Peacemaking

Normalement

Once I was enamored of the television series "A Year in Provence", in which a British couple retired to a dilapidated farm to restore it and to live a life of leisure.  Many queries to locals were met with the response "Normalement".  I've spent a bit of time in Provence in a lovely farmhouse converted into a bed and breakfast.  One morning I asked the owner what the weather might be like.  The mistral had been blowing some days, and it was a cooler-than-usual spring.  He replied, "Normalement"  Of course, I nearly laughed my head off.  Maybe I put my head down on the breakfast table in delightful exasperation.

"Normalement" is a word for which there is no precise translation.
"Whatever."
"Inshallah (God willing)."
"In the normal course of events."
So here I am back in Hebron.  I arrived just over a week ago.

We've visited a farmer and his family in the Beqa'a Valley, where we were induced to pick tomatoes.  Their home on the hill is the third on the site, the first two having been demolished by the Israeli military because they were too close to the Israeli settler bypass road.  The Israeli settlers and the military have finally stopped troubling the family so the mother can plant a flower garden.  Seven years ago I stood on the roof of their demolished house and watched as the Israeli military pulled up the irrigation lines across the road on the father's land.  Today the whole family was out harvesting, sorting, and packing tomatoes for the market.  We drank tea and munched tiny sweet cucumbers under the olive tree at the edge of the field.  I must admit I do not pick tomatoes well when the plants are not staked up.  When it was time to come back to Hebron, we hailed a shared taxi, one with a permit to travel on this Israeli-only bypass road, and got back to Navi Yunis, one of two ways open into Hebron.  There we got another shared taxi to the Old City.

As we were walking through the tunnels, a neighbor called to report that  Israeli soldiers were invading our far neighbor's home.  The building on Shuhada Street in which they live is a series of homes similar to but wider than the row houses of Baltimore, Maryland. Shuhada Street is closed to Palestinians except for a short stretch near the Ibrahimi Mosque down and across which they are permitted to walk.  So our neighbors who live in the block near us are forced to enter their homes from the back.  Our far neighbor walks down the Souk Shaheen, turns into an alley and through the door of a vacant house, up an open concrete stairwell to a roof, and up two ladders to the highest roof where the door to their home is located.  When we got there, the door was locked.  The soldiers were inside.  We called over the edge of the roof to the family and learned they had been locked into one room.  The soldiers soon left, after letting the family out of the locked room, and proceeded to search the surrounding rooftops.  We stuck with them as came down the ladders and steps and headed towards the next family's home.  I tried to follow them in, but the squad leader slammed and bolted the door on me.  Some of the team monitored the situation from there and I and another teammate headed back to our apartment where we could follow the soldiers' progress from our patio and our roof as they came out of the neighbors' and went across the roofs.

A couple of days ago, another neighbor told us Israeli soldiers had invaded our neighborhood mosque, called the Glassblowers' Mosque.  We live in the old Artisans' Quarter, home to metal workers, potters, and glassblowers in the past.  When we got there, the soldiers were outside checking the id's of the Palestinian men nearby.  When I asked the squad leader how he might feel if soldiers went into his synagogue, I got no reply.  When the soldiers had left, the mosque's caretaker invited us in so he could describe the damage, which, thankfully, was minimal. 

Three days ago, two of us were heading out of the Bab-iBaladiya to the outdoor fruit and vegetable market and nearly walked into a procession of Hebron imams protesting the Pope's speech last week in Regensburg.  They carried banners and copies of the Qu'ran held high.  We followed them through the Old City to the gate leading to the Ibrahimi Mosque, where things came to a halt.  Israeli military and border police closed the old gate for a time and caught a group of the marchers and others in-between the gate and turnstiles and metal detectors.  I was moving around working to get out of the Old City and around to the mosque from another direction, but the way at the foot of the street to the mosque was blocked.  The men did get through the gate and into the mosque for noon prayers.

We met them later, coming back the other way.  Some of them nodded to us.  Some spoke to us.

Today is the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, and of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting, commemorating the giving of the Qu'ran.  The Ibrahimi Mosque will be closed to the Muslim community for six days over the next month, so the Jewish community can fully use the sacred space for their Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) and Succot liturgies.  There will be other days when the Muslim community will have full access, but apparently not during these early days of Ramadan.  For two days that part of Hebron under Israeli security control will be under curfew.  We will go out.

These will likely be challenging and trying days for all the children of Abraham in Hebron.  May all of us remember Abraham's hospitality to the messengers who came to him at Mamre nearby, and look for that which is of God in those whom we encounter in these holy days ahead.

Yes, I'm back in Hebron, thanks be to God.  Ask me about what may be coming.

"Normalement."

Hebron
24 September 2006

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