March 14, 2018

On Wednesday we enjoyed our first breakfast at the Mar Elias guest house. The staff and volunteers that we have met have been very helpful and interesting to talk with. Samar is a delightful woman that has ensured we have more than enough to eat and expresses a genuine concern that we have all that we need. Ted and Jane are volunteers from New Jersey who have a wealth of knowledge about the area and are good at making sure things are smoothly run.

We had the chance to meet with staff at the Mar Elias school and interact with the students and it was really wonderful. When we arrived, the school was in a flurry of activity as the students began their day and staff congregated to review their daily schedules. The school serves both primary and secondary grades, with students that are a mix of Christian and Muslim. A key benefit and mission of the school is to bring together students of different faiths to generate relationships and understanding between communities that are often very segregated in other parts of the country. The staff is a mix of primarily Muslim and Christian and teach primarily in Arabic. There are two staff members that are Jewish and while their presence is exceptional in this environment, they are valued for their unique contributions.

Design teacher, Shosh, in new 3-D lab she has developed with and for MEEI.

I met with Shosh, an Israeli instructor that runs the graphic design program at Mar Elias. Shosh is Israeli and speaks Hebrew, and shared with us how she learned to speak and teach in Arabic while starting out in the job. Shosh has done an amazing job sourcing funding to develop a technology lab for design students. Students in Israeli follow a model of education that can start to direct them towards a specific trade or area of study while in high school. Once assigned to this course, this usually determines what they will study in university or do for a living, which is quite a contrast to the American model.

Conversation with 10th graders at Mar Elias.

Later on, we met with students in their English class and had the chance to talk with small groups and practice conversational English. Even in the hallways, it is clear these kids enjoy having visitors and the having the chance to use some of their English. It’s difficult to pass students by without many of them greeting you in English and asking “how are you?”. In most of our small groups there were one or two students that had a better mastery of English and would help interpret for their classmates. I met with a group of several boys that were mostly in their tenth year. We talked about our families and goals and hobbies. They had lots of questions about our jobs and had a distinct interest in how and when one gets married and buys a home in the U.S. Talking with these kids was really fun and it was refreshing to observe their enthusiasm and hear them express their hopes for their futures. The school clearly provides an amazing opportunity for these young people, in a way that is startling when compared to the lives of many young people we had observed in the West Bank.

Jonathan Cook

St. Anne’s Church in Saffuriya

Later in the afternoon we had the chance to meet with British writer Jonathan Cook. Jonathan, a former writer for The Guardian, has written extensively about Israel and Palestinian. He does an excellent job exploring and describing the historical and political aspects of the conflict in this region. We met with Jonathan for a walking tour, starting near a natural spring situated just outside the former Palestinian village of Suffuriya. As with most former Palestinian communities, Suffuriya was destroyed during the initial years of the occupation. We viewed remains of homes spread over an area that has been obscured by growth of more recently planted pine trees.

Jonathan described the long history of Palestinians, Romans and Byzantines in the area and challenged some of the myths related to the history of settlement in this area. This area is also unique in that some of the Palestinian history has been preserved due to its relationship with Christianity. Because it is believed that Mary came from this specific area, a church has been built here. The Vatican wanted rights to this land and have constructed an Italian run orphanage here. As a secondary result of the land deal made with the Israeli government, many of the remnants of Palestinian civilization here has not been erased. The Vatican was granted access to this land, however they have been discouraged from including this site in official pilgrimage tours and Israeli tour guides are not trained to bring visitors here. The ultimate goal of this is to prevent visitors intruding on the more recent Jewish settlements and to avoid additional recognition of the removal of Palestinians from the area. Jonathan demonstrates a real commitment to sharing the history of this area and advocating for the rights of Palestinians still living in the region. He was very effective in describing the complicated history of this region and explaining how current factors continue to perpetuate the conflict and disparity under which many in this region must live.

~ Ryan Larkey