The Elephant Sitting in the Middle of Ben Yehuda Square
The modern State of Israel and I share something in common – we’re both 60. My birthday celebration was a quiet one, spent with a handful of friends here in Jerusalem. My Lutheran pastor gave me a coffee mug and a T-shirt that proclaim me an “Old Lutheran.” I told him I’d wear it while working just to spite Luther’s slight of the Book of James.
Israel’s celebrations are not quiet, but they are curiously subdued. Every night this week, we are treated to the most amazing displays of fireworks and laser shows. During the day, jets roar overhead as Israeli pilots practice for air shows and salutes to visiting dignitaries such as President Bush. In the middle of Monday morning this week, a siren went on and stayed on for a full minute, and a full minute is a long time for a siren to sound. There are Israeli flags everywhere – well almost everywhere. You won’t see many Israeli flags on our side of town. You do see them on the municipal buildings and courthouse, as well as on the army jeeps that patrol the neighborhood. Israeli soldiers have mounted huge flags onto their vehicles and they love to draw near a group of Palestinian youth and just idle there for a few minutes.
In East Jerusalem and all across the West Bank and Gaza, people are in mourning as they remember the “al nakba” – the catastrophe. One people’s Independence Day is another people’s day of disaster. For the Palestinians, all this celebrating and flag waving is a little like having someone dance on your father’s grave. On the streets we can feel the temperature rising.
What the State of Israel has accomplished in 60 years is nothing short of stunning. Israel’s advances in the tech industry and in medicine are benefiting the whole world. Their agricultural achievements are phenomenal. And militarily, they are now a world power, with nuclear arms and every tool they need to dominate the region far into the future.
So why is the celebration subdued? Why are so many Israelis conflicted, even as they are justifiably proud of what they have done, and what they have withstood in order to do what they have done? It is because there is an elephant sitting in the middle of Ben Yehuda Square – Jerusalem’s main drag – and everyone sees it squatting there, and no one knows how it got there, and anyone who dares to point to it there is demeaned and then dismissed from there. There is something that is not right here, and all here and most everywhere else know this is true – something is not right here!
The Jewish people didn’t come here in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries intending to run the Palestinian people out. The Jewish people were running themselves. They were running for their lives, in fact. You know the story of Nazi Germany. Do you also know the stories in the rest of Europe and in the United States as well? No country was going out of its way to treat Jewish people with respect and dignity. They were harassed everywhere they settled. So they settled on settling here, in the land of their ancestors. They settled in the place of Abraham and Sarah in order to find a place where they could be safe – a refuge, a place to recover from centuries of abuse.
But let’s be fair and finally acknowledge that the place in which they chose to settle was not unsettled. There were people living here. And the people living here, the Palestinian people, weren’t a part of the abuse being heaped on the Jewish people in Europe. For centuries, Jews and Christians and Muslims lived side by side in Palestine, in little villages where people live and let live, because anything other than that made no sense to sensible people who lived by the sweat of their brow. The first of the Jewish immigrants were received reasonably well, rather like Abraham and Sarah when they immigrated into Caanan all these centuries ago. The new arrivals bought land, dug wells, built homes, farmed and opened shops. There were some problems, of course, but by-and-large, these new Palestinians were given a chance to grow and prosper.
However, as the Jewish population doubled and then tripled and then wave after wave of Jewish immigrants literally washed up on the shores near Hiafa, the Palestinians began to worry. The Arab population began to push against the Jewish immigrants, and well, one thing led to another and each side points the finger at the other, and each has their own narratives to tell and retell. The end result is what we have today – something not quite right. An elephant is sitting in the middle of this land and spoiling the celebration. The person on the street wears a tense expression, the politician a fixed smile. Newspapers hint at the beast, and some even have the audacity to almost name it, but not quite.
The nation birthed to be a light to the nations, is anything but, and all the successes in the world will not change that one burning truth. That one burning truth is the elephant that the Jewish people do everything they can to hide, and yet cannot hide from themselves. You cannot deem your dream come true, when that dream come true means another people have to live a nightmarish life, the kind of life you know only to well. You can tout all your accomplishments, and there is a long list of them to tout. You can marvel at what you have become, and in such a short time too. And yes, you have become a powerful nation, a force to reckon with.
But then, at the end of a day of dancing and singing and slapping one another on the back, there sits that dang elephant, and you are reminded that for everything you have done, there is one thing missing, and that one thing is really all that really matters. You are not who you are meant to be, and you will never be until the Palestinian people are free! The people of the State of Israel, along with all of us who love them and want the best for them, will not be free to fully celebrate independence, until the Palestinian people, a people longing to be loved as well, are able to celebrate the same. Until then, get to know the elephant well, because the behemoth is not going away, and not getting any smaller either.
