“Open your eyes”….
So, I recently took a trip to Israel with my wife and son (and in-laws). It was a 10 day long trip. It started in the Ben Gurion Int’l Airport, took us to Galilee, then to Jerusalem, around the West Bank, and then ended in hipster Tel Aviv. The primary reason for the trip was to spend time with my wife’s sister and her husband who live in East Jerusalem with their 1.5 yr old daughter.
This trip was *really* difficult, mostly because we took my 11 month old son. But I won’t get into that in this post. I’ll focus on the eye-opening injustices I saw amongst the Palestinian people.
The picture above is a snapshot of the gigantic wall that separates the Palestinian filled West Bank from the rest of the country of Israel. Why is it there? Because the Israeli government wants to control the flow of people in and out of it - namely keeping Palestinians from coming out.
This wall was ominous. I could see it from many different points of the New and Old city of Jerusalem. Often I would double take at it’s presence. When looking at it, I began realizing I was having some inner-conflict about it’s existence. I was asking questions to myself like:
- Why is that wall there?
- Why did Israel build it?
- Why is Israel trying to control the location of the Palestinian people?
- How come I’ve never heard about this wall?
- Why is that wall not jiving with my heart/stomach/etc.?
- Why am I angry that it’s there?
- Who taught me growing up that at all costs, pray for the Israeli cause and purposes?
- Why did I just blindly believe everything I’ve been told about Israel and their holy, righteous, and godly mission exist and control what geography they believe is theirs?
- Who are these Palestinian people and why are they treated this way?
- What did the Palestinians do that prompted the building of that wall?
- Are my eyes beholding a modern day ‘Berlin Wall’?
There were thousands more, but I’ll spare you. My point with all this is to help you understand I began to question every belief and fact I had heard up until the immediate present. While in Israel, I spent much of my time asking hundreds of questions (mostly to my patient brother-in-law :) and reading as much as I could about the political and religious tension of the country/people groups. I set out to hear out both sides (Israeli & Palestinian) and try to understand the conflict from both points-of-view.
What I concluded (though I’m very much still processing it) is that the Palestinian people (Muslim and Christian) that live in Israel/West Bank/Gaza, suffer grave injustices at the hand of the Israeli government that closely mirror South Africa’s apartheid era.
Example: Everyone in East Jerusalem (Palestinian) pays the same tax as the Jewish West Jerusalem, but they don’t receive any of the civil services (garbage, education, etc.). This results in a much dirtier and run-down East Jerusalem and feeds the Israeli argument that if they cede the West Bank land to Palestine, it will all turn into a grungy, run-down, cesspool. But this is wrong, because the Israeli government makes East Jerusalem run down…but we don’t hear stuff like that.
In all, I am shocked at it all. I’m frustrated at myself for just swallowing the spoonfuls of “Americanism” and “Western Christianity” ideology and not questioning it at all. I feel for the Palestinian people (but do not hold them innocent of violence, etc.). What does God think of this all? What would he do?
