What I Witnessed in the Holy Land
What I Witnessed in the Holy Land
Visiting Israel, Palestine, & the Golan Heights on the eve of war
In March and April of 2023, some six months before the October 7 Hamas-led attacks that precipitated Israel’s year-long assault on Gaza, I spent two weeks traveling in the areas which are labeled “Israel,” “the West Bank,” and “the Golan Heights” on current maps. I have made some social media posts about these experiences, but here I have attempted to place them in the context of a longer narrative. The resulting post is too long to fit into the email newsletter format, but I have decided against breaking it into smaller posts in hopes that it will be read as a single essay.
The first difficulty I encountered in attempting to write about my experiences is how I should title my post. Simply saying “Israel” or “Israel and the Occupied Territories” erases the other entities superimposed here, while “Israel/Palestine” inaccurately implies some kind of symmetry, as if these are two opposing nations locked in a struggle for dominance rather than a military superpower and a stateless population. While “Palestine” has historically been applied to the nearly all of the area currently occupied by the state of Israel, it does not include the Golan Heights, a part of Syria which Israel has occupied since 1967.
I have decided to go with the descriptive, yet also potentially loaded term “Holy Land,” as the areas in question are holy to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, as well as to members of the Druze, Bahá’í, and Mandean communities, among others. In using this term, I do not mean to imply that other places are not holy — indeed, one could argue that there are as many holy places as there are creatures on this Earth! — but to emphasize the centrality that this New Jersey-sized slip of real estate has occupied in so many distinct, yet overlapping religious imaginaries.
My title is also informed by a chant I heard at a Palestinian-led protest earlier this year in Heidelberg, Germany, which serves as a reminder of the colonial origins of the current boundaries:
vor den Briten waren wir einig / ein Land für alle heilig
(before the British we were united / one land, holy for all)
The purpose of my trip was educational. I am a current PhD candidate studying ancient Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature and its reception history. I have long wanted to visit this region of the world in order to ground my understanding of ancient texts and their historical interpretation in an embodied sense of geography, but I was not sure that I could do so ethically. An opportunity presented itself when a professor at my institution told me she was organizing a trip with a “socially conscious” Palestinian-owned tour company that works with both Israeli and Palestinian guides to present multiple narratives, as well as a network of individuals who open their homes to strangers in a manner that transcends typical tourism.
Our trip, originally scheduled for 2020, was repeatedly postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. When we finally got around to traveling in March 2023, our trip happened to coincide with the largest protests in the 75-year history of the state of Israel. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis had taken to the streets to protest Netanyahu’s “judicial reforms” — understood by opponents as a plan to undermine the judiciary’s checks on his power. For many of the Israeli people I spoke to during my time there, this moment felt like an inflection point for a nation without a constitution, forged from the dual traumas of the Shoah and the Nakba. Would the Israel of the future be a democracy or a theocratic dictatorship? If it would be a democracy, then a democracy for whom?
Observers have long described Israel’s stated mission of establishing a democratic Jewish state “from the river to the sea” as a “trilemma,” because it is impossible to satisfy all three of these criteria at once. To become a truly “democratic” state within all of the territories it occupies, Israel would have to extend equal citizenship rights not just to its 2 million Arab citizens, but also to the approximately 5 million Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank, at which point it would cease to be a functionally “Jewish” state. At the time of my visit in early 2023, senior members of the Netanyahu administration had already begun to push forcefully in the opposite direction, to the point of overtly encouraging the “wiping out” of entire Palestinian communities.
Silwan and the City of David
One of the first stops on our tour was the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan — a particularly active site of what Israel calls “demographic engineering” and what historians call “ethnic cleansing,” using militarized state power to forcibly displace Palestinian families. Not coincidentally, this area is home to a large archaeological park called “City of David,” where excavators search for material evidence of ancient biblical history. As the historian of religion Rannfrid Thelle has pointed out:
The area referred to as the City of David — a name which was first applied to the site by the French archaeologist Raymond Weill, who excavated there in 1913-14 and makes a very specific historical reference to the Bible’s most famous king, is most often called Wadi al-Hilweh by its current, mainly Arab residents. The name City of David privileges one phase of history, one that resonates with a Jewish national agenda and perhaps even more strongly with its Christian, biblically oriented supporters.
The archaeological park is also home to an Israeli settlement founded on top of a densely populated Palestinian neighborhood. In 2018, a European Union diplomatic report indicated that the park was being used as a “political tool” to shape historical narratives and promote the expansion of settlements which are illegal under international law:
Critics have described the project as turning the World Heritage site of Jerusalem into a commercial theme park while local Palestinian residents are absent from the narrative being promoted to the visitors.
As we hiked up the steep ridge outside the park, we noticed that several of the buildings visible across the valley were adorned with colorful murals of pairs of eyes. These eye murals were painted by artists wanting to remind tourists (many of whom are American Christians) of the neighborhood’s ongoing Palestinian presence. Our walk took us past the Israeli settlement both embedded within and cut off from the neighborhood like a fortress, surrounded by tall fences and barbed wire. At the top of the ridge, we reached the heart of Silwan. Here, the narrow streets are lined with more murals.
Our destination was nestled within this maze of murals: a vegetarian lunch feast prepared for us by a Palestinian Muslim family who would soon be fasting for Ramadan. It included hummus with falafel, homegrown olives, multiple kinds of pickled cauliflower, cucumber mint salad, flatbread, ‘Jericho’ brand bottled water and Arabic Coca-Cola. The inside of the home was small, and the tables for our group took up almost the entire living room. Around the house was a garden filled with all kinds of plants: flowers, fruit trees, herbs, and vegetables — plus chickens. Due to its close proximity to the archaeological “theme park,” the family worries that one day they will be forced out of their home by soldiers. Until then, they will continue to tend their garden and set mountains of homemade hummus before strangers.
Jerusalem’s Old City
In the afternoon, we visited the Kotel, or Western Wall, a fragment of the ancient Temple Mount complex which has been an important site of Jewish prayer and pilgrimage for centuries. The wall is gender segregated — men and women pray in different sections, often writing their prayers on small pieces of paper that they tuck inside the crannies of the ancient wall. Directly adjacent to this holy site, a virtual reality experience offers visitors a fantastical glimpse of what the area might have looked like during the Second Temple period, prior to the destruction of the Jerusalem temple by the Romans in 70 CE. The VR experience (which I came back later and did) is immersive, placing the viewer in an imagined past populated by teeming digital crowds, in which a glistening Jewish temple stands at the center of the Temple Mount, admired by all who witness it. At the end of the experience, the ancient “footage” crossfades into a view of the Western Wall as it appears today. The effect is a layering of historical periods to create a sense of the past embedded in the present. In the corridors beyond this building stand vending machines stocked with books with titles like Touching the Stones of our Heritage, which presents excavations around the Western Wall as “an expression of national pride and of the profound affinity between the Jewish people and the city of Jerusalem.”
The site of the ancient Temple Mount is now the Al-Aqsa compound, also known as the Haram al-Sharif, or “noble sanctuary”. It is home to multiple mosques, as well as the Dome of the Rock — a 7th century, gold-domed shrine which stands as the world’s oldest existing example of Islamic architecture. It used to be possible for non-Muslims to go inside these structures, but they are now closed to the public, and the area around them is now only accessible through security checkpoints, following attempts by Israeli extremists to blow up the mosques. While there are some Jewish Israelis who want to erase the mosques and build a “Third Temple” here (more on them in a moment), there are also Jews for whom it is taboo to set foot on the Temple Mount at all. This is because it is not possible to know the precise location of the Holy of Holies, and they do not want to risk accidentally treading on it.
At the time of my visit, the militarized presence around the Al-Aqsa compound felt like something of a microcosm of the Holy Land as a whole. In April 2023, just a few days after we left Jerusalem, Israeli police conducted raids inside the mosques during Ramadan prayer services, using stun grenades, tear gas, batons, and rifles to terrorize worshippers, prompting the UN and other organizations to condemn these “brutal attacks.”
The rest of the Old City is filled with churches and shrines maintained by almost every imaginable denomination: among them, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian, Syriac, Greek and Russian Orthodox Christians; Roman Catholics and every sort of Protestant. Some of these churches have histories going back many centuries; many others were built during the colonial era when it was desirable for every would-be world power to own a little piece of Jerusalem. Occasionally, brawls will break out between monks of different sects over who gets to place a chair in a certain area or sweep a certain step, but these disputes are held in check by an agreement known as the “Status Quo.” Inside the half-Catholic, half-Orthodox Church of the Holy Sepulchre, visitors can wait in line to place their hand in a hole that the faithful believe was the spot of Jesus’s crucifixion. Elsewhere in the church is one of the local sites that claims to be Jesus’s tomb. Another is the so-called Garden Tomb, which is covered with amusing signage admonishing visitors not to take selfies at the tomb entrance.
While parts of Jerusalem have the vibe of a religiously-themed Disneyland, there is (or was, at the time of my visit) something strangely beautiful, if incredibly precarious, about the superimposition of all these different sacred sites. Ein Land für alle heilig. But amidst all this diversity of devotion are hints that there are some who would love to turn this fragile ecosystem into a monoculture. Just outside the Haram al-Sharif, across the plaza from the Western Wall is an unassuming building called the “Holy Temple Visitors Center.” It is operated by a group called the Temple Institute which is dedicated to what it believes is “the Divine commandment for Israel to build a house for G-d's presence, the Holy Temple, on Mount Moriah,” that is, the Temple Mount. The group’s website is frank about what they mean by that:
Geo-politically, the Temple Mount has to be cleared of the Dome of the Rock and the mosques which are presently located upon it before the physical rebuilding of the Holy Temple can begin. Many scenarios can be imagined which would accomplish this, the most promising, and not necessarily the most far-fetched, would entail Moslem [sic] recognition of the Mount as the intended location for the rebuilt Temple.
Inside the Temple Institute is a gift shop filled with books and toys aimed at instilling a desire for the “Third Temple” in children. Since October 7, 2023, some members of the Israeli Defense Forces have been photographed wearing patches from the Temple Institute, suggesting an alignment with its intention to “clear” the Al-Aqsa compound of its Islamic holy sites.
The aims of the Temple Institute line up with the aims of American premillennial Zionist Christians, who believe the establishment of a “Third Temple” in Jerusalem to be a fulfillment of prophecy which will herald the Second Coming of Jesus and an ensuing apocalyptic war — an idea derived from a fundamentalist evangelical reading of the Book of Revelation. For Christians who read the Bible in this way, the “signs” of this coming fulfillment include the “restoration” of the Jewish people to the land of Israel, at which point the Jews will either convert to Christianity or burn in hell eternally. Everything except that last part makes apocalyptic Zionist Christians a handy ally for Jewish extremists who want to build a “Third Temple” on what is now the Al-Aqsa compound. It should be noted that these Christians are the demographic that much of the tourist infrastructure of the Holy Land overtly caters to. Any plans to alter the equilibrium will require the support of this key American voting block.
Despite Joe Biden’s efforts to present himself as an arch-Zionist (and Kamala Harris’s promise to continue the Biden administration’s unwavering support for the Israeli government), the politics of Donald Trump and his biggest supporters are much more closely aligned with radical Zionist aims. Evangelical Christians and Jewish extremists see Trump as a divine instrument in the model of Cyrus the Great, the ancient Persian king who allowed the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple following the Babylonian Exile. For these religious fundamentalists, Trump’s decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem and formally recognize Jerusalem (which is geographically embedded in the West Bank) as Israel’s capital is not only a forceful move toward Israeli control of the West Bank. It is also seen as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy by evangelical Christians and a sign that the war of Armageddon is drawing near (more on that later as well).
“Complicated” Morality
Not all Westerners who unconditionally support Israel are religious fundamentalists. While fundamentalists are driven by certainty, liberals are often guided to support the same policies by uncertainty in a conflict they perceive as “complicated.” Here, I want to steelman the most common ways I see complexity being invoked as a means of examining their underlying logic.
When people say that the moral question regarding Israel and Palestine is “complicated,” they are generally attempting to read the conflict within a larger context, whether by extending the historical depth of field or widening the geopolitical frame. The first type of “complication” arises from weighing contemporary conditions against historical ones. These historical conditions may reach back as far as biblical history and the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. They include the hideous strand of anti-Judaism that runs the length of European Christian history, leading to supersessionist theologies, blood libels, torture, pogroms, forced migration, and death, including the extermination of some six million Jews by the Nazis. Unfortunately antisemitism is not only a thing of the past. It persists today, on a spectrum that ranges from the perpetuation of harmful tropes (sometimes even by well-meaning people) to deadly attacks on synagogues. Given the deep trauma of all this violence, this argument goes, it is only fair for Jews to receive the state of Israel as a homeland.
While Jews, like all people, should be allowed to live free from persecution, there are at least two assumptions built into the above statement which are rooted in colonial logics. The first is the assumption that a Jewish “homeland” must entail a nation-state occupying all of Mandatory Palestine “from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” This assumption depends upon an exclusionary, colonial-era European concept of the “nation-state” and who may rightfully consider themselves at “home” within it — a concept developed by countries that have historically used it to ethnically cleanse their own Jewish populations. It should be noted that from the very beginning of the Zionist movement, there have always been Jews who have strongly resisted the mapping of Jewish identity onto a nation-state, and that defining the state in ethnonationalist terms remains controversial even within Israel.
The second assumption is that it is acceptable for this Jewish nation-state to come at the expense of Palestinian people, even if this must be done using the tool of state violence to expel or exterminate Palestinian populations. The colonial logic in operation here is one of sheer white supremacy. By “white supremacy” I do not mean to color code Jewish Israelis as white and Palestinians as brown — indeed, these are both very heterogenous groups of human beings — but rather to point toward the use of legal and ideological frameworks to privilege one group over another group which is generally considered to be of lesser import, or even subhuman. (The long history of portraying Palestinians as subhuman is an entire subject in itself. It frequently manifests as a tendency to characterize the conflict as a clash between ‘barbaric’ Islamist extremism and ‘civilized’ Judeo-Christian values, rather than a struggle between a religiously diverse occupied population and an occupying force which has, from the beginning, characterized its own project as a form of colonization.)
A second kind of “complication” can arise when the conflict is read within a larger geopolitical scope. It has often been noted that in the postwar order of the Pax Americana, the state of Israel has served as the US’s “aircraft carrier” in a region that it is necessary to dominate in order to exercise control over the shipping routes on which a large number of the world’s economies depend. This strategic partnership is so important that anyone who hopes to wield political power in the United States must pledge allegiance to the defense of the state of Israel no matter what, not out of sympathy for Zionism or fear of AIPAC, but simply because Israel plays such a crucial role in America’s foreign policy. To compromise this arrangement, the argument goes, would jeopardize the United States’s supremacy as a military superpower, allowing Iran or Russia or some other hostile regime to gain a strategic foothold in the region.
The solution that Zionism provides to this geopolitical quandary is the same as the solution it provides to the historical trauma of antisemitism: Squint until the human rights of Palestinians disappear in the shadow of something deemed more important, and then look away as this principle is pushed to its genocidal conclusion.
To understand how historical narratives are used to justify support for state policy, it is useful to pay a visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum on the western outskirts of Jerusalem. Designed by the architect Moshe Safdie, the structure of the building presses its visitor through an ordeal befitting its grisly subject matter. A long, bunkerlike concrete structure with a roof like an inverted V, the museum is laid out as a zig-zag, with galleries on either side of the central corridor. Within these suffocatingly angular rooms are a panoply of displays commemorating not only the lives that were extinguished by the Nazi regime, but also the acts of resistance by Gentiles who were determined to find themselves on the right side of history. In other words, there is ample room here for Christian visitors to imagine that they would have been among the “good” Christians.
The presentation of history at Yad Vashem is extremely compelling. It is at once sweeping and intimate, contextualizing the Shoah within a larger complex of European Christian antisemitism, while also containing drawers filled with family photographs and other personal effects that give human faces to the victims. In one particularly ghastly archival film, a bulldozer pushes a pile of rail-thin, naked human bodies into a mass grave. When I saw that film, eighteen months ago, I remember thinking it was the most shocking documentation of violence I had ever witnessed (having no idea that I was about to watch an entire livestreamed genocide).
Toward the museum’s exit is a vast cylindrical Hall of Names which aspires to make incalculable loss legible as an archive. Finally, the visitor emerges through the other end of the tube. The A-frame walls twist apart, like a zipper opening onto the breathtaking landscape that lies beyond it. The land is as beautiful as the archived suffering is horrific.
It is as if the building offers a logical axiom of cause and effect: Because of that, this.
In the parking lot outside the building, a gate inscribed with a quote pulled from Ezekiel 37:14 in English and in Hebrew drives home the logical connection between the building and the land, suggesting that the state of Israel is simultaneously the answer to the trauma of the Shoah and the fulfillment of biblical prophecy:
“I will put my breath into you and you shall live again, and I will set you upon your own soil…”
Across the valley from Yad Vashem are what remains of Deir Yassin, an Arab village that was ethnically cleansed by Zionist militants in 1948, culminating in the massacre of at least 107 villagers, including women and children. The nonprofit group Zochrot, which promotes awareness of the Nakba within Israel, writes about the disconnect between what is remembered and what is forgotten:
On [the Yad Vashem] side of the valley the world is taught to "Never Forget." On the Deir Yassin side the world is urged to "Never Mind."
Our guide for this part of the trip was Rotem, a Jewish Israeli who wore a keffiyeh as he showed us around. Rotem was born and raised in Jerusalem, and we learn that he had been to jail for refusing Israel’s mandatory military service. After we were finished with Yad Vashem, he asked our group what we thought. Some of the people in our group pointed out how strange it was to see so many young IDF soldiers inside the museum — mixed gender groups of teenagers in military fatigues flirtatiously kicking each others’ combat boots while machine guns dangled jauntily at their sides. It was jarring to see these cadets acting so playfully childlike amidst black-and-white images of German soldiers committing atrocities — some of whom also looked too young to be wearing their uniforms. Others pointed out familiar names among the lists of donors, like the late American casino magnate Sheldon G. Adelson, also known as the largest single donor to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Rotem told us that his own conscientious objection stemmed from viewing images like the ones inside the museum. For him, “never again” meant never again to *anyone,* not just Jews or Israelis. “Never again” is what prevented him from taking up arms against Palestinian people. So he went to jail instead of the military.
As the Jerusalem portion of our trip drew to a close, a colleague and I followed a sign near our hotel in East Jerusalem that said “cocktails.” We walked up a long staircase to what turned out to be a rooftop hookah bar. While there was actually no alcohol served (great marketing strategy, though!) it was the perfect place to process the first few days of our trip and watch a sea of people celebrating the first night of Ramadan. Shortly after the sun went down, the sound of an explosion made us jump. Our server laughed, assuring us that it was just the fireworks display, and offered us another pinch of peach-flavored tobacco.
Inside the Occupied West Bank
The next morning, we departed for the West Bank, an area separated from the state of Israel by militarized checkpoints and a long, graffiti covered wall. Out here, the vibe is less Disneylandish, but there are still pockets of commerce around the most important sites of Christian pilgrimage, such as the road to the Basilica of the Nativity, with its star on the ground purporting to mark the exact spot where where Jesus was born(!) (We didn’t stop there, but Banksy’s Walled Off Hotel, which ceased operations shortly after October 7, 2023, was also located here.)
In nearby Beit Sahour, we spent the night with a Palestinian Christian family who gave us homegrown olives and homemade fruit wine. Our hostess told us how her family was hoping to go to Jerusalem for Easter, and described the bureaucratic process of applying for permits to travel to Jerusalem (just a few kilometers away), which the Israeli government had the power to approve or deny at their whim. As of then, she and her daughter had secured permits, but her husband and son’s permits had been declined, seemingly arbitrarily.
The fact that we were allowed to travel freely in places where this local family could not reminded me of Emily Jacir’s piece “Where We Come From (If I could do anything for you anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?),” in which the Palestinian-born artist used her American passport to fulfill as many requests as she could for Palestinians who are not able to travel freely within their homeland. These requests include things like buying sodas in specific bodegas, playing soccer with children on certain streets, and placing flowers on mothers’ graves. If she asked this family, they might have had her light a candle for them in Jerusalem on Easter.
We also visited Qumran, the site of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which reflect an apocalyptic Jewish sect who believed that a rival Jewish group (possibly the priests in charge of the temple imagined so gloriously in the aforementioned VR experience) were actually in league with demonic forces. Among many other things, the Dead Sea Scrolls demonstrate that ancient Judaism, like its contemporary counterpart(s), was richly pluriform, and that no one group could ever claim to represent the interests of all Jewish people. Afterward, we visited the Jordan River, which was filled with American Christians in flip-flops and cargo shorts loudly baptizing each other.
Two locations that we visited stand out for me as particularly emblematic of my experiences in the West Bank. The first was the home of Bob Lang, an American-born Jewish Israeli living in a settlement called Efrat, which is part of a cluster of settlements known as Gush Etzion. These areas are permitted by the Israeli government despite being illegal under international law. Lang serves as something of an ambassador for the community, speaking regularly with tour groups. With his permission, I made an audio recording of his presentation, which is how I am able to include the quotes below.
Lang was born in New York and studied agriculture at the University of Wisconsin before moving to Israel to help start settlement communities in what the rest of the world calls the West Bank, and what settlers call Judea and Samaria. Since then, he has often worked in administrative roles, and once served as an advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu. These days, when he is not working as the head of his community’s religious council, he works for a company that cleans swimming pools.
Why move to Israel as an American? “We as Jews live here because this is the Holy Land,” Lang states. “Jerusalem is the holiest place to the Jewish people.” He acknowledges that it’s also holy to Christians and the people he calls “Moslems,” but the Jewish history reaches the farthest into the past, and for him, that’s tantamount to a land claim. He points out that long before Bethlehem was Jesus’s birthplace, it was the birthplace of David. “So being in this area is where Jewish history happened. Again, it doesn’t deny other histories here but understand, Abraham walked here 4,000 years ago.” I didn’t have a chance to ask him whether he believed Muslims are also descended from Abraham.
Lang describes Israel’s government as democratic. “Sometimes we feel it’s too democratic,” he quips. I ask him how he squares this concept of democracy with the fact that, at this moment, hundreds of thousands of Israelis are protesting the judicial reforms proposed by Netanyahu (who also happens to be on trial for fraud and other crimes). “We need judicial reform,” he responds. “Because every case that goes to the Supreme Court today, I can tell you what the answer is going to be. Anything that I would see as good is going to lose, in whatever issue it is. And anything to the left is going to win. The Supreme Court in this country is left of left. So we need to do something to try to swing it back.”
When asked what kind of court cases he’s talking about, Lang starts talking about the bureaucratic process involved in building new roads and housing within the settlements — roads which result in the fragmentation of formerly contiguous Palestinian communities. When I ask him about the eliminationist rhetoric that had recently been coming from Netanyahu’s government, such as finance minister Bezalel Smotrich calling for an entire Palestinian town to be “wiped out,” he laughs it off as unguarded hyperbole — something Smotrich probably shouldn’t have said, but which shouldn’t be taken literally. (In light of the Israeli government’s actions in the intervening months, this part of the conversation is particularly chilling.)
“When I first moved here, Israel was a third world country,” Lang tells us. “When Efrat was first planned, which was over 40 years ago, the zoning for the community was .75 cars per house. Today the average family probably two cars in the house, and we have neighbors that have three or four.” He proudly cites high-tech industries as another example of Israel’s transformation. “You guys all have these things?” He holds up his cell phone. “Cell phones were invented in Tel Aviv by Motorola Israel.”
Lang advocates a one state solution, annexing the Palestinian territories to Israel: “Between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, it should be one state. It should be the state of Israel.” In this case, he continues, the “Arab population” currently living in the Palestinian territories would “eventually become Israeli citizens. You have no other choice — to say that you can live here but you can’t be a citizen of the state is not real or just.” At this point, Lang launches into a long monologue about demographics and birth rates, as if to assure us that a Jewish majority can be maintained without (further) significant ethnic cleansing:
We’ve heard for years and years that the Arab birth rate is higher than the Jewish birth rate. I’m happy to say that the Jewish birthrate is higher than the Arab birth rate. At the present moment, the Arab birth rate in Israel, including Judea and Samaria, is 2.85 children per woman. It’s dropped tremendously — if we went back forty years, the number was closer to five or six, but it’s dropped tremendously in most of the Arab world as it has become more urban and less rural. The Jewish birth rate today is at 3.05 births per woman. So if you look long term, I hope that that will happen.
He is also optimistic about Jewish immigration to Israel, citing an uptick of immigration in 2022 from Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. “As Jews, they were able to get out of those war zones, or possible war zones, and come to Israel. So if you look at all those numbers, I don’t think our percentage is going to shrink. But let’s say Bob Lang is wrong, and in 50 or 100 years, there are more Arabs than Jews here in this little sliver of land. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have 50 or 100 years of peace?”
A little over a year later, in June 2024, Bezalel Smotrich gave a speech outlining the Israeli government’s plans to take control of the entire West Bank, with the goal of erasing the possibility of the territory ever becoming part of an independent Palestinian state.
From Lang’s house, we make our way some 5 km west to The Tent of Nations, a locally-owned farm filled with olive groves and many other kinds of native plants. This farm is owned by the Nassars, a family of Palestinian Christians who served us a huge buffet of vegetarian dishes made with homegrown produce (which was exciting, because the only snacks at Bob Lang’s house were bottled water and a box of graham crackers).
While we ate lunch, the Nassars told us about their constant ongoing legal battles. Although the farm has been in their possession for over a century, the Israeli government has repeatedly refused to recognize their ownership of the land, subjecting them to a protracted legal process in which they are constantly requested to file various pieces of paperwork and make court appearances. Meanwhile, their olive groves have repeatedly suffered attacks by soldiers driving bulldozers onto the farm, including one attack in 2014 that he says destroyed 1,500 trees.
Because they are unable to get permits to build additional structures on their land, the Nassar family resides in a complex of hand-dug underground caves. In the center of the largest cave is a painted pillar, with portraits of three generations of the family. On the other side are more painted scenes, including one depicting people of all nations (including what appears to be a Hasidic Jew) holding hands and dancing in a circle.
In the center of the farm is a structure labeled “Garden of All Nations,” which contains a small labyrinth built of rocks. All around it are signs labeling the various edible wild herbs that grow on the farm, along with a painted boulder that says “We refuse to be enemies” in English and German.
Perched on the high ridge surrounding the farm are more Israeli settlements, watched over by armed guards in surveillance towers. One particular building caught my attention. Bulging, futuristic, and massive, it looked like what might happen if you asked an AI image generator to design a luxury beach house for one of Elon Musk’s fake robots.
Visiting the Tent of Nations made me wish that we had stopped there first, before visiting Bob Lang, because if we had, I feel like I would have had better questions to ask him. The questions that I had asked him were all based on things I had read in the news. What do you think about the protests against Netanyahu’s judicial reforms ? What do you make of these genocidal statements that Israeli officials have been making about Palestinians? Once I had seen the settlements framed from a Palestinian perspective, however, these questions felt too faraway; too abstract. The Tent of Nations made me think more about the land itself, prioritizing its living immediacy over all the stories that have ever been told about it. It made me want to ask different kinds of questions, like what is the effect on consciousness of spending one’s days tending to olive groves? And what might it do to one’s consciousness to drive a bulldozer through them?
Throughout our trip, our Palestinian tour guide Ramzi kept saying “Palestinians are simple people.” At first I thought this was a very condescending thing to say. But as I started to pay attention to the contexts in which he would say this, I came to understand that what he was asserting was that Palestinian people, regardless of religion, often seem to have an understanding of reality and their own selfhood that is more engaged with their immediate surroundings than it is mediated through external narratives like ancient prophecies or internet memes. I am not necessarily convinced that this is the case, but I do think that one of the reasons that we in the West are so susceptible to dehumanizing propaganda about Palestinians is because we are more used to seeing media portrayals of Arabs cast as stereotypical ‘terrorists’ than we are accustomed to seeing Palestinian people using media to frame their own narratives. What none of us anticipated is that within a few months, thousands of Palestinians would find themselves tasked with livestreaming the annihilation of Gaza, and meeting the world’s complacency with poems composed in perfect English. Like the authors of ancient apocalyptic literature, who experimented with narrative forms in order to express trauma and contextualize oppressive circumstances, Palestinian people have turned to the storytelling tools at their disposal in hopes of reshaping their destiny.
Galilee, Golan, and Megiddo
For the third leg of our trip, we traveled north, to the region around the Sea of Galilee. This includes Jesus’s hometown of Nazareth, along with the archaeological sites at nearby towns of Magdala (home of Mary Magdalene) and Kfar Naḥum (the Bible’s Capernaum) — the latter filled with American youth pastors leading sing-alongs with acoustic guitars.
The vast majority of the people living within the modern city of Nazareth are Arab citizens of Israel, about 70% of whom are Muslim and 30% of whom are Christian. (Unlike Jewish Israelis, who often identify as nonreligious — according to Bob Lang, “secular Jews” make up around 30% of the Israeli Jewish population — the vast majority of the Arabs in the Holy Land consider themselves religious.)
Like Silwan, the streets of Nazareth are filled with vibrant street art, including a stenciled portrait of Shireen Abu Akleh, the veteran Palestinian journalist who was killed by Israeli forces while wearing a blue press vest while she was covering a 2022 raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank.
Since October 7, 2023, the targeting of journalists has become even more commonplace. In a recent article, the Committee to Protect Journalists writes that at least 128 journalists and media workers have been among the “more than tens of thousands killed in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel, and Lebanon since the war began, making it the deadliest period for journalists since CPJ began gathering data in 1992.”
Our group stayed in a guest house in a Franciscan monastery built atop 4th century Byzantine ruins on the Mount of the Beatitudes, so named for the sermon that Jesus is said to have given there, in which he said things like:
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
We also visited the nearby Golan Heights, an area of stunning natural beauty, including a hiking trail around the region’s tallest waterfall, surrounded by many signs warning of possible land mines. Although international law still recognizes it as part of Syria, the western two-thirds has been occupied by Israel since the Six Day War. Here, we saw the ruins of Banias (or Panias, named for the Greek god Pan), an ancient city that was continuously populated since the Hellenistic period before Israel destroyed the homes of its Syrian residents during its ethnic cleansing of 1967. The area is now an archaeological park. Controlling this area gives Israel possession of all of the land around the Sea of Galilee — a key source of freshwater in the region — as well as the source of the Banias River, one of the main tributaries of the Jordan.
The Golan Heights is not the only area beyond the boundaries of Mandatory Palestine that expansionists would like to capture. The concept of a “Greater Israel,” incorporating land which lies beyond the current boundaries of Israel and its occupied territories has a long and controversial history. It appears, in nascent form, in some of the writings of Theodor Herzl, and has historically been associated with antisemitic conspiracy theories. However, Smotrich and other members of Netanyahu’s far-right Likud party have begun to openly advocate annexing parts of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.
Among the groups who still live in the Golan Heights are a number of Druze people, who are cut off by the occupation from the nearby Druze communities in Lebanon in Syria. An elderly Druze couple was selling food in the parking lot by the trailheads: fresh apples (just like the ones in the 2012 film Apples of the Golan) and one of the tastiest things I had on the entire trip — laffa served with labneh and za’atar. The flatbread must have been freshly baked, and they had a small grill set up so they could serve it warm.
While the rest of our group rode bikes around the Sea of Galilee, my partner and I made a trip to a location that is especially relevant to my research: the place that is referred to in the Book of Revelation as Armageddon (or Har Megiddo, meaning Mount Megiddo). We were taken there by a Palestinian Israeli cab driver who lives in a small Arab village in the hills along the north edge of the Galilee. On our way to Megiddo, we passed a prison where Palestinian children accused of crimes like throwing stones at soldiers are held.
Megiddo is an archaeological site with layers that date back as early as 7000 to 5000 BCE — many centuries before Abraham, if one must keep count. It is at the intersection of several important ancient trade routes, and the city has been destroyed and rebuilt many times over its long history. In the Hebrew Bible, it is where King Josiah was defeated by the forces of the Egyptian king Necho II in 609 BCE, and it is also the site chosen by the author of the Book of Revelation to represent the downfall of the “kings of the earth” who are complicit in upholding the economic and religious structures of Rome/Babylon. This resonance reflects the tendency of ancient apocalyptic writers to fold events from their own time within narrative elements from the past in order to create densely layered compositions loaded with points of comparison. In the minds of American Evangelicals, however, Megiddo is the site of a decisive final battle which is yet to come. As we stood on the hill overlooking the plain, Israeli fighter jets circled overhead, as if in preparation for this final battle.
Our taxi driver had never been to the archaeological park before and was curious about it, so he paid the admission fee and checked out some of the displays as he waited for us to be done. Afterward, he asked if we were hungry and we said yes, so he took us to a truck stop with an Arabic restaurant with no Hebrew or English menu. He told us to sit down, and then proceeded to serve us a massive spread of grilled chicken, pickled vegetables, stewed beans, eggplants, and peppers, an array of creamy spreads, and of course hummus. He himself was fasting for Ramadan, so he sat facing away from us while we did our best to make a dent in everything he had brought us. Afterwards, he took us to a bakery that was closed for Ramadan, but he was friends with the owners so they let us in to try the m’tabbak — fluffy, honey-soaked, soft cheese-filled pastries that they were preparing for that night’s feast.
After we had eaten everything we could possibly fit inside of our bodies (and stocked up on m’tabbak to take back to the rest of our group), our driver offered to take us to his village to meet his family, and see how beautiful the Jordan Rift Valley looks from up in the hills. I wish we could have taken him up on it. But instead we returned to our guesthouse for a scheduled activity with our tour group: a boat ride on the Sea of Galilee.
The boat ride was one of the most surreal things I’ve ever experienced. Our tour guide and the people operating the boat were Palestinian, but the experience that they had been tasked with giving us was decidedly Israel-and-America themed, starting with the Israeli and American flags mounted side-by-side to the hull. As the boat pulled away from the dock, the Star-Spangled Banner suddenly came over the sound system. When that ended, Hava Nagila started playing. One of the people in our group happened to be a dance teacher who taught us a dance that went with this song, so for a few minutes everyone was dancing. But the same few songs just kept playing over and over on a loop. After maybe the third Hava Nagila, we asked the boat operator if he had any Palestinian music. No, sorry. This boat only plays the Star Spangled Banner and Hava Nagila. Just as it had been in Jerusalem, the tourist infrastructure was geared toward a very specific demographic: the kind of American Christians who would consider listening to Hava Nagila on a boat operated by Palestinians to be a pleasant and affirming cultural experience.
At this point in our trip, as the formal tour was drawing to a close, the massive groups of protesters, who had up to this point been moving back and forth between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, managed to temporarily shut down Ben Gurion airport, which worried those in our group who were planning on flying home immediately after the tour ended. (We were less concerned because we had some free days booked after the tour ended, which we would use to explore Tel Aviv and Haifa.) We ended up cutting our final day in the Galilee short so that our bus driver (who was also fasting for Ramadan) could drop us off in Tel Aviv and get back home to Jerusalem before the protesters had a chance to shut down the freeway.
On the hotel TV, Benjamin Netanyahu scolded the protesters for their divisiveness. “We should not have a fight between brothers,” he said. “We need to have a society that’s united.”
If that “united” Israeli society ever happened, it was in the hours immediately following the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023, which was shocking in its violence (even if some of the most salacious claims, such as that of the “40 beheaded babies,” turned out to be untrue.) I learned about the attacks from the professor who had organized our tour, via our group’s WhatsApp thread. My immediate reaction was horror — at the descriptions of violence against civilians, of course, and also because I feared that exactly what has happened since would happen: that the Israeli government would use the attacks as a pretense to accelerate the militarized ethnic cleansing that was already in progress long before October 7. The Holy Land that I witnessed — with its fragile tension between militant Zionists backed by the state of Israel and the multi-ethnic, multi-religious populations who have called this area home for centuries, was already a thing of the past.
In the year since, I have continued to watch in horror as all of the dynamics I have described here have been mobilized to dehumanize Palestinian people in order to justify an expansionist and genocidal war, engineered by extremists, and undertaken with the full support of the United States. I have been trying to write this piece for a long time, and have stopped and started it again too many times to count. Each time I began, I would stop in order to read another book, watch another film, or otherwise attempt to get clear on some historical point before inviting the intense scrutiny that writing on this topic will inevitably bring.
While I have had the luxury of educating myself, more than 40,000 Palestinians have lost their lives, with a death toll that is likely much, much higher and continues to rise. I have watched videos of babies and children torn apart by bombs, their broken limbs dangling. Parents wailing in the agony of mourning; children with faces half blown off, crying out for families that have all been killed. Children with limbs gaunt from starvation, trapped in the burning beds of bombed hospitals. Sometimes these images have made it onto CNN. Not only has the terror continued unabated, those who dare to protest are criminalized. Meanwhile, shipments of new American weapons arrive in Israel daily, making record profits for American corporations and their shareholders. In the past year, the US has sent more than $17.9 billion to a regime that the International Court of Justice has deemed plausibly accused of genocide, and which has knowingly blocked aid from reaching starving and suffering civilian populations (even to the point of killing aid workers in air strikes). As I strive to meet milestones in my graduate program, there are no colleges left standing in Gaza.
I am ashamed of how long it took me to complete this piece of writing, but I am grateful that I have finally been able to finish it — motivated, in no small part, by the terrifying certainty of apologists who — even now, as we watch refugees in Jabalia being burned alive — believe themselves to be in possession of some higher truth because they clicked a video that confirmed their suspicion them that Palestinians are monsters who must deserve every bit of the hell on earth that they have received and then some.
The reality is that Palestinian people are human beings, whose lives are as worthy of protection as anyone else’s. If there is anything monstrous in this equation, it’s our failure to do just that.
