It was the end of a long day of travel for me going from Seattle to Israel. Upon arriving at Ben Gurion airport, I had met up with a group of other travelers, many of whom, unbeknownst to me, had been on the same flight as mine. Once assembled and checked off a list by the person who was to be our leader for the next two weeks, we boarded a tour bus and were on the way to a hotel for our first meal and overnight in Israel.
As we headed along the highway towards Jerusalem, there was still some daylight left. Our leader, Kent Dobson, was giving us an orientation talk over the bus’s PA system, when in mid-sentence he turned towards the bus driver and asked him to pull over. My initial thought was there must be some kind of emergency starting to unfold. But as soon as the bus came to a stop, Kent said: "Everyone, just leave your things on the bus and follow me." He then got off the bus and just started walking down a slightly inclined hillside. From then on, at each stop for the rest of the trip, except for telling us how many bottles of water we should take with us, "Follow me!" was all we were told about where Kent was going to be taking us.
The terrain was rocky and uneven, and dotted with small patches of scrub. As we continued to follow Kent it appeared we were going down the hillside into a ravine. About midway down, he stopped us and said: "Listen to this:"
Now let me sing to my well-beloved, a song of my beloved regarding his vineyard: My well-beloved has a vineyard, on a very fruitful hill. He dug it up and cleared out its stones and planted it with the choicest vine. He built a tower in its midst, and also made a winepress in it.
Kent had read Isaiah 5:1-2a, and then he began to point to things on the hillside opposite us. The terraced walls along the hillside formed by the same kind of stones we had been stumbling over as we came down our side of the ravine. Also, along that hillside, Kent pointed out olive trees, fig trees and grape vines! Then a watch tower! And just where he had been pacing as he pointed these things out to us, he points down at his feet and says: “Oh by the way, this is a wine press and over there is a gan”. ‘Gan’ is Hebrew for 'a garden', any cultivate piece of land.
While our group is mulling over this first lesson, a family, a man and a woman, and three children--two boys and a girl--came walking up the path on our side of the ravine. As they walked by us, Kent said: "Salam" and the man responded back with "Salam". "Salam", not "Shalom"? These two words of greeting sound alike and have similar meanings but using ‘Salam’ meant this family was Arabic! And they were the ones we had been watching as Kent had been pointing out these features from the Isaiah passage. This was their piece of land! It was their gan!
Kent could only speculate as to how long this piece of land had been in that family. Generations maybe. One thing thought that was very likely the case, that the parents or grandparents of the man had not left the land back in 1948. This was when the Arab countries surrounding the newly formed state of Israel were admonishing the Arab inhabitants of that land to leave, while they, the armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, et al, would drive the Jews back into the sea. So, many Arabs left and cannot return--which remains a major impediment to any two-state solution. Nonetheless, even today, approximately 20% of Israel's citizens are ethnically Arab.
By now, the light was fading away fast, so we headed back to the bus. It was dark by the time we got back and continued on our ride to the hotel. While on the way, Kent explained that due to travel delays and having to wait at the airport for everyone in a new group to arrive, it is not often that there is enough time to make this particular stop. We were the fortunate few. So much for our first day in Israel!
Even though this was the start of my second trip to Israel, it was my first exposure to the complexity of another overarching issue that makes any kind of settlement between the Jews and Arabs in that land seem intractable. That is, the land and who belongs to the land. Not, who does the land belong to, but who belongs to the land. If that sounds like a distinction without a difference, welcome to the Middle East, “...where with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” (2 Peter 3:8). Being the young country that we are, we have no way of relating to that verse and the connection both Jews and Arabs have to the land. For me, being Christian, this trip was where I learned in the words of St. Jerome (347-420 AD) who spent the latter third of his life in the land of the Bible: “Five gospels record the life of Jesus. Four you will find in books and the one you will find in the land they call Holy. Read the fifth gospel and the world of the four will open to you.”
In my next post, I hope to deconstruct this complex problem in a way that can at least help us look beyond what we are seeing in the media and better appreciate its historical context.