Jerusalem: not a neutral spot in it. Every inch of every wall vibrates with ideology, politics, and public statement.
The Western Wall: a rectangle of Jewish space interrupts a regional line of mosques. With this wall, a minority culture claims its small space.
The security wall: miles of concrete, barbed wire, trenches and technology protect Israeli Jerusalem and estrange the Palestinian West Bank.
A feral cat wall: a tough tom stations himself on a mound of food left by a cat-lover, keeping other hungry cats at bay.
A gender wall separates women into a small zone and requires of them a muted self-expression.
A tent city near the Old City wall: young activists protest the high cost of housing and food in an increasingly gentrified new city.
Posted on a utility wall: “Armageddon is upon us! The Mashiach is in Tel-Aviv and will soon lead Israel.” A critic has scratched out Mashiach’s face.
On the wall of an abandoned building near a square of banks, a graffiti artist says, “End the Hate.”
A shared wall: On one side, it marks the courtyard of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher; on the other, the courtyard of the Mosque of Omar. As soon as the mosque’s broadcast of afternoon prayer ends, the church bells ring with a deafening percussive song.
A bathroom wall: in a public park, an urban prophet calls for an end to the inner walls that divide us one from another.
Thank you. I can’t believe how the “security” wall – what or who are we keeping in or holding out? (See “Once Upon a Time” a short story by Nadine Gordimer, written and set in Joburg, South Africa) – has grown so much since I was there.
Perhaps because they have more elements of the spiritual, your observations seem more in line with what I felt politically than what I felt were the prevailing views from Birthright.
On Birthright, more troubling than the dichotomy of, “the search for peace and promised land,” and “the political unrest” itself, was the prevalent attitude and attempt to ignore, and pass off with jokes of vaguely racist subtext, what was going on around them. People can get used to anything, I guess, and the pressure of the every day intrudes, but Birthright seemed determined to paint all Israel with one brush.
My overall feeling was that, with its current political clime, it was not the Israel I had hoped to find and perhaps not even the one I needed, but at least I did get to see all that I had wanted to see and visit.
Thanks, Miriam and Graham for engaging with ideas here! It seems to me: No one can go to Israel these days without meeting political and social issues.