Have Ya Been There?

Now have ya been there, have ya really, been there?
Have ya crossed the Allenby Bridge by day from Jordan
When such passage through the terminal maybe endless in time,
Where your success depends on the mind of a youth with a gun
Who knows you not by name.

Have seen the City of Jericho, whose walls came a tumblin’ down,
Been replaced by the new one of wire and steel
So as not to threaten the ones who farm their lands beyond?
Have ya driven up from the Dead Sea, passed the shanties of the Bedouin who flee,
Not because they are reckless, and feckless but because they simply are not free?

Have ya passed by the new Settlements,
that form new walls to the East, of the City that once was the scene of the Holy ones and their priests?
Have ya passed through the gates of that City whose babe was born long, long ago,
And is now a place so surrounded that even the wise men can’t go.
Have ya experienced the check points in origin that are meant to secure,
But instead, further divide the land, its people and their mature?

Have you traveled up from Ben Gurion, on up to the Galilee, raced down passed the city of Jericho, across to Jerusalem, Joppa and the Sea,
Without even a trace of the secrets that are within, the
Nearly four hundred miles of concrete for which it is a sin.
Have ya slept in a cave of the shepherds, pulled olives from their trees, and tried to take them to the markets, lined with walls as far as you can see?



Have ya been there? Have you really seen?
Have ya been to the old city of Hebron, that has endured death and desolation,
Walked down its old streets, passed the market shops
Now shuttered below from their clients, and stormed from above by the rain of garbage, and the epithets of the new “owners”?
Have ya been to the temple of worship where the bodies of the patriarchs abide, and reflect on the three great religions whose
Paths are more closely aligned, than imagined?
Have ya been there?

Have ya stayed with the families in Beit Sahour, whose Christian heritage is fading?
Not only because they’re sealed off from their roots, in the villages that were long ago invaded,
But because they can’t make a living, they and their families must go.
Have you walked the camps around Bethlehem,
Whose numbers near 20,000 or so, and whose children wander the Alleys, shooting cap guns and throwing stones,
Fighting an enemy they have seen take away their fathers and brothers and so?

Have you gone to the gates of Gaza - Rafa, Erez to name just a few?
Where inhabitants live like prisoners surrounded on all sides and the view?
Where the glass windows of the Crossing at Erez appear,
As some mall we might see in the land of the free, yet denies the tales within.
But the truth lies for those to hear, with over a million and half human beings,
Trapped by the fence that denies them their defense,
And Like shooting fish in a barrel, vulnerable and exposed.






Have ya seen the hungry children there, the men unemployed and depressed,
Because they have no meaning, no life and so they have much distress.
Until they promise to respect their captors, they have little of real life left.
But how can that be, from the land of the free, of mercy and justice.

A State that denies so much,
Must really have an alternative agenda, for which they feel is their destiny or some other disguised motive.
The captors have really lost their souls it seems.
Who can blame those within for their rockets, when a generation of children have nothing
To dream about, to strive for, to reach out amongst the forgotten.

So take a trip and see for yourself, and get up from that table!
Go to the land of strained enchantment if you are able.
Don’t take a route of comfort, nor just to see the historical stones.
Travel to its cities within the walls themselves, to the camps, and valleys below,
The settlements that rim above, the stolen trees and demolished homes.
For that is where you’ll find me, amongst the living stones.


Bill Plitt
Feb. 9, 2009

“Think about the Other”

Yaniv Reshef, a former Israeli soldier, watched from a distance of 12 miles, the bursting mushroom clouds high above the Palestinian cities and towns of Gaza caused by exploding bombs dropped by fleeting F-16’s. He felt the ground, farmed by his family for as long as he could remember; shake beneath his feet with each new cloud.

He thought about his own experiences as a foot soldier in one of the most elite and feared brigades called the Golani. Memories of times when he threw shock grenades through the windows of sleeping Palestinians for fun, or held his gun to the head of a child within an innocent household, now stirred his conscience.

Yaniv also recalled the meetings he helped organize for Combatants for Peace in the neighboring Israel town of Sderot so that the people there, who had been recipients of crude rocket fire from the other side of the prison-like fence, could hear his Palestinian and Israeli partners tell their stories.

Bassam grew up in the ancient city of Hebron, and remembers as a young boy seeing an elder in his community shot from behind by an Israeli soldier. The memory remained with him. At 17, he was caught planning an attack on Israeli troops, and spent seven and half years in prison for that act. Inside those walls he learned Hebrew, and saw a film about the Holocaust. He heard the story of the other. He knew that continued violence was not an answer.

In 2005, he co-founded Combatants for Peace and like Yaniv and others, he refused to use weapons again. Even when his 10 year old daughter Abir was gunned down two years later by an Israeli soldier from behind as she left her classroom, Bassam remained committed to ending the violence.

On March 24th, over 100 gathered in the sanctuary at Trinity to hear the stories of the two former soldiers who hadn’t known each other before the 30-day tour of East Coast cities, but who had become intimately close during those days on the road. Many of those in attendance came from outside the Arlington community. What they heard was riveting. What they recognized was a courage of conscience for which the Combatants had received an award just a week before at the Peace Abbey in Sherborn, MA.

Later that week, at the closing ceremony for the tour at St. Columba’s Episcopal Church in D.C, Bassam was unable to attend the meeting. Yaniv filled in for him, and told Bassam’s story which revealed how deeply he had come to understand his new friend’s inner voice and outer experience. Growing up just several miles from one another in the southern regions of their now separated lands, neither of them was given that opportunity to know each other before. At the closing, Yaniv translated a poem by a famous Palestinian poet, Mahmood Dawish.

Think about the Other

When you are making your breakfast, think about the other.
Don’t forget the food for the doves.
When you are making your wars, think about the others.
Don’t forget those who seek peace.
When you are paying your water bills, think about the others.
Don’t forget those who drink from the clouds.
When you are returning to home, to your home, think about the others.
Don’t forget those who live in tents.
When you are sleeping and counting the stars, think about the others.
There are some who can’t find a place for sleep.
When you are given your spirit a space to fly, think about the others.
Think about those who lost their right for words.
When you are thinking about the others, the distant others,
Think about yourself, and say, “I wish I were a candle in the dark.”

The Kibbutz and the Village: A lesson of hope

The Kibbutz and the Village: A Lesson of Hope
By Bill Plitt
On the final day of my recent trip to Israel and Palestine in November ‘08, in the old city of Jerusalem, where I was staying, a colleague suggested that I take a diversion on my way home and venture up just south of Galilee to the Israeli Kibbutz Metzer. So, along with my Quaker traveling companion and one other American, we hired a taxi and drove north for nearly two hours to the interior of the state of Israel, to a place I hadn’t been before.

As I sat down in one of the four, plain metal chairs around the small table in the trailer office of the Kibbutz Metzer, I stirred my coffee slowly and wondered about the appearance of the commune’s simplicity. I wondered also about the journey of its people and those in neighboring Israeli Arab villages. Dov Avital, the secretary general for the kibbutz, who had poured us each a cup of coffee, as is custom among the people of the Middle East, was as eager to tell his story as we were to listen. We knew little about this place that grew out of the idealism of the 50’s. We were not prepared for what he was about to tell us.

On Nov.10th, 2002, a lone Palestinian gunman entered the kibbutz and murdered three adults and two children. The mother had just finished reading her children a bedtime story. This violent act shook the kibbutz and neighboring villages, and the shock reverberated throughout Israel. What events could have led up to this?

Dov shared with us that in 1953, one hundred and twenty Argentinean émigrés formed the kibbutz in a barren area in central Israel, a practice that had been replicated many times since 1948 when Palestinian villages had been emptied and Arabs expelled during what was called ‘the war of Independence’ by the Jews or ‘the disaster’ by the Palestinians. In this case, the land was taken by the émigrés as granted by the “Armistice Treaty” of ‘48. From the very beginning, however, the founders chose to practice coexistence with the surrounding villages whose people were Arab and who today make up about 20% of the Israeli citizenry.

The cooperation was two-way from the very beginning. When the Kibbutz could not locate viable water, the nearby Israeli Arab village of Meiser connected Metzer to its own small well; that action would not be forgotten. Other acts of kindness would follow over the 50 years of working together: dousing a threatening brush fire together near the Kibbutz; sharing sports activities with neighboring villages, including the use of Metzer’s swimming pool; even forming a joint soccer team which competed in the regional league. In the words of Avital, the community ‘became a close knit, multi-generation tradition.’

In 2002, a few weeks before the murders in the kibbutz, the Metzer’s board protested against the building of the ‘security fence’ across the Green Line because it would cut through the olive groves belonging to the West Bank village of Kefin; it would deprive the farmers of 60% of their fields. Metzer’s leaders had scheduled a meeting with Israeli Defense Ministry for the 11th of Nov. to argue the case. The meeting never happened, for on the evening of the 10th, the terrorist committed his horrible acts. But the long history of coexistence between the Kibbutz and the neighboring villages endured the onslaught. The terrorist was not from those villages.

Despite the emotions that rocked Israel, the secretary general said at the time, “Although the thirst for revenge is natural, we need the strength to remember our message and remain firm believers in our desire to live in peace with our neighbors.” He then said, “Most Palestinians are not terrorists.” During Shiva, the Jewish period of mourning following death, many Palestinians from several villages visited the Kibbutz to express their sorrow.

Even after this tragedy, the members of the Kibbutz continued to extend invitations to maintain their long history of coexistence with Arabs across the Green Line. In 2004, when the ‘security fence’ or ‘separation wall’ was constructed, it prevented the villagers from tending and irrigating their olive trees that lay between the Green Line and the new “separation” fence. The Kibbutz offered to construct a tunnel under the wall to receive sewage, circulate the waste in their own holding ponds, and pump the water back to their neighbors for irrigation.

As we heard this story, I was truly amazed at the contrast between what I had seen over the previous two weeks of my visit in the occupied areas of the West Bank and at the Erez Crossing in Gaza, a walled prison containing more than a million people, and the Metzer-Meiser experience.

As we prepared to catch the train from Haifa to Tel Aviv, we couldn’t help but be captivated by the thought that in the darkest hours, human beings are capable of drawing from their common well of humanity, and as President Obama put it in his inauguration speech, “extending hands and unclenching fists”. We thanked Dov for his story. Our coffee remained cold and untouched. The lesson of hope warmed our hearts.

“The Nakba, Memory, Reality and Beyond”
The Seventh International Sabeel Conference, Nazareth/Jerusalem, 2008
By Bill Plitt
Josef Ben-Eliezer is a holocaust survivor. As a young Israeli soldier in 1948, he participated in the “Nakba”, the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and villages. His military actions in Ramla, a small village near the coast, recalled his own childhood when his family was forced out of their home in Poland, marched to the Russian border, and taken by train to the camps of Siberia.


He shared his story with us one evening at the Sabeel Conference which met that night in the Israeli City of Nazareth. It was a gathering of 175 Christians from five continents concerned about peace with justice. Josef’s story was powerful, and he recognized that what he had done in1948, was precisely what had happened to him at the hands of the Nazis, a few short years before. He no longer could remain in the Israeli army or in the country to which he had been drawn. His strong need for personal survival, as well as the drive to preserve his new homeland’s existence, dissipated as he realized the connection between his own horrors as a ten year old, and those he was inflicting on others, as a soldier.

You could have heard a pin drop during his retelling of the story. Every word was measured. There was not a dry eye in the room, when Josef described his return to Israel some years later, and his subsequent conversation with a survivor of Ramla. It was then that he revealed, he had asked for forgiveness from the Palestinian for any pain he may have wrought as soldier.

When Josef had finished his story, a lone Palestinian of similar age, rose slowly from the back of the hall and said in a critical tone, “I appreciate the sincerity of your words, but it is not enough. More like you are needed to stand up and share your stories. I thank you for your courage.” He paused and then said, “I wish you many long and happy years!” The two former adversaries shared that night a message of reconciliation and forgiveness, two necessary ingredients for true peace with justice. The moment was symbolic of the entire week as we heard more of such stories and more attempts to disclose the Palestinian narrative from both sides, so long buried in time.

After a week of digging more deeply into the events of what happened to the 750,000 Palestinians who had been forced to leave their villages in 1948, as well as hearing attempts by some Israelis to right the wrongs of that era, the conference participants were greatly moved to make their international presence known in some meaningful, non-violent way. 48 participants rose together that night in the Deheisheh Refugee Camp, outside of Bethlehem, planned our strategy and rented a bus to Gaza the next morning. We could no longer be content to just sit and listen to more stories of pain. It was a call to action.


The news report from the day before indicated that the Israeli Military in Gaza had refused representatives of non-governmental Organizations (NGO’s) their right of entry into the city for a second straight day. The bus arrived at the terminal building of the Gaza gate of Eretz, a large, modern edifice with a glass facade that stood three stories high, and extended the width of parking lot some 150 yards. The building denied the presence on the other side of a city of 1.5 million Palestinians under siege. Only the flies revealed their existence.


We were there to stand in solidarity with the health care organizations and media that had been denied rights guaranteed by international law. Mairead Maguire, a Noble Peace Laureate from Ireland, stood with us, as we encircled the NGO’s, who were holding an impromptu staff meeting in the center of the empty parking lot, to discuss the implications of being prevented entry into what appeared to be the world’s largest outdoor prison.

The next day, the NGO’s were allowed to enter, and shipments of food crossed the gate for the first time that week. There is no indication that our presence made any difference. But the NGO’s felt supported by our presence. We had felt we had made an attempt to act on our call to stand with those who mourn. At that point, the conference became more than a series of panel discussions and stories. It had become a call for an end of the occupation for both Israelis and Palestinians.

The week was full of rich worship experiences, memorable visits to destroyed villages and the stories of their inhabitants, stirring lectures by distinguished scholars like Rashid Khalidi, impassioned speeches by diplomats such as the former Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Andreas Van Agt, and descriptions of heroic acts by both Israeli and Arab citizens to expose the horrors of the disaster, the Nokba of 1948.


Submitted by Bill Plitt, December 23, 2008