Change is always swift when leapfrogging from one continent to another, it's just that some leaps are more far-reaching than others. Yesterday I was in Switzerland, today Palestine. It isn't difficult to imagine the transformation of the landscape, the cars, the food, the people, but it is something else entirely to experience it unfolding in front of you.
In the last week I had become accustomed to taking notice of marble archways, verandas overflowing with flowering vines, and steep, verdant peaks. Yesterday, travelling from Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv to my new home outside of Bethlehem, that composition became awash in an infinite sea of right angles, stands of cedar and olive, and arid hilltops. I arrived in Ad Dheisheh refugee camp yesterday evening around 6:00, a tangerine sun setting over West Bank highlands in the distance.
A brief and necessary history lesson: the Dheisheh refugee camp is not a 'camp' as you might picture one in your mind, though it did start out as a tent site 58 years ago. The municipality of Dheisheh (a l-sq-km area) has been leased by the UN Relief Works Agency since 1949 and is now a fairly built-up enclave of about 12,000 persons. Dheisheh was, until the Oslo Accords in the 1990's, surrounded by a 15' barbed wire fence and had only one entrance, controlled by the Israeli military, which remains today in the form of a rusty turnstile, a chilling reminder of perhaps the most restrictive policies ever imposed by the Israelis - 84 consecutive days of curfew during the Gulf War. The residents of Dheisheh come from 30 villages and from West Jerusalem, and inhabited the tent site in 1949 after their hometowns were either repopulated by Jewish immigrants, or demolished. Today, Dheisheh is headquarters for the world-renowned youth dance troupe, champion basketball teams, a media center, trade school, kindergarten, and a women's leadership initiative, all based out of the Ibdaa Cultural Center. It is my task for the next four months to understand the situation here more deeply - the realities facing Palestinian refugees as well as the legitimate concerns of Israeli citizens - and to offer myself in service in ways that I hope might be useful to the people here, based in some part on my training as a peace and conflict educator.
It is not likely to be easy, and I see that as a good thing. I can foresee myself being challenged to refine various aspects of my training in conflict studies, in developing a greater sensitivity to complex and seemingly insurmountable conflicts, to deepen my empathy for the victims on all sides of such tragic circumstances, to increase my ability to be open to new insights and learnings, and to become a better teacher (that is perhaps the most arduous of them!). If the past two days are any indication, it is going to be a great journey.
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