In early 2018, after much thought and prayer, I returned to Israel to serve a three-month term with a World Council of Churches program that places international observers in Palestinian communities throughout the West Bank. My admiration for Judaism was undimmed, but my love affair with modern Israel was over. I passed through the separation barrier that seals off the West Bank, saw it up close, with its checkpoints and guard towers, observed the contrast between Israeli prosperity and Palestinian poverty, and absorbed Sam’s answers to my questions about the ways in which Israel’s decades-long military occupation of the West Bank confines and constricts Palestinian life. It was on that day in Bethlehem, which lies within the West Bank, that my one-dimensional beliefs about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict began to modulate and mature. Sam had no interest in offending his American clients with his political views, but he answered my questions honestly, and I had plenty of them. Our guide’s name was Sam, and he was a Palestinian and a Christian. I hired a tour guide to spend a day with us in Jerusalem’s Old City, and then to take us to Bethlehem to visit the Church of the Nativity. Although we touched only the margins of all that Israel would prefer remain hidden to her tourists, I saw enough. Israel didn’t disappoint, but I was as troubled as I was entranced by what I saw there. Instead, we traveled independently, following an itinerary I’d planned myself. My husband and I didn’t go there as part of a typical group pilgrimage, visiting the holy sites in an air-conditioned bus with an Israeli tour guide and a carefully scripted Christian-friendly itinerary. In 2016, my admiration led me to visit Israel. And besides, hadn’t God given this contested land to the Jews? Fault, I was sure, did not lie with the Israelis, who were besieged and brave and valorous and wanted only peace. I had little understanding of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people, but that didn’t interfere with my certainties. My admiration for modern Israel was also deep, though uninformed. As I grew older and delved more deeply into the Old Testament and into Jewish history, my admiration for this ancient faith, with its rich and beautiful traditions, its bedrock principles of justice and mercy, and its survival despite diaspora and persecution deepened. Although only 14, I remember Walter Cronkite’s somber voice as he reported on the outbreak of war, my awareness of potential calamity for the young Jewish state, and my joyful disbelief at Israel’s lightning victory. Born into a post-Holocaust world and raised in a politically and religiously conservative home and church, I was a reader who had imbibed Leon Uris’s Exodus and its inspiring story by the time of the Six-Day War in 1967. Originally posted on Regarding modern Israel, I was once like so many American Christians. Author: CMEP Prayers4Peace: Why I Am Not a Christian Zionist

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