A Day in Israel: Borders and People
Today we woke up refreshed and energized, having finally settled into our new beds and a new time zone. The plane ride, filled with new faces and anticipation, seemed years away. Mugs of coffee were gulped at breakfast, crystallizing our expectations for a day filled with landscapes, water, geopolitics, hummus, and rafting. After a slight change of plans due to an impending heat wave, we made our way to the Jillabon for a hike. Perhaps steeper than we expected and teeming with optical illusions as wonderfully pointed out by our indispensable leader, Ori, we made our way to a shimmering pool of water fed by a picturesque waterfall. What unfolded was like a non-ironic scene out of a movie. People took off their sweat-stained clothes to dip into the cool, liquid life at the bottom of rock formations worthy of a "no filter" hashtag on Instagram. The rays of a severe Middle Eastern sun dissolved and we fell into a child-like trance in which we played ball, splashed each other, and put our heads under the surface of the water just to see what it would feel like, as if we didn't already know. Childhood is one of those rare periods of life that feel simultaneously unreal and yet wholly authentic. And like the end of childhood, the hardening of the world is met with semi-paradoxical engendering of an impossibly bright future. Reality came rushing back in as we always know it does.
After a lunch of hummus and salad in Katsrin, we drove to a point in the world where a theoretical understanding of foreign relations runs up against a deeply complex reality. At the Golan Heights, one has the opportunity to see Israel, Lebanon, and Syria in the same visual frame -- their exact borders obscured by distance and by geologic formations. We're asked for solutions to the Syrian Civil War and the flood of refugees pouring out of a ruined country to the doorsteps of their Middle Eastern neighbors, of Europe, and of the United States among others. This is a problem of course too vast for us to solve at this time, and yet, it's also a deceivingly simple one: it's a fundamental problem of ethics, but one made exponentially more complex when the scope is expanded only slightly to include history, religion, politics, culture, and people.
This conversation takes on new significance at this place. Standing essentially between Israel, Lebanon, and Syria, the land here lends itself to a real, material, embodiment of an often abstracted nexus of geopolitical and historical imbroglios. With these borders in view, strict geopolitical divisions seem to give way to the people who move, who have moved and try to move, across these lands. Our guard Ofek told us a story about the women, children, and seniors who have been wounded by the Syrian Civil War, and the Israeli hospital camps set up to help them. Stories like these bring into full view the material connectedness, a connectedness through flesh and land, between what parochially appears as vastly different societies. Ultimately, these stories remind us of a deeper knowledge too often obscured by differences in politics, culture, and religion: that we're all human beings. And yet, at the same time, such an experience reminds us how much more thinking there is to be done. We see land and nations but no bodies on those landscapes -- we see no people. Attempting to grapple with the relation between land and nation and of "staying with the trouble" of seemingly contradictory world views becomes infinitely more difficult when we acknowledge and privilege real, individual people whose lives depends on this land. This tall order cannot be made by one group alone, but must be made with all of us involved.
The rest of the day unfolded leisurely, allowing us to reflect on that afternoon's important conversation. Rafting on the Jordan River was a way to step away from the chaos of the world; however, the world will be waiting for us when we get back, and on this trip I think we're getting to face it.
Photo Credits: Header Image-@ktlevine, Image 1-@jord_gray, Image 2-@rbbloomberg, Image 3-@aecash, Image 4-@rbbloomberg, Image 5-@jsilvs90, Image 6-@elake2, Image 7-@unitednathans, Image 8-@regold2
