Day 1—October 12-13
Boston, Frankfurt, and Tel Aviv
Our group left Boston's Logan Airport on a Lufthansa Airlines flight in the late afternoon of October 12, arriving at the Frankfurt airport in Germany sometime after 5:00 am on October 13. We had to wait until 6:00 am for the security gate of our connecting flight's terminal to open for passengers. The security check was very thorough—much more so than at American airports. I was asked to take off my shoes, open my carry-on bag, and turn on my laptop. The guard said the extra precaution was only for that particular terminal, which had flights going to Israel and the United States. The group then had a long wait before boarding our flight, which was scheduled to leave around 10:30 am, but didn't actually take off until an hour or so later.
We finally arrived at Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv in mid-afternoon, and after a long wait in the immigration lines, had little trouble obtaining our entry visas when our group leader, Don McInnes, assured an immigration official that we had come to Israel as nothing more than tourists. When questioned about the timing of the trip, Don replied that since many in the group were elderly, we had been reluctant to postpone the trip any further. We had been warned not to mention anything about meetings with Palestinians or peace activists, and had been prepared to emphasize the group's church affiliation had we aroused suspicion. Even though UUs generally have little familiarity with crosses, many of the women in the group were prominently displaying crosses on necklaces that had been purchased for the occasion, just in case our story needed a boost! Jeannette wore a gorgeous cross she'd inherited from her devoutly Roman Catholic mother.
We were met by our driver, Issa, carrying a sign reading “Holy Land Trust, Don McInnes” in reference to the organization that arranged our West Bank travels. Issa would be our driver for much of the next 10 days, and we all piled into his roomy white van for the 45-minute drive to St. George’s Episcopal Cathedral Pilgrim Guest House in East Jerusalem. Along the way, he pointed out a couple of abandoned and destroyed Palestinian villages from which the inhabitants had fled in 1948. Issa has four citizenships—Israeli, Jordanian, El Salvadoran, and Palestinian--enabling him to move with relative ease between and within Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Related photos
We met up with our guide, Ramzi, at St. George’s Guest House. Ramzi is a Palestinian and licensed tour guide from Bethlehem who had not had work in over a year due to the collapse of the tourism industry and the Israeli-imposed closures and travel restrictions for Palestinians. Although he was able to travel regularly to Jerusalem as a tour guide in the past, he was now there illegally, having snuck across earlier in the day from his West Bank home. He was there at great personal risk, both physical and legal, but felt he needed to take the chance to earn some money. As a Palestinian without Israeli citizenship, he is no longer allowed to enter Israel, including East Jerusalem, which the Israelis unilaterally (and illegally) annexed in 1980, without a special permit. Furthermore, he is similarly barred from traveling even to other Palestinian West Bank towns. The Israeli government has also banned its own citizens from many Palestinian areas in the West Bank.
We had dinner at St. George’s with two guests, George and Nomi—British immigrants living in Jerusalem who are friends of relatives of one of our group, Henry Cutter. George and Nomi were extremely articulate and well informed, and were both to some degree involved in Israeli peace activities. They were both quite pessimistic about the possibilities for peace at any time in the foreseeable future, as was Ramzi. George and Nomi professed an intense dislike of Ariel Sharon and his policies, and did not believe that he had any interest in making peace with the Palestinians; however, they seemed somewhat suspicious of the international community’s growing criticism of Israel. George asked if it was our opinion that Jews are exploiting the Holocaust, and further, if we thought European criticism of Israel might be driven by a desire to assuage Christian guilt. In other words, if the Jews were seen as systematically perpetrating human rights violations themselves, then their own mistreatment at the hands of European Christians might not seem so very bad in hindsight.
Both George and Nomi defended Israel as a liberal, open democracy, and Israeli law as treating its Jewish and Arab citizens equally, irrespective of widespread discriminatory practices. They acknowledged, however (at our prompting), that the Law of Return, giving Jews anywhere in the world the right to live in Israel while denying Palestinians the right to return to their own homes, was at least one glaring exception.
Ramzi said that he personally would accept a one-state solution—even if that state is called “Israel”—as long as he is granted full and equal rights as a citizen of the state. He also mentioned that, as a Christian, he believes his religion makes participation in suicide bombings out of the question, noting that none of the suicide bombers to date has been Christian. When George or Nomi mentioned the shocking incident where two Israeli soldiers were beaten to death by a Palestinian mob after they had "taken a wrong turn" and gotten lost in a West Bank city, Ramzi said that, although it was a gruesome event, he and many other Palestinians believe that the soldiers had not gotten lost at all, but were undercover "special forces" soldiers which Israel often sends into Palestinian cities to help carry out surveillance, arrests, and assassinations.
The group found the conversation exceptionally interesting, but as George and Nomi had to get up for work the next day and we had been up since leaving Boston the day before, we reluctantly said our goodbyes and called it quits for the evening. Related photos