The View From Squag City

My wife and I are just back from two weeks in Israel.  It’s hard to overstate the importance I place on having had the experience of the visit, short though it was. So here are a few observations:

The people of Israel are smart, brave and dynamic.  They work hard and well, and the vast majority of them seem to want peace more than anything.  They certainly deserve it. But they won’t get it until everyone agrees to a two state solution, and right now it’s nearly impossible to figure out how that will be achieved.  The extremists within and without Israeli society play too great a role in blocking compromise, and way too many people think that God is exclusively on their side of the struggle.

When I speak highly of “the people of Israel”, as I did in the paragraph above, I mean all of them, whether they are Jews (secular or religious), Arabs, Druse, Palestinians or Christians.  There is more complexity to the societal makeup of Israel than I ever could have imagined, and yet it seems obvious that this group of people could have such an incredible economic future if ever the violence imposed upon them could be permanently and justly terminated.  I know this must sound simplistic and naïve, but it also seems so damn obvious.

Israelis serve their country…..almost all of them.  The number of young people in uniform seems different to my eyes, as is the presence of military arms slung from the shoulders of so many uniformed people walking down the street.  But these are people who are armed against a real threat to their way of life, and they are men and women who have been well trained in the use of their weapon.  They have been through what seems to me the best form of background check, intense instruction by their military trainers.

I know that I will spend months thinking about our experience of Israel, but one memory sticks in my mind.  Two weeks ago, I stood with my wife on the edge of the Golan Heights, looking west to the Sea of Galilee.  I stood where, a few years ago, Syrian soldiers rested their rifles while shooting down on Israeli farmers. The only sound I could hear above the wind was the song of nesting birds. Whoever occupies the Golan, it’s hard to imagine a better future for that land and those people than that simple sound.