Our group has been five days in Israel/Palestine; the scene is more depressing than my last trip here five years ago. Against the inexorable tightening of the screws on the Palestinians– Occupied Palestine brings to mind Orwell’s image of a boot stamping on a human face, forever—one can perhaps balance the heightening of international awareness and protest, and a quickening in the long dormant Israeli Left. But there is room for surprises from unexpected directions.
Our day began with a bus trip out to Hebron—a pause on the side of the road to take in the separation Wall surrounding Bethlehem, severing it from its farmland and olive trees. A Presbyterian colleague told me she once believed the world would never put up with the Israelis turning Bethlehem into a walled ghetto, but the world has, with hardly a peep. The road to Hebron is a vivid demonstration that you don’t need to occupy a large amount of territory to maintain control: here a Palestinian refugee camp, from 1948—and outside it a small complex of Israeli gates and pillboxes and machine guns. Everyone who enters or exits must satisfy the IDF guards. Here another Arab town, surrounded by the Wall, cut off from its own olive trees, which now fall on the Israeli side. One suspects there are aquifer considerations too—the Wall is generally routed to steal water from the Arabs and give it to the settlers. Here’s another crossing where the Palestinians now have to go through a tunnel to reach the other half of their town.
Hebron of course, is a trip in itself—a place like no other in the world. The city center has been turned into a ghost town for the benefit of a few hundred settlers—guarded by an equal number of IDF. After viewing the tombs, we wander the deserted streets on a cold afternoon. The Palestinians have been removed from the city center. A European NGO witness and observation patrol drives slowly around. Eight year-old settler girls throw rocks at it. The settlers have painted a mural, which looks to me like an attempt to portray a heroic Baruch Goldstein, mowing down Muslim worshippers with a machine gun. My Israeli guide, from New York, isn’t sure that’s what the painting represents.
And then, a lift in the mood, from a most surprising source. On the drive back we stop at Gush Etzion, a hilltop settlement, to meet with Nachum Pechenick, the director of Eretz Shalom. Born in Hebron, he is a settler who wants, allegedly, to co-exist peacefully and meaningfully, with his Arab neighbors. Our group is pretty skeptical. We are tired, but turn up the hill. He meets us and we follow to a restaurant. Night has fallen, the sky is clear. You can see Jerusalem on the right, and before us, all the way to Tel Aviv and the coast. Pechenick is in jeans, big knitted kippa, big brown beard, about forty. We sit down for tea and coffee in a restaurant full of settlers and their kids, warm and convivial. The guy starts talking . His English is halting, but expressive. He draws you in. He is religious, charismatic—reminds me of the 60’s. He loves the land, has a mystical attachment to it, won’t leave. His own settlement is illegal, even by Israeli standards. But his group tries to make friends with Palestinians—cooperate on soil, water, joint playgrounds with their kids. (This last may be the most radical, un- Zionist, and potentially productive, concept.) Respect their property. He hopes to live, he tells us, as a religious settler Jew in a Palestinian state. Peace must be made on the ground, between neighbors. I try to maintain my realist stance, but am taken by it. The guy is, kind of obviously, full of love. When he says that peace won’t come by driving Jews from Judea and Samaria, it does make sense. (It won’t come from what the Israelis are doing now, that is clear enough.) But after forty-five minutes it becomes plain to me that Nachum Pechenick should have an American audience. I would wager a lot of young American Jews –feeling as trapped by the current situation as I do–would find him enormously appealing. Certainly more so than the fraudulent peace maneuvers of Dennis Ross and George Mitchell.
Pechenick tells us has nearly a thousand followers. Who knows? If he’s right about the thousand, he could, I believe, have ten thousand after a month of talking to college Hillels. And through that emerge as a meaningful part of our sense of what’s possible.
A bit of googling finds Pechenick last spring trying to organize a joint demo last spring with West Bank Palestinians against a fence expansion. He is, as he puts in his not quite colloquial English, “off the box.” Over to you, Tikkun. Here’s his website: www.eretzshalom.org.
