Memory and what happens when it fails (continued)

One theme that has continually reoccurred during my time here in Israel has been that of memory. It is fundamental to this area and its many different peoples. Yesterday in a lecture given by Fr. Tom Stransky (former Rector of Tantur) we were told that in this land ‘centuries don’t succeed one another, they coexist’. Any discussion of the present or the future amongst its peoples of whatever faith or political persuasion always at some point contains the words ‘But remember. . . .’ . At this point hurts and losses from many centauries ago are recalled and are as significant as if they had happens two weeks ago.

I became personally aware of this phenomenon earlier this week in a gift shop in Bethlehem. I went to a specific shop to make a purchase for my parents who had met and dealt with the shop owner 14 years ago. I met the owner’s nephew (his uncle was working in the factory that day). As I paid for my purchase I asked whether the man in the photo above the counter was of the shop owner. The nephew said that it was not, it was his father. He went on to tell me about the 12 years old boy in the photo. It was the speaker’s brother. He had been chased and threatened by armed police who thought (wrongly) that he had been throwing stones at the police station. As a result of the shock the boy became ill and died some time later. His father died soon after the child, the speaker suggested of suppressed grief. This tragic (but I suspect not unusual) story was told calmly without further comment, but with the raw pain of a very recent loss. The event happened twelve years ago.

I am not at this point suggesting that the speaker should not have still felt pain, or that a double loss in such an unnecessary way should not continue to cause the family sorrow and indeed anger, it simple seemed to illustrate the particular hold that memory has here. This sense was heightened later on that day when we visited Bethlehem Bible College. We received a lecture from the Principal of the college on the situation in the West Bank and more generally in Israel. We heard aspects of the ancient and more modern history of the area, of conquest and betrayal, of attempts at peace and destruction. The story had an inevitable bias but it was neither that, nor the information given that shocked me, I had heard much of it elsewhere. The pain, which has remained with me since was in the sense of being trapped by the past, just as much as the ‘Security Cordon’ (the Wall) is trapping the Palestinians of the West Bank physically. Even more stark was the impassioned plea to us to go from this place and ask our churches to not forget the plight of Palestinian Christians. Unfavourable comparison was drawn between what they were receiving and the ongoing support which the wider Muslim community is giving to the people inside the West Bank. The greatest pain seemed not to be as a result of what the Israelis were doing rather that the wider Christian world had forgotten those to whom it was being done.

Memory, as such an integral part of the being of this land is causing many problems, but forgetting far from assisting, seems to be causing just as much if not greater pain. I have heard over this last week about projects, not to erase memory but to give it a more helpful, integrated place, through discussion and sharing between the different communities. This is inevitably going to be a long, hard and gradual process. In the meantime please pray for the people of this land. In a land of long memory please remember those who feel forgotten. Pray that they might live in freedom and peace today, that they might be able to build better memories for the future.