Ein Kerem

Last Friday we happened to have a rental car and a free morning with the boys in school, so Ben and I decided to visit the ancient village of Ein Kerem in western Jerusalem. Christian tradition holds that John the Baptist was born here, so there are several churches to commemorate that. Also, we just heard it was a beautiful area. 

Some of the hillsides surrounding Ein Kerem

After swerving past several humongous tour buses and parking in a tight spot that may have been someone's driveway, we took a short walk up the hill to the Church of the Visitation.

The Church of the Visitation (notice the incredible mosaic)

Libbie's grumpy face in the courtyard of the church

Happy face!

Libbie and "Ima"

St. Helena identified the particular spot where she believed Elizabeth and Zecharius lived. This is a well from that spot, which is thought to be the well they would have drank from. I'm not really into object-worship but I do like seeing really old things preserved and imagining them as part of a story.

This is a little absurd, but there is a large cornered off rock that they have marked as the exact rock that Zechariah and Elizabeth hid under to escape Herod's soldiers. Behold the rock.

The alleged hiding place of Elizabeth and Zechariah

A not so subtle reminder

Father and daughter admiring mosaic of mother and son

The upper hall of the church was dedicated to Mary. This is a beautiful painting of "the annunciation," when Mary visited Elizabeth and John leapt in his mother's womb to testify of Christ's presence in Mary's womb.

Mary visiting Elizabeth

The chapel was lined with painted statues of important women in Christianity.

Esther and Judith statues at the top

This twelve feet tall painting took my breath away. Go proto-feminist imagery! (Or is this post-paganism? Or something else?)  

We didn't have enough time to see any other churches or have brunch like we were hoping, but it was worth the trip nonetheless. It was indeed a beautiful area with some impressive churches to boot. 

As a side note, back in November when my sister Krista and her husband Chris came to visit, we got severely lost in this area. We missed the Mt. Scopus signs coming home from the airport and followed "Hadassah Ein Kerem" signs hoping they might be related to the Hadassah hospital near us. We ended up in the wrong side of Jerusalem, driving around endless hills, searching confusing maps, but nonetheless admiring the amazing churches around us.  This Eastern Orthodox church on the hill was a constant reminder that we had no idea where we were, since we had never seen it before and it's impossible to miss.

Here's to getting lost in your city of residence and not realizing that you are within twenty yards of the alleged place where John the Baptist was born. 

The Citadel/Tower of David Museum

This has been on our mental to-do list for several months. Yesterday, we finally set off to conquer the Tower of David with some new friends. After a short ride on an Arab bus (which got into a accident, which resulted in some minor damage to the bumpers of the two vehicles involved), a long walk through the Old City--passing through the Arab market near Damascus Gate, then dozens of stalls selling rugs, scarves, lamps, antiques, pottery, dresses, etc, stopping at Shabon's for a glass of juice (of course the boys checked out the very cool-looking daggers he sells), and finally getting to Jaffa Gate and the museum.

Heather holding Beth, some random guy, then Jacob and Aaron walking together, keeping true to the buddy system

We arrived at the museum at 3:45 then realized the museum closed at 4:00. Luckily, they said we could stay until 4:45 so we decided to just go for it. The hardest part of the adventure was over (just getting there), so it made sense to get what we could out of it. I hated having to rush the kids along (our kids have great museum feet... usually happy to spend at least two hours in a museum... and we are excited that our new friends have museum longevity skills as well) but we saw lots of amazing stuff despite the rush.

The entrance to the Citadel-- this would have been a wooden drawbridge a thousand years ago

Jacob, Elliot, and Aaron

The Citadel consists of towers and buildings built by the various ruling people over the last two thousand years or so. The stones, with their various ages and methods of construction, tell the story of the history of Jerusalem. The Hazmoneans, Herod, the Romans, the Crusaders, the Byzantines, the Mamluks, the Ottomans, and of course now the Jews all played a part in construction, destruction, and re-constrcution contributing to what we know of as the Citadel today.

The remains of the Tower of David, built by Herod in the first century BC 

At the model of the Citadel, Jacob and Aaron decided that this place looks a lot like Hogwarts. In fact, they decided it actually is Hogwarts. They spent at least ten minutes mapping out which houses were in which section, the location of the Forbidden Forest, and other such important orientations.

Aaron and Jacob mapping out Hogwarts on this model of the Citadel

 Libbie and Elliot, meanwhile, had fun playing with the phones that give you information in three different languages (Hebrew, English, German).

"Hello? Play outside? Okay! Bye!"

Just too cute not to include

Elliot thought the German was hilarious

There are many, many locations where you can view the Old City from a rooftop or hilltop of Jerusalem. Each one offers a unique perspective. This view from the top of the Phaesal Tower is probably one of my favorites. Or at least it was at the moment.

Christ's Church tower in the middle, Dome of the Rock on the right, Mt. of Olives in the background

We kept thinking of the phrase, "Jerusalem--united by its rooftops, divided by its people" while we were up here. Ben thinks Shmuel Agnon is the source but we are not sure.

The church with two blue-gray domes is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; Mt. Scopus and our home are in the background  

You can see several ages of stones here, and also the stage for the light show

In addition to the archeological sites they had a few exhibits that explained some of the history. I didn't get many pictures of the exhibits but we did take a few inside the Writing exhibit, where they showed some of the history of the written word with examples of scripts throughout. They had Phoenician, Egyptian, Aramaic, Latin, Hebrew, and several others. There was a large circular surface with sand where the kids were encouraged to try writing some of the letters into the sand.

Playing in the script sand, surrounded by ten different writing systems

In the Writing exhibit they also had an amusing video about one army attempting to send a message to another with objects, since writing hadn't been invented yet. They sent a box with a bird, a frog, a hamster-like animal and some arrows. Their message was, "If you don't fly away like a bird, or hide in the marshes like a frog, or burrow yourselves underground like a hamster, you are going to be killed by our arrows." The receiving army interpreted their message as a surrender and were subsequently killed. It was a pretty clever and entertaining way to convey the importance of the written word.

Libbie decided the stage set up for the Sound and Light show would be a good place to pray

Libbie and Elliot showing their silliest faces

We all had a wonderful afternoon, and finished it off with a spaghetti dinner at our friends' apartment.

Neighborhood Campout

Aaron planned and mostly executed another campout near our apartment building. Even though it was designated as a boys' night out, Libbie and I showed up late and left early. Aaron decided it was okay if we came for the food, so we obliged. Also not according to the plan (which can be very upsetting for our sweet Aaron), they met some friends in the playground on the way over who tagged along for the fun. Aaron was upset about it for awhile but calmed down once we encouraged him to think about how he would feel if he were in their position. He would definitely want to hang out and help with the fire. Once he realized that, he completely changed his attitude and even offered them some roasted marshmallows.

Getting the fire going

Elliot showing me the trees

Not quite your quiet and removed campsite (that's a major highway at the end of the trees), but still enjoyable.

All of our equipment fit in our granny shopping bag on wheels

Dinner is served

Scraping a little charcoal off the chicken

Of course we had to roast some marshmallows to make the campout complete

Aaron dramatically devouring his roasted mallow

Libbie preferred to just go straight for the chocolate
(This is her guilty/I-dare-you-to-stop-me face. I, of course, took the dare.)

These are our friends Sergei (the dad) and Daniel (Eli's classmate) with Ben

It turned out to be a lovely experience overall. The boys set up their beds and fell asleep by the fire, then Ben schlepped everything home when it started to get cold and uncomfortable around 10 pm. 

We love having a fire pit within fifty yards of our apartment. We don't have a sense of whether it's fully legal to use it but nobody has stopped us so we'll stick with thinking it's legal.

A Political Tour of Bethlehem in Palestine

This post on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict takes us farther out on a limb than we usually go. So be it. The post is not about a political point of view so much as it is an accounting of an inescapable part of our experience here. After our insider tour of the Bethlehem area, we debated whether to write about it at all. In the end, we decided to post this out of the desire to share our experience of the tour with many of our friends. If you would have wanted to be there with us, this post is for you. We were so pleased to have this experience: real, rare, and rousing stuff. On the other hand, we also hope this post is for other friends who would not have volunteered to accompany us on the tour--especially those with no feelings on the issue at all. Lastly, it should be noted that while our post is clearly opposed to the Israeli state's occupation of Bethlehem, we do so with certifiable respect for the Jewish nation and people. Ben writes as one pleased to be a Golda Meir fellow at Hebrew University, convinced that the richest source for his distinction between the Israeli state and Jewish nation is the Jewish intellectual tradition itself; Kourtney writes as a documented admirer of the passover and seder, among so much else. So, whatever our mistakes and trespasses, we begin our foray into this important abyss with a call for mutual learning, understanding, and sympathy.

A Sort of an Introduction

Mazin Qumsiyeh, a non-violent Palestinian activist, a Christian Arab, and a noted professor of genetics took us, together with two close friends from Europe, Martha and Rasmus, on a personal tour of the Bethlehem-area of Palestine last week. Mazin, a US citizen, taught biology at Duke and Princeton for more than a decade before returning to his native Bethlehem, although he continues to fly around the world, delivering lectures and supporting activists for the Palestinian cause. When asked why he chose to leave the USA for Bethlehem, his first answer was, "Because I'm stupid. At least that's what my mom says." Sahar, Mazin's sister and our dear friend, also asked what brought him to give up his comfortable life. Mazin just sat there, until a smile broke out: "There are ways to resist while you are in the US, there are lots of things we did there. But here, every time we breathe we are resisting. Every time we put food in our mouths, we are resisting. Every time Sahar goes to church in Jerusalem, she is resisting. Here, merely surviving is a resistance since the Israelis do not want us here." The last line in this post, also a Mazin paraphrase, elevates this humanizing point, we think, beautifully.

After a pause he added with a grin, "Besides, you just can't get good hummus in the States."

"Maximum geography, minimum demography" was the overriding theme during the car portion of our tour. The idea, which explains the Israeli strategy of occupation as Mazin sees it, is simple as well as subtle. The aim of the Israeli occupation is to maximize the land under Israeli control while minimizing the number of Palestinian inhabitants on it. This takes place through a policy of step-wise appropriation of land that excludes the homes and physical living spaces of the Palestinians (although homes have also been destroyed). Leave the Palestinian people on the other side of the wall from Jerusalem, but also leave them no place or means for development; slowly throttle the economic and social livelihood of Palestine by disrupting the regular flows of life; then make those disruptions permanent obstacles through legal and bureaucratic institutions. Call it, in an infelicitous phrase, apartheid by incremental administration.

Depending on one's view, this is either a generous or a heinous approach to expropriating a territory and the people who live on it. Human history is riddled with examples in which the powerful wantonly destroy the less powerful: the conflict around Bethlehem, while entrenched and sickening, is clearly not one of these incidents. Yes, there is violence but mostly there is strategic restraint and shades of gray. Palestinians here fare far better than the oppressed in the poorest war-torn countries in the world. A privileged few receive international support to study abroad. The GDP of the West Bank, about 13 million USD in 2010, ranks 136 out of 197 listed countries and territories (CIA Factbook); that may be less than one tenth of Israeli GDP, but over sixty countries are economically worse off. As pictures below suggest, the Bethlehem trees, what remain of them, are fruitful and beautiful; their land, what remains of it, rich and productive. On the whole, the situation strikes us as more tragic than horrific, in the sense that injustice and malice aforethought is tragic, while violence and rage would be horrific. Things could be worse.

Yet to say "things could be worse" is not an innocent or necessarily even a hopeful statement. They often do get worse when one repeats phrases like that. The phrase serves as a cushion that insulates and excuses the advances of extremists. "Things could be worse" also means that, without flashy violence to headline, little sustained public attention is devoted to the situation. The truth is despite decades of media coverage in the States, when we moved here, we knew diminishing little about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Now at least we know firsthand that we know almost nothing; that we have so much more to learn.

So with that, here are some scattered notes about things that, as recently as a few months ago, we did not know. (To be fair, our report needs fact checking.) Our repeated visits to Bethlehem have left us open-eyed, frustrated, and grateful for the human dignity we find on both sides of the wall.

A Few Things We Did Not Know

Before our tour, we did not know that Bethlehem, a pilgrimage point in Palestine for all of Christendom, is itself a quarter Christian. To further complicate the Christmas scene in Bethlehem (blog post here), St. Nicholas was apparently born there. It is a stubborn fact that US tax-payers would probably respond to the conflict very differently were it framed as a Jewish-Christian-Muslim conflict, not as an Israeli-Arab conflict. We also did not know that the city of Bethlehem is surrounded by a massive cement wall, completed as recently as 2004; nor that, during the uprising in 2002-2004, dozens of refugee children were shot by Israeli soldiers in turrets on that wall. When faced by events like that, one has to recognize that, for the parents of those children, things really could not get any worse.

We also did not know that the tomb of Rachel, the wife of Jacob in the Old Testament, also lies on the edge of Bethlehem, very near the refugee camp. It is considered a sacred place by local Muslims, Jews, and Christians alike (but especially the former two). It used to have a mosque. Now it is ensconced in a winding, labyrinthine corridor of 8-meter (25 feet) high walls. Only Israelis and foreigners can visit the tomb, which we did on a different day.

A photo of Rachel's tomb, taken between 1890 and 1900, sourced here.

A map of the current wall gerrymandering Rachel's tomb, near the bottom, copied from here.

A woman on the Bethlehem side of the wall fought to keep her house. After lengthy and costly court battles, she was able to keep her home on the condition that the upstairs windows be permanently covered for security reasons. Most of her land is now the Rachel's Tomb parking lot on the other side of the wall. You can see the results in the picture below. A classic example of "maximum geography, minimum demography."

A Palestinian woman's home surrounded on three sides by the separation wall

Our tour covered the Arab towns of Beit Sahour, Beit Jalla, Bethlehem, and the almost abandoned Al-walaja. Our first stop was the Aida Refugee Camp in Bethlehem. According to Mazin, of the 11 million Palestinians world-wide, 7 million are refugees. In 1948, 70% of the population or about 800,000 was displaced, a number that remains largely unchanged several generations later. We are not sure how these numbers work out, given Israel houses some 7.7 million inhabitants in total (Wikipedia demographics article). They should be checked. There are reportedly 59 refugee camps that house the descendants of the 534 villages displaced in the original 1948 war. 18 of those camps lie in the Gaza Strip. Only three are in the West Bank, we were told. The rest are in Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and other surrounding countries, as far as we understand.

The Aida refugee camp struggles in part because two thirds of its population of three or four thousand is younger than 18 and in part because a staggering 77% of that is unemployed. As noted above, it witnessed a tragedy when some 40 children and youth--some in demonstration, some not (Remember these Children memorial link)--were gunned down by Israeli sniper fire during the 2003-2004 second intifada. Two thirds of the refugee camp is under than age of 18. We only saw drivers and young children on the street. We took this picture as we passed through.

Children walking home from their UN-run local school

We met with a prominent native of the Aida refugee camp, Mr. Abedelfattah (Abed) Abusrour, who holds a PhD in microbiology from France and is the director of a children's theatre center. According to Mr. Abusrour, the camp, established in 1950, was initially no more than a collection of large tents (since everybody figured they were just biding their time until they were allowed to return home); by 1956 it had grown into temporary shelters (still hoping that they would be moving back into their homes soon), and by the 1970s second generation refugees began to settle in semi-permanent and earth-quake unstable structures, which remain today, well into the third generation. Abusrour also directs the Al-Rowwad Cultural and Theatre Training Centre, a media and theatre outlet for children that has recently begun equipping youth with cameras and video cameras. Their stills, shots, and clips of everyday life are then put on display off-line. The Centre is also looking for social media training and support, should some of our readers be interested. They also promote women and parliamentary representation, although we do not know more about that off-hand.

A telling anecdote: When Abusrour went to study in France, his identity card initially read "Jordian refugee under Israeli mandate." After explaining that he was neither Jordanian nor under Israeli care, he petitioned to have his place of origin changed. The bureaucrats eventually decided on "to be determined." To this day, Arab inhabitants in East Jerusalem carry cards marking them as "Jordanian residents" (i.e., not inhabitants) in the country. The Israeli policy seeks to leave the refugees fleetingly few options: they are, as Abusrour told it, not without some drama himself, to explode themselves, to send themselves into exile, or to endure until the bitter end. 

Abusrour seeks a fourth way, as it were. In the course of espousing a philosophy of "beautiful resistance" throughout our discussion, he also offered a memorable parable of a village turning milk into water. A village, faced by a coming drought, decided to pool some portion of its available milk into one large container, which could be used to develop cheese and other diary products necessary to support the villagers in hard times. So it was unanimously agreed that every family should add one liter of milk to a large vat the next morning. And so, that next morning, a member of every household came and poured one liter from their private stores into the collective container. After each villager had done their part, the people gathered together and opened up the container to view the results.

To their horror, the villagers discovered that the container contained only water. How did milk become water? Every household in the village had, Mr. Abusrour explained, quietly added a liter of water, instead of milk, with the reasoning that "if everyone else adds milk, and I add only water, no harm will be done and I will benefit." The thought, while locally not incorrect, is the source of serious collective action problems in Palestine. As long as this parable describes resistance movements, they will have trouble producing meaningful, milky results.


As we drove away from the refugee camp, Mazin pointed out some graffiti on the wall. The Bethlehem side of the wall is covered in graffiti, much of it artistic and bold; the Jerusalem side is completely blank. If you've ever seen the Berlin wall, or its remnants, the parallel doesn't need making. 

One of the many political graffitis on the Bethlehem side of the separation wall.

When the pope came to visit Bethlehem in 2000, the locals built a stage on which he could speak. The Israelis refused to give the permit for this location because of its proximity to the wall, which would not exactly make good international press.

The pope's stage built in 2000 for his visit, later dismissed by Israeli forces for the inopportune photo-op

Palestinians hold out hope of returning someday, although that hope lingers generation after generation to no avail. Return, it should be noted, is a theme running throughout the whole country: the Jews believe in the law of return, commemorated in the policy of Aliyah ("ascension," the right for those of Jewish descent to move to Israel and claim citizenship); the Palestinians believe in the right of return, symbolized by a simple metal key, the kind many took with them when they left or were driven from their homes (many thought they would be returning soon so they brought almost nothing but the key to their home); and of course religious peoples of many stripes believe in the return of the Messiah to this part of the world.

The sections of the wall, below, are decorated with drawings of the cities the people were forced to leave. When we asked how the refugee kids knew what their families' cities looked like, Mazin explained that documents are not required until you are sixteen years old, so children and young teenagers are free to travel throughout Israel. Sometimes they have field trips for kids so they can see their "hometowns" (in which they have never actually lived). Consider that current Israeli national identity, which was initially formed on the desire of a scattered people to return to Jerusalem, still involves sending youth abroad. Both group identities share narratives of persecution and displacement.  

A wall paining of Al-Malha, one of the many formerly-Arab towns now in Israel

The wall, in some places a single electric razor-wire fence, in others a double fence, in others a looming cement wall with turrets, is built up enough to keep Arab residents of non-Israeli towns out of Jerusalem, although construction of the wall continues.

A threat, a real danger. 

The wall has cost more and taken far longer to complete than initially expected. Whether this can be attributed to Palestinian resistance is unknown. Mazin is part of that resistance, although it should be made very clear that he is only interested in non-violent resistance. His most recent book, which we admit to not having read yet, documents a long tradition of hope and empowerment through non-violent resistance in Palestine. It seems a decidedly optimistic take on the future of Palestine. In general, he advocates as a broad strategy many different long-term, piecemeal strategies for resisting Israeli occupation. For one example of what that means: he slyly explains his most recent arrest as "I don't know what happened. I was just having tea at a friend's house when some uninvited bulldozers showed up." When we asked whether all resistance in Palestine is non-violent, he answered that of course it is not but that political violence tends to dominate reporting, as these Wikipedia articles on Palestinian political violence and Zionist political violence suggest. He also said that most staged acts of non-violent resistance are inevitably met with violence from both Israeli and Palestinian security police. Non-violent protestors are regularly arrested, beaten, cuffed, detained, etc., etc. Preserving the status quo appears to be in the immediate professional interest of the Palestinian police. To his great credit, we think, he is in favor of working with anyone--Palestinian, Zionist, foreigner, etc.--who works non-violently, anyone who opposes inhuman and violent treatment. (See the update at the bottom of this post.) 

Mazin also directed our attention to land that the Israeli government "covets," many of which are either being seized or slated to be annexed by the wall. Here's a hill between Bethlehem and Jerusalem we can really understand coveting. The picture does not capture its striking beauty.

These stone terraces were built thousands of years ago by the Palestinian residents' ancestors. Once the construction of the wall is complete, it will be Israeli land.

A piece of craftsmanship: a (non-political) rock wall built without cement, mortar, or gluing agent

A new highway under construction, with a conspicuous restraining wall on one side, cutting through a Palestinian neighborhood. It will connect two Israeli settlements.

Mazin thinks the slanted shield on top of the highway wall, visible here just above the trees center and right, is purely cosmetic. So that settlers can commute without having to look at the "ugly Arab town."

An Israeli court required that construction workers replant privately-owned olive tree displaced by the highway construction. But the court order did not specify that the olive trees not have their branches cut off in the process. You see the results on the right and in the left foreground. A symbol of the weakness of bureaucratic fixes.

Here's an intersection with three roads. The signs point to Har Gilo (an Israeli settlement) to the right and to Jerusalem to the left. There is no sign indicating that Alwalaja, a Palestinian town slated for removal, lies along the road heading straight.

An incomplete wall. The uneven decorum suggests which side is which. 

Martha, Rasmus, Mazin, and Ben surveying the village Alwalaja

A fine (if poorly lit) example of maximum geography seizure. The electric fence here runs along the S-shaped road, which appears to have been built to cut off half of a Palestinian family's olive tree grove, not for clear security purposes.

This map speaks for itself.

In Search of a Peaceful Resolution

At different points throughout the day, both Mr. Abursour and Mazin advocated for a one-state solution, in which all citizens were treated equally by one another and by a pluralistic, secular state. Yet we all agreed that that solution was very far from the present state of things. It is, according to Mazin, theoretically the most reasonable and the least surprising solution: the area currently occupied by Israel and Palestine should be, he argues, just like most other aspiring modern states--democratic, pluralistic, and without a dominant church state actor.

However, he continues, one-state proposals are currently not viable solutions. Major reforms would need to take place in the Israeli state, which are not likely to happen on either the current international and local stages. Mazin mentioned there being an Israeli constitutional requirement, for example, that forbids any politician from espousing as part of his or her platform the goal of pursuing a secular, pluralistic state for Israel. Any politician that does not avow a Jewish state is banned from running in the first place. (It is not entirely clear to us the source or status of this current law, although it may build on a tradition tracing back to the UN General Assembly Resolution 181 that established Israel as a "Jewish State" in 1948. See "Basic Israeli laws" in Wikipedia.) Despite endless disagreements about everything else, all Israeli politicians must be nominally and politically Zionist in the sense that they must publicly commit themselves to the promotion of a Jewish state. To date, no one has managed to propose a Jewish state that recognizes a non-Jewish Palestinian public, and negotiations are usually a dead end too, since they tend to favor those in power. All this adds up to the fact that a single (secular) state does not appear quick coming.

This Gordian knot is made even more tangled by the fact that the other two available main paths forward are so undesirable (except for the most staunch extremists). One, the two-state solution, while the consensus position in international politics, also appears to be an increasingly discredited position by leading local figures on both sides who doubt the economic and political viability of a Palestinian state. Two, a do-nothing continuation of the status quo apartheid. There are of course other proposals. Neither path naturally leads to cooperative coexistence. From what we saw, none of the self-evident political paths forward, including the present status quo, is really a solution at all. 


Mazin admitted something else we found interesting: given the choice of living under a hardline, hawkish right-wing Israeli government and a liberal-leaning left-wing Israeli government, he would prefer the right-wing government. It's easier, he says, because the right-wingers are honest about what they want and why they want it: they will say we are building a wall here because we fear Arab terrorism. The left-wing, on the other hand, talks about security measures and mutual protection, and yet, in his experience, the occupation spreads more quickly under left-leaning coalitions than it has under the current Israeli government. Why is this the case? Consider that Kennedy or Johnson or Carter have had to work to be harder on the Soviets (or Obama on Afghanistan) than did Nixon or Reagan (or Bush on Iraq) because the Democrats have long had to publicly prove their toughness credentials in order to deflect accusations of being soft on America's enemies. Meanwhile, both parties agree Republican hawkishness does not need to prove itself. A similar problem besets Israel. Several of our trusted Israeli associates have independently confirmed this view: current Israeli politics is acted out on a thoroughly imbalanced stage. 

Instead of a Conclusion, Lunch

After a few hour tour, Mazin treated us to a delicious home-made lunch, which he made himself. The prevailing feeling we brought with us to the lunch table was one of discouragement, and so a lot of the discussion focused on the obvious question: What can be done? How can we help? Where can we anchor hope? The resulting conversation, admittedly buoyed by pleasant company, delicious lentil soup, chicken, salad, pita and (yes, very good) hummus, was revealing and encouraging in a subtle way. 

Mazin, although he has devoted his life to the situation and speaks encouragingly of one common secular democratic state, does not advocate any single solution. Instead he encourages us to live a life that helps the situation in many small, enduring ways, a few of which he has listed here "50 ways to act for peace and justice." It's a commendable list. Resistance in the end is about living, not dying, in a complex world. That is something we all can do, simply by virtue of our common humanity. We do not mean to diminish the importance of what can and must be done to improve the situation, but we found it fitting that, at the end of this exasperating experience, we all sat down together and had lunch. 

Life, and this is the point, continues. Or to paraphrase Mazin:

True resistance, non-violent resistance is to continue to exist humanely. It is to remain human in the face of tragic inhumanity--that is the real challenge, the struggle, the jihad worth living for.

Kourtney, Ben, Jesse (Mazin's wife), Mazin, Martha, Rasmus on Mazin's balcony overlooking Bethlehem

** UPDATE: May 16, 2010

Yesterday afternoon Mazin was arrested with other Palestinians, Israelis, and internationals during a non-violent march in the village of Al-Walaja (noted above). The internationals and Israeli marchers have since been released, although Mazin and others remain imprisoned and in good spirits. A YouTube video of the march, which ends with his being forced to the ground and arrested, can be found here. Email updates may be posted here. This event, thankfully, did not spill over into the fatal Israeli-Palestinian violence that swept through Ramallah and the Golan Heights yesterday, which was for the Palestinians the day of Nakba.