The following
is a brief but representative example of what it is like these
days to be living on the inside of Palestine looking out. My wife,
Sis, and I thought it couldn’t get any worse when we first
started participating in and later shepherding fact-finding delegations
to Palestine/Israel in the mid 1980s and early 1990s. But it has.
By the
time of our participation in a CPT (Christian Peacemaker Team)
delegation a year ago we could see for ourselves how wrong we
had been. Nevertheless, even then we thought it couldn’t
get any worse. But again it has.
For the
first time in our experience Christian and Muslim children are
begging in West Bank towns and cities, and rats are actually dying
in the streets—possibly because there is no rat version
of a land of milk and honey to which they can flee in order to
survive.
“Happy are those who reject the advice of evil people, who
do not follow the example of sinners or join those who have no
use for God. Instead they find joy in obeying the law of the Lord.”
Those words, although they sound proverbial are actually taken
from the very first Psalm. And they seem to signify that—at
the time of their writing —the distinctive God of history
had been leading the ancient Hebrews to the novel understanding
that faith fully understood needs to be expressed—exemplified
actually—in part through the sort of justice they were seeking
for themselves and which they were sure they had been empowered
from above to apply.
But events today in the Holy Land indicate quite dramatically
that the theological clock has been turned back scandalously and
with what amounts to almost complete abandon. Radicals among the
adversaries here (and supporters of both outside its borders in
both the East and the West) are fostering the bombing of each
other back if not to the stone age at least certainly back to
a time that predates the radical Mosaic attitudes towards retribution
and revenge—when eye for eye tooth for tooth represented
a revolution in the concept of justice and violence.
This
back to the future regression, which makes eye for an eye look
like the good old days, extends all the way back to the time of
Lamech, that boorish churlish Hells Angels, Sharks and/or Jets
prototype who proudly boasted (see Gen. 4:23) that “I have
killed a young man because he struck me.” [Read: “I
have killed a Palestinian child because he hit me with a stone…or
an Israeli youngster because he or she was an easy target on whom
to vent my rage.”] “If seven lives are taken to pay
for killing Cain,” Lamech crowed, “Seventy-seven will
be taken if anyone kills [or tries to kill] me.”
We truly
live in a neo-Lamechian age and have perhaps for at least a hundred
years. The lack of global discipline, selfless leadership and
assurance of evenhanded accountability are having a disastrous
effect on and in this tiny terrified and terrifying strip of land.
How else to explain the unregulated use of U. S. built Apache
helicopters capable of snuffing out multiple Arab lives with a
single explosive burst or the posthumous lionizing of young Palestinian
men and women who turn themselves into equally capable, culpable,
and deadly smart bombs or mini-F-16s.
Because
of this frenzied disproportionate vengeance is man’s, pre-Mosaic
Jesse James, O. K. Corral, recidivistic, rationalizing, barbaric
vigilantism being perpetrated pervasively on both sides of the
Green Line, the authority of the message of Psalm 1, of Matthew
5:21-24, and 5:43-48 for that matter is fading fast. And the concept
of a myopic never again is being acted out by all the people of
the book in accordance with the shocking sentiments expressed
in one of the most celebrated of all Psalms (137), which begins
with words of epic and timeless pathos: “By the waters of
Babylon we sat down, and there we wept…….” However,
it ends —putting it mildly—in startling and deplorable
bathos: “Happy are those who pay you back for what you have
done to us—who take your babes and smash them against the
rock.”
“Why
do you look so angry?” one of our small group asked an Uzi
toting security guard. He had just led an IDF patrol (Israel Defenses
Forces—the army in other words) up to our little group of
CPT and Quaker fact finders, which had been waiting expectantly
and hopefully in a field outside the Arab village of Twane—in
the hills southeast of Hebron—for someone in authority to
answer our call for help. We had gotten touch with local police
on a cell phone a half hour before in order to get help for villagers
helpless to deal with mooning Israeli kids from the nearby settlement
of Maon. Before that they had been bathing brazenly and nakedly
in what had been an Arab well but which lately had been confiscated
and put under settler lock and key. The Police told us it would
send the Army. But when the troopers arrived, escorted by that
scowling Maon security guard, it was clear that they were there
on Maon’s behalf, not Twane’s.
Our complaint
had no constructive effect on either the security guard, which
was no surprise, nor the commander of the soldiers, which really
was not a surprise either, although we had hoped he might try
to reign in the security guard a bit. Instead he clearly was concerned
with making as few waves as possible for the settlers—not
the villagers. The security guard went so far as to tell us that
we CPT and Quaker visitors had no right to be where we were because
the land we were in was Area C—the notorious military security
zone which many people do no know constitutes about 60% of the
West Bank and where the Israel military is almost a law unto itself.
So from now on, the Security Guard yelled, we had to get permission
from authorities in Maon to visit the area. The Army commander
did not contradict.
That’s
when the security guard was asked, “Why do you look so angry?”
“I was born angry!!!” he literally snarled.
A few
days earlier in the Old City of Hebron, a thirtyish settler, clutching
the hand of a four year old boy, probably his son, seeing me intently
observing two IDF troopers detaining a couple of Palestinian youths
starting spitting in my direction. (Spit Spit) “Our God
will kill your God,” he shrieked. Then (Spit Spit) and pointing
to my red CPT cap and red CPT arm band he yelled, “You have
a bloody head. Get out of here. We will kill you.” Then
he led the little boy into the Yeshiva in front of which they
had been standing—presumably for the lad’s latest
lesson in scripture.
And so
the fanatic uncompromising debilitating beat (beating?) goes on:
a physically, emotionally, and spiritually draining demented dance
of death—the theme music of the four horsemen, who win every
time peacemakers loose.
Has the promise gone from “The Promised Land?” Right
now it surely has or is at least on the verge of going. Just as
“Holy Land” these days is an oxymoron, so has Palestine
become “The Broken Promised Land.”
