not ok that Palestinian teachers and children are detained on their way to school It is not ok that Palestinians are refused basic human rights. He works from faith in a just God who created people to live together justly.
Here is a picture of a demolished Palestinian home outside of Jerusalem.

On Sunday we talked with Mordecai Vanunu. Mordecai spent 18 years in prison for revealing to the world Israel’s nuclear program. Mordecai left Israel in order to release this information. However, the Israeli government tricked him into flying to Italy and then kidnapped Mordecai and brought him back to Israel in order to imprison him. Most of his imprisonment was spent in solitary confinement. The Israeli prison guards tried to psychologically torment him. I asked how he survived the psychological torture and retained his humanity. Though they kept him from speaking to people, he sang loudly, he read out loud, and he prayed. Technically, Mordecai has been out of prison for 2 years. Yet, he remains imprisoned in the state of Israel. He is not allowed to leave the country. Upon his release he released his anger in prayer and in church services- never in violence. He said that violence is what the government wants- the prisons seek to diminish the humanity of those captive. According to Mordecai, suicide bombings and other violent acts fuel more racist policies. The government wants to push dissenters to dehumanizing violence. Yet, Mordecai said that he survived and continues to survive by not giving in to that dehumanization, by resisting the tormentors attempts to marr the free image of God in which he was created.

Sunday night we spoke with two men from Parent’s Circle, a joint Israeli/Palestinian bereavement group. Rami, the son of a Holocaust survivor, spoke first. He began by saying, “I am a Jew. I am an Israeli. I am a human being.” Like almost all Israelis, Rami served in the Israeli military as a teenager. He was very angry after his military service and he got out of the army. Following the army, Rami married and had 3 sons and 1 daughter. On September 1, 1997, 2 Palestinian suicide bombers killed 5 people, including his 14 year old daughter. In his tradition, there are 7 days of mourning with family and friends. He said, “On the 8^th day everyone goes home and you have to face yourself. What are you going to do now? There are 2 options: 1) When someone kills your 14 year old daughter you are so angry and want to get even, but we are people so we can use our head & when I asked, ‘Will killing someone else bring back my baby?’… of course not. The other response is 2) to ask: ‘what would make someone so angry that he would kill a little girl? And another option is to ask what you can do to prevent this pain from happening to another.” Rami has come to the conclusion that hate and violence are not ways to bring about security or to prevent others from experiencing his same pain. Through Parent’s Circle, Rami connected with other Israelis and Palestinians who are mourning the deaths of loved ones due to this conflict. Parent’s Circle makes room for friendship and empathy between Palestinians and Israelis. They believe that these things are keys to ending this conflict- especially “listening to the other.” Rami decided this during an encounter with a Palestinian mother. The mother had a picture of her dead 6 year old daughter around her neck. About that encounter, he said, “I am not a religious person- I cannot explain what happened to me then. But from that moment, I dedicated my life to telling this one truth- We are not doomed. This is not our destiny.” I heard in Rami’s words a claim similar to Rabbi Ascherman’s. We are not created to hate. This is not who we are. We are created in the image of a loving God.

Rami’s close friend, his “brother” Ali, a Muslim Palestinian shared part of his storyas well. Ali comes from a refugee family. One day an Israeli settler drove by shooting from the window of his car. The settler shot Ali in the knee. Ali left the country to have surgery on his knee. While he was away, an Israeli soldier shot his brother Yousef in the head and killed him, leaving Yousef’s wife and 2 children in Ali’s care. When Ali returned from surgery, he did not want to see any Israelis. He believed they were all part of the military. After his brother’s death, he began thinking about the connection between all acts of violence. Despite his anger at the Israeli military and settlers, Ali thinks that suicide bombing is not the way to Palestinian liberation. Yet just peace is something that we must work towards. Ali said, “Peace is not just hope… It is not something to wait for. It is something to work for.” “We cannot take land, nation, etc. to the grave. We can only live as humans… We (Palestinians) are not asking a lot- only to live as we were born- as humans.”

We spent Monday in Bethlehem where a significant population of Palestinian Christians live. After passing through the horrendous checkpoint, between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, we were met with a “Welcome to Jerusalem” sign that is attached to the wall. Despite Israel’s best attempts, there is nothing welcoming about going through a concrete wall that cuts people off from their land, livlihood, families, friends, and places of worship. In Bethlehem we met with a Palestinian man who works with children and families in trauma healing. He reminded us that “there is no post traumatic stress disorder here because the trauma is ongoing.” He shared a story with us about when he learned that he was Palestinian. At age 13 he begged his mother to let him go to Jerusalem to visit the stations of the cross on good Friday. His mother let him go. He left at 6am but soldiers detained him at the checkpoint entering Jerusalem and demanded to see his ID. Because he was only 13 years old, he did not have an ID. Youth are issued an ID at age 16. The soldiers hit him, pushed him against a wall, and insulted him. Finally, 12 hours later, at 6pm, they released him back into Bethlehem. He returned home disillusioned and disappointed. His mother told him not to worry- “You lived the stations of the cross today.” He told us, “The things that you take for granted, we (Palestinians) die for.” “We do not measure distance in kilometers but by number of checkpoints. There is a theft of spontaneity.” He said, “We and Israelis are hostages of fear.”

We spent that night at the Dheisha refugee camp in Bethlehem. (here is a picture of several of the children in the camp making oragami with us.) This camp was established in 1948 when hundreds of Palestinian towns were depopulated to make the state of Israel. In Dheisha there are more than 12,000 refugees on 1 square kilometer. We stayed with a family whose brother was killed by Israeli soldiers in 2002. Later that year, the entire town of Bethlehem was under siege by Israeli troops. Another brother from the family, who was 17 at the time, was taken by soldiers and moved to Gaza. The soldiers said that they were afraid that he would want to retaliate because of his brother’s death. So, they preemptively moved a 17 year old boy to a place inaccessible for his family. The mother in the home sadly told us that she thinks people in the U.S. think that Arab people are terrorists. She said that God tells them to treat strangers kindly and, of course, her family was incredibly hospitable. Suel, a neighbor of theirs from a women’sgroup in the camp came by to sell some of their crafts. She told us her story and ended by saying, “I do not want to kill Israelis. I will go back to my original village and live by Israelis… French… whoever, as long as they treat me as a neighbor.” Suel emphasized that she wanted us to share their stories with our friends and families. She asked, “So you will go back and tell people that we are humans?!”

(A child enjoying his ice cream in the camp)

The concept that all people are in God’s image is such a central belief for many of us and yet we often fail to consider the implications of this notion. Those who are denied their basic human rights seem to understand something about full humanity that those of us who “take for granted what [others] die for” miss. One man told the U.S. citizens in our group, “You wonder why people hate you… It’s because you don’t know.” He described a visit to the U.S. His home city had just been bombed. He flipped through 81 hotel TV stations and only found news about “a man being eaten by a tiger and an actor becoming governor. This is why people hate you… because you don’t know.” (The man speaking to us did not actually hate us, he was just elaborating on why people around the world hate the U.S.) So many people here lament that they just want to be treated as human by those around them- to be treated like they are created in the image of our loving, just, and free God.

"I Am Not Leaving My Home."

This afternoon we went to Al-Fawwar refugee camp. The families there were expelled from their villages over 50 years ago when Israel became a state. They first lived in tents. Then they built small concrete squares. Now many families have added onto the original square. Two families asked us to come. Both needed medical help, which we cannot provide. But we can suggest help from other organizations and because they are refugees, the UN provides some very limited medical care. The mother of the first family told of her exhausting trip to Jerusalem to have a surgery done on her baby boy. Her son shares the same name as one of Saddam Hussein’s sons so the military detained her and her young son for hours. The oldest daughter, a 10th grader, needs to go to Jerusalem to the hospital for a nose problem, but the family is afraid of going through a similar ordeal again. Her brother, a 4th grader, showed us scars on his leg where Israeli soldiers kicked and cut him. One day on his way home from school some Palestinian children threw stones at the soldiers. The soldiers chased him and beat him. However, he claims that he was not one of the children who threw stones.

A few hours ago, after we returned home from al-Fawwar, our next door neighbor and translator who joined us in Al-Fawwar today, knocked on our door. She said calmly, “I just wanted to let you know that I have been attacked by settlers.” We asked if she was ok and she said that she was eating dinner and settlers began throwing stones at her window. One went through and broke the glass. We went over to her house and saw glass scattered on the floor and a stone sitting in front of the sofa. She climbed out on the balcony and showed us the other stones that did not make it through her window. Her front door is on the main road, Shuhada Street, that Palestinians are not allowed to use. She cannot open her front door (we all share a back door) and sometimes she hears settlers beating on the door, trying to “encourage” her to leave. She thinks they are hassling her because she recently moved into her apartment. Before she began renting it, it had been abandoned for a while. It is not uncommon for settlers to take over abandoned buildings here in Hebron. Our neighbor is a strong and determined woman. She wanted to have her window, which faces settler-only Shuhada St., open for air (although she has metal shutters that could stay shut over the windows). She said, “Why do they do things like this?” My teammate said, “I guess they want to frighten you into leaving.” And our neighbor, who had just heard stories in Al-Fawwar from people who were forced from their homes, laughed and said, “Well, they must not know me. They should throw stones somewhere else if that is what they want. I am not leaving my home.”

Joining the Upcoming Delegation

We have been making preparations for a CPT delegation of 12 that is coming tomorrow. A delegation is a group that comes for about 2 weeks to see the situation, to join in some of CPT’s work, and to report back what they see/learn to their home communities. Some delegates end up coming to work here longer. Since I have not previously worked or lived in Palestine & because I have not been on a delegation here & also because I feel a little unprepared to work here (meaning I feel like I do not know as much as I should), I am going to join the delegation for the next week. We will be meeting with lots of different Palestinian, Israeli, and international organizations. It will be a good chance to get to some of the other folks working around this area and to learn about their specific roles. We will also go down to the village called At-Tuwani where CPT also works and we take part in some other projects, some of which the delegation will plan.

If you’d like to say a prayer for me personally, I’d really appreciate your prayers that I would be more flexible… Although I was having visa issues, I was still hoping/expecting all to work out and to go to Iraq (which still may happen before the end of the summer or it may not happen at all). I want to be in Iraq so badly (though I agree that it is a good idea for CPT-Iraq to engage in as much discernment and research as necessary before sending more team members. But that still does not keep my heart from longing to be in Iraq.) I cannot explain the connection that I feel to that country and to all of the lives there. I love Palestine and remain indignant and brokenhearted over the situation here. & the need for peace & justice here is definitely no less than the need for peace & justice in Iraq. When we are on the streets or engaged with people, I am totally present here. But... in the evenings or when I read some news of Iraq, I want to be in Iraq. I don’t know why that is. & I feel guilty for having part of my heart in a different place than my body. Each day I’m feeling more and more connected to here and that is a very good thing. If you so desire, please pray that I would be more open and flexible- that I would continue to hold Iraq in my heart with Palestine, but that I would hold them both while joyfully living wherever I am.

If you would like to read weekly (delayed) updates or writings by other folks working with CPT in Palestine, you can go to www.cpt.org, click on Palestine in the left hand side and follow the links to join the Palestine email list. You can do the same thing to join the Iraq or the other projects’ list serves.

Peace & love to y’all.

What it takes for a farmer to plow his own field...

Saturday we joined a group called Tay’ush (which means “we live together” in Arabic), a joint Israeli/Palestinian organization, in the village Bet Omar. Here is a picture of one of the Palestinian children sitting on the road looking at the nearby Israeli settlement (the white buildings in the distance). All of the land between the child and the settlement belongs (on paper) to Palestinian families in Bet Omar. However, those families are usually not allowed to use their land.

A group of 50-70 Palestinians, Israelis, and internationals split into 3 groups to accompany several Palestinian farmers to their land. When the farmers attempt to reach their land they are usually stoned by Israeli settlers. When our group arrived at the farmer’s land, soldiers and settlers were waiting at the edge of the land. As soon as we arrived the farmers began frantically spraying their grape vines, afraid that any minute the soldiers would begin arresting or the settlers would begin attacking. Thankfully, it was a peaceful day.

Because there was such a large group of us, the soldiers were there to protect the settlers (although we were a nonviolent group and only intended to plow and spray land that belongs to the Palestinian farmers who cannot use their own land without a caravan folks). While the soldiers were there for the sake of the settlers, their presence also kept the settlers from attacking the farmers. And, since there were so many people from so many countries, that presence perhaps kept the soldiers from intervening in the farmers’ attempts to work their land. The soldiers are in green and the man in white is a settler carrying a weapon, “settler security.”

We spent all morning and afternoon in the fields. The farmers sprayed and plowed their fields. The rest of us pulled some weeds.

It was such a beautiful day inside the field. We shared pita bread, communicated volumes across language barriers, made new friends, cared for the earth and cared for each other. The boys sat around singing (LOUDLY :) songs in Arabic and “We Shall Overcome” in English.

As I threw the Frisbee with some Palestinian children, my teammate wanted so badly to invite the settler children to play. They sat on the stone wall that separates the farmers’ land from the settlement.

The settler children made sure to stay near to the soldiers and their protective weapons. Instead of hiding behind guns and stones, I wish the precious settler children could have joined the precious Palestinian children in frisbee and songs.

"Existence is Resistance" in Hebron

I got to Hebron around noon on yesterday, May 17. After quick introductions, we left the apartment to accompany a second grade girl home from school. Her mother told CPT that Israeli soldiers chased her daughter and pointed their weapons at her on her way home from school. So the mother asked if CPT would watch her daughter home. However, school let out early so we did not see her yesterday.

School accompaniment is one of CPT’s roles here in Hebron. We go out at 7am each school day and walk with Palestinian children to school through and by military checkpoints and Israeli settlements. Yesterday, soon after I arrived, while we waited by a school, soldiers demanded to search 3 Palestinian women’s purses on the street. The women had babies and it was quite awkward for them to open their tiny purses. It’s hard to imagine anything dangerous in those little purses…

After children were in school this morning, my teammate John and I went to deliver some pictures of a building that CPT has been helping to monitor to the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee. On the way we encountered several photographers taking pictures of a Palestinian home. Soldiers had thrown a sound bomb ( a loud explosive device that may burn if a person is within a foot, but generally is just an extremely loud, terrifying noise) into the home and it landed very close to a sleeping woman and child. Needless to say the woman and her child were very disoriented and afraid.

This afternoon there were six soldiers in the street outside our apartment. We moved to the side and let them pass us. As we walked into the market behind the soldiers, the phrase “existence is resistance” began to make real sense to me. I was pretty intimidated by the soldiers who were pointing their guns in various directions as they searched the market for... ?something But people in the market just carried on with life, as if they did not notice the guns (which they may not take much notice of anymore?). At one point a soldier’s gun was a few inches from one man’s head. The man did not flinch or take notice. He just kept his eyes on his friend and continued his conversation. Three Palestinian school boys maneuvered their way between the soldiers and the man at the falafel stand kept making delicious sandwiches.

Palestinians cannot drive on the main road (a road which the U.S. funded for both Palestinians and Israelis). Some families’ homes and businesses have been taken and/or destroyed. Israeli settlers that live above this market throw their trash (tons of it!) out of their windows and into the market (most of the market has netting above it to catch the settlers’ garbage, but it is still disgusting.). Palestinian children are harassed at checkpoints on their way to school. Teachers have not been paid in 3 months but most of them (those who can afford transportation) come to school each day anyway. Many women, children, and men resist injustice by living in their homes or by going to school or by playing outside or by selling falafels…

It’s kind of astonishing to me… how quickly a situation can become much more real when one sees it... Things seem incredibly complicated here in Hebron... I will try to write a little more about that soon. I just wanted to share a bit about what we’ve been doing this past day and a half and my first impressions. Peace.

Change of Plans

I arrived in Israel yesterday afternoon around 3pm. I have stamps from several middle eastern countries on my passport so I had to wait in the Tel Aviv airport for a couple of hours of intense "questioning" and a baggage search. (apparently my toothpaste was alarming?) The guy next to me, who was on a 3 day business trip, had the ill luck of being named "Omar." He had been waiting 3 hours and was still waiting when I left. 3 Muslim women and their children were being held because of their names and dress, and the guy on the other side of me had no idea why he was being held. I left relatively quickly- after 2 1/2 hours. Getting past the border was a small source of anxiety for me. So I'm glad that's over!!

I stayed in Jerusalem last night, but will not be heading to Amman anytime soon. Plans have changed- The Iraq team had a long and intense debriefing session this weekend. As many of you know, 4 CPTers were kidnapped last November. On March 10, Tom Fox's body was found in a Baghdad neighborhood. Two weeks later the other 3 CPTers were released. The 4 months that our coworkers were missing and the time following Tom's death have been very challenging times in the life of CPT. After a lot of consideration, most of the Iraq team feels like there is more discernment to be done about our work in Iraq. CPT has learned a lot over these past 6 months and we plan on continuing work in Iraq. But at this time the team decided to spend some time in discernment before sending more people into Iraq. So, for the time being (at least a month but maybe longer), I'll be working with CPT in the West Bank. I'm leaving to go join the team in Hebron in a few minutes. That's all I know for now...

You Shall Go Out in Joy...

For you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song,
and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. -Isaiah 55:12

I leave Monday, May 15, to (hopefully) spend the summer working with CPT in Iraq. However, I am having a little trouble getting a visa. I arrive in Israel on Tuesday, May 16 & will go by land to Jordan to work on a visa for Iraq. (I've been working on that for 2 months here in the U.S., but with no success... I haven't been denied a visa. I just haven't recieved the permission that I need for a visa. Hopefully, we'll have better luck in Amman!) After I talk to the embassy in Amman and if it looks like the visa process is going to take a while, I'll cross back over to Palestine and join CPT there until I get an Iraqi visa.

You can find details about Christian Peacemaker Teams at http://www.cpt.org/. CPT is an interdenominational effort with roots in traditional peace churches whose mission is to reduce violence and to promote conflict resolution through nonviolent means, seeking "to overcome evil with good" (Rom 12:21). These next 2 paragraphs are directly from the website & give some background of CPT's involvement in Palestine & Iraq.

CPT has been in Hebron since 1995, witnessing to the need for peace in a violent and sometimes desperate situation. Team members have sometimes (especially following Al-Aqsa Intifada)provided an alternative, first hand perspective for scores of foreign journalists who wanted to look beyond Israeli and American government analyses of the crisis. In addition to repeated bombardment of their neighborhoods, Palestinian families in the Hebron District continue to suffer ongoing effects of military occupation. Israeli authorities persist in confiscating land to expand Jewish-only settlements, tightening access to water resources and threatening to demolish homes. School accompaniment, documentation and human rights reporting, nonviolent trainings, regular visits to families involved in the Campaign for Secure Dwellings (CSD) and joining with Palestinians and Israeli peace groups to develop action campaigns that expose the face of the Occupation are all part of the Hebron Team's work.

CPT initiated a long-term presence in Iraq in October 2002, six months before the beginning of the U.S. led invasion in March of 2003. The primary focus of the team for eighteen months following the invasion was documenting and focusing attention on the issue of detainee abuses and basic legal and human rights being denied them. Issues related to detainees remain but the current focus of the team has expanded to include efforts to end occupation and militarization of the country and to foster nonviolent and just alternatives for a free and independent Iraq.

I decided to go to Iraq in the Spring of 2003, though I did not actually go until 2 years later. As the U.S. prepared to bomb Iraq in "Shock & Awe," I was hearing different perspectives from people of faith about what was really going on. As a senior in college, this was the first time that I seriously considered war alongside my faith. As I read the Bible and prayed about the situation, I was not able to reconcile bombing Iraq with what I experienced of a just and loving God. Once I decided that I thought going to war with Iraq was wrong, I felt like I had to do something. As time goes on and as Iraq is pushed deeper and deeper into destruction, I still cannot reconcile this war with my faith. I cannot reconcile hundreds of thousands of lives lost with the justice that the prophets proclaimed or with the love that Jesus demonstrated. I go to Iraq still trying to do something, though I am not always clear what that something is. I know part of it is to declare that another way is possible- that good can overcome evil and love can overcome fear. Part of it is to be with Iraqi and Palestinian sisters and brothers in this struggle and part of it is to learn more and to seek Truth...

I would greatly appreciate your prayers- Please pray that I would speak and act in love and that I would be open to the Spirit's guiding. & Please pray that children in Palestine & in Iraq (& the U.S. & the world) may walk to school without risking their lives, that parents may send children to school without fearing that their children will not return, and that we, the whole body of Christ, would rise up and act upon Jesus' command to love God, our neighbors, our enemies, and ourselves.