In 2005, I traveled with the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles to Israel and Palestine. Bethlehem was already scarred by an economically catastrophic cement wall constructed by the Israeli government beginning in 2002.

Our group spent time examining seven murals Banksy had just painted on the walls around the city holy for Christians.

At that time, the walls, fences and checkpoints around the West Bank were an in-your-face aberration.

In my three subsequent trips over the following decade, however, the walls snaked further throughout the West Bank. They imprisoned hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, subjecting them to capricious and sometimes deadly checkpoints.

By my 2011 trip, Israeli-only highways separated the haves from the have-nots. The injustices seemed designed to produce misery and hate. Hard to doubt their success, as witnessed by the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorism in 2023.

In each of my journeys, we met with Israeli groups intent on serving their Palestinian neighbors despite the personal cost.

Some were picking olives to deliver to Palestinians who could no longer access their own olive groves. Some were directing integrated preschools.

We toured a pre-school in Israel welcoming Jewish and Arab-Israeli children, attempting to mitigate what they were absorbing in their toxic environment.

One preschool founded by a woman named Dahlia met in the house given to her parents when they arrived as immigrants from Bulgaria.

Dahlia had been an infant at the time, but as a teenager she met the young man Bashir, whose family had built the house, living there for decades before the 1948 Israeli War of Independence/Nakba forced their evacuation.

The pair became close and worked together on peace issues for decades despite widely differing viewpoints.

The history of contention is long. In 1901 early British Zionist Israel Zangwill expressed many Jews’ yearning for Palestine: “Palestine is a country without a people; the Jews are a people without a country.”

This claim despite the population at that time of around 600,000 people, mostly Muslim but also around 10% Christian and 4-8% Jewish.
 
In the U.S., the narrative for events in Israel/Palestine has been tightly controlled for decades by American Jewish groups such as AIPAC. They appear to assert that anything less than complete support for Israel is anti-Semitic and anything connected with Palestinians is terrorist.  

I realized the power of this narrative for myself after one of the Episcopal trips I organized. A good friend had effusively praised our wonderful Palestinian Christian guide Iyad. He was a master of the biblical sites – and the Bible – which made our trip come alive.

A couple of years later, she was puzzled. “Now Karen, Iyad wasn’t a Palestinian, was he?”

In her mind, she couldn’t reconcile this gentle and learned man whose Palestinian roots traced to the time of Christ to the view presented in the U.S. media.

My book clubs occasionally read challenging and important books. A new one worth considering, by British-born Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, is “Ungrounding: the Architecture of Genocide.”

We have read El Akkad’s “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.” We wonder how our nation has come to support financially and politically the bombings of hospitals and schools full of children, women and men.

What is clear is that many American Jews are not supportive. According to the Jewish Electorate Institute, while 86% of American Jews describe themselves as generally pro-Israel, nearly 70% “sometimes find it hard to support actions taken by Israel or its government.”

About half (51%) favor a two-state solution. A Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs survey found in September that about 60% of American Jews support the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Despite this, the majority of U.S. states have passed laws prohibiting the boycott of goods related to Israel or prohibiting those who boycott from working for or with the state.

I hope I’m still around when Muslims, Jews, Christians — the People of the Book – live together in peace in the Holy Land.

I hope I’m still on this earth when, like Jericho in pre-history, the walls come tumbling down in Bethlehem and all over Palestine.