What the World Needs Now

The Hannukah riffs of a busy sax drift through the airy Tel Aviv-Ben Gurion terminal as we wait by the hundreds for our flights to other places. It is unclear how many of us are tourists returning home and how many of us are residents seeking solace and safety, looking for a place beyond the borders of this tumultuous half-nation.

Two days ago, one day after Christmas and halfway through Hannukah, Israel began an air raid over the Gaza strip after futile repetitious requests to Hamas to stop firing rockets into neighboring Israeli towns. Many believe that war is imminent, and from southern Israel to Tel Aviv, Israelis are evaluating their staircases for their stability against rockets and planning escape routes, as they have done dozens of times before. Many remember 2004, 1995, 1967, even 1948, and even more remember countless nights in between of sleeping with the TV on, ears alert for a warning, thoughts searching for anything other than the threat of a detonation or a war or a loss.

These words echo those I wrote in 2006, on a plane from London to Amsterdam when Beirut was under attack. This is no surprise; the tune is very much the same. Call it what you will: the clash of civilizations, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the War on Terror, these terms are all identical at their core. In Israel, they mean constantly questioned authority, fervent persistence of hope, cautiousness after centuries of exile. They mean fighting for national legitimacy when every neighbor denies it. They mean calling home a place that scores of individuals, organizations, nations, even a religion, claim you do not own. This is no easy task.

Like most, I do not agree completely with Israel’s mission, nor do I agree with the Arab nations’ perspectives on the land that is so greatly contested. I do, however, fear that the global community is not being fair to Israel in its judgments. Irit pointed out today that no matter how Israel responded to Hamas, the global reaction would have been the same. Had any other nation acted this way in the face of an attack, it would have been accepted. But in global eyes, Israel never acts appropriately. Without global legitimacy, without the Middle East and the general world order accepting Israel as a nation, we will never perceive Israel as doing anything right.

Meanwhile, the United States has invaded Iraq and worsened the situation in Afghanistan. We have received endless criticism for many of our military decisions, but hardly any of it (at least the criticism from legitimate critics) has attacked our very existence. Nearly none of it has questioned whether we deserve to subsist.

As one person, I cannot convince the world to be fair. There are far too many actors and interests. This globe is structured around splintered sovereignty and international cooperation only as a means toward local benefit. Only secondarily, we are individuals seeking camaraderie in a global community, in which we act within and slightly beyond the smaller national entities that govern us more than we might like.

The challenges of our world order are exacerbated by these generally trying times. We face economic uncertainty, the splintering of families and communities through increasing divorce rates and the impersonality of a tech-driven, achievement-focused world, disturbing violence among youth, threats of terror locally and abroad, and international conflicts that question whether collaboration and mutual understanding are values that anyone can successfully live by.

But we need to challenge ourselves to be accountable. We talk about building the world we want for our children’s children and building the world our ancestors were never able to build for us, but this is clearly not enough. We need to own our own lives; we need to build the world we want now. What does it mean when we agree, in conversation, that this madness has to stop? How can these millions of tiny conversations translate into an achievable reversal of our self-destructive trends? Where is the message of peace lost? When do we collectively, collaboratively, say loud and clear and strong that we have had enough?

We must be the change we wish to see in the world. It starts here, from me and you, within and between us.

Reflections on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

In the taxi to Tel Aviv, Moshe (our driver) pointed out the intermittent concrete wall and barbed-wire fencing that separate the Palestinian Territories from Israel. On the other side, apartment complexes like those seen anywhere are inhabited with people like anywhere else--except they are in nation-less territory. Some people have compared Jerusalem and the Palestinian Territories to Luxembourg, proposing a multi-state-ownership solution. This has worked in Luxembourg because the participating states are content (enough) with their own territory. The Palestinians do not have any state right now--what feasible solution will be sufficient enough for them?

David Schulman and Yigal Bronner told me a bit about the Jewish settlers--people who live in the Old City's Arab Quarter or in the Palestinian Territories and attempt to make the Palestinians around them miserable. These people should not be given a medium through which to promote their inhumane perpetuation of a complex crisis. The Arab terrorists who do the same, who force all in Israel into a level of fear that reaches everyday paranoia, should be denied these mediums as well. However, quieting the extremists is not the solution, and if it is even part of it, it does not make a large dent.

Why is the United States the nation that has been designated as the third-party mediator? Other than the surrounding Arab nations, it is exceptionally biased and unlikely to serve as a fair mediator. Why has no other nation stepped up to the plate? Though the stakes are high, the rewards of facilitating a sustainable solution are much higher. While the UN and other multinational organizations will be influential, it may take the resources and status of a true nation-state to facilitate a mutual solution.

Jerusalem's Old City

The transition from the Muslim Quarter to the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City is stark. On one end of a walkway, Arabs man crowded storefronts with hookahs, rugs, and brass spilling into the street. Pedestrians crowd every cobblestone and Arabic conversations continue across the gritty ends of the road. On the other end, a pristine and empty passageway is dotted with Israeli flags and quiet, women-run shops touting glassware and high-end paintings. The newness is eerie, utopia-like, throughout the quiet, deserted streets of the Jewish quarter. The distant laughter of children echoes and it is apparent that this is what the Jews were longing for. How has something so Western been created within the same walls as a preserved Arab community continues to thrive? The lack of integration is the most surprising feature of the Old City. The transitions in language on street signs, apparel, and goods between quarters in the Old City signals that these quarters serve almost as ghettos--as enclaves with clearly defined borders and boundaries.

Does an Eye for an Eye Make the Whole World Blind?

Initial Reflections on Israel

There are many realities here that I am trying to unearth, to explain or rationalize or just see clearly. It all begins with history, with the perpetual persecution and "othering" of the Jewish people. When Israel, the Jewish nation, became a reality in 1947 and then extended in 1967, it seemed that Jews would finally be able to live as one in the absence of ghettos and markers and all the things that made Europe and other locations unbearable for the Jewish people. But as David Schulman pointed out tonight, Jerusalem is defined by ghettos. Whether this can be called projection or retaliation or the nature of human dynamics is not for me to say. It is so clear here that the branding, the consequences of being identified as Jewish or Palestinian or Arab or tourist, defines daily life to an extreme extent. People are not living here simply as people living in a nation. They are living here as communities and enclaves that connote dangerous potentials--their ID cards and passports and religious affiliations are demanded of them at random, in drugstores, at historic sites, on city sidewalks. Has the collective memory of persecution, first in the Jewish community and now fermenting in the Palestinian community, really led to respite from this persecution? Doesn't an eye for an eye make the whole world blind?

There are too many parts that I am struggling to piece together here: the Palestinian experience, the many Jewish perspectives, the role of the Israeli government, what it means to claim what you deserve, to speak a different language, to ignore similarities when the particularities define the deserving-ness. These are only some of the things I'm trying to understand.

I am also thinking about newness. Though I have no real sense of what was here before 1947 or even before 1967, I doubt it was in Hebrew. How has an entirely self-sufficient, self-perpetuating, self-defined nation developed in such a short time? How is it that it seems as though this is how life has been here forever?

Another element to process is fear. Two incidents today paused the pace of daily life in Jerusalem for a handful of moments before business returned to usual. Near the King David Hotel, a Palestinian turned a construction tractor onto pedestrians, injuring about thirty people. Nearly simultaneously, the doors to the Old City were closed, creating a fortified section of what has become a much larger urban realm. Around the same time, two blocks from where we stood, watching, an Israeli officer detonated an abandoned duffel bag that was considered a suspicious package. Once the streets reopened, locals photographed the charred contents--coping by calling it a novelty. In these moments, fleetingly, I understood the fear with which many residents of this terrain must life. Especially during intifadas, when anything is possible, how do you maintain both patience and composure?

Amongst all these thoughts, I visited some of the most holy sites in the world today. The Temple Mount, the Western Wall, the birthplace of Mary, the tomb of Jesus, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Via Dolorosa. These are the footprints and cornerstones of modern history. These are the symbols that restrict and presuppose the ways that I will interact with Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Simultaneously, they should be informing and enlightening my own personal relationship with my spirituality. Each of these thoughts, or brackets of thoughts, could occupy me wholly. Which should take precedence? What is my duty? How can this visit define (in part, at least) the plot of my course?

The Epic Crossing from Jordan

I have just arrived at the Fellows Lounge on the Givat Ram campus of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The journey door-to-door from my hotel in Amman to here was surprisingly only five hours. After all the hype about crossing the border, I expected much more chaos. I took a JETT bus from Amman to the Jordanian border terminal. It was odd to be the only rider, other than a few men who seemed to be friends of the bus driver. At the terminal, families at the head of the departure line moaned that they had been there for hours and I expected the worst. It was not long before I headed for the next bus with my 5JD departure stamp in hand. The bus waited until it was full and then took us across the King Hussein/Allenby Bridge, after which we were unloaded for a young Israeli with a machine gun to board the bus for 30 seconds and then tell us to re-board. A 2-minute drive brought us to the Israeli border terminal. Luggage in hand, I passed through a series of easy checkpoints and then reached passport control. The entire operation was being half-heartedly handled by 18-year-old girls (and a few boys) wearing required garb paired with current youth fashions. Alternating between vaguely gesturing toward a line for travelers and furiously texting on their cell phones, these girls commanded absolutely no sense of security or authority over the state of Israel and those who enter it. On my turn, though, a terse teen demanded my return ticket home and spewed a list of Middle Eastern countries that she wanted to be certain I hadn't visited. It was both terrifying and laughable. After stating that she intended to stamp my passport (with a brief pause for me to speak now or forever be marked with visiting Israel), the guard waved me through a corridor where I wound up lost in a slew of cafe deliveries with no sense of how to exit. Finally an employee gave a helping gesture. Outside, I followed the building's side until I came to what looked like two guys with a hut and a van. I gave them 35 shekels to ride in an extremely hot servecee to Jerusalem's Damascus gate. From there, another taxi took me to the Givat Ram campus, and a few kind souls struggled to help me find the Feldman building. It fascinates me that Israel is so focused on security. I still can't figure out who is allowed to enter and live here, what the status of the West Bank's residents is, and why many Muslims continue to live here. Hopefully this visit will provide some insight.

On the Dead Sea, Identity, and Carpets

At Mount Nebo, tourists peer through the haze over the rolling hills toward Israel. They strain their eyes, close them, squint--they try to see what Moses saw, what Jesus proclaimed--they remember this as the Holy Land. At this site, Moses was buried. From here you can see across the Dead Sea and the River Jordan, Jerusalem and the glaring deserts of Jordan. We begin our morning here, reflecting on this historic site, this place that shaped most of modern Judeo-Islamo-Christian civilization. Then, we descend through the hills, past Bedouins and camels, to the border that didn't exist for Moses. After 2 checkpoints, we arrive at the Amman Beach on the Dead Sea. Israel lies just a few miles across the water, and guards keep watch for any signs of illegal crossing.

The Dead Sea region is not nearly as hazy or as putrid or as calcified as all the guidebooks have led me to believe. At 400m below sea level, the Dead Sea shore is rocky and sandy, like any ocean shore. The sea, an eerily calm basin separating two barely amicable nations from one another, muffles sound, as if this were the quietest, most solitary place in the Middle East. But then the Arab families and the French tourists arrive, and happy children squeal at the strange sensation of floating on water. Breaking the sheet of serenity, Jordanian salesmen pedal mud products while women in hijab wade steadily into the sea. We walk into the water until our feet are swept up from under us, and we are turned horizontal by a silent, powerful, motionless force. Floating effortlessly, unable to right ourselves without conscious strategy and careful motion, we gaze at Jordan to one side and Israel to the other, alone in a lifeless, dying Dead Sea. Is this where Jesus walked on water? Where Moses dreamed? Where countless explorers reached a seemingly insurmountable barrier?

Stinging from the salinity, I pull myself toward the beach. It is a strange sensation, but not one that is particularly alarming or fresh. On the beach I dream of sharing tea with the Bedouins, being nomadic, shepherding. Are these things I could ever do? I cannot stop thinking about the boundaries that we can't surpass, those things that by defining us confine us: the color of skin, gender, language, to a much lesser extent now, nationality. In a borderless world there are some borders that will always remain. There will never be a day when I can sit with a group of Bedouins or Parisians or African-Americans and not be, even just a little bit, an outsider. This makes me strangely sad, this permanence of identity, so malleable but ever-present.

After visiting the Dead Sea, we drive back up the winding road through the hills to the Mariam Hotel. We decide to mail our carpets and embark on a Madaba adventure. The post office gives us mildly credible information, and we visit a small stationery shop in hopes of finding packing supplies. A friendly man plays charades with us as we try to obtain packing tape and a box. After many comical interactions with other shopkeepers, we return to the hotel victorious. We end the evening poolside, supposedly the "hot nightspot" in this town, after overfilling our bellies at a reasonable restaurant.

I am not overwhelmed by difference here, as I expected to be. I am not sure if this is a pleasant or disappointing surprise.