What I Saw In The Holy Land, 2
I promised a post about the Israeli security wall or fence (which depends upon where you are), so here goes. I'm not going to pretend to do a comprehensive overview of the pros and cons. If you need to understand all the political implications of the wall, try this old article from Israel's most read paper (it's vehemently anti-wall, but you'll be able to discern the issues). Instead I'm just going to pass along what all the Palestinian Christians I spoke with last week had to say about it, together with my own impressions.
Above left is what you see on the approach to Bethlehem. Not exactly Christmas card material, eh? In full disclosure, this is actually a photo of the wall in another city as armed guards won’t let you take pictures at the Bethlehem checkpoint, but this is pretty much what it looks like. The only difference is that the road at the Bethlehem checkpoint is paved and across the street is a big parking lot for tour buses.
Going from Israeli-controlled territory to Palestinian territory isn’t much of a problem. In a big tour such as ours, the impossibly young guards (including sometimes petite women with machine guns as big as they are slung casually behind their backs) smile and flag you through, wishing you a nice day. It’s coming back that’s another matter. While two of the three buses on our tour were waved right through, our bus was selected for the full security treatment. We had to step off the bus, which went through its own inspection, while we walked some 100 yards or so into a forbidding looking security complex. Basically it’s a maze of the kind you see in airports when the crowds are large, except the gates are permanent. After you snake through the long maze, you’re stopped at an electronically controlled revolving door composed of metal bars and bulletproof glass that lets people through one at a time. Once you pass the revolving door, you’re by yourself in a glass security booth that isolates you until they buzz you through to passport control. (Anyone happen to recall the scene from Episode 1 of Star Wars where Obe Wan has to wait for some kind of timer to let him into the room where he can confront Darth Maul? Like that.) My sympathies lie more with the Israelis than with the Palestinians on this matter, but when you go through it, it can’t be denied the experience is creepy. And time-consuming. If you had to do it day in and day out in order to get downtown to your job, or the market, or the doctor, I think you’d indeed find it humiliating and onerous.
What do people themselves say about the wall? Mind you, I spoke with no Jews –only Arab Christians of varying confessions. But they uniformly hate the wall because it’s destroying them. The Christians are not interested in the political question between the Arabs & the Jews. Most Palestinians see the wall not as a security measure, but as Israel’s effort to mark its permanent territory. (And the facts, it must be admitted, support this view. The wall isn’t built along the so-called “green line” dividing the political map, but in many instances spills into territory in control of the Palestinian Authority.) Below you see the tomb of Rachel, which is in Bethlehem, and the reason you can't go in it any longer.
What the Christians object to is that the wall has exacerbated the hatred Muslims feel for Israel, has destroyed their livelihoods, and has left Christians trapped in what is now Hamas-controlled territory with no protection. As one of our guides put it, “we are the salad in the sandwich.” That is, he elaborated, Christians in the Holy Land are like a limp piece of lettuce squeezed between the bread and the falafel.
The wall is not a simple border that means you can only cross from one side of the city to the other through checkpoints. It in many cases surrounds entire cities, isolating them from the rest of the world. The wall in many instances cuts Palestinians off from their own lands: shepherds from their grazing fields, olive farmers from their orchards. And everyone from jobs in the bigger cities (there’s no industry in Bethlehem except tourism, which until recently had all but disappeared). Bethlehem, for example, has something like a 70% unemployment rate, even though its population is young and able to work.
Going from Israeli-controlled territory to Palestinian territory isn’t much of a problem. In a big tour such as ours, the impossibly young guards (including sometimes petite women with machine guns as big as they are slung casually behind their backs) smile and flag you through, wishing you a nice day. It’s coming back that’s another matter. While two of the three buses on our tour were waved right through, our bus was selected for the full security treatment. We had to step off the bus, which went through its own inspection, while we walked some 100 yards or so into a forbidding looking security complex. Basically it’s a maze of the kind you see in airports when the crowds are large, except the gates are permanent. After you snake through the long maze, you’re stopped at an electronically controlled revolving door composed of metal bars and bulletproof glass that lets people through one at a time. Once you pass the revolving door, you’re by yourself in a glass security booth that isolates you until they buzz you through to passport control. (Anyone happen to recall the scene from Episode 1 of Star Wars where Obe Wan has to wait for some kind of timer to let him into the room where he can confront Darth Maul? Like that.) My sympathies lie more with the Israelis than with the Palestinians on this matter, but when you go through it, it can’t be denied the experience is creepy. And time-consuming. If you had to do it day in and day out in order to get downtown to your job, or the market, or the doctor, I think you’d indeed find it humiliating and onerous.
What do people themselves say about the wall? Mind you, I spoke with no Jews –only Arab Christians of varying confessions. But they uniformly hate the wall because it’s destroying them. The Christians are not interested in the political question between the Arabs & the Jews. Most Palestinians see the wall not as a security measure, but as Israel’s effort to mark its permanent territory. (And the facts, it must be admitted, support this view. The wall isn’t built along the so-called “green line” dividing the political map, but in many instances spills into territory in control of the Palestinian Authority.) Below you see the tomb of Rachel, which is in Bethlehem, and the reason you can't go in it any longer.
What the Christians object to is that the wall has exacerbated the hatred Muslims feel for Israel, has destroyed their livelihoods, and has left Christians trapped in what is now Hamas-controlled territory with no protection. As one of our guides put it, “we are the salad in the sandwich.” That is, he elaborated, Christians in the Holy Land are like a limp piece of lettuce squeezed between the bread and the falafel.The wall is not a simple border that means you can only cross from one side of the city to the other through checkpoints. It in many cases surrounds entire cities, isolating them from the rest of the world. The wall in many instances cuts Palestinians off from their own lands: shepherds from their grazing fields, olive farmers from their orchards. And everyone from jobs in the bigger cities (there’s no industry in Bethlehem except tourism, which until recently had all but disappeared). Bethlehem, for example, has something like a 70% unemployment rate, even though its population is young and able to work.
Between the beginning of the intifada in 2000 and the erection of the wall, the Christians of the Holy Land have in essence been trapped behind the wall with a hostile majority –and the Israelis literally don’t see what happens behind the wall. When I defended the wall to him, one guide responded, “How can they guarantee security for themselves and not for anyone else?” It would be as if California built a wall around the Watts neighborhood and then confined its police presence to controlling people’s coming and goings, but left the gangs to run things behind the wall. The result is that 40% of Christians have fled the country in the past four years, reducing them to a mere 1.5% of the population.
Let me pause to say a word for the other side. The Christians may hate the wall, but in some ways they benefit from the stability the wall has created. Fr. John Solana, LC, the Vatican diplomat who runs Notre Dame de Jerusalem where we were staying, gave us a conference about his work and what the Holy See hopes to accomplish in the Holy Land in the near term. He said that prior to the 2000 intifada, Notre Dame was 100% booked some 18 months-2 years in advance. “I can bring out the enrollment books and show you,” he said. “But from the moment the intifada broke out, I can show you a day where we were 100% booked, and the next day 50% booked, and the next day had 0 pilgrims and received zero pilgrims –I am not speaking figuratively—zero pilgrims—for more than a year. That made the plight of Christians in the Holy Land particularly dire, since they work in the travel industry. It may have been implemented unjustly, but it can’t be denied (this is my conclusion, not Fr. John’s) that the wall has had the effect of making the city safe, and pilgrims have begun to return –a great hope for struggling Christians.
