An Islamic History Seminar field trip to the Old City of Jerusalem inspired many reflections on the nature of human history. The way empires, kingdoms, dynasties, peoples and the different institutions that humans create pile up one on top of another with little concern for what came before. King Herod, the Romans, the Umayyads, the Mamluks, the Crusaders, the Ottomans, the British, the Israelis, the Palestinians. The intuitive desire to leave a mark, to persist and to survive, all the more so when those efforts are challenged.
I remember my first visit to Israel. The year was 1993, I was 11 and a half years old. Our tour guide, Joe Gilboa, said to us, "Right where you are standing, there is at least 5,000 years of human history, layer after layer, civilization on top of civilization right under your feet."
Fifteen years later, those words have more significance for me than when I heard them standing under the hot Jerusalem sun, somewhere near the Mount of Olives a decade and a half ago.
Unfortunately, so it feels sometimes, I cannot help but get very involved and very emotional about what transpires on the ground here. My identities start arguing with each other and debates in seminars or among friends and colleagues take on very personal dimensions for me. A Jew, an American, a woman, a Catholic-Sicilian family background, a yoga background, seven years in the San Francisco Bay Area, girlfriend of an I.D.F Army Captain, employee of the Palestine-Israel Journal, a human rights activist, a Zionist. Give me a conflict or a situation and my opinion and thoughts and interpretation of the facts will be colored by all of these identities in my life. And I do not always know how to reconcile my conflicting emotions and identities, for example, how I feel when hearing the history of the Temple Mount, its glorious Jewish past and its inaccessibility to me now as a non-Muslim.
I can never simply have an opinion that designates a good and bad side and then formulate a point of view from there. So I live in this limbic state of semi-dread that I will not live to see any resolution to the conflict of peoples and places to which I feel so connected and so hopeful that a breakthrough could actually turn the wheel of human consciousness.
Tens of rockets have fallen on Sderot and Ashkelon since the tahadiyeh (calm) with Hamas ended. There are photographs of mothers and children in these Israeli cities with looks of terror and tears marring their features. There are also images of overflowing cesspools in Gaza, reports of continued fuel and food shortages as well. (Along with reporters such as Israeli Gaza correspondent, Amira Hass, reporting deliveries of pistachios from Tehran and Damascus via tunnels leading from Egypt to Gaza.)
On both sides, there is a palpable sense of defeat, surrender to violence, continued rockets that will be matched by an I.D.F. air and land incursion. I am afraid that a lot of people are about to suffer a lot more when the winter storm that has brought much needed rain upon these lands moves past us and the skies become clear. Perhaps I feel even more downcast because I fear and I am beginning to feel that there is no solution available for Gaza aside from military action. (I could be convinced otherwise with a compelling argument, however.)
My professor of Selected Topics in Modern Middle Eastern History succinctly described the challenge that Hamas poses to a peaceful future in the Middle East. They have an agenda for which they believe time is on their side. A divine-sanctioned mission to reconquer these lands in the name of Islam and 200 years is nothing in comparison to an eternity of paradise under the auspices of Allah. On the other side of the coin, I read in Haaretz this morning that Israeli religious parliament party Shas is calling for the reassembling of settlements in the West Bank that were dismantled concurrently with the disengagement from Gaza. The Shas Party, too, operates on a time scale that synchronizes with this idea of eternity. An attitude and view toward the struggle that bears no concern or compassion for those of us who would prefer to see a better today instead of a questionably, arguably, very subjectively constructed conception of a God-given, messianic future. Today, today, today, I want all of this to end today. And I want to believe and see with my own eyes that it is possible to stop killing each other and hating each other and ruining each other's right to human dignity.
We can have it differently, I just don't understand why we can't take the responsibility upon ourselves to see through the lies and deceit, to stop trusting what the "people in charge" say and do, and instead listen to our gut that it doesn't have to be so hard. But I am beginning to understand that in order to have that, we'd have to create a John Lennon "Imagine" world, with no religion, just start there.
I wonder if we tried...
