Jerusalem (War is Peace)

After two days in Jerusalem (or one really, yesterday I was so tired I walked around like a cotton-brained zombie) the biggest shock is that everything seems so normal. The surface is beautiful, quiet and harmonious; Jews, Muslims and Christians of all sorts filling the narrow alleyways of the old town, kids playing, street vendors inviting tourists for coffee, tourists photgraphing street vendors (and other exotic appearances), Jews praying at the western wall, old men playing backgammon in the streets, allah o-akhbar from the mosques, church bells ringing, birds singing, everything surrounded by extremely old stone walls, blue skies, doves and cobblestones.

And this is exactly what I find so disturbing: it is perfectly possible to arrive at Ben Gurion airport, take a taxi to Jerusalem, stay there two weeks and leave again without getting to know a single thing about all the madness going on around here. The surface is a vicious betrayal of reality, like an embroidered carpet hiding a horrible dark hole in the ground. How can everything seem so normal and peaceful when truth is this country is totally fucked up?

I drink my coffee on the wonderful roof terrasse on top of our super-cozy youth hostel in the heart of the old city, the afternoon breeze cooling my over-heated mind, the amazing fairytale-view fooling me into believing that I really have come to the land of milk and honey. And only kilometres away, a whole family was blown up while having a picnick at the beach in Gaza last Friday, only the 10-year old daughter survived. Violence breeds violence, and in the distance, if you look very closely, right there in the horizon behind a cypress tree in some Jerusalem garden, there is a glimpse of the apartheid wall. A reminder in stone and steel that oppression is the flip side of this peaceful surface, if people only would lift the carpet and look that far.