Lions' Den

Writer’s block can be as much a disease of too much as too little, especially when you are the Mission Intern in Palestine during the statehood bid. There is a traffic jam at the front of my mind; as narrow as the streets are here, you cannot unjam without someone going in reverse. So I am backing away from President Abbas’s triumphant return to Ramallah and what it means in the occupied territories so I can return to Hebron. Zoughbi took Gabby and me to the bus station that morning to meet with Usama, the citizen diplomacy coordinator. Citizen diplomacy, in a nutshell, is converting well-meaning tourists into viable activists in their countries of origin.

“John Daniel,” said Zoughbi, “you know what means Daniel? He is the one who fights with lions!” I smiled. “And you know what means Usama? Forget about Osama Bin Laden...”

“I already have—what does Usama mean?”

“It means lion; so, you are fighting with him, right?” I laughed but I got to thinking. My understanding of Daniel in the lions’ den has changed, now that I work with two lions (yes, we have another Usama at Wi’am): it was the Babylonian occupiers who penned the lions. Perhaps Daniel joined the lions in solidarity or the lions were not savage, as they were billed. I’m sure Daniel’s family was really worried, though, after hearing about lions on the news...

Of course, Daniel does not mean “fights with lions”; it means “God is my judge”.

Usama narrated our journey across the West Bank. Bethlehem is area A, under the Palestinian Authority, but we had to take an Israeli by-pass road through area C. To review, area C is under the complete control of the neo-Israel state, so people from places like Walajah cannot build houses or dig wells without having them demolished. This is also where most illegal settler development takes place but I will leave that topic for a post about the protest in Walaja. What I want you to picture is the sublime beauty and simultaneous emptiness of area C. Confined in Bethlehem, people must build vertically, stacking family units like legos on top of their relatives. The landscape between checkpoints is rippled with rocky hills so that, if it would just rain more and more trees grew, it would look just like Kentucky. Instead, the hills were studded with shrubs, grasses and the occasional field of crops. Oh, and the settler shopping-center (We didn’t visit)

The bus dropped us on a traffic island in Hebron, next to a pedestrians-only street. Hebron is the largest Palestinian urban center in the West Bank*. The whole place was teeming with people and smelled of falafel and hubz~ I wanted to eat the entire contents of that street*. Instead, we burrowed South into the ‘old city’ with our pod of British students. I took many pictures from my hip that day. What I adored most and wanted to capture was the sense of passage, as through a tunnel. Many times, we literally did pass under an arch into the dark space beneath solid buildings while at other times the space between buildings was little more than a fissure. Coming from the ‘New World’, there is something I cannot quite ingest about stone edifices that are over a thousand years old but used normally. It is the same in the monolithic storefront by King David’s well, where you can enter a store built before the inquisition and buy an iPod shuffle. Yet in Hebron there is a sense of being submerged, as if diving along a reef. The colors support the metaphor: jewelry, candies, handmade dresses and all manner of dazzling wares line the narrows of the Hebron market.

Unfortunately, a wire mesh is all that shelters it from trash, feces, urine, and insults. About four-hundred settlers injected themselves into the old-city and began waging psychological warfare. Internationals are not allowed to see, of course. A solid, metal gate sets the settler section of the old city apart and hides their streets from view; the soldier in the adjacent tower warned us not to take any pictures. Evil finds ways to blur its outline. It’s like an infestation and I cannot help but notice the irony: Nazi anti-Semitic posters featured rats with the Star of David on their haunches and here are these people, throwing shit and scurrying back into their holes. That does not seem like the conscientious Jewish lady who vaccinated me in New York or my colleague from student government. Race cannot diminish anyone’s humanity but a racist heart makes people sub-human the more they dehumanize others. Behavior, not blood, makes someone a rat.

Only a starving lion wants to eat a rat. So the rats starve the lions? ...I don’t get it...

Abraham’s tomb is at the end of the Hebron market place, beyond its own small check-point. The Church over the tomb became a mosque, then a church, then a mosque again before the occupation turned more than half of it into a Synagogue. It’s a form of collective punishment: rather than turn it entirely to Synagogue, they make Muslims who worship there remember that more than half of it is off-limits. In fact, tourists of all different shades are allowed into the Synagogue, so long as they are not Arab—even Arab Christians, like my co-worker. That’s racist. Just racist.

So, I lived up to my name and sat with Usama and the Brits while Gabby (who is Muslim) snuck into the Synagogue (by pretending to be Chicana—sock it to them!) We had mint tea with some shop-keepers and relaxed away from the sun, trading stories. On the way out, Usama took us up a narrow set of stairs, up onto a roof-top for a geography lesson. The day before, he did the same thing from a housetop in the refugee camp that overlooks the apartheid wall. There [in greater Bethlehem], the ‘dangerous’ lion Usama reflected on the occupation and how it had affected his life. The house where he spend childhood, his grandparent’s farm and the fields he grew-up playing in were engulfed when the wall was erected.

“Are you looking forward to a two state solution?” one of our tourists asked him.

“I hoped for a one-state solution... where we could all be equal citizens and co-exist but...”

So savage, huh? The guy who told the Israeli guard to “have a nice day”? Maybe not savage but definitely fierce for going in there, time after time~ I want to fight with the lions. Mission with.

Daniel: God is my judge. Elijah: My God is the Lord. A young man named Elijah, appropriately, prophesied over me about a year ago. He told me to take care of the little things, that God was going to do something great that would blow my mind. Now, I am in Palestine and still learning, still growing. I have a long way to go, yet. Elijah also told me that there was meaning in names and to pay attention to that. I always considered my name rather simple and arbitrary, something to distinguish me from my father and grandfather.

But I would not be here if God were not my judge. Do you know why?

John: God is gracious. My judge is gracious.

*Later, I had the best falafel sandwich ever for only 3 shekels. WIN. 

*Nablus is actually the largest, though Hebron is larger than Bethlehem [10/30/2017]