It was late June, 2004, my first summer working at The Seeds of Peace Camp on the shores of Pleasant Lake in Otisfield, Maine.  “I’m an old man,” Mohammed told me, though he was younger than I am now. 

“You are not so old.”

“Getting old is different in Gaza than in America,” he said.  

In the following years, Mohammed and I became friends. In the fall of 2006, I accepted a full-time position with Seeds of Peace and moved to Jerusalem. Alongside his job as a professor of education at a university in Gaza, Mohammed represented Seeds of Peace on the ground in Gaza; over time, he expanded his role across our network. The two of us worked closely together.  We met in Ramallah, in Jerusalem, in Amman, by Petra, in Wadi Rum, in Cyprus, in Manhattan, at a retreat center in New Jersey, at the Seeds of Peace camp in Maine. We always roomed together. At night, he wore his tight knit Islamic skull cap on his head; he often gifted me such caps, so when we were together in the evenings, we each wore them. 

We stayed up late talking. I heard him each morning clearing his throat and coughing up flem.  When we were apart and he was home in Gaza, we talk on the phone several times a day. I would be walking around Jerusalem; he would be at the grocery store in Shijayea or at the nearby ice cream parlor. The grocery store owner was Mohammed’s childhood friend; the store was a gathering spot. The men there would ask Mohammed to ask me about life in Jerusalem. At the ice cream parlor, Mohammed always ordered strawberry ice cream with strawberry sauce. 

In June of 2014, members of Hamas kidnapped three Israeli teenagers in Gush Etzion, a settlement bloc in the West Bank, also a Jerusalem suburb where my cousins live. Israeli military forces invaded Gaza and The West Bank. That summer was supposed to be the culmination of years of our Seeds of Peace work. But when I asked the Palestinian and Israeli educators, my allies and friends, if we could go forward, they said  “no way, Daniel. The ground is burning.” 

That summer is burned into my memory. When missiles from Gaza hit close enough to trigger the sirens, I rushed to the bomb shelter I shared with my Israeli neighbors. My friends and colleagues visiting from America huddled together at my apartment on Shimoni Street, across from Gan Sacker, a sprawling park that included an ancient monastery built on the location where, according to tradition, the tree once stood that was cut down and then used for the cross that crucified Jesus. Deb, a facilitator, coach, and curriculum designer from Portland, Maine, got stuck overnight in Ramallah because of tear gas at the checkpoint. We drove by a missile from Gaza burning on the side of the road outside of Jerusalem. When I called Mohammed, he was often in bed under the covers.  “Daniel, the bombs are all around me. My bed is shaking. I think I’m going to die.”

Late that summer, Mohammed joined me at the Seeds of Peace camp in Maine. Most of the day he kept his skull cap on and stayed in his bed in our cottage by the lake.  I didn’t see him smile until by accident he met an Israeli woman named Orli who was visiting her teenage daughter. Orli had grown up on Kibbutz Nahal Oz.” I want you to meet her,” Mohammed told me. 

We met by the flags at the entrance of The Seeds of Peace Camp. Dark hair cut short, about Mohammed’s age, Orli was much shorter than him. The two of them hugged like old friends. A former Hebrew teacher in Gaza, Mohammed took every opportunity he could to speak the language. He loved to to speak Hebrew with Orli but they also went back and forth to English for my sake. They reminisced about when they were young in the 1970’s. Israelis would drive into Gaza; Palestinians from Gaza would drive into Israel. Mohammed’s large family lived in a one room house made from clay and hay with a dirt floor. His parents could not read or write, though his father memorized The Koran. His father—in his late fifties when Mohammed was born—worked as a nightwatchman. “We depended upon the chickens and the vegetables we could plant next to the house. . . .The only way for us to cook was with the primus stove or the wood, ” Mohammed explained. “I remember when I was a child, there was a grocery store close and another one a bit far. I used to go to the one close with an egg and the man there would give me candy.”  In 1975, when he was about eighteen, Mohammed started working at a gas station in Ramle [a mixed Israeli city of Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel]. This launched him into new worlds. 

“I was a smart boy and I succeeded to learn Hebrew faster than anybody else. . .The boss looked to me,” Mohammed said that first time with Orli, or at least other times, for such conversations have blended.  “I was also smart with math. I succeeded to gain his trust, to occupy his heart. He depended on me. He was a German Jewish Israeli. His name was Asher Khofkin. He had numbers on his arms. He had daughters, one with a popular television show, Rifka Michaeli. This daughter had been in the army and was living on a kibbutz. Asher was married to another wife, a woman who was a head stewardess. They had two daughters, too. He had a brother. Together they owned about five gas stations. His brother David was the head of the union of gas stations. Asher used to take me to Gaza in his Pontiac. He treated me to hummus and falafel. Later he offered me a gas station in Gaza. He used to give me my salary and then more than the salary. He was always buying and giving me things. One time I said to him, Asher, you have a lot of money and you don’t have a son to carry your name when you die, and all of your money is going to the girls. He said: ‘You are a crazy Arab. Who cares if when I die anybody remembers me. Who cares about the money.’ That is something I’ll never forget. It had an impact on my thinking. I heard that once he was injured in a movie theater. There was a bomb there. He was a major in the army. I worked with him for a long time. I would leave, go home, and come back. When I got married, I came with my wife to visit. He said anything you want, just call me. . . “ 

 

By the flags at the entrance of the Seeds of Peace Camp, Mohammed said to Orli in English, “I used to go to the demonstrations in Tel Aviv.”

Orli nodded. “Of course, me, too. I was there.” 

“How far were your homes from one another?” I asked. 

Mohammed thought for a moment.  “With no checkpoints, you can walk from Shijaeya to Nahal Oz. Maybe it’s three miles.”  When Orli and Mohammed looked at one another, the silence between them contained infinite depths of memory and loss. 

 

“My whole neighborhood has trauma,” Mohammed said. “I still believe in peace.” During that same conversation, he told us that he wanted to create a community center for his neighborhood after the fighting stopped. 

 

That fall, Mohammed opened The Shijaeya Community Project (The SCP) on the ground floor of his family compound, on the land where he grew up. I helped him to raise money, so I immersed myself in the language he used to describe the center’s mission: “to teach life skills; to teach ethics through storytelling; to encourage free thinking through the arts; to teach the English language; to use the English language as a window for cross-cultural understanding.”

 

Not long after, I remember taking Mohammed to visit my father. The two of them stood on the balcony of my father’s 17th floor apartment on 123rd Street, in Morningside Heights, across the street from The Jewish Theological Seminary.  They spoke in Hebrew like long lost relatives, with such passion and care. My father grew up the second of four sons of working class Orthodox Jewish immigrants from the borderlands between Romania and Hungary. As a kid in the late 1940’s, he stood in uniform to greet Menachem Begin, the right-wing Zionist leader, when Begin visited America. After high school, my father spent a pivotal year on a secular left-wing kibbutz. There, he stopped wearing a yarmulke and eating kosher. He was moved by the radically egalitarian kibbutz vision, the integration of work, of purpose, of community. He loved working with the cows. He loved the intellectual intensity. He loved the folk dancing at night. After moving back to New York, against his parents wishes, he insisted on going to City College: he became the first in his family to get a secular liberal arts education. He made his way into America. But he never washed the kibbutz dirt from the way he approached life. I remember my father and Mohammed on the balcony, leaning into one another as if they had known one another forever, using their hands for emphasis, sharing their hopes and loves. 

 

When my father visited me in Jerusalem, which he did regularly over those years, I took him with me to workshops, public events, and work meetings on both sides of The Green Line. I tried to show him what I was learning on the ground: peace, like health, is a long-term practice rooted in trust and relationship and composed of small decisions, small acts, that add up over time.  To begin, I did what I could to earn the trust of Israeli and Palestinian educators and community leaders. I visited their schools and community centers; I sat across the table with them for meals; I did a lot of listening. My colleagues and I did what we could to support immediate needs on the ground while we weaved together circles of courage and commitment across the more distant lines of conflict. 

In April of 2015, Mohammed, the Palestinian educators, and I, organized a spring camp at the Murad Hotel in the hills outside of Bethlehem. Mohammed did the impossible: I helped him.  He selected twelve Palestinian children of ten and eleven, most of them girls, from his community center to participate in that camp. He obtained written permission from parents making him temporary guardian. He got permission from relevant Hamas officials. He worked with our Ramallah and Tel Aviv offices to get Israeli permits to enter Jerusalem and the West Bank. He worked with Uraib in Jerusalem on transportation, room and board. With the help of our friend, Islam, director of a community center in the south Hebron Hills who was visiting Gaza for work, Mohammed shepherded the kids from Gaza through the checkpoints, to Jerusalem, and then to the camp in the hills outside of Bethlehem–what for those kids was the stuff of dreams. 

On a beautiful spring afternoon around Easter, I sat in the restaurant of the Jerusalem Hotel, across from the Palestinian bus station and The Garden Tomb, around the corner from The Old City’s Damascus Gate, waiting for Mohammed and the children to arrive. The Jerusalem Hotel’s restaurant, one of my favorite spots in Jerusalem, is designed like a greenhouse —glass ceilings crisscrossed by purlins and bows, a stone fountain with water trickling, stone floors, and plants hanging everywhere.  One can sit there undisturbed for hours. I started with a cup of Arabic coffee, a plate of hummus and pita bread. In succession, I ordered multiple cups of coffee.  In the early afternoon, my phone rang.  “We’ll be there in ten minutes,” Mohammed said, so I paid my bill and waited outside. Then I saw them. 

 

Mohammed is a tall, lumbering man with olive skin, short dark hair on the side, and a patch of dark hair on top. He jokes and laughs a lot. Deaf in one ear, he speaks loudly. He likes to buy things at Goodwill, Sam’s Club, and Costco, and give them away.  That day, he was in a dark sweater and a dark wool sports coat, a dark cap on his head, folded glasses on a chain around his neck, and a radiant smile on his face. There were the children, each one dressed in their best clothes or in outfits borrowed for the occasion: black patent leather shoes; dresses for the girls, clean, well ironed pants and shirts for the boys; hair combed and moussed; skin scrubbed; exuberance on their faces along with looks of childish shock. They were understandably shy at first. They shook my hands and looked up with eyes, shades of brown, of green, gray and blue, that gave me a chance to take in their already individual approaches to life, along with the vulnerability, curiosity, and courage they were mustering up.

 

“Let’s get something to eat!” Mohammed said in Arabic and English while waving us forward. We walked toward the Old City and then down the stone steps to Damascus Gate. We passed the vegetable stands and wrinkled old women selling fresh herbs; the tables with carafes of fresh lemonade with mint and Arabic coffee; the din of layered conversations in multiple languages; through the light dust hanging in the air, until we made it to a crowded falafel restaurant. 

“These kids are not like the kids you know from the American School or from camp or even from the places you go in The West Bank,” Mohammed told me, in between bites of falafel. “These kids are from Shijaeya. It’s another world.  They come from very poor families. Their parents don’t speak English; many of them hardly read or write Arabic. These are simple people. You are the first American they ever met; you are the first Jewish they ever met. You are the first foreigner they ever met. I think the first person they ever met who says he is not a Muslim.”

 

After lunch, we walked as a group to “The Haram al-Sharif,” also known as “The Al Aqsa Mosque Compound” and as “The Temple Mount.” According to Jewish tradition, God created the world from that location. According to Jewish and Christian traditions, Abraham, obeying God’s command, brought his son Isaac there as a sacrifice.  Many generations later, almost a thousand years before The Common Era, King Solomon built The First Temple there; it was later destroyed by the Assyrians and rebuilt after The Babylonian Exile. During the time of Jesus, King Herod turned this same site into one of the great pilgrimage destinations of the Roman Empire. After the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, including The Holy Temple, they built a Temple to Zeus and forbid Jews access to The Holy Site. Early Christians built churches on the ruins of The Temple Mount. According to The Koran, from there, The Prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven on the back of a winged horse-like creature.The first Muslims prayed in the direction of the ancient Temple. The Crusaders gained control of the City but left the Al Aqsa Mosque Compound intact. Various Islamic regimes ruled Jerusalem, most recently The Ottomans. The British took over after World War I. According to the U.N. Partition Plan, Jerusalem was to be an international city. Instead, after what Israelis call “The War of Independence” and Palestinians call “The Catastrophe,” from 1948 until 1967, the Israelis and Jordanians divided Jerusalem among themselves: The Al Aqsa Compound, The Temple Mount, stood on the Jordanian side.  

 

For generations, The Temple Mount itself was closed to Jews who prayed instead beside “The Kotel,” “The Wailing Wall,” visible remnants of a wall that King Herod built as part of his Temple complex. When the Israelis conquered East Jerusalem in 1967, they demolished houses and cleared out a neighborhood below The Al Aqsa Compound to create a pilgrimage site around The Wailing Wall. Claiming descent from the Prophet Mohammed, the Hashemite Rulers of Jordan remain the guardians of the Islamic holy sites of Jerusalem. Extremist Jewish groups envision building The Third Temple on The Temple Mount—where the Al Aqsa Compound stands. In late September, 2000, a visit by former Israeli general and opposition politician Ariel Sharon, accompanied by Israeli riot police officers, ignited what became The Second Intifada.  

 

We are talking about an intricate emotional and spiritual geography, a focus of prayer and longing for billions of people across generations with concentrated power that is difficult to convey. In Temple Times, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year—and only on that day—The High Priest ventured into the Holy of Holies, the most sacred part of The Temple, originally the place for The Ark of The Covenant, dressed in white linen, to burn incense and sprinkle the blood of the sacrificed bull in a ritual of atonement. It was the single instance of the year when The High Priest spoke God’s true full name out loud. The High Priest entered The Holy of Holies with a rope tied around his ankle and that rope linked to something outside so that, if needed, he could be dragged out without putting anybody else in danger. Muslims built their Mosque Compound over The Temple Mount because they continued with such reverence and awe. 

 

This is a long way of explaining why the young, thin, unshaven Israeli soldier stood guard, keeping a tense calm between Jews and Muslims. When this soldier stopped us with a gesture of his hands, Mohammed spoke to him in fluent Hebrew. The soldier looked over Mohammed’s and Islam’s passports and permits. He looked over the children. Then he looked at me while speaking to Mohammed. “Is he a Muslim?” the soldier asked in Hebrew. 

 

“Of course,” Mohammed replied in Hebrew, smiling.  “Mohammed—come on,” I said in English, worried that he would get himself in trouble. “Show me, show me,” the soldier beckoned for my passport. When he saw my American passport and Jewish name, he shook his head and turned to Mohammed. In Hebrew, he said, “The rest of you, go; he stays here.” 

 

“But why must he stay? He’s a good Muslim.” Mohammed meant that I was, from his perspective, a person who lives a life of submission to a Godly ethic and is thus, broadly speaking, a Muslim. The meaning of “Islam” is submission to God: Muslims view themselves as those who submit to God.  For Muslims, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, all of them, are Muslims; Jesus, too, is a great prophet, not the Son of God. The Prophet Mohammed is the last of this line of prophets with final words of Revelation. My friend Mohammed would not call himself devout.  He compares himself to his imam, to his wife, to his older sister, and to others who pray five times a day and are far stricter in their ritualistic observance. And yet he has a difficult time understanding how people can be agnostic or atheistic: God, the creator and sustainer of all life, for him, is an obvious fact.  Are you a Muslim,” the soldier asked me, now switching to heavily accented English. “Or are you Jewish?”

 

“I’m Jewish.” Switching back to Hebrew, the soldier turned again to Mohammed. Pointing to me, he said, “He stays here.” Mohammed gave a slight nod. In English, he said: “okay.” 

 

During this exchange, the Shijaeya children were watching, their mouths agape. I sat down on a plastic chair as Mohammed and the group walked into the Al Aqsa Compound. When they returned, we retraced our steps through the streets of The Old City. By the Jerusalem Hotel we boarded our charted bus and headed out. The children were quiet. Like me, they looked out the window as the scenery changed.  Until the late 19th century, The Old City of Jerusalem—densely packed into its Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and Armenian Quarters—was surrounded by semi arid rocky hills that would have been recognizable to the ancient judges, prophets, pilgrims, farmers, shepherds, queens and kings. These hills have been covered by roads, by apartment blocks of Jerusalem stone. Away from the center of Jerusalem, it becomes easier to see the hills for what they are. One can still find shepherds walking with their flocks, though fewer make their living this way, and local lamb, more expensive than what is imported from New Zealand, has become a relative rarity in the local shops. The Holy Land is not large in a physical sense. The Jordan River is unimpressive as a simple river.  Jerusalem is a relatively small city. Putting aside The Holy Sites, Bethlehem is not that much of a town. But the emotional geography, the undulating levels of perception, the spiritual geography, of Israel/Palestine, is a kind of Mount Everest.

In The West Bank, prominent red signs in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, mark the boundaries set up by The Oslo Peace Process in the 1990’s and meant to be temporary. “Area A,” is composed of Palestinian urban areas that The Palestinian Authority directly governs. Area C, which includes Israeli settlements, is governed fully by Israel.  Area B is theoretically under joint Israeli/Palestinian administration, with Israel in charge of security. Palestinians cannot cross checkpoints to Jerusalem without permission from Israeli Authorities. Israeli citizens are legally barred from Area A.  Between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, in between checkpoints and those red signs, in liminal space, there is hilly land where both Palestinians and Israelis can meet legally. On this land are three hotels—Talitha Qumi, owned by The German Evangelical Lutheran Church, and The Everest and The Murad, both privately owned by Christian families—that live from the peculiarities of the political situation: this is where Israeli and Palestinian activists and peace builders and their international allies meet. On that drive from Jerusalem with the children from Shijaeya, we entered this liminal space: we turned from the main flow of traffic and followed the curves of a dirt road to the gates of The Murad Hotel. What a welcome we received.  

 

We joined the roughly 50 Palestinian children who had arrived earlier from Jerusalem and across The West Bank, along with about 30 Palestinian educators. The children were there for the camp; the educators were there to run the camp and to participate in a workshop on “peaceful learning environments.”  It was rare even then for Palestinians from Gaza, The West Bank, and Jerusalem, to gather in one place. I spent those days at the Murad between the children’s activities and the educators’ workshop. I sat with educators over long meals and into the night. On alternate evenings I joined the men at the swimming pool and in the sauna. I walked the hills and took in what we were accomplishing together—something so precious and so difficult to describe. 

The Shijaeya kids vied for my attention. They used my presence to practice their English. They asked me questions.  “How are you, Mr. Daniel?” “Will you visit me in Gaza?” Can I visit you in Jerusalem?” “Are you really Yahud [a Jew]?” “Can you take me to America?” “Can you help me to be a doctor? “What’s your favorite animal?”  “Can you take us to the zoo?  

 

I looked at Mohammed. He looked at me. We both smiled. “Yes.”  

 

The morning everybody at camp was going home, the Shijaeya kids dressed in their best clothes, what they had worn on the day they left Gaza. I have issues with zoos. But those kids cast their light on the experience. 

 

The Jerusalem Zoo was integrated into the hills and criss-crossed with walking paths. Many of the animals enjoyed relatively ample living areas. We checked out the amphibians. We walked through the dark room of nocturnal creatures. We walked through the humid bird room like a jungle, where the small birds with bright colors flew all over chirping. We spent time with the chimps, each one with a photograph and corresponding name tacked up by the fence so that we could get to know them individually. The kids stood, stared, and danced with excitement in front of the tigers, the lions, the zebras, the hippos, the African and Asian elephants, the monkeys, and the penguins. There was a special Biblical section where members of various species mentioned in The Bible shared an enclosure. There was a separate enclosure for a wild boar with a prominent sign in multiple languages: “THIS IS NOT A PIG. Do NOT throw garbage.” 

 

A zoo can help us remember: the diversity of life is stunning. And those penguins were something else. They had their own pool of water and a surrounding infrastructure of white shelves in a panorama meant to mimic the snow and ice of their Antarctic home. While we stood in the penguin section, the penguins dove into the water and swam about. They played together as penguins do–with joyful abandonment. That day, I saw those penguins in their black and white penguin birthday suits as the kids from Shijaeya saw them—as marvels of creation. An Israeli Jewish guide, a young brown haired woman, passed us with her group of Israeli Jewish children, and then stood, facing the penguins. She pointed to the penguins and started speaking Hebrew. The Shijaeya kids kept looking at the penguins, jumping around, making noises of amazement, laughing, and talking amongst themselves.

 

“Quiet, please,” the young guide said in Hebrew, no idea where we came from or who we were. “Be quiet, children, Mohammed said to them in Arabic. “This woman is telling us about the penguins.”  My senses went abuzz to worlds of experience colliding. 

 

We left the zoo in the late afternoon and drove a short distance to “Melik Shawarma,” a fast food restaurant. Mohammed handed out sandwiches. After we ate, the kids stood in line outside of the bus. One by one, they approached me, shook my hand and looked up with eyes, shades of brown and black, of green, gray and blue, that gave me a chance to take in their sheer joy and gratitude.

 

The next morning, I woke up alone in my apartment on Shimoni Street in West Jerusalem. I walked into Gan Sacker, the park I used to see from my balcony. I walked by the monastery built on the site where, according to Christian tradition, the tree once stood that was cut down and used for the cross that crucified Jesus. When my phone rang, it was Mohammed.

“Daniel,” he said. “There is a revolution.”

“A revolution?”

“A Revolution. Really. Everybody in the neighborhood is talking. They all want to go on a trip like we did. Now we can really do something. We just need more money.”  

 

As things turned out, though, that was the last trip of its kind that Mohammed and I did together. The leadership of Seeds of Peace got distracted by shiny events in banquet halls and incubators for social entrepreneurs in Stockholm, Athens, London, and New York.  Reflecting dynamics of the larger society, the organization broke down because its leadership could not talk with one another.  At 3:30 one afternoon in January of 2019, the brand new director of Seeds of Peace global programming, a young woman of about thirty who advocated a new vision for the organization, “to imagine a world without oppression,” called Mohammed on the phone. She told him that he was being “let go:” she said his e-mail inbox would be shut down by the end of that day.   I hung on longer to my position at Seeds of Peace. I tried to bring Mohammed back. The extreme carelessness of the organization’s leadership continued. The Global Pandemic made things worse. In May of 2021, I left Seeds of Peace. I made a new life with my partner Celia in upstate New York. We adopted a rescue dog from Texas. We named her Maizie. We built a yurt in the mountains. I tried to snap out of a rolling sense of shock. 

 

On October 7th, 2023, Orli’s Kibbutz, Nahal Oz, was one of the targets of the Hamas terrorist attacks. Hours after those attacks started, Mohammed called Orli from Columbus, Ohio. Orli was in the suburbs of Boston. Orli’s sister was in her safe room on the kibbutz, hiding from the terror outside. The sister could text Orli but for obvious reasons, they could not talk on the phone. Mohammed listened to Orli. He wished her sister and her whole family safety and security. He spoke with deep empathy about the loss of Israeli life. Then he said something like “this is going to be very bad for the people in Gaza.” 

 

That day, twelve residents of Nahal Oz were killed, along with approximately sixty Israeli soldiers. Others from the community were taken hostage. The kibbutz—a rare effort to create a humane, radically democratic community—was devastated. The people of the kibbutz remain overwhelmed by trauma and grief. Just as Mohammed predicted, the Israeli military rained hell on Gaza. Mohammed’s wife Haja was visiting Shijaeya when hell made its appearance.  Mohammed’s niece and her family were among the tens of thousands of people killed by Israeli bombs. Mohammed’s son Ahmed and daughter-in-law Oraib, along with Mohammed’s daughter and her family, and most of their extended kin, fled Shijaeya and went south.  Oraib gave birth. Her husband, Mohammed’s son, took her to the hospital on a wagon drawn by a donkey because they didn’t have gas for a car. In the following months, they escaped to Cairo with as much of the family as possible.

 

In July, 2024, nine months into the devastation, Israeli bombs destroyed Mohammed’s family compound in Shijaeya, including the community center. Relatives staying there escaped in time. But while running away, one of them, a man in his seventies, died of a heart attack. 

I called Mohammed. “I’m so sorry to hear about another death in your family. And I‘m so sorry about your home, Mohammed, and about the center.” 

“Thank you. But the building was only a building,” he said. “And I was expecting it.” Our conversations go in circles of futility and loss. 

“I’m worried for you and for the Jewish even in America. There is so much hate against the Jewish. I’m worried for you.”

“Thank you, Mohammed. But I’m more worried about the people in Gaza.”

“You don’t see what I see on Tik Tok. You don’t hear what I hear. And only the Jewish in America can stop Israel. Only the American Jewish can stop Netanyahu. Maybe. It’s enough. Halas. I remember I used to go to Tel Aviv for the peace demonstrations. What happened to the Israelis, Daniel? Their government doesn’t want peace. They are radical. What happened to the ethics? Where is the humanity?”

“I don’t know, Mohammed. I don’t know.” Then Mohammed said what he had said so many times before: “you have to do something.”  I said goodbye to Mohammed. I sat down on a rough wooden bench by the Poestenkill Creek in the woods by the local cemetery in Troy, New York. Maizie the dog sat by my feet.  I ran through the “somethings” I might do. I let myself be enveloped by the swaying trees, the singing birds, and the flowing creek. 

Almost every week day, late afternoon, early evening, depending upon the season, depending upon the time of nightfall, Maizie, and I walk in those same woods.

“We have completely lost,” Mohammed told me on the phone just before Thanksgiving, 2024. We were talking about the money we had raised to support activities for the children left in Shijayea. The teachers on the ground were using the shell of Mohammed’s center. They wanted to expand their offerings to include a range of academic subjects because there were no schools in operation. But they needed toilets. They needed running water. Running water. I looked out at the creek again. And again. The creek iced over in places but the water continued to flow. Maizie and I tramped through the snow. The snow melted. It snowed again. The snow melted but it snowed again. The final snows of the season melted, as did the ice in the creek. The birds returned to sing. The buds on the trees burst forth in spring-time splendor.  The feelings of despair and futility grow stronger.  I am surprised by how often I think of the penguins and those kids from Shijaeaya, Gaza. Images of Mohammed and me, of the young Israeli woman, of those kids from Gaza, of those Israeli kids, keep flashing through my mind: penguins just being penguins; children just being children. That memory stands out as a high point of my eleven years living in Jerusalem and twenty five working in conflict zones.  

***

I wrote not long ago to an Israeli cousin in Jerusalem to thank her for the invitation to her son’s bar mitzvah and to say that I could not make it. When she wrote back and mentioned that her oldest daughter, a recent high school graduate, will be joining the army, I thought of that daughter, a kind girl with thoughtful brown eyes and a quiet smile. Images of that daughter at family occasions over the years flashed before my eyes, along with images of Noah’s ark floating through the downpour, and of walking with the ancient Israelites through the parted sea and the desert toward a forever receding Promised Land. I thought of Mohammed and my father standing on the balcony together. I got swept into a tsunami of tears over the realities that we, human beings, collectively create, and impose upon one another, and upon ourselves, and then inhabit like prisoners in striped uniforms in a pantomime jail. 

*******

Daniel Noah Moses is a former Lecturer on Social Studies at Harvard University and former Director of Educator Programs at Seeds of Peace. From 2006 to 2017, he lived in Jerusalem. He’s been a Jerusalem Fellow at The Mandel Institute; he taught in the JTS Kesher Hadash Program for Master’s students in Jewish education. More recently, among other things, he is the
co-founder of The Fig Tree Alliance. He’s working on a writing project, Fragments from a World on Fire: Life in Conflict Zones. See this page for more about The Shijaeya Community Project, see.