July 23, 2001
Elizabeth poses in front of Tantur.
After class today, we headed off to visit some friends of friends (there are a lot fewer of them these days passing through) who are spending part of the summer at Tantur. Tantur is an ecumenical institute founded in the early 1970's in an effort to bring churches together for conversation and fellowship, as a bridge between East and West. Over the years, though, it has become a place where such conversations take place primarily between Protestant and Catholic - the Orthodox have largely opted out of the conversation. The Institute has the interesting geography of being right at the Israeli checkpoint along the Jerusalem-Bethlehem Road.
Palestinian day laborers find their way back into Bethlehem through the grounds of Tantur.
Our bus from Damascus Gate stopped just short of the checkpoint to let its Arab occupants off. Most of them followed us, into the grounds of Tantur, so that they could get around the checkpoint and into the waiting Arab busses on the other side to take them home to the Bethlehem district. Such roundabout transportation system has developed since the seige tightened in September, and the Israeli Army seems to turn a blind eye - this is the "illegal" traffic which feeds Israel's need for a cheap labor force.
The sprawling Har Homa Israeli settlement, illegally built on Palestinian land inside the West Bank.
Across the road, we could see the continued construction of Har Homa, the Israeli settlement on the Arab land of Jabal Abu-Ghneim, once a thickly forested hill, renowned for the beauty and respite it offered to the Bethlehem area. The aesthetic and ecological (not to mention moral) disaster makes our (especially Elizabeth's) stomachs turn. It began under Netanyahu, continued under Barak, and we have seen its presence explode in our brief time here.
We had a wonderful visit with our new friends, hearing about their summer experiences - particularly those involving dialogues between Jewish and Palestinian peace groups - and their lives in the US. It was also good to get second-hand reports on friends back in the States.
Upon returning to Birzeit, we went to the roof to do some investigative work with our neighbor, and discovered that someone had closed our water tank's valve. This means that when water arrived to Birzeit (to fill roof tanks), ours remained shut off. We should have water in the morning.