Four of us just returned from a driving trip through Israel. At one point, we took a public bus from the Damascus Gate (outside the Muslim quarter) in Jerusalem to the check point for Bethlehem. Since a wall twice the size of the Berlin Wall now isolates entry into Bethlehem, we had to get off the bus, walk through the check point. We stood in a concentration camp-style building in line with Palestinain male workers returning home and Israeli soldiers with loaded guns walking the catwalk above us. We were encouraged to use our American passports to cut in line ahead of the workers but chose to stand with them. Of course, we did not have to have our papers examined and our hand prints checked as those blue passports waved us through. On the other side of the wall, taxis were lined up and worked hard to get our business. We chose an older gentleman who then waited for us while we saw the Church of the Nativity and walked the streets of a town that has “zero hope,” to quote one of its residents. We bought some souvenirs from the taxi driver’s relatives’ shop, mostly as an attempt to help their failing economy, and the bag of nuts I bought in a small store ended up being distributed among begging children who were obviously hungry. The needs are overwhelming and I wondered: where does one even begin?
The hard thing is that The Wall has virtually ended suicide bombings in Israel but it is also destroying life for the rest of the Palestinians trapped behind it. Going to the airport with a Palestinian Christian taxi driver brought more security at the airport than we would have normally had to go through. In fact, we were encouraged to not even mention that we had gone to Bethlehem to the Israeli soldiers at the airport check point while the car was examined under its hood and in its trunk. We were mildly interrogated (the gist being: what are you doing with this Palestinian scum?).
There are no easy answers here but I do know that the Christian witness in the Holy Land is primarily Palestinian and they are a part of the persecuted church who desperately needs our prayers.