In which Mark meets a couple of new Jews

From Mark Freeman:

We took the next day off. No Old City, no archeological ruins, and I slept in well past the time when the rest of our group had eaten and gone on to ever greater travels. We stayed near the hotel, wrote and posted, and went to the gym.

I, for one, needed the break. Yesterday I had risen early to go to a last minute added-on excursion with the Committee to Stop House Demolitions before our scheduled 9 AM tour of the Christian Quarter . An intense, Ben-and-Jerry bearded activist jumped right in as the minibus left our hotel at 7:30, with details about housing permits denied, villages divided by the "Prevention Barrier" and settlements built near Jerusalem and elsewhere to make the possibility of any future Palestinian state a non-viable one. He was trying to fit a day's worth of information into a short time. Unfortunately, he did this by raising his voice and speaking at, not to and certainly not with the ten of us who had chosen to learn more of the activities of Israelis who oppose what is done to Palestinians. Twice I assured him we could hear him and that it would be easier at a lower decibel; several of us plugged our ears with our fingers and could still hear his monologue quite clearly.

It is hard for me to understand why I then cracked and slid into rudeness when he complained that he had no idea we had to be back by 9, and that it would be our loss-- but I did, responding that he had been yelling at us for an hour, so it wouldn't be much of a loss. Maybe it was because I agreed with all his facts, but worried that his presentational style would alienate our group. All week I had been (I hoped) a loving, usually gentle but relentless, and no doubt at times annoying reminder of the Other people, our Palestinian cousins, in the history and facts "on the ground" we were witnessing. Perhaps I imagined an unflattering version of myself, a ranting prophet in an unappreciative land. Or maybe it was my decades in the protest movement in the States, from a hippie perspective, who grew tired of tirades and believes that evoking and playing on guilt never moved anyone in a real way. Most likely, it was my sleepiness.

Anyway, the rabbi's approach worked much better than mine. She asked him about himself, how he came to Israel, how it felt. His voice lowered, his gaze met ours, he shared some of the frustrations of trying to reach people on this difficult topic. Another of us kept pressing him for his vision of some kind of solution, which he offered as his "Two Stage Solution" since the facts of large Jewish settlements in their territories would make the "Two State Solution" a no-starter. Basically, the Palestinians would have to temporarily accept the "most they could get" even if it looked like apartheid islands in an Israeli political sea, but only if this was part of a longer term plan for a regional confederation like the EU in ten or fifteen years, to include Israel, the new Palestine, Jordan and, though that doesn't look likely right now, even maybe Lebanon and Syria. Travel and trade would be open, people could live, work or start businesses in any of the collaborating countries but keep their own national citizenship, so Palestinians would effectively get their "right of return" while Israel would remain a Jewish state and have real allies. An impossible dream? Maybe, but one of the few times anyone here has presented us with an idea that at least holds hope. I thanked him for offering that, and we shook hands as we parted. In the course of the day I apologized to the people in our group for my rudeness, which reflected on them, and several said that they had not minded his decibility but had been impressed by his passion and fervor.

The other Jew I met today was my cousin Zvi, for the first time ever. He was one of several from among a dozen cousins who had answered my email and were in the country at the time, Ken asked just how orthodox religious he would be, and I guessed that he would be casually dressed but yes, wear the kippa skullcap and fringed tsitsis of an modern observant Jew. Yep, jeans and tassels, but with twinkling animated eyes and a methodical but droll manner of speech of a born storyteller, or teacher. He in fact is a professor, expert on Jewish scholarship within the Muslim world of modern times-- the last two centuries--and is fluent in Arabic. He began by asking about us, then driving to a mountain top where we could get a great view and at the same time visit a shrine to the tomb of Samuel the Prophet, the one who anointed Saul and then David as the first kings of Israel. That turned out to be in a converted church from Crusader days, which had a minaret for a tower-- and it was an eyeful.

Cousin Zvi wanted to show us how elegantly the problem of two competing religious groups was solved there. On the same floor that had once been a chapel was a Moslem mosque, locked today but in full use on Fridays by the neighboring Palestinian villages. Just below it, in a tiny room made even smaller by a mehitsa, the dividing curtain that keeps devout Jewish males and females separate, was the prophet's cylindrical stone tomb. Surrounding it on three sides were at least that many dozen Hasidic men bending and rocking in silent prayer. They were a mixed group in one sense: some wore the black block jacket and flat hat of their yeshiva, others merely white shirts, black pants and velvet kippas, and one a yellow jellabah and large cloth cap that was considered truly biblical by some in the settler movement. A dozen kids, all with kippas and payes (below the ear sidelocks) except for one, who is a little girl). I and Zvi are handed prayer books, though not Ken, who is wearing a makeshift head covering consisting of a handkerchief decorated by his sister Patricia with little candy-bar motifs and looking somewhat dismayed. He excuses himself by generously noting that "I felt I was a distraction to those praying," and after we chant a repetition of the Amidah prayer concerning the forefathers, we also leave and join him on a staircase to the roof. From there we can see Jerusalem on one horizon, the Mediterranean on another "but only on a really clear day" plus orderly line Israeli villages and more haphazard Palestinian ones in between, with a Palestinian woman in a head scarf herding two goats just below. It is now obvious that we are well into, though not deep in, the Occupied Territories of the West Bank.

Four minutes away, past a guard in a lovely neighborhood made of the same pink/white stone as Jerusalem, we are at his home. We met Gali, his charming wife and the architect of the home's arts-and-crafts ironwork on the windows and Mondrian-on-white bathroom, affordable when they were first married because of its location. Since then the almond tree and fig tree and olive tree have grown large enough to shade the whole area, and we eat pears from the ir pear tree and talk. They want to know about each of the members of my family, none of whom they have met-- and enjoy the irony that though my brother and sister have wonderful kids, neither is in a relationship at the present, and that Ken and mine of 17 years is the longest in the family. Their sixteen year old son is in Eilat learning scuba diving as a summer adventure, and their 18 year old son is in Switzerland, hiking and staying with my cousins who live there. Zvi also has five other children by a previous marriage. He and I are exactly the same age.

And how are things in the West Bank? "Just look around you, they are fine." And the Palestinians? "Par for the course." Their 12-year old daughter Tchelet (Azure Blue in English) is in the stage of withdrawal from parents and other adults, her attention consumed by the online writing and sharing of new Harry Potter adventures among friends-- and do her folks know that these are often homoerotic? Another question best left unasked.

I had been worried, make that anxious and very worried, about meeting my relatives in Israel after 23 years, since if they know anything about me it is that I am gay and politically critical. It is not all smooth, but it is not horrible eiehter. They are orthodox, but definitely not fanatical. On the security of Israel they are conservatives, but informed, openminded ones and liberal on domestic social issues (they appreciate the same gay-owned bookstore where we know the owner and feel most comfortable too). They can be called settlers, but economic and not wholly ideological ones, and they are very warm and caring.

By 10:30 at night, after a great vegetarian meal (easiest if you are kosher) plus pieces of a 72% Israeli dark chocolate bar and almonds from their front yard, we know we care enough about each other to argue the difficult areas, much to Ken's consternation. But there were areas of common ground, until the ground shifted. They loved hearing about our Petra trip, and had also been there. When the Sinai was returned to Egypt and the eastern side of the Jordan river to Jordan, they and all Israelis had been crying tears of joy, but had but became disillusioned when the peace never meant visits both ways-- it was a cool rather than a warm peace. And they did not believe that our guide there could have been Palestinian if he called us "cousins"--he must have been Bedouin. (In fact our guide has relatives in East Jerusalem.) They gave flat refusal of the concept that Hamas had held a voluntary ceasefire for the year before they got elected. After an hour of this, to involve Ken and make him more comfortable, they change the subject of biblical exegesis on the topic of Catholic passover seders, rewriting of the messiah into the central metaphor and the uncanny reflections of that in early Jewish writing. By Midnight we all hug, and are ready to be driven back to the other side of the green line, the old 1967 borders of Israel.

We left exhausted by the roller coaster of conversation, but warmed and well-fed. For Ken, I think it required a deeper look at the complexity of the problems in the Middle East --not complex if you just want to be critical from one side or the other, but infinitely complicated if you guard any hope for a solution. For me too, as I must now put a human face even on the settlers. SuddenIy I have to see them as people, deeply but not stupidly religious, heartbroken not only by their own losses, but insecure at being abandoned by the rest of the West, and deeply disappointed by the Arabs.

The two Semitic neighbors, even if sadly similar, are so far apart. A day later, we had a waiter at a Ferry-Building-like restaurant in the fabulous Medhane Yehuda souk/open market tell us this about Israeli men: "They are like the local prickly pear, tough and dangerous on the outside, but soft and sweet within." Both Israelis and Palestinians drink it with soda and lick popsicles of it in summer heat, and spit out the stony seeds.

Or if we could understand the love lyrics of Arabic pop songs (as part of World Pride Jerusalem we did take a class that transliterated one of these songs into Hebrew to let us try and translate it), then we would have to say the same about the Oriental "them."