Saturday, August 14, 2010
Jayyous, Palestine
Photo by Paul Adrian Raymond

A young boy who looks about 10 or twelve years old is encircled by Israeli soldiers towering over him with US made M-16 Assault rifles or Israeli made Uzi submachine guns slung over their shoulders. The boy is looking up with a sad fearful perplexity in his eyes. The soldiers’ expressions are neither kind nor particularly gruff. But insert the boy into their midst and the pathos of power meeting the powerless is palpable. The boy, isolated from his father at the Israeli check point between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, waits with both hope and despair for the soldiers to send him back or let him pass into Jerusalem with his father to pray on this first Friday of Ramadan.
A woman approaches one of our people in the World Council of Churches Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI) with her pass in her hand. “Why can I not pass to pray,” she asks? A few words, some sign language, and examination of the pass reveal that she is 44 years and six months old. The Israeli rules at this time are only women 45 and older may pass. However, a conversation is initiated with a Palestinian police woman who then calls her superior over. They all explain to the woman that she is too young to go to pray this year. However, 15 minutes later the Palestinian policeman in charge comes over to the PA and says, ”the woman has been passed through.” A hint of humanity and justice has surfaced for a moment into the coercive power dominated system. But it is still the powerful that make the choices.
These scenes are repeated over and over as over 10,000 Palestinian Muslims seek to walk through a series of three check points on their way to pray at Haroam es-Shrif, their holy site at the temple mount in East Jerusalem. Only men over 50, women 45 and older, and children under 12 with a birth certificate are allowed to enter Jerusalem on Fridays during the month of Ramadan. A few others are able to get special prayer permits. Five, six or more Israeli soldiers meet each person at a narrow opening in each of the three barriers, one with a seven-foot turnstile. There are two lines, one for women and one for men. Husbands and wives look across the 25 yards that divide them, trying to see if their spouses have passed through and hoping to meet them at the end of the process, among the 10,000 people who pass through the check point in 5 hours.
Here in Bethlehem and Jerusalem holy sites, churches, synagogues and mosques abound. Christians, Jews and Muslims seek inspiration from these ancient cities. Jerusalem is a place where David, Jesus and Muhammad walked. It is the place where they met the coercive power of occupying armies and nations. It is the place where the power of prayer and principalities and powers intersected and clashed. It is the place where the occupying powers misunderstood the holy amidst the powerless people.
Looking over Bethlehem and Jerusalem on this first Friday of Ramadan it is still difficult to recognize the holy: in the dead stones of the “holy sites,” in the separation barriers, in the fear of terrorism, in the anger and hopelessness of the oppressed, in the eyes of a small boy awaiting his fate within the circle of soldiers. However, it may be that a small child will be the one to once again introduce a spark of holy spirituality into the arrogance of coercive power solutions?