Today I woke up with the intention of writing a lowdown on the position and role of Christians in Bethlehem, but I got diverted onto dealing with important enquiries and other work. So that will have to wait.
It was prompted by the interesting fact that, although Bethlehem is nowadays 90% Muslim, Christmas is quite important here for the Muslims too. This is not just because Jesus is one of the prophets of Islam and because Christmas has been globalised, or because Bethlehem is the epicentre of Christmas – Bethlehem’s worldwide name-recognition is important to all Bethlehemites, walled in and abandoned as they are. It’s also because Christians and Muslims here get on in a salutary way, and they care about supporting one another.
Of course they have their tiffs – it’s not just that they have different faiths, but there’s also an ethnic and social-economic difference between them – but the overriding atmosphere is one of tolerance and harmony. This is one of the wondrous aspects of Bethlehem and its atmosphere. I wish more people would come from round the world to experience it – Christians or not.
So the majority of people at the daily concerts being held down in Manger Square every evening this week are Muslims. Last night we had a band from Ramallah, a Palestinian-American singer from New York, and an Austrian rock band. You’re missing something, and it’s all for free!
But today I’m going to share with you extracts from a long e-mail I wrote to an Israeli friend who had picked me up on something I had written in my blog. He’s a good guy, and he does his best to step over the divide between Israelis and Palestinians, but the issue here is that there is such a difference between the Israeli and Palestinian narratives that, when a European like me comes along writing a blog about them both, someone somewhere is bound to get upset.
I’m writing for Westerners, and I am a Westerner – albeit a dissident one, critical of my own country too. I’m not writing for Israelis or Palestinians, though I hope my modicum of influence on the perceptions of Westerners might ultimately help them both. If I worried about what Israelis and Palestinians thought of my writings I would be moved to silence, confounded by the balancing act and contradictions involved. Also, in this polarised area, just because I write primarily to elucidate the Palestinian side of the equation, it doesn’t mean I’m anti-Israeli. This, for me, highlights the difference between two kinds of Israelis: those who believe I’m against them, and those who see my position and judgements, even if they upset some people, are thoughtfully expressed and ultimately helpful to them too.
I wrote an e-mail to reply to my friend, and it moved into my feelings about the ‘peace process’ in this land. So I’m reproducing most of it here (minus the more personal bits), for your interest. Here it is.
1947-48 (the date of the Palestinian Nakba or disaster and the Israeli War of Independence) were very bad years - a ruthless carve-up in which my own country, Britain, played a significant role in terms of setting up and permitting the conditions by which it happened, in its policies and practices back in the 1920s and 1930s. We could have done otherwise - it was a manifestation of our errant sense of superiority.
From the British side of things, this was a policy of hubris which is instructive for today, since there’s a lot of hubris around nowadays, particularly in the West. [That is, Westerners believe that since the West is so great, it cannot fail or go down and everything will continue as before, regardless of the current signs.] The Establishment in Britain, not least Churchill, believed the British empire would last forever and saw things through that lens, so they failed to set up colonial structures in such a way that, when independence started happening from 1948 onwards to the 1960s, systems and social values in the decolonialising countries were not appropriate for supporting what came next.
Particularly the ‘divide and rule’ philosophy the British used, and its effects, has cost the Middle East vastly (India-Pakistan too). Although the French ruled Syria, their own version lies at the roots of what’s happening there now with the Assad regime. The overarching power of rich, military-backed elites in Middle Eastern countries, being fought out now in the Arab revolutions, has a lot to do with that colonial period too, as is the fact that the Middle East is carved into individual small countries. In this sense it is true that the ‘Palestinians’ are an invented people (as stated by Newt Gingrich in USA and by some Zionists in Israel) – though I don’t agree with the political implications that advocates of this idea are implying, that Palestinians thus have no inherent right to nationhood.
I found the conference in Beit Jala to be interesting in this regard – to see people sincerely working on alternative political solutions for Israel and Palestine (see Blessed are the Peacemakers). Most solutions I judge to be well-meant but probably not doable. I don’t think a two-state solution is doable – and if it were, I’d still only see it as an intermediate step toward something else. If it were doable it would have been done by now – its time was in the 1990s.
A one-state solution looks more plausible at present, but I’m not optimistic about this either, because I don’t think the Palestinians would get a good deal, even if the deal were a diplomatic triumph, and I don’t think the Zionist aspect of Israeli society and politics would sit back and drop its agenda anytime soon to render all peoples in this land more equal.
Besides, given the current state of capitalism, I think a one-state solution, even if politically quite fair, would nevertheless lead to an economic imbalance allowing Israelis more financial power to take over and control the nation’s assets than Palestinians, and I don’t see Israelis easily accepting Palestinian or Arab investment, ownership and influence in what is now ‘Israel proper’.
In my own country, we’ve had a significant capital takeover of the country by London-based big investment sources, making Britain into a sort of parkland and estate for city-dwelling London English to exploit according to their values and needs, and this is happening worldwide as part of the current ‘development’ frenzy, focused as it is on an economic-capitalistic definition of development to the exclusion of many other aspects of life and society. Capitalism is good at takeovers. Britain is by degrees an occupied country too – occupied by corporations, bankers and bigwigs who treat it as their territory and who take it upon themselves to define for all of us what our ‘national interest’ is.
My feeling is that it’s going to take longer because the issue at stake is larger than questions of national independence. We’re faced with multiple planetary issues which are overriding the interests of individual nations, and the primary issue here is global governance and worldwide coordination to deal with global issues – unpopular though this notion currently is. In effect, this renders historic nations into regions (this is what’s developing at present in Europe), and it brings into question the borders which have been established in newer nations, often cutting across ethnic and more ‘natural’ geographical and social areas, leaving some ethnic groups nationless.
So in the end I see the solution to be a combination of the psycho-social healing of deep hurts of the nations of the Middle East, plus the eventual reuniting of the whole region into some sort of union – which puts the whole question of Israel and Palestine into a different context. One of the outcomes of this would be a loosening up for Israelis themselves, who are penned up in quite a small territory, and yet who have had a long history of involvement in wider affairs in historically Jewish-strong cities such as Baghdad, Alexandria, Damascus and so many other places. The Middle East is multi-ethnic, always has been and always will be, and in this context and the wider global context, nations can be obstructive.
After all, if we do have such a thing as significant sea-level rise, then this will affect Tel Aviv and Gaza equally, and they’ll need to cooperate to deal with it. Water-extraction issues in this region also cross boundaries and walls, as do the risks of earthquakes, toxic, climatic and public health disasters, and many other possibilities. If the relative reconciliation between Greece and Turkey a decade ago, arising from two earthquakes, is anything to go by, we have there an example of how ancient historic connections between regions can be revived through plain old evolving facts – Greeks anciently ruled much of what’s now Turkey, and Turks more recently, in the Ottoman period, ruled Greece. Reconciliation there, around 2000, was not prompted by peace talks but by hard facts – the damage and loss caused by earthquakes or ‘acts of God’. The outstanding question of the division of Cyprus, still dominated by politicians and political issues, demonstrates how leaving things to politics and diplomacy doesn’t heal issues on the ground.
I do think there are openings to a resolution here, but they lie in psycho-social shifts and changes at ground level, which will resolve and ease things on a de facto basis. I was recently taken to a Rami Levi supermarket in the Etzion settlement bloc to demonstrate this point (see Gush Etzion settlement bloc). Consumers everywhere, regardless of politics, share roughly the same needs, have similar diets and consumption patterns and have little reason to pursue separate development and ‘apartheid’ patterns. In this you are right that the settler movement is, perhaps unwittingly, prompting a change and a funny sort of reconciliation by moving in amongst Palestinians – though, for this to work fully, it needs to operate in both directions, with Palestinians enabled to settle in West Jerusalem and ‘Israel proper’, and leading to a more widespread integration of peoples.
I think one thing people get wrong in this question is the idea that, if people cooperate, they will lose their identity – and I don’t think this is necessarily true. Thus people feel threatened with strangers in their midst. Identity is not a frozen thing: in Britain 10% of the population is of non-British origin in the last 2-3 generations, but it is actually morphing the notion of ‘Britishness’, and many of Britain’s high achievers are of foreign origin yet they have adopted forms of Britishness, sometimes even more than the British, while also transforming British society and still remaining quite uniquely themselves.
We now have more practising Muslims than practising Christians in Britain – though this is largely to do with secularisation, which is the British people’s own choice, not a foreign import. Actually, the unspoken statistic is that Britain has become a place where ‘spirituality’ and not ‘religion’ is the biggest force – we now have more people practicing yoga, meditation, neo-paganism and a spectrum of self-defined beliefs than either Christians or Muslims, and British society is transforming thereby – but it is still very British! Yet the minorities within Britain are also still very connected with their home cultures – in this sense Britain’s connections with places like India and Pakistan are finding a new meaning in a newly-globalised context. One of our flagship corporations, Jaguar-Land Rover, is owned by an Indian (Tata), and all is well.
Anyway, in the end, it will probably be evolving facts that decide these things. I’m a great believer in the influence of defining moments and evolving circumstances as a way in which history unfolds, to some extent independently of human ideas. Also, old people die off and young people grow up, with new perspectives and values. No one intended or planned the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War or the fall of the British Empire, or the current decline of American hegemony – it’s just the way things are unfolding.
I feel that, in the end, this is what will happen here too, for both ‘Israel’ and ‘Palestine’ are constructs, and meanwhile there are people, there is land and there is life to get on with. You are personal friends with Palestinian neighbours, and you’d miss them if they disappeared, and they would miss you too if you disappeared. The world is changing very rapidly and what affects all of us together are the global issues that are becoming more pressing as time goes on – climate, ecology, economics, demography, resources, everything.
I think it’s worth investigating all the options, such as one-state and two-state solutions, but I believe that, in the end, neither will happen or, if they do, they will prove temporary. It’s a deeper change that’s needed. To quote a now-deceased Sufi sheikh friend in Jerusalem, Sheikh Bukhari, ‘God is too big to fit within just one faith’. It’s our common humanity which will bind us in the end – we all have kids, eat food, live in houses and have needs and contributions to make. It’s funny how, as I grow older, I find myself returning to the basic principles I saw as a young hippy, summed up as ‘love and peace’. It’s not as easy and simple as that, but if we humans are to be happy, that’s the basis on which the future will be carved.
My primary identity is that of a human on Planet Earth, and I welcome the rest of humanity to sign up to this, because that’s who we all are, whatever our beliefs and ways. This will then put our secondary ethnic and national identities into a new context, and it might cause us to start really enjoying and appreciating our differences more constructively. In this sense, you and I might have some differences of opinion or viewpoint, but I enjoy your existence and appreciate meeting you, and I hope we carry on! Part of the reason I come here to Palestine-Israel is to be stretched, and I hope I help others stretch too by coming here. No one pays or supports me in this – it’s my own stupid choice and preoccupation!
I’m not anti-settler, but I do think something needs to change in the way the settlement project is unfolding, and I suspect that this is where you and I meet. I work with Palestinians because they welcome me and, as a healer, I can work only with people who invite me to work with them. And I become healed thereby.
I’m sure that, if you snuck in discreetly and intuitively, there would be no problem in visiting the school (just call to arrange it – I serve good tea!). The people of Al Khader are fine folk, with an eye for good people whatever their persuasion or background, and we used to have Jews at the school until 1999, and Jewish teachers. One was Menachem Froman, the rabbi of Tekoa settlement southeast of Bethlehem. He is strong advocate of settlement, yet big enough in his heart to make close friends with Yasser Arafat during the second intifada ten years ago, and more recently to walk into Gaza to meet Ismael Haniyeh of Hamas. When challenged by IDF soldiers he used to simply say, “Go on then, shoot a rabbi!” and he’d keep on walking, beard and locks flowing in the wind. Sadly, cancer is getting to him now. I am game for coming over to your side of the wall again and, if anyone shoots me, then I’ll just go home to heaven and do something else! I’ve been screwed over enough in my life to have developed a slight resilience! But I find a smile and a gentlemanly approach works wonders and seems to get me through the scrapes that life can bring – thus far!
Shalom alekum, brother – you’re cool and you have integrity, and I like that.
Palden
