Some People Have More Stars Than Others (from April 7, 2011)

Renana is our fearless leader for our day in the West Bank. She is Palestinian and went through the Seeking Common Ground Building Bridges for Peace program many years ago. She is featured in the film, My So-Called Enemy. She is the bright-spirited, short-haired, tattooed, outlier who plays basketball, won’t wear a headscarf and blurts out in the film, “Who puts broccoli on pizza? Americans. That’s who!” She is a bright spirit. Did I already say that? She lights up a room when she walks in. She doesn’t take it over or fill it up, but the room always seems to get brighter.

Hasmig and I saw the film the first time at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival last July before we had decided for certain to work with Seeking Common Ground. Erin (the SCG Executive Director) was in The City for the screening, and agreed to have dinner with us afterward to talk about a potential partnership. I don’t remember why, but Renana was in San Francisco for the screening, too, and joined us for dinner at Café Mediterranee. It was such a pleasure and a relief to meet them both. We were so reassured and confident that working with them, we could pull off something great, that we could pull off…this! I remember I cried at dinner telling them about Kyle. Then a month later, I went to Colorado to observe the Building Bridges 3-week retreat. Renana was staff, and I was able to observe her in action both with the teens in the program, and making a presentation to the SCG Board of Directors. I wrote in my notes that day that Renana told the Board, “The program caused me to make the choice not to be on the side of the road throwing a stone or getting on a bus and exploding it. The program was life changing for me. It saved my life.”

Renana only spent this one day with us on the trip, but she managed to drop in on us a handful of other times over the course of our stay in Jerusalem. She had dinner with us a couple of nights, so by the time we boarded the bus for Ramallah, everyone felt like Renana was part of our group.

In between taking us through the Check Point, looking at the Wall, showing us Arafat’s Tomb, introducing us to Shmuel, hiking 10 miles with us, and convincing two Israeli soldiers with automatic rifles who boarded our bus to let us back through the Check Point into Jerusalem by telling them we had only driven through the West Bank to get to Masada that day, she managed to share with us little pieces of her life and her story. She lives in Beit Hanina, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem on the road to Ramallah in the West Bank. Beit Hanina was taken over by Jordan in the 1948 War. The Jordanian government built roads and schools, and a new modern suburb emerged. After the Six Day War of 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank, including Beit Hanina and all of Jerusalem. Many Palestinians left for the United States. Some like Renana’s family, stayed. Renana is officially designated by the Israeli government as a “Temporary Resident,” even though she has lived there her entire life. She is not a citizen of Israel, she is not a citizen of Jordan, and of course, there is no state of Palestine to be a citizen of. She has no passport, only an identity card. Renana showed us her identity card. She said her last one, an older version, stated in the bottom left corner, “Arab.” Each person was designated as either Arab, Christian or Jewish, and rights and privileges were assigned accordingly. I asked, “what if you are a Christian Arab, or worse yet, a Jewish Arab? Or an American Muslim?” Renana just smiled, and raised her eyebrows and shoulders in equal measure. She said the United Nations and some human rights groups challenged the Israeli system for being so much like Apartheid South Africa, not an association Israel likes to have. They collected all the identity cards and re-issued new ones. In place of the three labels, there are now a series of small stars in the same lower left corner. “Some people have more stars than others,” Renana laughs. All the Jews have the same number of stars, all the Arabs have the same number of stars, all the Christians have the same number of stars. As they say in the restaurant business, presentation is everything.

Renana is finishing up her Masters at McGill University. I asked her what she’s planning to do next. She will go on for her PhD. Where, I ask. Hebrew University in Jerusalem, if she can finally get accepted. Wow, I said, what will that be like? She said she isn’t sure. It’s the best University available, and there is a professor there with whom she really wants to work, but it’s a bit of a hassle to get in. “I’ve lived here all my life, but I have to apply as a foreign student.”

Sleepy on the bus ride back to Jerusalem, everyone is quiet, bouncing along. Renana turns around in her seat up front to survey the tired faces. She is smiling. Why is she smiling, I think to myself? From where does that brightness in her eyes come?

The Shire (from Thursday April 7, 2011)

We are walking through the most beautiful, idyllic, pastoral landscape outside Birzeit in the West Bank, led by our gentle, soft spoken Palestinian guide, Schmuel. It feels like we could be walking through oak woodlands in the wine country or the rolling Sierra foothills of California. The hills are that fluorescent, throbbing, California springtime green that only lasts for two or three weeks each year before the first grasses begin to dry out. Unlike in California, though, the “oaks” in this woodland are neatly spaced equidistant from each other. Some are separated by ancient, winding, terraced stone walls that have contours that match those of the hillsides. The walls have profiles so low, and are so integrated into the landscape, you have to look closely to notice that the stones were placed by human hands. The oaks here, of course, are actually olive trees. Hundreds of olive trees, thousands of olive trees. Each bend, each horizon, each vista reveals hundreds more. They seem to stretch forever.

The landscape is so beautiful and so wild, it is hard to take in how carefully cultivated and manicured it is. Schmuel tells us that some of the trees are only a hundred years old, but that many are 300 years old, and some are probably 500 years old. They have thick, gnarled, elephantine
trunks, but each tree has been systematically pruned so that there are small green branches with fresh growth topping each one. Our group is spread out in a meandering broken thread of pairs and trios sauntering along the trail. We are walking at an unrushed pace. It is so bright and clear and green, the temperature is so comfortable, that there is a lightness in the group that does not seem to match the gravity of where we are. An hour before, we had driven through the Check Point, stopped to gasp at the Separation Wall, gawk at Yasser Arafat’s tomb and proceed deeper into a land of 2.5 million people torn by Conflict and living under military occupation.

Alex, Gracie, Evan at the Separation Wall

Gemma at Arafat's Tomb

At this moment, though, none of the tension or pain was apparent. We sauntered in t-shirts, talking, laughing, passing the morning in a lovely spot. Gemma, who had been walking 50 meters ahead of me out of sight around a bend, came running back to us. She shouted, “You guys, you guys, you’re not going to believe this! Around the corner, it’s the Shire. It’s totally the Shire!” Someone piped up, “This whole place is the Shire. Which part is up there? Where in the Shire?” Gemma quickly responded, “When he’s riding into the party on the wagon!” We walked forward for a moment in anticipation, and just as we rounded the bend into Gemma’s Shire, the theme music from The Lord of the Rings magically wafted forward from just behind us. Everyone stopped cold, looked around in disbelief, and broke into giggles. Hasmig was just behind us. In Billy The Kid Quick Draw fashion, she had pulled out her iPhone, called up iTunes, found the theme music and timed it to come on just as we rounded the bend. A Disney moment from a teacher accustomed to creating magic for her students.

We hiked for a couple of exquisite hours. We encountered herds of sheep, complete with sheep dogs and a ragged shepherd with a staff. We marveled again and again at the olive trees. Schmuel stopped on a shady slope, and suggested we take a little break for water and a short rest under the trees. Schmuel pointed down into a valley below us at a collection of white, modern buildings a mile or so away that appeared to be a small community. “That was supposed to be a development for engineers to live with their families. It was started several years ago. But it was never finished. See some of the buildings don’t have roofs? The homes were all nearly finished. Seventy-five percent of all the money for the project was already spent. And then the Israeli Army came in and stopped the project. It has been there unfinished for years now.” Someone asked why the Israeli Army shut down the development, and Schmuel said, “That land there, this whole area, is in Area B.” “What is Area B," we asked? “Oh, you don’t know about Area A, Area B and Area C? In the West Bank, all the land is one of those three. Area C is completely under Israeli control, like the Settlements. Area B is mostly run by the Palestinians on the ground, but the Israeli Army has military control and makes all the decisions. There is no Palestinian Police there. Area A is the only part of the West Bank that has Palestinian Police and is really run by the Palestinians. Even in Area A, the Army can come in any time they want to make arrests and we can say nothing, but the Palestinians are mostly in control. Area A makes up about 12% of the West Bank, not so much. And those buildings there, they are in Area B. So, the Israelis shut down the development. Now the Army comes there every so often for training. They come in the middle of the night, make a camp there on the edge and go house to house like they are doing a search and taking control of a village in the dark.”

We stood, looking out quietly over the green hills, the olive trees, the nearly completed buildings. I said, “It’s so beautiful here. It’s hard to imagine that there is so much fighting and unhappiness in a place this beautiful.” I was standing shoulder to shoulder with Schmuel, so I was not looking at his face. Still breathing quickly and just a little sweaty, I might have been projecting my own strong feelings, but I thought I could feel his emotion welling up in him next to me. After just a brief moment to take a breath, Schmuel turned his head just slightly to make eye contact with me and almost in a whisper, said, “Craig, this is what is so sad. There is enough land for everyone.” He raised his right hand, palm open, “Look. There is enough land for everyone, for all of us. This Conflict is not about land. There is plenty of land. This Conflict is not even about religion. My grandparents told me that Jews and Arabs had farms right here next to each other. Their children played together, and they had each other into their homes for dinner. Craig, we do not fight about land or religion. We fight about politics. It is not the people who cannot get along, it is the politicians. This is what makes me sad.”

Faces in the Trees

Guiding Us Through the Flock