this blog post is uncomfortable: uncomfortable to think through, uncomfortable to post, uncomfotable to read. but it is true, or one piece of truth, and I need to write it, and you need to read it.
About a week and a half ago a family of Jewish settlers were found stabbed to death in their home in the West Bank. I don't know how much press this has recieved in the US, but I think pretty much everyone in Israel and Palestine has heard about it. The family was from the West Bank settlement of Itamar, which is a Jewish settlement built illegally on Palestinian land. The people killed were a couple and three children. It is horrible; I don't even know how to wrap my mind around the fact that an entire family here is dead, that there are grandparents who lost grandchildren, that someone's best friend has been buried... It is a tragedy, plain and simple, and the community suffering now has my prayers and sympathy.
And yet this is not the whole story. Let me tell you another piece of this story, a bit of truth that is not ever going to be picked up by the Israeli news, that is never going to be reported in the New York Times or the Washington Post.
Three of my friends went back to Palestine over free travel. While I was hanging out on a Turkish beach earlier this week, they went back to Beit Sahour, Bethlehem, and Hebron. When they traveled to Hebron, they sat and drank tea with a Muslim shopkeeper and his son and talked for a while.
Here is where things get uncomfortable for me: One of my friends told me she asked to use the son's cell phone, and when Muhammad handed the phone to her it had a picture of a little boy on the screen. She asked who it was, and he told her it was his nephew. And he asked, did you hear? About what, she asked, and he told her that after the murders in Itamar, his nephew was walking alone at night and never came home. They found his body in a cistern, later.
He was killed; retaliation, an eye for an eye. He was seven years old.
Two nights ago I was sitting in the lounge of the hostel I'm staying at, writing in my journal about my experiences during the past week. A man I didn't know walked past and asked me what I was writing about, and when I told him just about my experience here, he said, oh, let me tell you about mine. It's sick. I didn't understand what he meant and asked him to explain himself, so he sat down and we ended up talking for over an hour. He is a Palestinian who works here at the hostel, and this is how he explained what he meant:
People here are sick. People on both sides; Israelis, Palestinians. It is sick what they do to each other.
It breaks my heart. There is no moral high ground here. Each side has wounded each other and said the other side started it. It is like they want to wound each other the same amount, as if to make it fair. But how to you judge the amount of pain one human inflicts on another?
I've heard from some of my news-following friends here that Sarah Palin is visiting Jerusalem and that she has been criticizing the current US administration for not supporting Israel enough. I just want to ask you, my readers living in the US, to consider the fact that there is pain on both sides of the wall. There are injustices perpetrated from people on both sides to those on the other - just realize that sometimes it is harder to see the humanity of the people whose voices aren't picked up by global media.
That's why I needed to write about the little Palestinian boy. No one is going to read about his death, no one will remember him. His death may likely serve as a catalyst for yet more violence, and the world will never know it -
and so I am serving now as a witness, a witness to the truth that there is pain everywhere, death on both sides.
God,
I pray that you will be showing people everywhere that human life is precious, that people are created to be like you, made in the image of you. Show us how to see, open our eyes.
Amen.
