Christmas 2017: The Hopes and Fears of All the Years Are Met in Thee Tonight

We finally acknowledge the obvious: that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital.  This is nothing more, or less, than a recognition of reality.  It is also the right thing to do.  It’s something that has to be done. 

-Donald J. Trump, December 6 (Feast of Saint Nicholas), 2017

Pence’s Christmas Pilgrimage Is Canceled.  

-New York Times headline, December 20, 2017

***

“Why are you visiting Israel?” asked the young woman soldier at the Allenby Bridge crossing.

I gave my simple and rehearsed answer: “Religious pilgrimage.”  It was the spring of 2009.

“Are you planning to visit the West Bank?”

“No.”

My friend who worked in the West Bank and would help me get around the next ten days advised me to keep my answers kosher.  

            Religious pilgrimage.  That was also what I told my mom after I bought the plane ticket, and it was partially true—I did want to see some of the Jesus stuff.  However, I had been a student of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since college, and I was much more interested in that modern history than in the sometimes not historically accurate events of 2000 years ago.

            From otherwise gorgeous Mediterranean vistas, I saw with my own eyes how Israeli settlements (called “facts on the ground” by U.S. newspapers and politicians) spread for miles and ate up vast portions of land—always the most arable land, too, with access to water.  These settlements cut wide swaths inside the ‘67 borders, which most Palestinians have accepted as the borders of their future state, even if that future state is well less than half of historic Palestine.  Israel and Palestine are negotiating the division of a pizza, an unofficial tour guide explained, and meanwhile Israel is eating the pizza.  I appreciated his attempt to make us Americans understand, for if we do not understand history we at least understand eating too much.  

Curiosity, chance, and friends of my friend provided me the surreal occasion of playing volleyball on the Mount of Olives next to Mordechai Vanunu one evening during my trip.  The Mount of Olives I knew from years of Catholic education and Catholic sometimes-Bible-reading.  Mordechai Vanunu I did not know.  I learned later that evening that Vanunu had spent eighteen years in Israeli prison—more than 10 years of that sentence in solitary confinement—for whistleblowing to the world in 1986 that Israel possessed nuclear weapons.  I remember he moved in quick spurts on the court, he frequently used his shin to keep the ball in play, and he wore cargo pants.  More importantly, I remember a piece of advice that he delivered enthusiastically to the whole group.  It was a farewell party for an American activist-humanitarian couple, whose visas the Israeli government would not renew.  Palestinian, Israeli, American, and European friends alike toasted this couple, who were deeply disappointed that their service in the West Bank was coming to an unexpectedly quick end.  Mordechai got the last word, though.  He knew some things about hope and resistance.  “You have been here fighting the occupation.  But now and perhaps more importantly, as Americans, you must go home to fight the second occupation: the Israeli lobby’s occupation of the U.S. Congress!”  (Translation: A. “the Israeli occupation is enabled by the billions of dollars in U.S. aid every year and by vetoing UN resolutions; fix that”; B. “No matter your issue, fight where you have the most agency.”)

I visited the separation wall.  It’s hard not to.  It winds and imposes everywhere. I passed through the Qalandiya checkpoint.  I stopped by the Dheisheh refugee camp.  And, I walked down the eeriest emblem of the occupation: Shuhada Street in Hebron.  My U.S. passport meant that I could pass through these regions fairly easily, with the privilege of a poverty-tourist.  My U.S. passport also, Vanunu would hint, meant that I was complicit. 

Fight where you have agency.  Even if you do not have agency, fight nevertheless. 

A couple years after that pilgrimage-of-sorts, I met Cy Swartz.  Cy and his wife Lois were founding members of Bubbies and Zeydes for Peace, a small group of older Philadelphia-area Jews who advocated on behalf of Palestinian rights and held weekly vigils outside the Israeli consulate decrying the occupation of Palestine.  Area Quakers, Catholic Workers, atheists, and Penn and Temple students alike would join them.  

Cy died at the end of this summer.  I didn’t know him very well—we had only spent about ten hours together over the course of three years—but he taught me a lot by his fidelity and his grace.  He knew how to receive with a smile an angry middle finger from a passing motorist.  He knew how to show warmth to someone who yelled “ignorant asshole” at him.  When I received my first “out of my way, shithead” from an angry Philadelphian (I was not really in the way, for the record), I became flustered and then embarrassed at my sudden lack of courage and conviction.  Cy assured me with a chuckle and a quip that the not-so-gentleman must have had an important lunch date.  Cy had been standing outside of the consulate for years and had received death threats—and then the requisite police protection—in the earlier years, when criticism of Israel was even less popular.           

At the end of every vigil, Cy would gather us together in a circle and hold up a loaf of bread he brought.  The group would sing a simple tune of peace first in Hebrew, then in Arabic, and finally in English. He would break the bread and pass it along, for each of us to consume and pass along until it completed the circle.  I recall fondly those informal eucharists at 20th and JFK, more meaningful than most formal Eucharists I’ve been to.  Cy and Lois knew about hope and resistance.   

***

            It has been a bleak advent, as the horror show of the Trump presidency drags on.  This new illiterate Caesar, who didn't even know Israel was in the Middle East gives carte blanche to Netanyahu, his beloved new Herod.  “It’s something that has to be done.”  Meanwhile, on the domestic front, in an alternative ending to A Christmas Carol, real-estate Scrooge really sticks it to the Cratchits all the while telling them that this “big, beautiful” tax cut is for them.  In a sickening, dishonest display, Scrooge’s oligarchic friends-of-convenience in Congress lavish him with praise for his “leadership.”

 Mike Pence stood with Christian-Zionist dreams in his faux-steely eyes as Trump made his Jerusalem announcement.  But, Mike Pence has had to cancel his trip to Bethlehem.  He and the white American imperial Christianity he is the face of could not possibly understand the story of Bethlehem—the Bethlehem of today and that of 2000 years ago. Religious pilgrimages and religious ceremonies and religious stories are empty and self-serving when they do not connect to the present.

 “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.”

Bethlehem teaches us about hope and resistance.  We do not condone violence, but we support a people’s right to resist nonviolently.  Most Palestinian resistors have been practicing nonviolence consistently for the past thirty years even though you would not know it from most U.S. media which only highlights the violence.      

Mordechai Vanunu, Cy and Lois Swartz, Palestinians resisting in the West Bank and their Israeli allies.  These are the people that understand the Nativity.

And, Chelsea Manning and all whistleblowers.  And all transgender people living proudly in defiance of the Mike Pences of the world.  Tarana Burke and all #metoo women, from the famous to the farmworkers.  DREAMers.  Peace activists, conscientious objectors, and good military people still in and ready to disobey unlawful orders.  Saudi women gaining the right to drive, if not much else.  Working people, with two to three jobs, organizing instead of giving in to Trump’s racialized southern strategy.  Standing Rock.  People battling cancer, even as their health care is wrested from them.  The People’s Organization for Progress on their 99th consecutive “Justice Monday” in Newark (photos below).  Those police officers in Newark and elsewhere who protect our first amendment rights and serve us well and who do not see calls for police reform as personal affronts.  The Mennonite farmers near Lancaster we visited last week who have lived on the land for generations, new young urban farmers trying to get healthy food to city kids, and suburban horticulturalists cultivating their own gardens in between.  Parents trying to raise kids and take care of their own dying parents.  These countless people living with dignity—the leaven, the mustard seeds—in an undignified time.  From Bethlehem, Palestine to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and all the little towns of Bethlehem in between.  Fighting where they have agency and even when they have none. All these people are the shepherds.  These are the wise (wo)men.  These are the friendly beasts around the manger.  These are the lights in the darkness.  These are the reasons to believe and the reasons to resist and persist.  

It is an undignified time indeed, yet still....

“The Risk of Birth, An Advent Poem”

This is no time for a child to be born,
With the earth betrayed by war & hate
And a comet slashing the sky to warn
That time runs out & the sun burns late.

That was no time for a child to be born,
In a land in the crushing grip of Rome;
Honour & truth were trampled by scorn–
Yet here did the Saviour make his home.

When is the time for love to be born?
The inn is full on the planet earth,
And by a comet the sky is torn–
Yet Love still takes the risk of birth.

Madeleine L'Engle, 1973