I pay much more attention now- it took travelling thousands of miles to get me to this point, but it’s the truth. When I see a headline, a picture, a red news alert that refers to Israeli and Palestinian relations, my attention is held fast. Should I have cared like this sooner? Yes- but I can’t deny that, at least for me, a sense of place makes a difference. A long time ago I was taught to think of myself as a world citizen but I still gravitate toward the countries where I’ve been more than others. Obviously I care about my native land, the United States of America, but Mexico and Canada matter to me too, as do India, Pakistan, China. My mind is still crowded with images of those places, snapshots that line up alongside of Austria, Germany, England, Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea…and, now, Israel/Palestine, with a nod to what I could see of Jordan, just over the border.
When I saw the slideshow today on the msnbc.com site (I recommend checking it out), I saw pain on both sides of the walls that have been built. For every grieving Palestinian mother, there is an equally raw Israeli father; there is a hole from a rocket in the roof of an apartment in Israel, and there is a wall blown away in a domicile in a Palestinian settlement. Trading blows, exchanging angry, violent messages is now a daily practice. Had this happened a couple of months earlier, I may not have been able to travel there at all…I would likely not care as much as I do today.
What do I do from here? Ten days of presence certainly doesn’t qualify me as any kind of expert, it only grants me a smidgen of increased understanding. For now perhaps that is enough, for understanding can breed compassion, education, and conversation, and understanding can be the seed of greater prayer for peace. Let it be so.
