Freedom Riding and City Gardening

Now that I’ve finished cleaning the kitchen of our awesome Jerusalem apartment I finally have a minute to catch up on blogging. The last week has gone by incredibly fast, yet it also feels like forever since we were at Lotan. I really love the city – we are in an awesome neighborhood, and I really feel like I’m starting to know my way around. We do our grocery shopping in the shuk, where you can negotiate three giant pomegranates down to about six shekels ($1.50 US). There is a great night life on the streets off-shooting Yafo Street, and Beit Shmuel (where we live) is only a ten minute walk from both the Old City and Ben Yehuda Street. We’ve been keeping very busy between various volunteering projects that are taking us all over the city and beyond.

Every day we work in a different community garden, helping however we can. There is a community called the Garin Dvash (honey scouts) that are people around our age who have chosen to live communally, and they work with different neighborhoods to help gardening and ecology grow in the city. The first garden we went to was beautiful, and we met a few of the people who have plots in it while we were there. The next day, however, we had a much different experience. The Garin have a project in a very low income neighborhood, where they have several small plots of land in front of some apartment buildings. The people of the community haven’t stepped up at all in helping with their garden, and in fact they continue to trash the place by throwing their garbage out the windows of their homes (even after two hours of us picking up trash, we didn’t make a dent). It was frustrating because as we picked up garbage, the people watched us almost as though we were intruding – which we were. It felt very uncomfortable to enter someone’s neighborhood and pick up their trash for them, as if we were making a statement that they should try and be more clean like us. The point of the project is to give them land they can take ownership of and take care of, but if they aren’t wanting to get involved even after six months it makes me feel like why should people continue to go there and help them, or pick up their trash. If anything, they want a garden to be gifted to them, without any help from them required, so I didn’t feel the project was all that fair – why should I pick up someone else’s garbage if they aren’t willing to help?

Another project we are working on is very interesting. In Israel, many public city busses are segregated by the Orthodox Jews, who make the women enter from and sit in the back of the bus. A few years ago many laws were passed to forbid this segregation and discrimination, but there have been various levels of implementation on different routes. We are working with the Israel Religious Action Council as “Freedom Riders” meaning we are assigned various routes to ride busses and document if various regulations have been met, and if we witness any segregation. Last night we took a bus to Haifa, and the girls in my group were asked to go sit in the back. When my friends said no, they didn’t have to, the men were very upset and we could hear them talking about us the entire bus ride. The adventure to Haifa was very fun – we stayed with my friend Jomi in her apartment, went to the beach and swam in the Mediterranean in the morning, and then took several busses for more freedom riding; after taking the wrong bus for one leg, and then missing another bus we were hoping to report on, it was time to head home to Jerusalem. The day was long and stressful, but we got to see a lot of Israel from out the window, and learned about the bus system and various cities we had never been to.

I’m very excited for the next week of volunteering – we have many more fun projects coming up – and then after that is our break...but now it is time to go to bed! 

Human Rights in East Jerusalem

On King David street there is a tattoo shop, and next to it a place where you can get a ham sandwich. Here in Jerusalem’s Old City I can stop for a 10 shekel iced coffee while making my way to the Western Wall. Jewish school children play basketball just below the wall on which hundreds of tourists explore the perimeter of the Old City daily. Jerusalem is a city of pairs (as in Hebrew it ends with the sound for things that come in pairs), this concept being visible in a number of ways: the new and the old, the religious and the secular, heaven and earth, etc. After spending a day in the Old City (and hanging out in the modern areas of West Jerusalem) and spending a day touring East Jerusalem with Rabbis for Human Rights, the contrasts and divisions in the communities of Jerusalem are hard to ignore.

A separation wall has been constructed between East and West Jerusalem. This wall is 8 meters of concrete with barbed wire at the top – nothing beautiful about it. We spent time discussing the purpose of walls in human life. Not only are they meant for protection, and to keep outsiders out, but they serve a more mental purpose as well. Some walls, such as the wall around the Old City, are constructed to be walked on so you can see what is happening on both sides; this is not the case for the separation wall. The barrier between East and West Jerusalem is meant to keep the populations apart. We use walls to define us, and this wall has defined much of Israel as ignorant when it comes to human rights – our guide suggested that almost 80 percent of Israelis today have not been across the wall, or have not bothered to learn about the struggles and human rights violations that it has created. However, the more “concrete” definition created by this wall is the physical boundaries of Israeli West Jerusalem.

The borders to Jerusalem are much in dispute, as they have always been. The “Green Line” is what was supposedly agreed upon in 1949 as Israel’s territory in Jerusalem, however from the time the line was drawn it has continued to build settlements outside of the Green Line to extend Israel’s control of the area. There is another line from 1967 which separates Israeli West Jerusalem from Palestinian East Jerusalem, and then there is the route of the Separation Wall. The wall was constructed disregarding this boundary thus stealing land against international law. Checkpoints, limited access and transportation flow, and other issues create many violations of human rights for the people who are now living outside of the wall. Many cannot come to Jerusalem to work, or even access hospitals without hassle of driving around the city or going through sometimes several checkpoints.

We visited a small town where several neighborhoods were very close together, some Palestinian some Israeli. The Arab/Palestinian side of town was clearly neglected; although its residents were tax-paying citizens within the Jerusalem border, the roads were not taken care of, trash was not collected and taken away, and there was overall mess. Yet, just around the corner where the Israeli neighborhood sat there was clearly new infrastructure, and it looked pleasant and well-treated. It is crazy that the Palestinians are paying taxes (so that they can keep their blue cards and access Jerusalem) but they are not seeing ANY of this money come back in the form of government services. The worst part, however, was that one Palestinian neighborhood in the area is now on the other side of the Separation Wall, which was arbitrarily built in a way that completely isolates these people. They now have no road on which they can drive in and out of their neighborhood, and they must pass through a checkpoint by foot in order to get to their cars and buy groceries. Now that they are no longer considered a part of Jerusalem they receive no government services – they must throw their trash in a pile on the side of the road. They have been separated from their families, who live in the same town just on the other side of the wall, and their standard of living has been completely disregarded.

There are many issues about human rights violations in this city – people being displaced from their homes, inequalities for women, a horribly imbalanced education system, just to name a few categories. I am so thankful to have the opportunity to start volunteering with several human rights organizations in the upcoming weeks. I feel a connection to this country, warts and all, so I feel excited to be a part of working towards solutions.

Time is Flying By

Take the fact that I haven’t posted in over two weeks as a sign that life goes by fast when you’re having fun. Today is Saturday, so things are pretty low key, and I’m giving myself sometime to catch up on work and on thinking. Its a sad day for me here at Lotan – the shorter Green Apprenticeship that was in conjunction with my program has just ended and everyone is heading out – leaving only five of us to continue on for the next 9 weeks. We ended the program yesterday morning with a closing circle that was very special. Everyone contributed a poem or quote that was read aloud, or a song, and we went around the circle reflecting on what we’ve learned and how we hope to apply it. Yes, I have many projects I hope to start when I am at home next fall, but I think the biggest thing we all took away is that this is just the beginning of much more learning to be done.

The last few weeks have been nice because we’ve had four major holidays breaking up the time. We’ve had less classes, but doing less has made it easier to absorb all the information. We started with our big Permaculture Design Projects – we had to come up with ideas for a space in the Kibbutz that could be reinvented using the guidelines of permaculture – earth care, people care, and fair shares/limits to consumption. I designed a new education building that had a classroom, a museum, and an office for the Center for Creative Ecology. It was a lot of work drawing up the plans and organizing the write ups but it went well, and they even said they might use some ideas from my project as they are starting to consider investing in a new education building for the program.

On Yom Kippur I went to services and fasted, and then after breaking the fast at the big feast in the dining hall several of the families on the Kibbutz had little open houses. A few friends and I went around to them all, and it was really fun to get to know even more of the community, which I’m now starting to feel more a part of. On Sukkot the whole Kibbutz ate under a giant sukkah (for every meal for the entire 8 days) which was very exciting. I took my day off from classes on Sukkot to go to the Dead Sea with two of my friends – we got up at 5:00 in the morning and made it to Ein Gedi, a nature reserve at the Dead Sea, at about 8:00 and went for a 3 hour hike over the mountain, stopping at a few natural springs and pools along the way. We then went and sat by the Dead Sea for a while, hot and sweaty, and decided not to go in because we were all pretty cut up. We went to Masada but since we were too tired to walk across the parking lot we decided not to waste our time heading up the mountain – I’ll go there again when I have enough energy to enjoy it. It took us a lot longer than expected but eventually we made it home and crashed for the night.

I’ve done so much over the last few weeks that I won’t even try to write it all but a few highlights – I lead services with my friend last night on the guitar camp style and the Kibbutz members really liked it, we made home-made felafel in the bustan for a potluck and even though it took 2 hours to grind all the chickpeas (we didn’t have a food processor) it was amazing! I want to make it all the time (as long as I can find a grinder). I am so excited for Jerusalem – we leave Tuesday morning and will be there for 3 weeks volunteering for several different social justice nonprofits. After that we’ll be spending a week living with a Beduoin tribe near Beer Sheva!