A Few Moments on the Other Side of the Wall
by Michaël Séguin, Canada
I know that from Montreal, Ashkelon, Toronto, Tel Aviv, Victoria, or Haifa the separation wall and the ubiquitous military checkpoints designed to control the movements of Palestinians can seem strange, distant, and perhaps justified, given Israel’s security concerns. In fact, according to the United Nations, there are some 549 obstacles to movement in the West Bank, from checkpoints and road blocks to earth mounds and trenches. As I stand every day at these military checkpoints and watch average Palestinians queuing up—sometimes for hours—and see Israeli soldiers checking IDs, it gives me a very different perspective on the conflict. Listening to the stories of Palestinians, who feel abused and humiliated on their own land, I’ve faced the same challenge over and over again: how do I deal with my own feelings of helplessness and anger? How do I keep trying to understand both sides? How do I share this daily nightmare of the Palestinian people in a way that fosters peace instead of creating more evil?
For a moment, I would like to cross the wall with you, as I do every day, to make sure you see a bit of what is happening on both sides. Doing so is also a way to reflect on our ability, as Christians, to seek justice and resist evil, to stay awake while our brothers and sisters are suffering. To understand what’s going on in Palestine and Israel, I think we have many walls to cross—an adventure that is neither easy nor simple. To do so, we have to let go of many preconceived ideas.
Media Walls
The first wall we have to cross is the rhetoric we hear in the media every day. Too often our media reduce the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a battle between democracy and terrorism, justifying, at the same time, the Western “war against terrorism.” Information is a powerful tool because it creates in us a vision of reality, a way to feel things, and an ongoing narrative that is difficult to deconstruct, even on the ground.
September 11 is one of the ongoing narratives that is rooted today in our minds and hearts. Since then, many of us identify easily with the Israelis who have lost a loved one in terrible suicide attacks, condemning, at the same time, all Palestinians without trying to understand what it looks like to be born and to live under military occupation.
How different the situation would look to us if we didn’t use the media lens of terrorism. What if we saw the situation more as a struggle over land, with a Jewish state trying to sieze as much land as possible, from 1948 until now, in an ongoing settlement enterprise. Isn’t this type of land grab something that the Native peoples of this world know all too well?
Cultural Walls
There is another wall between Palestinians and Israelis that we, in the West, so often fail to consider: the cultural gap. Culture is much more than language, food, and music. It’s a whole way of living, believing, and seeing the world. Because of what we hear and see in our newspapers, it’s so easy to identify with a “Western” Israel that’s somehow “like us,” over against an “Arab” Palestine that’s not.
Grasping a totally different culture is not an easy task. It requires a lot of humility and a willingness to understand the other. Without letting go of our assumptions (for example, about the value of democracy, secularism, and development), how can we embrace the differences of Palestinian society—a cultural difference even bigger if we consider that this society is composed of Arabs, Gypsies, Bedouins, Samaritans, Africans, Circassians, Armenians, Uzbeks, and many other communities?
The cultural walls between Palestine and Israel (which is also composed of an incredible cultural diversity) are well embodied in the city of Jerusalem. To cross Road Number 1 from East to West Jerusalem means, for many, going into another world. It is, somehow, like instantly traveling from the Middle East to Europe.
Considering the situation in Palestine and Israel, I think we need to bear in mind all the prejudices that many people in the West have against the Arab world, prejudices that we have often unwillingly internalized. What would happen if we reviewed our relationships with Arabs and Muslims in Canada, forging a more cooperative, accepting environment, instead of our current environment of competition and duality? How would that impact our feelings about Palestine?
Religious Walls
Another important wall—that can also be an amazing bridge—is religion. To understand this conflict, I think we have to read the Bible with new eyes. As Christians, we grew up with the idea that historic Palestine is the promised land of Israel. We were “modeled” to believe that colonialism is normal and that the expulsion of the Canaanites by the Israelites under the leadership of Joshua was God’s will. How do we feel about colonialism today?
We also have to look differently at Islam and our Muslim brothers and sisters. What would happen if we understood Islam as a religion of peace; if we saw Christians, Jews, and Muslims as sons and daughters of Abraham, believing in and worshipping the same God? What would happen if we understood the election of the Jewish people as God’s call for peace among peoples; as if God had said, “I give you this land so that you can become an example of faith and love on it.”? What would happen if we saw this land as the holy mountain where the Lord wants to gather the whole of humanity in peace, right now (Isaiah 4: 1-9)?
From the Wall to the Narrow Gate
The separation barrier, the security fence (known to some as “the apartheid wall”) built to divide Israelis from Palestinians, is a physical symbol of the last wall to overcome if we want to understand what is going in this land. The separation barrier symbolizes the wall of fear that generates hatred.
On the Israeli side, the memory of regular suicide attacks on Jerusalem buses just four years ago is still fresh. So is the almost daily sound of sirens warning the inhabitants of Sderot against Qassam rockets. These are both the cause of great trauma on the Israeli side. On the Palestinian side, checkpoints, the expansion of settlements and the expropriation of arable lands, targeted assassinations, prisoners put in jail without trial, night incursions by the Israeli army into Palestinian cities, house demolitions, and tanks and gunship helicopters firing missiles at civilians are all sources of fear and hatred. They constitute the tools of a terrible matrix of control that render the life of Palestinians practically unlivable. It’s one of the main reasons why 90 percent of Palestinian Christians have left Palestine, a number that’s increasing every day.
Can things change for the better in this region? I think there is no other way than searching together the “narrow gate” (Luke 13:24) of reconciliation and encounter, the gate that many courageous Palestinians, Israelis, and internationals choose to engage in every day through many peace organizations. Together, they find the courage to meet one another, even if that implies being seen as a “betrayer” by their own community. In time, let’s hope that more people will sneak in through these narrow gates and, more and more, the wall will be cracked until the torrent of peace will carry it away.
Michaël Séguin is a master’s degree student at the University of Montreal who served with the World Council of Churches’ EAPPI program from July to October of this year. He is a member of Saint-Jean United Church in Montreal
