'Here. Please. For the baby,' said a man, handing me a huge bunch of purple and yellow grapes, their skins as taught as my pregnant stomach. Recently washed and glistening with drops of water.
I didn't know the man, but I thanked him from my seated position by a shallow pool where the dwarves were playing with their friends. And as he walked off I thought to myself - I don't know whether he was Palestinian or Israeli, or an Arab Israeli. Because in this land the bridges between the cultures, soaring over the violence and the terror are the same. Passion and respect for family, the mother, for babies and children. For food. And loud, loud fun.
The same week that an 18 month old Palestinian baby is burned alive in his house by settlers; the same week that a crazed religious Israeli goes on a stabbing fest at the Gay Pride march, recently released from prison for the same crime ten years ago; both of these crimes accompanied by the murmurs of the likelihood of a new war only one year on from the last;
a stranger hands me a bunch of grapes for my baby.
J and I had dinner at a lively tapas bar near the market here in Jerusalem. The women dark and beautiful, the mood was heating up with the beat. Pulsing. Arab. 'Yalla!' sang the beautiful women, gyrating their hips on their small stools, waving their hands in the air above the little plates of tapas and cocktails. The same word they use, Arabs and Israelis. Yalla! Let's go!
Just another bridge.
Last night we watched: 'The train that divides Jerusalem' the Panorama programme about the only transport artery we use all the time. It highlighted once again the hatreds in this city. And then we watched the Channel 4 Dispatches: 'Escape from ISIS' - an escape from a place where the evil knows no bounds.
And yet.
As 34 men, women and children walked to safety across the plains of spring flowers, rescued by the cunning and courage of a group of men, risking their lives to spare even a handful of the estimated 4 million women imprisoned by Islamic State. After the tearful hugs and the desperate sobs of relief, the camera pans to a tiny figure, turning away, alone, across the plain. The insider responsible for saving these 34, walks back over the lines of ISIS. Risking his life once again.
These things, as Richard Le Gallienne wrote, are: 'The Rainbow bridge eternal that is Hope'.
'These things are real,' said one, and bade me gaze
On black and mighty shapes of iron and stone,
On murder, on madness, on lust, on towns ablaze,
And on a thing made all of rattling bone:
'What,' said he, 'will you bring to match with these?'
'Yea! War is real,' I said, 'and real is Death,
A little while--mortal realities;
But Love and Hope draw an immortal breath.'
Think you the storm that wrecks a summer day,
With funeral blackness and with leaping fire
And boiling roar of rain, more real than they
That, when the warring heavens begin to tire,
With tender fingers on the tumult paint;
Spanning the huddled wrack from base to cope
With soft effulgence, like some haloed saint,--
The rainbow bridge eternal that is Hope.
Deem her no phantom born of desperate dreams:
Ere man yet was, 'twas hope that wrought him man;
The blind earth, climbing skyward by her gleams,
Hoped--and the beauty of the world began.
Prophetic of all loveliness to be,
Though God Himself seem from His station hurled,
Still shall the blackest hell look up and see
Hope's rainbow on the summits of the world.
Richard Le Gallienne
I didn't know the man, but I thanked him from my seated position by a shallow pool where the dwarves were playing with their friends. And as he walked off I thought to myself - I don't know whether he was Palestinian or Israeli, or an Arab Israeli. Because in this land the bridges between the cultures, soaring over the violence and the terror are the same. Passion and respect for family, the mother, for babies and children. For food. And loud, loud fun.
The same week that an 18 month old Palestinian baby is burned alive in his house by settlers; the same week that a crazed religious Israeli goes on a stabbing fest at the Gay Pride march, recently released from prison for the same crime ten years ago; both of these crimes accompanied by the murmurs of the likelihood of a new war only one year on from the last;
a stranger hands me a bunch of grapes for my baby.
J and I had dinner at a lively tapas bar near the market here in Jerusalem. The women dark and beautiful, the mood was heating up with the beat. Pulsing. Arab. 'Yalla!' sang the beautiful women, gyrating their hips on their small stools, waving their hands in the air above the little plates of tapas and cocktails. The same word they use, Arabs and Israelis. Yalla! Let's go!
Just another bridge.
Last night we watched: 'The train that divides Jerusalem' the Panorama programme about the only transport artery we use all the time. It highlighted once again the hatreds in this city. And then we watched the Channel 4 Dispatches: 'Escape from ISIS' - an escape from a place where the evil knows no bounds.
And yet.
As 34 men, women and children walked to safety across the plains of spring flowers, rescued by the cunning and courage of a group of men, risking their lives to spare even a handful of the estimated 4 million women imprisoned by Islamic State. After the tearful hugs and the desperate sobs of relief, the camera pans to a tiny figure, turning away, alone, across the plain. The insider responsible for saving these 34, walks back over the lines of ISIS. Risking his life once again.
These things, as Richard Le Gallienne wrote, are: 'The Rainbow bridge eternal that is Hope'.
'These things are real,' said one, and bade me gaze
On black and mighty shapes of iron and stone,
On murder, on madness, on lust, on towns ablaze,
And on a thing made all of rattling bone:
'What,' said he, 'will you bring to match with these?'
'Yea! War is real,' I said, 'and real is Death,
A little while--mortal realities;
But Love and Hope draw an immortal breath.'
Think you the storm that wrecks a summer day,
With funeral blackness and with leaping fire
And boiling roar of rain, more real than they
That, when the warring heavens begin to tire,
With tender fingers on the tumult paint;
Spanning the huddled wrack from base to cope
With soft effulgence, like some haloed saint,--
The rainbow bridge eternal that is Hope.
Deem her no phantom born of desperate dreams:
Ere man yet was, 'twas hope that wrought him man;
The blind earth, climbing skyward by her gleams,
Hoped--and the beauty of the world began.
Prophetic of all loveliness to be,
Though God Himself seem from His station hurled,
Still shall the blackest hell look up and see
Hope's rainbow on the summits of the world.
Richard Le Gallienne
No comments:
Post a Comment