“In Arabic we say that every situation has a word or phrase that suits it perfectly.”
I wish I could find that word or phrase here, in the Middle East. Those words were said by a young woman sitting in the living room of Sami Awad’s home in Beit Jallah, above Bethlehem, in the West Bank. Many activists come to his home, stay a while, then go home. This young woman is married to a Palestinian living in Jordan, but her family is in a city in the West Bank, so she frequently makes the crossing in the same place, Allenby Bridge, where a Jordanian gunman shot three Israelis two days ago. Israel shut down all the crossings with Jordan for a while.
Separations also occur between Palestinians living in the West Bank and those living in Israel (often referred to as Israeli Arabs), so that in joining their spouses they pay a price of not seeing their parents for a long time though the distance is short. You can have a wife living in East Jerusalem while your family lives in Bethlehem, a 15-minute drive away but with a locked checkpoint in between.
My own travel to Israel from Massachusetts, some 25 hours long (not including travel to and from Logan Airport), was somewhat longer but required only an American passport. Caring for my brother has been very important. The evenings and nights have been the worst for him; we often considered going back to the Emergency Room and we went to Urgent Care two nights ago because of his shortness of breath and incessant coughing. It’s draining, and when evenings come—which are the most difficult—I am very tired. I’m scheduled to return tomorrow and feel I can sleep for a week.
I don’t watch TV here. The pain of soldiers being killed, civilian hostages kept in tunnels for close to a year, inhabitants of northern and southern Israel leaving their unsafe homes to find refuge in the middle of the country–it pervades everywhere, no escape. There is barely a mention of what Palestinians are experiencing in Gaza.
But on Sunday I went to visit my dear friend, Sami Awad. Beit Jallah is high up, 25 minutes’ drive from Jerusalem but most often blocked by military barriers. Last time we parked the car and crossed over stones and rubble by foot. This time the barriers had been eliminated so I was able to drive to the main round-about in Beit Jallah, where Sami met me and took me to his home.
Bernie and I first met Sami 20 years ago. He came to our Auschwitz retreat (a highly suspect thing to do among Palestinians) and he has publicly declared, time and time again, that it completely changed his perception of the Israel-Palestine conflict because of how it brought collective trauma into the picture.
Sami founded Holy land Trust, a Bethlehem organization dedicated to promoting non-violence and peaceful co-existence. He traveled a lot during those years, staying with Colombian peace villages and native settlements in the Amazon, a pilgrimage in the footsteps of Mahatma Gandhi in India.
After many years of work, he stopped to take care of his aging parents, particularly his mother suffering from ALS. Caring for one’s aged, sick parents is part of this ancient culture, no nursing homes here. His mother died a month ago, his father joined his family in the US, his daughters are mostly grown, and Sami is now free to travel once more and turn the page—to do what? To go where?
He’s exhausted after 30 years of activism, training others in nonviolent resistance and preparing future Palestinian leaders of young men and women using a model of non-linear leadership.
A year ago, I asked him what happened to that young, optimistic, post-Oslo Agreements generation that wanted to prepare for a new democratic state. He shook his head. There are no leadership openings anywhere outside of Fatah, which runs the Palestinian Authority like its own personal fiefdom, not to mention the Israeli occupation.
Ah, the optimism of those post-Oslo years, when Rabin and Arafat signed an agreement leading to a two-state solution! But while a political agreement had been reached, there was no actual social, sociological, religious, and economic groundwork laid. Not much different from Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation which, for lack of a similar groundwork, turned into Jim Crow laws that fiercely and stubbornly undermined the promise of freedom and opportunity for Black Americans.
Palestine-Israel? He shakes his head. He’s done this work for some 30 years. He’s tired and deeply, deeply disappointed.
Five years ago, he said, they celebrated Thanksgiving with 40 family members at the table. Now, he’s the last member of his family living in Palestine; the others, like many Christian Palestinians with a double citizenship, have left for Europe and the US. He had family in Gaza who had to abandon their homes and go from one zone to another, often living in their car (fa few of them are in their 80s), until they got special permission to go to Egypt where they live in a small apartment, supported by the rest of the family..
“How was it to come here this time?” he asked me. “Aside from caring for your brother.”
Fine, I tell him, but the posters in the airport are always hard for me. WELCOME HOME! they proclaim. TOGETHER WE WILL WIN! is everywhere, in airports, buses, dangling from bridges above highways and from apartment balconies. Everything implying that you’re one of us, that I am part and parcel of that us by virtue of being Jewish.
“I don’t recognize that us,” I told Sami. Never did, even as a young girl. The religious and geographic us is not for me.
Nor is the American us or the New Englander us. Who’s the us for me? My family, I told Sami. Zen Peacemakers are my us. Members of Green River Zen Center are my us. People inspired to make peace everywhere, in every area, based on wholeness. “You are part of my us,’ I told him, more so than cousins or next-door neighbors.
Yes, Sami Awad living alone now in his family home in Beit Jallah in the West Bank. Not the narrow, parochial, unempathic, confined us.
The danger of not belonging to an us is that you can lose your grounding, your foundation and balance. You can get too spiritually abstract, inhabit your head or the clouds. I’ve even envied the certainty and the sense of belonging of those who belong to a religious, gender-based, political or geographic us.
I can’t go there. Never could.
Eve Marko is a Founding Teacher of the Zen Peacemaker Order and head teacher at the Green River Zen Center in Massachusetts. She received Dharma Transmission and inka from Bernie Glassman. She is also a writer and editor of fiction and nonfiction.
Eve has trained spiritually-based social activists and peacemakers in the US, Europe, and the Middle East, and has been a Spiritholder at retreats bearing witness to genocide at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Rwanda, and the Black Hills in South Dakota. Before that, she worked at the Greyston Mandala, which provides housing, child care, jobs, and AIDS-related medical services in Yonkers, New York.
Eve’s articles on social activists have appeared in the magazines Tricycle, Shambhala Sun, and Tikkun. Her collection of Zen koans for modern Zen practitioners in collaboration with Roshi Wendy Egyoku Nakao, The Book of Householder Koans: Waking Up In the Land of Attachments, came out in February 2020.
Hunt for the Lynx, the first in her fantasy trilogy, The Dogs of the Kiskadee Hills, was published in 2016.
“When I was a young girl my dream was to be a hermit, live alone, and write serious literature. That’s not how things turned out. I got involved with people. I got involved in the world. Two things matter to me right now: the creative spark and the aliveness of personal connection. In some way, they both come down to the same thing.”