BACK IN 2007, I was a guy with two TV series in early development at studios with a third project about to land elsewhere. I was ‘hot’ enough that business executives were taking my calls, or calling me. It was around this time that I decided to write a documentary series about my experiences in Israel/Palestine in the late 90s, and so I wrote the pitch, titled, ‘Palestine is Gone (Truth in the Balance)’ and sent it off to a creative Producer I knew who wanted to work with me.
We met for coffee a little later, and he said, waving the proposal, ‘It’s great,’ he said, ‘but I can’t make it.’
‘Why?,’ I said, knowing why.
He answered, ‘Because if I do I will never work in the industry again. You have to be careful,’ he said, ‘or I do. I’ll help any way I can, but I can’t have my name anywhere near it.’
‘I get it,’ I said.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘Sure,’ I said.
We never spoke again.
In 2008 the financial market crashed, and with it my budding creative empire.
MOST OF YOU think you know Israel — the modern State of Israel — and I assure you, 99% of you haven’t a clue, for two reasons:
First, you’ve probably never lived there, and if you’ve visited (pilgrimage doesn’t count, sorry), you have almost certainly never spent any time in the West Bank or Gaza, and …
Second, For most of you, historically speaking at least (it’s changing now), what you think about Israel is totally defined by what Israel wants you to believe (what the Media tells you), and what certain evangelical churches also want you to believe.
To live in Israel and in the West Bank and work as I did as a covert operative for justice against Israeli Occupation and the constant oppression of those it repeatedly conquers, dehumanizes, and controls, doesn’t just open your eyes, it rips your eyelids straight off.
I won’t be an apologist for tyranny. I don’t excuse it. I love God, order my life and actions by His truth, and am not confused about good and evil or right and wrong.
My heart vision is clear as a bell.
Over the years I spent in the OT and Gaza, I witnessed incredible courage under fire by those eating the boot of Israeli military rule, and the complete disconnect from the relenting hand of evil and its explosive repercussions by those doing the filthy bidding of Zionism.
And just in case you believe I’m one of those who only bats left, I assure you I hit for average from either side of the plate; that is, I know enough to make the distinction between people and ideologies that strive to twist and control adherents on both sides. I get that Israelis are people, and not monsters the way they are often depicted, but also that a compelling, generational force that turns some Israelis into monsters is also undeniable.
If you say that this is true for both sides, I would agree. But where we would disagree is on the framework of formation. There is an original sin here. Without the modern state of Israel, Palestine would still exist; there would be no ongoing human rights tragedy, nor the shameful history of violence and displacement that gave rise to creatures of retribution, like Hamas.
These facts are indisputable.
Moreover, the tit-for-tat narrative that boggles the minds of many, canceling out all further discussion, is highly uneven in terms of actual equity of violent exchange overall.
Let me give you an example: In the first Intifada, Palestinian boys faced off against IDF invaders (the Israeli army) on the streets of their towns and villages with slings and stones. Israel responded with live fire and rubber bullets aimed at the heads of these young men and children, adding daily to the numbers of those blinded and brain-damaged by these missiles of blunt trauma, meant as a token reminder for grieving families of the cost of resistance.
How do I know this?
I will tell you how. I was a personal friend of the only brain surgeon working in Ramallah at the time who introduced me to the shocking reality of these atrocities and the terrible burden bore by those sentenced for life with the care of these same surviving martyrs.
ONE TIME IN Gaza I unexpectedly walked into a small group of men in the Jabalia refugee camp (still standing at the time, later flattened by air strikes, and again, I'm told, in recent days) who approached me to discuss existential questions relating to life in the fishbowl — fish in a barrel — that is Gaza. I listened politely, not unfamiliar with the enduring hardships, but interested just the same.
The leader, a youngish man with faltering English explained to me that Gaza is a defacto prison they can’t leave. There is no work, no money, and because there is no money they can’t marry and start families (a husband-to-be gives gifts of gold to his betrothed, an Arabic cultural tradition). As a result, young men were killing themselves in despair. From this vacuum rose an organization to give these young men something to live for so that they might no longer take their own lives in vain.
That organization: Hamas.
‘But why only violence,’ I asked. ‘Because it is the only way left,’ he said.
That was true.
‘I don’t agree,’ I said.
‘Today you will leave, yes?,’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘… and we will stay,’ he finished.
And then silence.
‘Please, tell the people what you see here,’ he asked as we shook hands.
‘I will, I promise,’ I said and left.
I guess you had to be there, standing at the center of a largely corrugated tin city of lean-tos built on sand, home to tens of thousands that would soon disappear in clouds of dust. I was moved once again to quiet rage and that feeling of helplessness that sickens the soul with unbearable sorrow. I am not pro-Hamas, and can never be; I am against all violence. I am for peace and justice, and for the love of Christ to reign in the hearts of men.
But I understand, beloved, I understand.
Israel was born long before its inception in 1948. It had been gestating since the end of the 19th century. With Theodore Herzl an early, key proponent of ‘Zionism’ and a Jewish homeland in Palestine, it would take another 50 years, including two world wars, a global depression, the extermination of 6 million Jews, and the displacement of a population of Palestinians — Christians, Jews, and Muslims — before that dream would become the reality-nightmare that has played out in successive waves of misery since 1948.
THERE IS NO getting away from the truth in Israel. It hits you in the head, any time, any place, and sometimes quite literally.
I was clobbered one time in the Old City for witnessing an act of unprovoked violence by Israeli riot police against a crowd of mostly elderly Orthodox Christians, women mainly, waiting patiently in line to celebrate the risen Lord on this their Easter Sunday at the Holy Sepulchre (the ancient Church housing the sites of the Crucifixion and Resurrection).
I said to a friend at the time, ‘They saved every penny to come here.’ Their simple piety was deeply moving and I’ll never forget it.
And then the burly, hatless men in blue jumpsuits with insignia arrived, sleeves rolled up and clearly under orders of some kind. They waded into the line of faithful, approximately four across and hundreds deep, and started throwing hands. They smashed and elbowed some, stepped on others, and amidst the screams of those who had come to worship the Lord of Peace, forced a stampede of retreat up the down stone staircase that brought them here, reversing physics in those who in their panic to flee, collapsed atop each other like falling dominoes.
I was not more than 20 feet from the front of that line, sipping my morning cappuccino when it erupted. Having keen intuition from my time in the OT, I sensed the bastards and tasted the acid in my throat within seconds of their arrival, and before the first bodies fell I was on my feet and moving toward the mayhem yelling, ‘Stop!’ It was then I felt the first blow to the back of my head. Then another. Stunned and on my knees, I attempted to stand and was yanked to my feet and dragged off by two cops who shoved and kicked me all the way to Jaffa Gate (a couple hundred meters from my hotel inside the Old City), where I was told to leave and not come back.
The whole thing was entirely surreal in that obscenely normal way things are in Israel. Of course, I would go back, but not the way I came. So, I limped a distance around the walled city and entered by New Gate, taking the same route only recently crowded with the now departed Orthodoxers. I descended the empty steps without incident and entered my hotel.
Except for the pain and the memory, there was no evidence any of it had ever happened.
THERE ARE REMINDERS everywhere that what modern Israel is, it wasn’t before. The Old City and land of Palestine belong to centuries of Biblical and ancient histories, but not to the modern Zionist narrative which has co-opted this history to create a bridge between past and present that simply did not, does not, and cannot exist.
To illustrate, if the State of Israel was stripped of the colorful diorama that surrounds it — plopped down in Wisconsin, say — it would look precisely like the ugly, stained limestone thing it is: a grimy assault on the senses where most Israelis barely tolerate one another, and all Palestinians are behind wire.
LIVING AND WORKING in the West Bank and Gaza gave me privileged access to facts on the ground few are allowed (or supposed) to see.
In the 90s, the fever build of illegal Settlements on stolen land inside the Occupied Territories together with the growing cantonization of Palestinian towns and villages in the West Bank (signaling the next to last chapter of the ethnic cleansing campaign we’re seeing now), began.
The official term, I believe in UN speak is 'discontinuous cantons,' which simply means Israel employed cruel and clever methods to cut Palestinians off from commuting, communing, and living life on anything like their own terms ever again.
They achieved this by using the construction of the Wall and ribboning of new roads as new arteries of censure, constraining the travel of Palestinians to permission-only movements enforced by IDF gatekeepers sentried at village entry and exit points.
You’ve probably heard the stories, about how numerous people in need of urgent medical attention at various times including pregnant mothers and children born at these checkpoints died at these checkpoints because soldiers refused them permission to travel.
Let's review: A once largely coastal and mainly Arab people are forcibly ripped from their homes and land (people of the Nakba and later Naksa) and routinely brutalized, killed, and displaced for getting in the way of Israeli ‘Statehood’ and its cancerous sprawl later throughout the Territories. Such, is the agonizing plight of these victims of unholy designs who continue to be systematically demeaned and diminished in full view of the world, and in full view of the world now face their own final solution.
I WAS FIRED by my sacred employer for siding with the enemy: the only other prominent Holy Land Catholic organization that is not the one I worked for at the time. Same league; different teams. Silly, I know. But divisions exist everywhere here, keeping both sides apart like castles on opposing hills from the Middle ages.
This separation would heal somewhat later when the head guy at Catholic Group 2 (CG2) was Vatican-appointed to replace the top man at Catholic Group 1 (CG1) after he and his group were caught siphoning 100s-of-millions of dollars in a massive embezzlement scheme (you didn’t know?), but that tale for another time.
The time I'm speaking of was before all of the cross-pollination, around 2011 or so. I had just finished my main project at CG1 in the Old City and was asked by the brass to leave my VIP digs to make room for incoming dignitaries. Luckily, a friend from CG2 invited me to stay at his residence outside the walls, which I happily accepted despite any existing enmities.
So, I moved from the Old City to a seminary held in Israeli possession since ‘67, returned to CG2 in recent years, and subsequently turned into a 5-star residence housing a handful of people, few of whom were actual seminarians.
It was while living there that I met Catholic figures from various religious orders who would drop by and socialize and who had no trouble talking openly in front of me about behind-the-curtain concerns, which always took on more political airs to be fair. It was something I was used to as a second-tier insider often privy to private discussions at CG1.
Having learned of the move, my employer asked me to leave the seminary immediately. Insiders know things, and I guess Operations were concerned I might be tempted to spill secrets, which was ludicrous. You can’t do what I did without keeping your mouth shut. I lived the code, the Omertà; they had nothing to worry about, I said.
But they weren't having it. They didn’t trust each other, so how could they trust me? And for my part, I wasn’t about to move. Life suited me just fine where I was. So, halas!
They fired me.
It was during this limbo between stints at CG1 (yep, they re-hired me!), that I took time off from the grind to hang with the boys of CG2, be a normie, and decompress a little.
It was on one of my nightly walks around the rustic neighborhood that I found and would start to frequent a quaint bar/bistro not far from the seminary and a stone’s throw from Bibi’s Jerusalem residence. The bar stood at a crossroads between secular and Ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem and was especially busy on Fridays (Shabbat) because irreligious Jews look for watering holes when much of the country shuts down at sunset. It was an outpost for outliers and eccentrics, attracting all kinds, including the muttering stares of Orthodox Jewish families pushing babies in prams.
It quickly became my favorite go-to, less of an expatriate trap in the flavor of the American Colony on the other side of town. The people were local and infused the space with a sense of authenticity I found refreshing.
But what really piqued my interest was when I learned the owners were directly involved in a sort of rescue operation for ex-IDF recovering from trauma as the direct result of the awful things they saw or did in the Territories during their tours of duty.
I got to know the owners who told me the stories. I risked telling them a little more about myself without going into too much detail, and they accepted me. They liked talking to someone from the outside who could listen and understand, and who, like them, had seen things. We weren’t picking sides, we were on the same side. They gradually opened my eyes to the people around me — the staff — who, as it turned out, had all been pulled from some sort of personal crisis following military service that had kicked them headlong into addiction, depression, self-harm, and the shambles of a conscience broken by institutional abuses against a people targeted for simply being there.
I got to know some of these people personally, most in their 30s by then, who were scarred and often cynical, yet introspective. We would sit on the patio and I would listen to them without judgment, knowing well the fires left smouldering and burning a short distance away. They told me there were so many others who were used and cast aside and hurting just like them. One of the staff shared that one day there would be enough recovering veterans to defeat Zionism and plot a new course for the future by making peace with the past. My eyes watered with the knowledge of things they didn't understand, but it was a start.
‘Amen,’ I said.
.30
JMDA
Wow, eye opening