Touring Mainer witnesses strife in Israel

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Editor’s Note: Emily Bernhard is a free-lance writer who lives in Blue Hill.

JERUSALEM – We had traveled for 24 hours. Our clothes were rumpled, our eyes were bloodshot.

Twenty-eight of us had just collapsed into a slightly air-conditioned bus. We were about to reach our hotel when Israeli soldiers flagged us down.

They were no older than 18. Just boys and girls dressed in drab green uniforms and combat boots toting submachine guns.

We sat up and took a look around. Rocks the size of baseballs, upended trash containers, garbage and burning tires covered the street. A lone plastic shopping bag danced in the wind. Our driver opened his window and started yelling at the soldiers in the guttural sounds of Arabic. They yelled back.

Finally a decision was made and Rami, our Christian Palestinian guide, turned to us and said into the bus microphone, “We go back.” One woman on our bus said, “I want to go home.”

So began our 12-day pilgrimage to the Holy Land in early October. What we learned to call “The Troubles” had begun just a few days before our arrival when Israeli right wing Likud party leader Ariel Sharon visited a holy Muslim site.

Most of us were there for a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to this ancient holy place. As luck would have it, the fragile truce among the citizens exploded just as we got there.

We were mostly Mainers, some of French descent, some Down Easters, a host of retirees from away and a smattering of New Yorkers. I have to confess that the last place I ever thought I’d find myself was on an air-conditioned bus in Jerusalem with people who, for the most part, were 30 to 40 years my senior and devout Catholics to boot.

I am not Catholic although my mother’s family is. I’ve never even been baptized. I was here because, for the last four months, I attended a Bible study with John Bernier, a scholar living in Winslow with a knack for bringing the Bible to life and putting the stories in their historical context. He was leading his 14th trip to the Holy Land and I jumped at the chance to go with someone who really knew what was what.

We finally made it to our hotel, and the next morning I came to breakfast, looked out the window and, given my look of astonishment, someone said, “It’s something isn’t it?”

Our hotel was on top of the Mount of Olives, which is separated from Mount Moriah – where the old city of Jerusalem is located – by the Kidron Valley. The two mounts are no more than a mile apart as the crow flies and we had a perfect view of the huge dome of the Temple Mount which King Hussein of Jordan had covered in gold a few years ago.

Everything in Jerusalem is built using limestone, which is white and bleached by the sun. Against this stark backdrop, the Temple Mount shines gloriously.

That day, we began our routine of seeing the sights during the day, and hoping for the best in regard to “The Troubles.” We were told not to walk around at night, and mingling with the locals was quietly discouraged.

We walked the Via Dolorosa, which is the path that Jesus walked as he carried the cross through the streets of Old Jerusalem. Normally, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people pressed into the 6- to 10-foot-wide tunnel-like streets of the old city where cars are not permitted.

Storefronts line the streets, which bend and dip and the shopkeepers live upstairs, as they have for centuries. The day we were there, however, the Palestinians were honoring the dead who had been killed over the past few days and all the shops were closed, their metal doors shut tightly and padlocked. We had the streets to ourselves.

Street encounters

Stopping for a moment, I sat down next to two Palestinian boys on a bench. I chatted them up for a minute and then asked, “Why aren’t you in school today?”

One boy, who was no more than 10, pointed his hands like a large gun at my head and said, “Because the [Israeli] government is killing us, like this.”

We continued on the Via Dolorosa, which finally culminates at the Holy Sepulcher, an enormous and some say hideous conglomeration of architectures constructed over Calvary, the hill where Jesus was crucified.

Stepping inside out of the glaring sun into the sepulcher dimly lit by several brass Greek Orthodox lanterns, we saw walls covered with intricate mosaics depicting the life and death of Jesus hewn in intense shades of blood red and deep violet. Gold glimmers everywhere, accenting Jesus’ agony.

Only one person at a time may crawl under the altar and stick his or her hand in a hole in the floor to touch the actual rock of Calvary and feel the hole in the stone where the cross was probably set using wedges. Not content to wait their turn, sweet little grannies in babushkas used their elbows to ratchet their way up to the altar.

The pushing was extraordinary. One of our number said in a loud voice, “Ma’am we are all going to get there. I know you can’t understand a word I am saying but we are all Christians. Let’s behave in a Christianlike manner.”

Outside the church, the Jews and the Muslims were intimidating and even killing each other, and inside, the Christians were practically sparring to be the first to touch the holy rock.

Next, we visited the Western Wall, really just the remains of the retaining wall from the Second Temple destroyed in 70 A.D. The stones are massive and there are hundreds of bits of crumpled paper, presumably prayers, clustered on the ground.

Hasidic men passed in groups of three and four wearing long black coats and high black hats. Group leaders holding flags lectured pilgrims while tourists snapped photographs. Soldiers paced the edges of the plaza. Jeeps and other military vehicles stood ready near one of the entrances.

The sun was hot and people packed into what little shade there was. Before approaching the wall, we proceeded through a metal detector. Men then prayed at the left half of the wall and women prayed on the right. Some women standing near the wall rocked back and forth as they prayed and women in shawls read the book of prayers.

Whispered prayers

I approached the wall, whispered my prayers for peace to the stones and then sat in the tiny strip of shade to watch the others. I struck up a conversation with two Jewish girls praying and reading. They spoke freely and quickly offered their opinions about The Troubles.

One said, “How can you talk to [the Palestinians]? We cannot talk to them.”

The other girl said, “How can we give a gift back that was given to us by God? God gave us the land. We are not losers; we are winners. We will fight. Tell that to the Jews in America.”

The next day was Friday, which is the holy day for Muslims. Everyone expected that, after their main service in the mosques at noon, Muslims would demonstrate all over Jerusalem.

That day, we headed south to the Dead Sea, Masada and Qumran. Two thousand years ago, a group of Jewish leaders and religious purists holed up for two years in a standoff with the Romans in a desert castle called Masada built on a cliff by Herod the Great. After two years of siege, the Romans were about to win. Rather than give themselves up to certain slavery, rape and torture, the Jews decided to commit mass suicide.

To this day, the Jews regard Masada as a symbol of Jewish bravery and defiance. Up until a few years ago, all Israeli army conscripts were sent to Masada to declare that they will die rather than see Israel run by non-Jews.

When we arrived in Jerusalem on Friday evening, there was a large crowd of Palestinians outside the hotel looking across the Kidron Valley at the Old City. “Please stay inside the hotel and don’t let your curiosity get to you,” our leader implored us. So I went outside. How could you not?

Outside, across the Kidron Valley in Jerusalem, by the Western Wall, bright orange explosions flashed and bullet fire was followed by the sight of 20 to 30 Palestinians running across the plaza. They began throwing stones down at the Israeli forces who shot at them.

In the distance near Bethlehem, black smoke rose into the sky here and there where Israeli cars had been firebombed. I was a little jumpy and my escort said, “It’s very safe here, you don’t have to worry. This is nothing.” Right.

“You are American?”

Later, I was standing with a small group of Palestinians. One nodded at me and asked his friend, “She’s German?”

“No, American.”

“You are American?” he asked me. “Really?” His friend started laughing.

“I don’t want to talk to you if you are American.” And then he talked to me for an hour and a half about The Troubles, about the Intifada, about 17-year-old boys being tortured in Israeli prisons. He had bright eyes and dark hair and one of his legs was destroyed – the muscles were completely gone from a bullet shot by an Israeli soldier in the 1980s when he was 16.

“Every time we shooted, we see on the bullet, Made in USA,” he said. “You read it. You are American? I don’t like Americans. Americans, yes, they are very nice, but American government, no. I don’t like.”

We left Jerusalem the next morning during Yom Kippur, the Jewish high holy days. The Troubles were heating up dramatically and churches, the old city, Jericho and other places were closing down.

Nazareth tragedy

We headed to Nazareth, where we were told that the Palestinians were more assimilated into Israeli culture and therefore less likely to demonstrate. Nonetheless, we saw signs hanging on telephone poles near the church reading, “The Palestinian workers are on strike here because they haven’t been paid in two months.”

As we made our way through the narrow streets of Nazareth, an old Muslim woman in long green robes and a white veil covering her hair smiled at us and said, “You are welcome here.” and bowed her head.

That afternoon, two Palestinians in Nazareth were killed and we could not leave our hotel for 24 hours. We ended up playing a very international game of five card draw in the hotel bar. We played for packets of sugar, which we redistributed often to keep the game going.

Venturing onto the hotel roof later, we could see Israeli soldiers in riot gear launching cans of tear gas down in the town and shooting rubber bullets into the crowd. We heard children screaming and ambulances rushing people to the hospital. It was good to leave Nazareth the next day.

Peace is hidden

Our last stop was in Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee. There, the Jews recently burned an old mosque in retaliation for the Muslims’ burning Joseph’s tomb.

Palestinian protesters marched outside our hotel and two more Palestinians were killed.

On our last day, I woke up early to watch the sunrise on the shore. I stepped into the Sea of Galilee and it felt exactly like the soft sweet water of the Cochnewagon Pond in Monmouth, Maine, where I spent summers as a kid.

Hours and hours and plane rides later, outside Boston, someone asked the group what place in the Holy Land had affected us the most. Every day, we were swamped with sights and sounds, layers of ancient civilization, stones that martyrs and saviors had touched, places where people had ascended to heaven and springs and rivers which still flowed after 2,000 years.

My own personal epiphany, if you can call it that, came at a shrine on the Mount of Olives called Dominus Flavit, meaning The Lord Wept. The story goes like this: Jesus came over from Bethany and stopped for a minute on the Mount of Olives a few days before he died. He took one look at Jerusalem, began crying, and prophesied the destruction of the temple and Jerusalem.

He said, “If you had known, even you, especially this your day, the things that make for your peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.” Luke 19:42

Maybe he saw into the future or simply read the writing on the wall. Either way, I couldn’t help but imagine how he would feel looking at Jerusalem today. How does anyone feel looking at the beautiful city of Jerusalem today where the things that make for peace continue to be hidden from our eyes?