My work on the Land
How my views on the protracted has been informed by on the ground experience
I began working in the Holy Land in 2005 when I made my first trip to Hebron with the Christian Peacemaker Teams. I have worked for the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions, the Christian Peacemaker Teams, Defense for Children International and Holy Land Trust. I have worked all across the West Bank and Jerusalem, but the majority of his work in the field has been in the Old City of Hebron and the surrounding villages facing Israeli settler violence.
I grew up in the Beaverton Church of the Brethren but have most recently been attending the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in Jerusalem, where I had spent a year on the church council.
While I was transformed by my experience in Hebron some 13 years ago, it was the birth of his son in 2012 that centered and anchored my life pursuing peace and justice in Israel-Palestine.
I spent the first seven years being here viewing this conflict through my own eyes and witnessing the lives of my Palestinian friends being lived under the heavy weight of Israel’s military occupation: home demolitions, administration detentions, military operations, child arrests, and people killed on the streets. It was a methodical, systematic violence I never experienced living in rural Michigan. But when Alex was born, I started to see the conflict from a completely different perspective: the eyes of my son. With being an Israeli Jew, he enters into this conflict from a completely different experience than his Palestinian counterparts. He has basic rights and social privilege that Palestinians inhabiting this same land simply do not. He sees and experiences that contrast through spending so much time with Palestinians in the West Bank, going through Israel’s military checkpoints, visiting families whose homes have been destroyed, and seeing parts of Israel’s military occupation that many Israelis never see. On the flip-side of that coin, with my son being a Jew, I’m much more sensitive of the validity of charges of anti-Semitism in this movement for the realization of justice and equality and our moral obligation to confront that violence at the same time we struggle for basic human rights for Palestinians.
While I had been actively engaged in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for many years before the birth of my son, living in community with Palestinians who were struggling with live under Israel’s military occupation and through witnessing countless home demolitions, arrests, night raids, and other random acts of violence, it was during this time that I cam to understand the many layers of oppression wrapped up in Israel’s colonial project.
Having a son didn’t change my views on this. But what it did do is make me more aware of the rampant anti-Semitism that runs through this movement.
Over the course of these 13 years, I’ve if been a party to some successful political campaigns, fundraising endeavors, local direct nonviolent action organizing and have travelled across the United States giving various presentations on the different layers of the peace movement here, discussing the ways in which we need to be accountable and authentic in our work.
I continue to do this work because I believe that not only peace is possible, but that justice is possible as well.
