Jerusalem 1977-2027 ... The Trilogy. Quest for a Just Peace. Part Two.

By Gordie LaRocque

Part Two of 'Jerusalem 1977-2027 ... The Trilogy. Quest for a Just Peace' chronicles a year of exploring and working in Israel, Palestine, and the Sinai - with Jerusalem the axis. The story centres on meeting local inhabitants and visiting extraordinary environments. These interactions celebrate the characters' lives and convictions, and pivots on the prospects for peace and understanding from the peoples prevailing upon that land.

Travels and work ensue via: kibbutz living; northern Israel and the Lebanon and Syria borders; the West Bank/Occupied Palestine; Eilat verve; the mystical/improbable/expansive magnificence of the mighty Sinai; the Dead Sea region and Hebron - of course returning often to Jerusalem, The Eternal City.

Stalwart characters share the dynamics and the issues of: displacement; political-national dispossession and conflict; Palestinian nationhood and resistance; the historic visit of Egyptian President Sadat; the emergence of Peace Now; cross cultural-political interests - and of Jerusalem, The City of Peace, with defiance and hope.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gordie LaRocque
• Release date: Jul 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9780991804566

Gordie LaRocque

'Worlds Collude - Escape Tales from Surf City to Sidi Ifni' is the 2nd of a trilogy. The first book is 'A Personal and Political Journey Through Beirut, April/May, 1977'. The 3rd book currently in progress is titled ‘Jerusalem 1977-2027. Quest For A Just Peace’. All these works stem from years of studying, travelling, working, and living in the Middle East and North Africa.In my career in Social Work I wrote formal research, and about citizen’s resilience, and of the need for egalitarian systemic response to peoples’ socio-economic struggles.My professional Social Work writing, as well as my primary life duty as full-time father, took all my time and energies. I do not communicate or promote on social media. My life has not followed the usual ‘grid’.

Book preview

JERUSALEM 1977-2027 … The Trilogy

Quest For A Just Peace

Part Two

Gordie ‘Youssef’ LaRocque

Copyright Gordie LaRocque 2023

Prologue

Part Two of ‘Jerusalem 1977-2027 … The Trilogy. Quest For A Just Peace’ chronicles nearly a year of exploring and working in Israel, Palestine, and the Sinai – with Jerusalem the axis. The story centres on meeting local inhabitants and visiting extraordinary environments. These interactions celebrate the characters’ lives and convictions, and pivots on the prospects for peace and understanding from the peoples prevailing upon that land.

Travels and work ensue via: kibbutz living; northern Israel and the Lebanon and Syria borders; the West Bank/Occupied Palestine; Eilat verve; the mystical/improbable/expansive magnificence of the mighty Sinai; the Dead Sea region and Hebron – of course returning often to Jerusalem, The Eternal City.

Stalwart characters share the dynamics and the issues of: displacement; political-national dispossession and conflict; Palestinian nationhood and resistance; the historic visit of Egyptian President Sadat; the emergence of Peace Now; cross cultural-political interests – and of Jerusalem, The City of Peace, with defiance and hope.

Contents

Prologue

1. Palestinian (Arab) ‘need not apply’

2. We can wait them out!

3. Silwan shall be the capital of Palestine!

4. From City of Peace to Eilat … and Sadat!

5. Israelis

6. Well welcome to the Sinai!

7. The return north – the proximity and dichotomy of … Masada, Dead Sea, Ein Gedi, Hebron!

8. Peace Now

9. Fare Thee Well, Jerusalem

1977-1978 Mid-East trip (outlined)

JERUSALEM 1977-2027 … The Trilogy

Quest For A Just Peace

Part Two

Palestinian (Arab) ‘need not apply’

"Yalla! Everyone together now! As one!" commanded Ofer. Come on Gordie! Pull up! Yalla!!

It was already humid and hot at 9 a.m. We’d been on the job already 4 hours – so to beat the heat. Morning after morning commencing at 5 a.m. we drove a jeep jarringly out to the fields to move the irrigation pipes by hand. The cotton plants were knee-high in July. Between the long rows were sections of 6 inch-diameter heavy metal pipes each 40 feet long and connected together, with sprinklers between each section that watered the cotton.

There were four of us: Israeli kibbutz members Ofer and Schviker, ultra-fit and strong in their late 20s; Ian Hanley, a Brit from Birmingham, a kibbutz volunteer like me – except Ian was of medium muscular build while I was gangly, wiry, and underweight from 4 months of budget travel in the Middle East.

With one man to each 40-feet pipe we’d disconnect them, pick them up, and jump over 18 rows of cotton, yelling beastly (them, not me), lay the pipes down, hook the pipes back up … usually 20 pipes to one row and 4-6 rows to be alternated in each cotton field, of which there were dozens. Thick mud higher than our ankles at times made it more grueling. After completing each field we’d turn the water on, and if sprinkler nozzles were blocked by mud we’d clear them with a wire insert and get belted in the face by the powerful spray of water. At day’s end, after hours of this physical fervor at 90 degrees Fahrenheit, a high-pressure water hose removed the dried mud from our legs and feet. The hoses also watered our internal elements all day. Whew!

During a rest break I mentioned to Ofer that I wanted to hitchhike south along the Mediterranean Sea to visit Gaza when I had a few days off work. Ofer in his typical straightforward summation replied dismissively: Gaza’s not even a ‘nice Arab town’. I was there in the army. You should visit another.

Thus far in discussions with Israeli kibbutz members their perspective regarding Palestinians, who Israelis referred to only as Arabs, seemed to be of a ‘non-entity’, of a group that wasn’t relevant, an after-thought. This included Palestinians in their larger diaspora as well as local inhabitants. But this surely was a measured façade? …

"The weeds are growing in between the cotton. Tonight we’ll hire those Arab girls again from Acre to pull them up."

Ofer continued matter-of-factly: During last night a rocket, a bomb from Lebanon fell not far from here. In our field. Schviker saw it fall and found it before we started work. Hasn’t happened here in a long time.

During demanding days of field work, before and after that Katyusha rocket, low-flying Israeli warplanes jetted deafeningly over our heads.

Ofer’s older brother, just the summer before, was a commando of the Israel Defense Force (IDF) at Entebbe Airport in Uganda when they freed Israeli hostages aboard a plane hijacked jointly by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Recently Vesper had said, of that Jerusalem bombing in May, that bombing had been too small for the PFLP. The infamous German Baader-Meinhof militant group also was part of the hijacking.

The kibbutz was 20 kilometres south of the border with Lebanon, and just north of Acre and slightly inland off the coast road. A post-1948 kibbutz, its members were mostly from East European countries and also some Spanish-speaking ethnicities. The age group of East European members was generally mid-40s to mid-50s … who had survived the Holocaust when they were in their teens or early-20s. I was forever riveted by the sweaty forearm of a kibbutz member as we shared meals in the dining hall. His Concentration Camp Prisoner serial number was tattooed on his forearm. I learned this tattooing occurred only at Auschwitz. Wanted to be able to talk with him about it, but was gripped and couldn’t find the words. But he did. During one dinner that summer he animatedly approached me: Are you an Elvis fan!? Elvis died yesterday! I didn’t know. So much I didn’t know.

The tragedy and ongoing trauma of The Holocaust are unfathomable, unimaginable. Did survivors settle in their new Jewish state and, so traumatized, were unable/unwilling to ‘deal with’ the reality that another group of peoples was being displaced from their respective homes and lands? That the other groups’ rights were being denied? Would not Jewish people, so recently persecuted, be attuned to their state’s refusal of rights and land toward a nationality already present? Did the recent reality of experiencing genocide lead to a peoples’ belief that their persecution was still ongoing, thus precluding the need to recognize other peoples’ national aspirations? Did the Israeli leaders of their new state have a sufficient justice-based vision toward sustainability? These questions that only posed more questions went on and on during this summer.

These Jewish immigrants to the new state of Israel then had 1st generation Israeli children born on the kibbutz in the late 1940s to early 1960s. They were the late-20s (like Ofer) and older teenagers who had grown up on the kibbutz and primarily were my associates and co-workers. The kibbutz was a mix of mostly the ‘philosophically/politically conservative’ with a spattering of some ‘liberal outward-thinking Israelis’ – who were more often some of the young people, like in all societies. Palestinians (‘Arabs’) and Moslems were not permitted in Israel to be kibbutz members, or volunteer.

There also were some recent young adult Jewish immigrants from the U.S. and Canada who were more extreme and fundamental in espousing their beliefs on the religious rights of Jews vis-à-vis ‘Arabs’ (Palestinians) when the latter peoples had lived on this land long before these 1970s immigrants from privileged lives within colonizing Western countries. Some debates and disagreements were held with these recent religious-rights-based Western-world Jewish immigrants. There was no common ground. The ‘ground’ was theirs. Nobody else’s.

The recent Israeli general election, that ‘earthquake election’, was still being analyzed nationally and collectively. The daily newspaper Jerusalem Post rarely made it to