Thank you, Jeremy, for sharing this.
While we were in Jerusalem in spring of '20, we also took a side trip to Bethlehem. While we were there we saw smoke wafting on the far end of a street on which we drove. We promptly turned around and found a different route out of the city. A couple of people in our party of four were alarmed.
That experience was definitely an eye-opener for us sheltered Americans.
Even so, a couple of enthusiastic local merchants persuaded us to visit the inside of their mosque. They adorned us with Muslim garb, friendly-like, with a strong suggestion that we should buy the garb. My wife and I, clueless American Christians, politely declined with a few awkward objections.
But they were nice.
But that vague detection of some kind of apartheid is definitely there in Isreal. Sad but true. We live in a troubled world.
I blame the nazi third reich. If they had not mounted such a hugely murderous final solution, killing millions of their own citizens, the Jews of Germany and eastern Europe would not have been terrorized into a frantic desperation that ultimately compelled them to, a few years later, occupy and dominate Palestine.
Another factor is simply this: we live in a modern, secularizing world. Notions of governance and nationhood no longer revolve around tribal (racial) identity, nor religious identifications, except . . . apparently, among many Muslim sects, and the Israelis.
As an American Christian, I do feel empathy for the plight of Palestinians. The burden they carry is somewhat like what we did to our indigenous tribes.
Every person born into this world is most likely born into some nation or polity of ages-old conflict, accompanied by fear and loathing.
There have surely been injustices perpetrated since the Israelis have imposed their outmoded quasi-racial, quasi-religious polity upon these 21st-century native Palestinians.
Read 'em and weep. Life goes on. I hope those two groups can work out a more suitable arrangement, someday.
Thank you, Jeremy, for sharing your experience.
