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News from the Region

Olive Harvest Delegation
Report #4: Strengths of Spirit
November 12, 2006

Promised Lands

By John Treat

After being turned away in Jenin, we drove to Nazareth to spend the night in a hotel.  Everyone was disappointed from the experience of being denied entry to Jenin at the three Israeli checkpoints surrounding the city.  All of us had been looking forward to meeting the staff of the Palestinian Fair Trade Association, whose olive oil AFSC sells, to another afternoon of olive picking, and—most of all—to our home stays with families in Jenin.

Kiryat Shemona. Photo: John Treat

After dinner in Nazareth, the group met to process the day.  We talked of our disappointments, of the families who had been waiting for us and whether their time and food would now go to waste.  In the end, we decided that we would drive north in the morning for our scheduled visit to Kiryat Shimona then make one more try at getting through the checkpoint on Monday.  We went to bed tired and disappointed, but also a bit consoled and hopeful that at least we’d be trying again.

Nazareth is no longer the rural backwater that it is described as being in the New Testament.  It is now the largest Palestinian town within Israel, and the largest Christian Palestinian town in the region.  Both Greek and Latin Christians as well as Muslims live here in the town where Matthew and Luke tell us the story of Gabriel’s appearance to Mary and where Jesus “grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man.”  Houses hug the hills in all directions from the Roman basilica and the Greek cathedral and there is a general feeling of ease and prosperity. However, even here within Israel there is the Jewish hilltop settlement of Upper Nazareth commanding the high ground above an Palestinian city.  Bill Plitt, Ken Carlson, Al Espenscheid, and I got up early to go to the 7:00 a.m. Arabic Mass at the Basilica of the Annunciation.  Afterwards, a local woman told Ken and Bill, “Pray for us.”  How many armies have marched through this region?  Persians, Greeks, Roman, Muslim and Crusader, and on to the present.  What did the boy from Nazareth make of living in “contested territory”?

After a quick walking tour of Nazareth, we headed north to Kiryat Shimona, the northernmost major town in Israel, just two miles from the Lebanese border.  The Golan Heights and Mount Hermon were to our right as we drove.  The land was lush with olive trees giving way to vegetables and fruit.  It is from this valley that the Sea of Galilee is fed.  It is land worth having by anyone’s estimation.

The Israeli town of Kiryat Shimona was founded in 1949 and has grown through successive waves of Southern European, Ethiopian, and Russian Immigrants.  It is not a wealthy town.  High rise apartment buildings and modest shops line the main street, but it is amazing to think that the Israeli town was no more than a cluster of World War II surplus tents less than 60 years ago.   Before 1948, the Palestinian village of Al-Khalisa—on the site of today’s Kiryat Shimona—was  home to over 1800 Palestinians. 

Haim Barbibay, the mayor of Kiryat Shemona. Photo: John Treat

Since 1967, the city has withstood more than 4,000 katyusha rockets, including heavy bombardment during the recent Lebanon War.  The pride in what had been accomplished here, the love of the land, and the determination to carry on were clear in the talks we had with the city manager, the town’s spokesperson, and the mayor.  In concluding his time with us, Haim Barbibay, the mayor of Kiryat Shemona, said, “If Kiryat Shimona were gone, so would be Nazareth and Tel Aviv.  We will never be overcome by force; our spirit is stronger.” 

I was disappointed that there home stays weren’t possible here as had been planned.  It seems that there were too few people who spoke English in the city to be able to accommodate us.  I could see the mayor’s pride in living in such a beautiful place and his determination that his city would not be intimidated out of existence by rockets lobbed over the border but, at the same time, I still have trouble conceptualizing Zionism.  I want more time to talk with people in the cafes and see how they understand the idea of a Jewish state. I want to hear how they think there can be peace when one ethnic group is privileged in law and a hundred less formal ways.  I keep trying to remember that Israel is a state born from the Holocaust, a safe haven from 2,000 years of oppression, but I cannot believe that legislating inequality and building walls can ever make anyone safe.

One of my own ancestors, Robert Treat, was a settler.  He fled the state church in England in the Seventeenth Century to the Bay Colony in Massachusetts and from there, with his father and family, moved to the new outpost on in the Connecticut River Valley and then to New Haven to establish a colony based strict interpretation of Levitical Law.  He was an ideologue out to create a safe haven, a city on a hill.  He made his name in King Phillip's War, the decisive conflict between colonists and Native Americans for control of Southern New England.  He confined some Native Americans to poor land and helped push others west.  From his successes as a war hero, he launched himself into colonial politics. He presided over a colony where whipping Quakers at the cart was good public policy, a necessity for keeping order.  When the Commonwealth fell in England, he helped hide the judges who passed the death sentence on King Charles.  Yet he is remembered today, if at all, for saving Connecticut’s charter from being seized by the British at the time of the Restoration.  As with other founders, the less pleasant facts are lost in the accepted narrative of the nation’s beginnings.

I see in him the dangers and complexities of a man who wed his own experience of discrimination to an ideal of a safe place, a perfect place.  I'm sure old Robert would have a certain sympathy for the things I see here--protecting the land, keeping the ideal alive, building the city on a hill.  No one can question his results or those I see in Kiryat Shimona. But neither can one look back and really understand or empathize when he or she looks behind the national myths through analyzing the facts on the ground and listening to the competing narratives that have been suppressed by those who had the privilege of writing the accepted history. 

What would old Robert make of me 300 years later? Catholic, part Native, and consorting with those troublesome Quakers.  What questions will the children of Kiryat Shimona ask when rockets no longer come down and they want to know the story of their city, their country?

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