Peacemaking

Trees of Life

Let us pray:

Pray not for Arab or Jew, for Palestinian or Israeli; but pray for ourselves that we may not divide them in our prayers, but keep them together in our hearts. 

Amen

Lately, I've been a bit obsessed with trees of life. I headed to England at the end of August to attend Greenbelt, the Christian arts festival held every August bank holiday weekend, and to join friends and colleagues from the Network of Christian Peace Organizations in staffing the Peace Zone. The theme for the festival was The Tree of Life.  The Peace Zone had a tree sculpture, illustrating the roots of violence and nonviolence. Visitors were invited to trace their hand on construction paper and write a word or phrase which illustrated the theme. There was a huge tree of life at the Sunday Eucharist. People were given a luggage tag and invited to write a thanksgiving and an intercession on the tag. The tags were collected at the offertory and tied onto the bare branches of the tree.

On my annual visit to the British Museum, I was preoccupied with getting a ticket for the new exhibit on the Persian Empire and paid not the least bit of attention to what was in the Great Court, a light-filled soaring space outside and surrounding the famous Reading Room. In one of the shops, I spotted a t-shirt with a design of a skeletal tree labeled Tree of Life and then its postcard. I dashed around to the Africa rooms to ask if the sculpture was still on exhibit and learned it was around the other side of the Great Court. I had walked right by it to purchase my ticket for the exhibit on Persia. So much for obsessions.

What's compelling about this tree is that it's made of decommissioned weapons from Mozambique's civil war. The catalogue says, "Through the Transforming Arms into Tools project, people in Mozambique hand in guns in exchange for sewing machines, bicycles, even tractors. The weapons are dismantled and the artists...make sculptures out of them."

What does this have to do with Hebron and Israel and Palestine? I see trees of life there as well, and I dream that a tree of life will be fashioned there like the one fashioned in Mozambique.

In the passage from Deuteronomy we hear of God bringing the people into a good land, with plentiful water, grains, grape vines and fig and olive trees, where they will lack nothing.

The people of Hebron love the land. It is their tree of life.

First, a little background.

Hebron is a Palestinian Muslim city of about 140,000. Under the Hebron Protocols which came out of the Oslo process, Hebron was divided into two sections: H1 and H2. H1 is under total Palestinian control. H2 is the Old City and market and the Ibrahimi Mosque/Tomb of the Patriarchs and the surrounding area. With a population of about 30,000 Palestinians, and 4 Israeli settlement enclaves with a population of about 400-600 settlers, it is under Israeli control.

For the Israeli settlers, God gave their ancestors the land. Specifically in Hebron, their ancestor Abraham bought the Cave of Machpelah, where the patriarchs and matriarchs are buried. It is critical for these settlers to retain what land they have and to recover what was claimed as theirs in previous centuries. The settlers in Hebron are very clear: it is their intention to run all the Arabs out of Hebron and take Hebron back for the Jewish state. The apartment building which forms part of the settlement enclave of Tel Rumeida is built on piles directly over the excavation of David's ancient capital.

For the Palestinians who have lived there far longer than the settlers, who returned after 1967, their connection to the land is life itself. Olive trees are cared for almost as a member of the family. It takes some years for them to bear fruit, and nurturing throughout the year to bring them to harvest. Families have lost olive groves to land confiscations, or to the clearing of their land for reasons of security. Some can't get to their land because of Israeli military roadblocks or assaults by settlers. This year, while driving through Ma'ale Adumim, the large Israeli settlement bloc east of Jerusalem, the guide pointed out an olive tree of massive girth planted in the middle of a traffic circle. The marks of the chain which had been wrapped around it to uproot it and drag it were still visible. What name had the Palestinian family from whose land it had been taken given it? From a tree of life giving sustenance, it had become a traffic circle ornament.

Six years ago, I sat with CPTers on a hill in the Ba'qaa Valley overlooking one of the Israeli-only bypass roads connecting Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The road splits Palestinian agricultural land. Across the road and up a hill we could see the settlements of Kiryat Arba and Harsina, the latter encroaching on the Palestinian agricultural land in the valley. The home of our host family had been demolished twice by the Israeli Civil Administration. The wife and mother was cooking a meal for us over a fire next to the ruins and the tent in which they had been living. Since then, a third home has been built and has not, thankfully, been demolished, although Israeli settlers took it over during the rebuilding and attempted to burn it.

The family patriarch, across the bypass road, continues to farm his land. His older son's home, built next to his father's house, was demolished a year or so ago. Built without a permit, and below Harsina, it was too close to the settlement. I remember the day I was invited to pick a huge fig off one of the trees in the yard. It was warm from the sun and had split open.

The steadfastness - sumud - of this family in the face of home demolitions, settlement expansion, blocked roads, settler harassment, and land confiscation, and their commitment to peacemaking are trees of life.

A team translator farms on the roof of her home in the Old City of Hebron, close to the Ibrahimi Mosque/Tomb of the Patriarchs. She has planted vegetables and herbs and fruit trees in recycled containers and old refrigerators. In the midst of a dying old city, there are trees of life on a roof-top garden overlooking a site holy to Muslims, Jews, and Christians.

But the tree of life provides more than bodily sustenance. In the reading from Matthew's gospel, Jesus invites his disciples to "strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well."  I've heard the kingdom of God defined as a working for justice. Indeed, righteousness can be defined as "the quality or condition of being...just."

CPT is sometimes challenged about not being neutral. I asked a team mate about that. This is what he said:

We ascertain, as best we can, who is the oppressed and who the oppressor and then stand...with [the oppressed] - suffering the oppression along with them, standing in the way of the oppression as much as we can, appealing to the humanity/divinity in the oppressor to change him/her into a nonviolent person/power, responding to the violent resistance of the oppressed with models of nonviolent resistance. We do not stand with/protect those who choose armed resistance but with the unarmed civilian victims of the oppression. Could we do the same for the civilians on the other side? Yes, if we had large numbers, but as it is we cannot meet the needs of those we do stand with who are under worse conditions every day, hour, minute because of the oppression of leaders and forces of the other side.

He wrote this four years ago. It hasn't changed. It's gotten worse. The Old City of Hebron is cut off more and more from the rest of the city by iron gates and padlocks, x-ray machines and metal detectors and turnstiles whose operation is controlled by the Israeli police. Those Palestinians who have the means to move elsewhere have moved. Many businesses have been forced to close by the Israeli military or have given up and moved elsewhere or shut down altogether. There are more frequent home invasions by Israeli soldiers, more searches of school bags and of Palestinians moving around and through the Old City. There are assaults and searches and detentions.

Suffering the oppression along with the oppressed and standing in the way of the oppression is a piece of striving for the kingdom of God.

Another piece is reconciliation. Howard Thurman defines the spiritual form of reconciliation as a process of reversing the dehumanization of both oppressed and oppressor.

During my time in Hebron this year, the team faced all sorts of Israeli soldiers and police officers. There were rude soldiers and soldiers who threatened us with arrest at the checkpoint which was the most direct route to visit Palestinian families on Tel Rumeida. These families face attacks on their homes by Israeli settlers, rock throwing by settler children as their children walk to school, destruction of their grapevines, almost house arrest because the way off their property is blocked by settlers or military personnel. There was the soldier who was unfailingly polite and would generally let team members through the checkpoint. One day he let pass a group of thirty visitors. As my team mate led them up the hill, I paused to call our office to let them know we'd been able to get through that day. The soldier walked over to me and said, "I've called them [the checkpoint at the top of the hill] to let them know you're coming. Be careful."  He knew we could face angry settlers who had been tossing stones and eggs at us if we walked too close to their settlement enclave.

We took a visiting group to observe a summer program with Palestinian youth, in which they were taught acting techniques to help them understand their feelings and work through them. These young people face assaults by Israeli settler children, curfews and closures when they might have to go over the roofs of the Old City of Hebron to get to and from school. They face x-ray machines, metal detectors, more searches of their schoolbags and more security gates on their way to and from their schools. After their program, we had an amazing conversation with them around how they see their situation and the work we do.  Some difficult listening and truth-telling.

Once upon a time, there was a Jewish community in Hebron. They were called Palestinian Jews. They and their Palestinian Muslim neighbors often owned businesses together. Mothers would nurse one another's children. The Jew would work on Friday, and the Muslim on Saturday. During the British mandate, in 1929, Arabs from outlying villages came into Hebron and killed 69 Jews. Their Palestinian Muslim neighbors saved many, hiding them in their homes and denying there were Jews there. Shortly after that, the British authorities evacuated the remaining Jews from Hebron. Some descendants of this pre-1929 Jewish community have stated publicly that the settlers now in Hebron do not represent them. Some have come to Hebron to meet the Palestinian Muslim descendants of those who saved their ancestors. The stories are being told, the experiences shared, connections made. Another tree of life.

Seeking out the humanity in those we perceive as Other or Enemy is some of the most important work we do, I believe. And in this work we all partake of and share the fruits of the tree of life.

In the Revelation to John, we read, "On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations."

May the fruits of these trees of life contribute to the healing of these nations.

22 November 2005

Prayers for Peace in the Middle East
The Church of the Advent, Baltimore MD

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