Gaza

Their numbers have been small in recent years, and understandably so.  Not only does peace feel remote, but they sometimes get cursed at, spat at, or shown a variety of crude hand gestures. They are routinely called naïve and accused of being unpatriotic.  A few have even experienced the sting of rubber bullets and tear gas.

I’m describing Israelis who actively oppose their government’s actions and policies in Gaza and the West Bank.  These people were upset long before rockets began falling on Israel.  To them, it was and is no less upsetting when Palestinians are dispossessed of their land in villages like Bil’in and Ni’lin.  To them, condemnation is called for not only when Hamas perpetrates violence against Israel; it is also necessary when Israeli soldiers stage mock executions or beat civilians at checkpoints, or when Israel’s own extremist settlers terrorize and even murder Palestinians.   (And so on.)

Most of us only get indignant and angry when wrong is done to us, not when we are doing wrong to another.  People like the woman in this photo, however, are an exception.  She was one of maybe 100 Israelis demonstrating at Israel’s border with Gaza in November 2006, angry at both the blockade and Israel’s firing of missiles into the Strip.   Given the degree to which she was going against the grain of her society by simply standing with such a sign at the Gaza border, I suspect she would have resonated with the words of Oscar Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador from 1977 to 1980.  For Romero, violence wasn’t just that which caused physical harm; it was also a government’s twisting of societal structures and law so that the powerless were kept down and oppressed. He said:

I will not tire of declaring that if we really want an effective end to violence we must remove the violence that lies at the root of all violence: structural violence, social injustice, exclusion of citizens from the management of the country, repression. All this is what constitutes the primal cause, from which the rest flows naturally."

Romero was assassinated while celebrating Mass in 1980, the day after preaching a sermon in which he called upon Salvadoran soldiers to stop participating in government repression.

I received an email this morning from a Venezuelan friend who had been celebrating New Year’s Eve at a nice hotel in Panama City, Panama.  She wrote, “The dinner was great, a lot lot lot lot of food it was, but at the moment I ate my food I just can´t stop thinking about the 400 people killed in Palestina, and how it was the new year for that families. The party was awful…I just can´t imagine that the rest of the world were celebrating yesterday while a lot of moms, dads, and sons were crying about their lost in Palestina.”

She writes about a tension with which many of us are familiar.  How does one celebrate while knowing that at the same moment someone else is mourning, or living in absolute fear?

There is no space here to delve into that question.  But like her, the events in Gaza and Israel have been on my mind in recent days.  Of all the places I’ve traveled, none were as difficult as Gaza.  I thought it an often claustrophobic strip of land (at least in the cities and refugee camps) that had taken not only the lives of Gazans but also amazing (and controversial) people like Rachel Corrie—and where one afternoon, in my desire for a photograph, I had feared it might take mine as well.  I had never been to a place where even for a mere 72 hours it was so hard to stay sane.  Unless you’ve been there, you simply have no idea what it means to live in Gaza, to live in a cage.

The photograph above was taken in the West Bank town of Ramallah in late 2006.  The Palestinian boy was part of a protest against Palestinian-on-Palestinian violence, which the day before had left three Palestinian children dead in Gaza City.  Some eyes on this Earth take in an incredible amount of suffering.  They take it in, even while many of us celebrate.