Reflections on the last month

Since I didn't post any thoughts from my last month of travels I decided to back up and share a couple of things. First, this video is a great summary of a lot of the realities of the current situation in Israel-Palestine that our seminar group witnessed over the last few weeks of learning and observing in and around Jerusalem:


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Second, here is one of my journal entries from a couple of weeks ago (ok so I expanded and edited it a bit for this context. It wasn't this wordy in its original format):

Wednesday, January 14

Since I got here to Israel-Palestine, a lot of people have asked me if it is dangerous for me to be here. Actually, from all appearances this is a very peaceful place, and I have felt very safe here. The weather has been beautiful. Today was a great day of hiking around on archaeological digs in 65 degree sunny weather. This trip has also has had very much a feeling of religious pilgrimage as our group walks in the footsteps of Jesus and the ancient patriarchs of our faith. Just a few days ago I had one of the most picturesque and peaceful experiences of my life, watching the sun rise over the Sea of Galilee.

So yes, I do feel very secure here, but this is a bit of a deception. Both the histories of the places we visit, and the current realities we see in the news and hear from the people we meet, give evidence to the deep-rooted anger and unrest of the all the people of this place.

This is a country that carries in its national consciousness and personal histories very deep wounds. Each person in this nation—on both sides of the conflict—has in his or her past the kind of dehumanizing experiences that most of us can not imagine.
As someone very interested in the effects of the past on the present, I find myself both fascinated and terrified at my first thoughts of implications of such histories for the present state of Israel-Palestine and, unfortunately, for the future of this entire region.

For without resolution, the trauma of these historical injustices not only accompanies the population into the present, but is also an ongoing reality. This is not even a nation with post traumatic stress disorder, but one continuing to experience trauma daily. The trauma sits just below the surface of daily life, life which must go on in spite of the unresolved injustice. Each day provides many many opportunities for this underlying trauma to boil over. Although the news that reaches us in America makes the violence of this region seem arbitrary, each of the seemingly sudden acts of violence and war that occurs here has a history and therefore a chain of events leading up to it. When an entire nation of people is some combination of fearful, disempowered, humiliated, stigmatized, and desperate, it can only be a recipe for an outpouring of violence (if not now, then later) until these problems are addressed and justice is felt on both sides.

As tourists we can keep ourselves fairly insulated from this volatility (even though, as Americans, we are directly involved, whether we like it or not). But the evidence for and causes of the injustices of the past are there and obvious if you are looking—from the unobtrusive cacti marking the boundaries of the sites of Palestinian villages destroyed during the 1948 Nakba/ Israeli War of Independence, to the fairly obvious wall separating Bethlehem from Jerusalem.

While visiting Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial and museum, I was struck by the current truth of line from a poem written during the Holocaust. Even in the midst of peace and beauty,

"Here, all things scream silently."