Hope for Palestine, or Not

I am just back from Palestine where almost everyone told me that they have lost hope. I hadn’t been hearing that in the past years, so it was pretty depressing.

Then today in church the pastor said that to lose hope is to fail to honor those who have gone before us.

And tonight I talked with a Palestinian who lives here in Massachusetts, and he said that there hasn’t been any hope for Palestine since the Oslo Accords set the stage for unfettered Israeli expansion.

Hope for what? The hope that has been lost since my last visit in 2009 was for the international community to finally come through with pressure on Israel to stop building settlements so that there might be the possibility of negotiating an end to the occupation. But when Obama said “please stop”, and Israel said “no thank you”, that was the end. It became crystal clear that Israel was going to continue to do just as they pleased, and no power on earth was going to stop them.

As for honoring those who went before, those who have struggled for Palestinian liberation since 1948 or before, right up to the Turks who died on board the Mavi Mamara trying to reach Gaza, and including the olive farmers killed in their fields this season, and the Silwan resident shot by a settler in September as he was on his way to early morning prayers at the mosque, do their deaths require us to have hope in a falsehood called “the peace process?” Maybe we honor them more by looking facts in the face.

That’s what my Massachusetts Palestinian friend was saying. Any chance of Israel changing course has long since vanished. Israel was founded with a plan in place to take the whole of Palestine, and now they are armed not just with military weapons, and a nefarious set of regulations, but with a propaganda machine that reaches right into the U.S. Congress and media.

Catching up on my mail today, one article illustrates the hopeless situation facing Palestinians in their daily lives. The article is from an Associated Press journalist, Diaa Hadid, reporting from Jenin, West Bank, Palestine. She tells of the Helou family who are trapped in this city because Israel will not recognize their residency in the West Bank. The father and four of the children were born in Gaza and have Gazan IDs. The mother and four younger children were born in Jenin. If they try to travel outside Jenin with a Gaza ID, they will be deported to Gaza. If they were to return to Gaza even to visit they would lose their West Bank home. There are about 20,000 Palestinians in this same predicament. They cannot travel between the two parts of Palestine, and with Gaza IDs they are subject to “deportation” to Gaza. This is one of Israel’s tools for clearing the West Bank of Palestinians. There are hundreds of such tools.

I don’t want to lose hope for Palestine. I know a lot of fine and loving people in there, and I want them to have a life. But the facts on the ground, put there by Israel and sustained by the United States, look hopeless. So I turn to a poem by Wendell Berry called “Practice Resurrection”. It was in my “to read” pile of papers and turned up today. Here are some of the lines:

“So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute....
“Expect the end of the world. Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable.
    Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.....
“As soon as the generals and politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it.
    Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn’t go.”

His words shake my mind loose from the facts on the ground and allow me to find hope for Palestine in the unpredictable, in miracles, in the farmer’s inexhaustible love for his land. And maybe that's enough.