Hands like these
14 April 2008
Durham NC
Hands like these
Were hammered on the Tree:
Feet like our feet
Were pierced: a head like our head
Bore the shameful thorns.
Holy Week has been a struggle for me since I started traveling
to Israel and Palestine in 1991. We rarely hear the stories about how people got
to Jerusalem for Holy Week or how many were denied entry, who were tear-gassed
or beaten or detained. On one of my earliest trips, the shared taxi in which I
was riding was stopped by Israeli police or soldiers at a flying checkpoint near
Bethany and the Mount of Olives. (A flying checkpoint is a temporary road block
at which individuals’ documents are checked for ‘security’ purposes.) Three
years ago when I was shepherding a CPT short-term delegation around to meetings
with Israeli and Palestinian colleagues, I asked a Bethlehemite when he was last
in Jerusalem. He replied, “Legally, eight years ago. Illegally, last Palm
Sunday.” Today Bethany, Al Eizariya, is cut off by the Wall. A couple of years
ago, you could still get there on foot by going up to the Mount of Olives,
squeezing through a gap near an Israeli checkpoint, and cutting across the
grounds of two convents. Some of the Palestinian staff at St. George’s College,
an Anglican continuing education center in East Jerusalem, have to obtain
permits to get through the checkpoint and on to East Jerusalem to work. Others
are Israeli citizens or have the blue Jerusalem ID card which allows them access
to Jerusalem. Some of the families are in limbo, without a blue Jerusalem ID,
without Israeli citizenship, without an orange West Bank ID. They have no legal
way to get from Al Eizariya to Ramallah, north of Jerusalem, in the West Bank,
and are denied access to Jerusalem and its services.
Routinely on Fridays, Israeli soldiers and police stand at the Damascus Gate
entrance to the Old City and check Palestinian men’s ID’s as they try to go for
Friday prayers at Al Aqsa Mosque. Last month after a Palestinian shot and killed
eight Jewish students at Merkaz Harav Yeshiva, Palestinian men under 45 were
denied entrance.
A Palestinian Christian woman watched with me last year as a Palestinian Red
Crescent ambulance was delayed at an Israeli checkpoint in Hebron. Its passenger
was a Palestinian woman returning home from the hospital. The ICRC
(International Committee of the Red Cross) had coordinated with Israeli
authorities in advance for its safe passage. The soldiers delayed for so long
that the patient had to be transported to the hospital to be stabilized. My
companion, a resident of Jerusalem, said, “I have heard of this happening. Now I
have seen it.”
While the Israeli settlers of Hebron enjoy the protection and support of Israeli
military and police, and the men carry automatic rifles as well as handguns, the
Palestinian community faces harassment and violence from them. When I once
offered sympathy to a pregnant woman who had suffered the effects of tear gas in
her home, she replied, “It is my fate.” This is not ‘fate’ in the sense of
resignation or acceptance. It is fate in the sense of steadfastness, sitting
sumud. When I thanked our primary translator for sitting down and translating
her extensive notes from Arabic into English after a long day in the field
documenting house demolitions, she said, “No thanks are necessary: it is my
duty.”
Many Palestinians with the means to do so are emigrating. The Palestinian
Christian community tends to have more means than the Palestinian Muslim
community to do so. On my last day in Jerusalem earlier this year I headed to
Shu’afat, to Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center for their Thursday
Eucharist and to say my goodbyes for the year. I was talking with a staff member
about how much more entrenched the Israeli occupation was, how the situation
seems never to get better, how it drags everybody down. I said, “I can leave.”
She replied, “We choose to stay.”
During the Roman Occupation of Palestine, Jesus took on humanity to stand with
the people and to suffer for and with them, and to die for them. Paul in his
letter to the Philippians says, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ
Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death - even death on a cross.”
As we move through the Easter Season, let us remember
Hands like these
Were hammered on the Tree:
Feet like our feet
Were pierced: a head like our head
Bore the shameful thorns.
Gwenallt, Gwreiddiau (Gwasg Gomer 1959); English translation in Brendan
O’Malley, ed., Welsh Pilgrim’s Manual (Gomer 1989) from Bread of Tomorrow,
edited by Janet Morley
Adapted from a reflection spoken Palm Sunday 16 March 2008 at the Episcopal
Center for NC State University, Raleigh NC
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