ISRAEL & PALESTINE
Hoyt, Robert G.
ISRAEL & PALESTI N E An unequal struggle Robert G. Hoyt O n a recent (November) visit to Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Hebron, Tiberias, Ramallah, and other points in Israel and the West...
...so you decide to build the house anyway...
...In the peace process negotiations, the Palestinian Authority holds at best a pair of treys and a couple of jacks...
...Damifino...
...Some others that I found more significant: 9 Greenery...
...When it does happen and the timing is known, volunteers from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) may arrive to protest by lying in front of the bulldozers...
...I'd love to go back in another thirty years and find greenery flourishing everywhere, along with universal peace and harmony...
...The Arab countries are not at the table...
...Our most optimistic source was our Jordanian guru, a cultivated and convincing cosmopolite...
...We were free to make our own contacts with Israeli sources...
...9 The maps...
...They're everywhere on the West Bank, or so it seemed, recognizable for their unvarying, unadorned, uninspired architecture...
...For me it was not a wholly edifying experience, because of new evidence that while my left leg, along with the rest of me, is a mere seventy-seven years old, my right leg is ninety-four and aging fast...
...J~i~en Mohmann TheologyToday Single Issues: $7 Annual Subscriptions (4 issues): $24 Send check or money order to: Theology Today, RO...
...Regardless of provocations, of which there have been plenty, that's not forgivable...
...Bethlehem is one big construction site, in preparation for the millennial tourists...
...But Arab use of terrorism isn't news to anyone who's read the American press over the past half-century...
...Dennis Ross, special U.S...
...But one can still believe they're making a historic mistake...
...We saw ongoing construction work in some of the latter...
...It wasn't a tent city, like the one I visited, nervously, thirty years ago, but the buildings were jammed together and decrepit, the streets between them unpaved and dusty...
...9 Refugees (2...
...Box 29, Princeton, NJ 08542 609-497-7714 9 Email: theology.today@ptsem.edu 9 www.ptsem.edu/read/tt/index,htm Commonweal | 3 January 14, 2000...
...Could be true, but I didn't think they proved their case...
...but, I have to confess, I didn't...
...But, for personal and political reasons, I think that's about as likely as a reversal of the aging process in my right leg...
...9 Access...
...and I could indeed write a book, but only by making unashamed use of all the handouts from various sources that I picked up or were thrust upon me...
...A number of our interlocutors, maybe most of them, reported growing Arab anger not only toward Ehud Barak (he's not Benjamin Netanyahu, but neither is he Yitzhak Rabin) but also toward Yasser Arafat, who's seen as all too willing to give away the store to the Israelis and as anything but democratic in his governance of the Palestinian Authority...
...We toured a camp, some of whose resident families have lived there for decades...
...It might even be a pretty good book, but partisan: All the handouts were pro-Palestinian...
...There's a lot of it in West Jerusalem and other areas where Israeli Jews are dominant, not much in areas controlled or populated by Palestinians...
...demanding shekels...
...We weren't told, but I'd be willing to bet half the farm that very different advice comes from guides with Palestinian ties...
...9 The U.S...
...It was slummy and depressing...
...A reporter for Ha'aretz, Israel's leading daily, who writes solely and sympathetically about the Palestinians, says she gets almost no feedback from her readers, no matter what she writes...
...Fortunately, the engineer in our party, who is six-feetthreeinches and somatically well endowed, hove into sight, and the kids gave up...
...The holier the hillier--or so I felt--after our first-day walking-walking-walking tour of the Old City, site of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Via Dolorosa, the Western Wall, and the Dome of the Rock, among other sacred sites...
...the militants among the latter, he said, often give Christians a bad time...
...It's costly if you get it, but in most cases it doesn't come, doesn't come, doesn't come...
...Prepaid orders only...
...9 Settlements...
...But the kids seemed healthy...
...That's a minor matter...
...If you're desperate enough and have the means, you may choose to rebuild on the site, and the scenario may be repeated...
...9 The future...
...I was the group laggard...
...My bias suffered a switch during my first visit to the Middle East thirty (yes, thirty) years ago...
...why Palestinians reject Israel's action as unjust and contrary to the law of nations...
...One can understand why today's Israeli governments don't want to help give birth to a unified, potentially prosperous Arab state Commonweal | 2 January 14, 2000 next to Israel's borders...
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...You've probably read or heard about the squabbles over the building of a mosque close to the Church of the Annunciation...
...and why the status of East Jerusalem will be a major sticking point in the "final negotiations," if they ever get final...
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...It has nothing to do with tastes in landscaping, and everything to do with who controls the water...
...And so also most of my companions on the tour: a writer from Sojourners magazine, a TV reporter/producer from PBS's "Religion and Ethics Newsweekly," an editor of the Christian Century, complete with spouse, a reporter from the Voice of America, an ArabAmerican retiree from the U.S...
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...An Arab living in, say, Ramallah, who wants to go to Jerusalem to worship in the al-Aksa Mosque, Islam's third-holiest site, or to visit his ailing mother, needs a permit...
...role...
...You request a permit to build a house...
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...They are dragged away, and the demolition proceeds...
...envoy to the Mideast, arriving in Israel during our stay, declined to take a position in the then-current impasse between the two sides over whether Israel alone or the two sides together should determine the size and placement of the areas to be handed over by Israel in its next redeployment...
...A most congenial group...
...It would have been more intense if our plates had been white or green, denoting residence in Gaza or the West Bank...
...Both Christian and Muslim sources said the flare-up in Nazareth was an aberration, that the two groups get along famously, and that the Israeli authorities, acting on the ancient Roman strategy, divide et impera, deliberately inflamed the situation...
...That may happen in two weeks or not for two years...
...State Department, and a former engineer who spends his retirement organizing in Chicago-area churches on behalf of a shared Jerusalem...
...But later, as I trudged toward the entrance, a group of older boys, ten to thirteen, gathered around me insistently (and angrily...
...The Catholic pastor in Bir Zeit said the dominant mood among his people is not revolutionary fervor but apathy and disillusionment, accounting for the dwindling number of Christians in the Holy Land, where they're already a tiny minority...
...Our big yellow GMC van, owned and operated by an Arab with Israeli citizenship, had yellow license plates, so that we breezed through most checkpoints...
...Robert G. Hoyt is Commonweal's senior writer...
...It would be a lot more so if, per impossibile, the Palestinian Authority got anything like the billions of U.S...
...It's a slingless David against a wealthy and well-armed Goliath...
...I was reminded of Lord of the Flies...
...If you stay a month, you may be able to do an article...
...Early in December, Barak announced a moratorium on new construction in existing settlements, citing the Palestinian protests that became familiar to us...
...But, in the public mind, particularly in the United States, revisionist history hasn't caught up with the realities of the past...
...9 Housing d e m o l i t i o n s . You're a Palestinian holding proper title to a piece of land in East Jerusalem...
...That is a principal (not the only) reason why Israel annexed it from Jordan, along with all of East Jerusalem, after the 1967 war...
...We were told that tour groups led by Israeli guides are warned that it's not safe to stay in Palestinian-controlled areas (not so, in our collective experience...
...It is not cynical but realistic to conclude that a major factor in the struggle for control over Jerusalem and other hallowed places is revenue from tourism, in dollars, euros, pounds, francs, deutschemarks, Commonweal | | January 14, 2000 etc...
...at best, they're kibitzers...
...Israel's hand makes up a royal flush...
...9 Refugees...
...In my eyes, and those of partisans on all sides---Jews, Muslims, Christians, in all their varieties--the Old City is Jerusalem...
...So now you know where I'm coming from, and some of you may wish to stop reading...
...he cited polls showing strong majorities among both peoples favoring continuation of the peace process, and he detects a gradual shift in Israeli public opinion toward a more benign view of Palestinian aspirations...
...Respected Israeli historians, along with other scholars, have deconstructed the myth that all the Arabs who left their homes in what is now Israel left voluntarily in the 1948 war, urged on by broadcasts from Arab capitals...
...Israeli army units committed atrocities and forced expulsions in Arab villages, and reports of these were purposefully used to spread terror among Arabs elsewhere...
...An American journalist long resident in the region couldn't address the Nazareth to-do but cast large doubt on the happy picture of peaceful ecumenical relations between Christians and Muslims...
...Most of us talked mostly or exclusively with Palestinian sources: among others, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, a representative of the Latin patriarchate, a Lutheran bishop, the minister for tourism of the Palestine Authority (PA), the editor of the largest Arabiclanguage daily in the region (based in Nazareth), the pastor of a Catholic parish in Bir Zeit, an Israeli-Arab member of the Knesset, a Jordanian author/journalist often seen on network news shows in the United States...
...Well, yes...
...Out of compassion for my leg I opted out of part of the tour, and sat by the side of the road, where children five to seven years old gathered to stare at me (maybe it's the beard) and to play with me...
...foreign aid annually transferred to Tel Aviv...
...Well, I arrived on a Saturday and left on the following Saturday (starting at 2:30 A.M...
...Predictably, our sources did not dwell upon, or mention, the murderous tactics used by irredentist Palestinians against their purported oppressors, mostly civilians, some of them babies, for the militarily unachievable, politically stupid, morally unjustified aim of driving the Israelis into the Mediterranean...
...ISRAEL & PALESTI N E An unequal struggle Robert G. Hoyt O n a recent (November) visit to Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Hebron, Tiberias, Ramallah, and other points in Israel and the West Bank, I heard it said that a reporter who spends a week on such a tour can write a book on his return...
...You receive a notice saying that the house is illegal and is slated for demolition...
...To complete this acknowledgment I will mention that I was pro-Israel during and after the 1948 conflict, known to Israelis as the War of Independence, to Palestinians as the Disaster, and also during and after the Six-Day War of 1967...
...A year, and you get a major case of writer's block...
...two young women in our group walked anywhere they liked, night or day, feeling secure), and/or that accommodations are inferior (true, they're not posh, but our hotel, the Meridian, was dean, comfortable, and well-run (free plug...
...when we were stopped the interrogation was brief...
...Our sources claimed that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak has betrayed campaign promises by stopping construction on only a few nascent settlements, little more than camps, while encouraging continued expansion of established settlements...
...That's why Israeli maps of the future Palestine show an area dotted with settlements connected by bypass roads, and demonstrate why the "concessions" made to the Palestinians constitute what are essentially Bantustans, carefully segregated one from another...
...Damifanybodynoes...
...Building a governable nation and a viable economy on such a base asks miracles...
...There were no such broadcasts...
...That sounds like an admirably even-handed position for an honest broker...
...she thinks Israelis are ill-informed about and mostly indifferent to the situation of their cousins...
...So what's going to happen...
...They're hard to get...
...So was the sponsor of the tour, the American Committee on Jerusalem, founded and run by Arab-Americans, their answer to the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee...
...Here are some of my 1999 observations: The Holy Land is a hilly land...
...9 Nazareth...
...Too much complexity, too many contradictions...
...I sensed less passion, less wild dreaming, among the Arabs, somewhat more fairness in the Israeli press...
...People ask me if I think things have changed greatly over the past three decades...
...It was a moving and at times enraging experience...
...A Millennial Challenge to Theology and Church Timely and critical reflections on childhood in the Christian tradition "Every child is a chance for the coming reign of peace and the decrease of violence and power...
Vol. 127 • January 2000 • No. 1
