Day 4: Morning Reflections

We have a little more time this morning which is much appreciated. Some students have gone off to the Church of the Nativity in the City Square of Bethlehem. Today is my 13th year wedding anniversary and it is fitting for me to acknowledge my joy, appreciation and gratitude for this relationship with Michael. I was thinking about yesterday during my yoga practice this morning and I realised that the thing that troubled me about the responses to Ardie Geldman, from Efrat, was that I felt like he was being personally targeted for being part of an oppressive system that is much bigger than him. On the one hand people need to be responsible for their actions and on the other hand, government policy and broader systems of oppression need to be targeted and challenged. There are no bad Jews (settlers) and good Jews (non-settlers). One may not accept the settlement policy but it's not like they're different. This came home to me when one Palestinian guide who we met in Hebron asked me if I was Jewish. He said he liked Jewish and that there were Jews and there were settlers. I was okay because I wasn't a settler. It's not right that in order for me to be liked as a Jew I need to disassociate myself from a settler. In a way doing that is like letting them own the distress and targeting of my people. It's a bit like good whites and bad whites. By splitting people off from each other we make certain people be visible in carrying the distresses of our people that we all carry. All white people carry recordings of racism because of the oppression that they have witnessed and grown up around. If we let one part of a group be targeted then we get stuck in our own pretense. As I was recognising this a few hours ago I realised that there was someone I met who reflected a similar point from the Palestinian perspective. On the first night we went to a Sulha tribal fire gathering http://www.sulha.com/ . One of the highlights was dancing around the fire. Several hundred Palestinians had come to the gathering which was held in Beit Jala (that may sound familiar because of shooting from there to Gilo in the Second Intifada). We met at the Everest Hotel, one of those rare places with access to Israeli Jews and Palestinians. I met a Palestinian guy, Muhammed, same age as me. He told me his story. He had been in jail for 7 years after stabbing an Israeli Jew. In jail he educated himself reading everything he could find including Gandhi who he said influenced him immensely. After that he changed his ways away from violence. He is now married with 2 children. He is struggling because he said he can't get employed by Palestinians because he is vocal about peacebuilding and non-violence and by Israelis because he has been in jail. He is in the process of searching out the person who he stabbed to be able to make amends with him. After being disturbed by this man's story, and his struggles for food for his family, I checked in with Aziz Abu Sarah (more about him later) our Palestinian guide who said that he didn't think it was true about Palestinians not being willing to employ peacebuilders. Aziz claimed that people can get in to these peacebuilding activities attached to their position of victim and trying to use it to get charity. That was difficult to sit with. Aziz also critiqued the whole notion of charity. Muhammed asked me for money but I had left my wallet in the room (by mistake) and asked him to email me.