society

Pilgrims in the Empty Streets

The Holy Sepulcher, the Basilica of the Annunciation, the Grotto of the Nativity. For two years now, the holy places have been practically deserted. Fear looms. But in the evening, friends meet to talk about the situation, and to tell each other about an indomitable hope

By ROBERTO FONTOLAN

Except for a few French tourists, the Holy Sepulcher today is almost deserted. You do not have to wait in line to go into the tiny room, and the usually inflexible Orthodox custodians leave you in peace. In Nazareth, the not-very-pretty Basilica of the Annunciation is empty; the voice of the mullah haranguing the crowd a few yards away, urging them to pray and to fight, reverberates through the big, two-story cylinder (remember the episode of the mosque that was supposed to be built in Nazareth, whose minaret was going to be higher than the church? The mosque was not built, but the camp that takes its place is still there). Ours is the only little group of visitors, a dozen people led by the indefatigable Fr Francesco Ventorino (Fr Ciccio). We have all the time we want to walk among the remains of the little ancient village: the grotto-houses, the little silos dug out of the rock, the shards gathered together in the big room that functions as a museum. And in Bethlehem, the Grotto of the Nativity, blackened by centuries of candles and smoking lamps, has not seen pilgrims and hurrying guides in a while. The access points to Bethlehem are down to two. At one, you can come through in a car, but you risk being blocked for hours at the checkpoint; at the other, you have to get organized with taxis, because transit is only on foot. All the other entrances to the area of Bethlehem-Beit Jalla-Beit Saur have been meticulously blocked with rubble from the demolished houses of the Palestinians.

For two years now, the Holy Land has had a different face: it lives in solitude, a sensational and oppressive solitude. The disappearance of pilgrims and other tourists has not only put thousands of people out of work, has not rendered the Franciscans’ days emptier (who nonetheless continue assiduously to “safeguard” the Holy Places), but it has interrupted the affectionate occasions for encounter between a wayfaring people and two peoples in conflict; it has broken off the chances for fruitful, albeit transversal, dialogue, and has left the Christian communities alone, alone as they never were in the past. “Come back to the Holy Land,” the Patriarch Sabbah, the Father Custodian Battistelli, the Nuncio Bishop Sambi ask; “Come back to see us,” say Arab and Jewish friends (“maybe you will even succeed in making us talk to each other again”).

Table talk
At a crowded dinner table (and a merry one, because of the sense of friendship linking people who barely know each other, because someone has been to the Meeting in Rimini, because we are Italians, Muslim Arabs, Christian Arabs, and children, because a School of Community has recently been started and this is something very important), we talk at length about the solitude of the Holy Land, the solitude of the Palestinians, the solitude of the Jews.

One of the people at the table says, “Two years ago at Camp David, Arafat missed the best chance for peace by saying no to Barak’s offers. Now we are in a blind alley. The Palestinian people are living under two occupations, the Israeli one and that of the corrupt oligarchy surrounding Arafat.”

Another says, “For the Arab countries, Israel remains an invader. Despite the fact that many years have passed, for many of them the goal has not changed: to cancel the state of Israel from the face of the earth, to root out the tumor.”

A third says, “With Sharon, there are no prospects. Go out, go out of Jerusalem, along the Bethlehem road, and turn around: the Israeli city advances, taking land and vital space away from the Arab villages; it is surrounding them slowly and inexorably. Just like in the most classic nightmare, the walls of the room are closing in, closing in more and more... but here, you can’t wake up and be freed of the fear of suffocating. We are already awake, and every morning we look at the hill in front of us, to see if they have built more houses, if they are bulldozing the ground to make new roads.”

Another says, “However, many times it is the Palestinians themselves who sell their land, and when they govern, they are worse than the others. I–and as an Arab I know that what I am saying is enormous–can’t wait for the [Palestinian National] Authority to leave; they are not working for the people.” And again, “The Israelis live in terror, and you can’t live in terror for very long.”

Finally, “The spiritual leaders have gotten involved in politics; they don’t exercise their ministry any more, which is education of human beings to a religious sense. On the Christian side, too, people are disconcerted. Those who can, leave; those who can’t, accumulate frustration. With a young Christian, either you try to communicate to him the sense of his being here, his vocation that must be tempered day by day, the certainty that has to sustain him in the face of countless difficulties, or he does not have a chance, he has no hope on which to build.”

What solution?
The night is clear and beautiful. The old city of Jerusalem stretches below us: the alleys crammed with garbage, the suq practically asleep, the young soldiers (this evening they are black, Ethiopian Jews, the famous falasha) guarding the Jewish quarter, the Orthodox popes, the Muslim women with their veiled heads and burning eyes. The walls of Suleiman, the pavement stretching from the Damascus Gate to the Temple Wall, the porches and fountains, even the Via Dolorosa, seem no longer able to withstand the force of a wind that is always against them. The millenary stones crack under the pressure of too many wars, too many unfulfilled expectations. So much history is concentrated in so little space, crushing it. The air is too thin, the mind craves oxygen.

In all the conversations held on so many of these days in the Holy Land, the question about the prospects emerged forcefully and obstinately: how will all this be resolved? And while people speak nervously about possible solutions or the countless facets and complexities of a solution, a doubt comes to mind that leaves one aghast: what if there is no solution? What if survival is possible only in this way: the cancellation of the state of Israel or the expulsion of all the Palestinians?

The floodlit Wall receives the rhythmic prayer of hundreds of Jews. They are almost all Orthodox, Hasidim and Lubavitchers, dressed in black or in the costume of eighteenth century Polish peasants. Above them, above their prayers, above the niches in the Wall where they insert messages to God, is the Temple Mount, dark and silent. In the large square in front of the Wall, dozens of young kids with kippas on their heads sing at the top of their voices and dance until they drop from exhaustion. Tomorrow, some of them will put on a military uniform, will take a bus to reach their units, and will be afraid. They will be afraid like Angelica’s son [cf Traces, Vol 4, No 9], a son who is a soldier and rides the bus. Angelica pours tea and talks about him, brings the cake and thinks about him. And together with her husband Yehuda, she wonders about the future, the future that is already tomorrow, already tonight.

The dream of the kibbutz
Angelica tells of the crisis of the kibbutz ideal; no one manages to be truly devoted to the others. It is the crisis of the Zionism of the pioneers, secular and socialist, heroic and raging. They are the ones who made the dream of the State come true; they are the ones who struggled and fought with unparalleled abnegation. And like so many, Angelica had come here as a 20-year-old, with the hope of being able to launch that great ideal, to be able to find herself in the epic of her fathers. Today, hope no longer lies in the kibbutz, and it looks for reasons and roots in history, in the entire history of the Jewish people. “We are in the world for the law of Moses, to spread it, to make it an example, because without it, men cannot stay together.” There is a hope in the encounter with these Christians. “Yes, it seems that things are happening that should have happened some time ago; we hope to be able to feel That hand on our heads… that blesses us right while these things are happening,” Angelica and Yehuda later wrote to Fr Ciccio.

Christians of Hebrew expression
Among the things that are happening, there is the emergence of a completely new pastoral horizon for the Church, about which the Apostolic Nuncio, Bishop Sambi, speaks in glowing terms. It is the surprising reality of the “Christians of Hebrew expression,” which today sees, along with a small core of Jews (about 500) converted to Christianity after a complex, special spiritual journey, tens of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians who immigrated to Israel starting in 1989. They came thanks to the law of return, which grants Israeli citizenship to anyone who has a Jewish parent or grandparent, along with hundreds of thousands of fellow countrymen. It is estimated that about 80,000 Russians, Ukrainians, and other immigrants from the former Soviet Union are Christians. Many others are atheists or simply non-practicing. They too do military duty, they too swear in favor of the State of Israel, but on the Bible. The Franciscan Fr Pizzaballa (who assists converted Jews) says, “All of them, once they get here, start seeking. On Saturdays and Sundays, they crowd into the churches and monasteries. Sometimes they request Baptism for their children or to be able to have, one day, a Christian burial. They want to know where they have ended up, they want to find or rediscover the faith of their origins.” There is this, too, among the things that are happening in the Holy Land. We have to go back, more and more often.