Last Saturday night, Luke and I went on a date (hooray!). A man I met in a module/class I took in the Spring term had invited us over for dinner. During his Masters he is living on campus. He most likely will return home in August. Home for him is the Gaza Strip, to which he calmly told us in answer to a question of what it's like to live there, "For us, life and death is just a matter of luck."
It was a dinner conversation that made me realize just how fortunate of a life I have lived and am living so far. This 31-year old man (around our age) is married and has a daughter the same age as Tyler. He accepted a scholarship to study here at the University of York in the well-respected Centre for Applied Human Rights. He hopes to return back and be able to work with law enforcement. Before he came here, he was a police officer although they are not allowed to carry weapons (Israeli law, which also mandates that Palestine does not form a military).
Coming from a Western point of view, we had to ask: are you worried about your wife and daughter? He would be, he said, if he allowed himself to worry. The thing is that he recognizes there is nothing he can do. They felt it was an important opportunity for him to pursue, one that he hopes will help him to be an agent of peace in his country. Worrying would consume him if he let it, and having faced death in the eyes on several occasions, he is aware of the randomness of military aggression and murder.
He told us about a time when he was sleeping soundly in his parents home and woke up to the loudest blast he had ever heard. The other half of the house (thankfully the one that no one was sleeping in) had been ripped apart by a bomb. The windows and doors were gone, and things were displaced everywhere. Another time, Israeli forces fired small bombs that explode and send nails flying everywhere. The nails covered the front of his home. It was at this point that the family decided they had to move.
His family has been trapped inside their home for days at a time (once while his wife was 7 months pregnant) without access to basic supplies of food and water. His brother-in-law is missing four fingers from one hand after shrapnel from a bomb came through a window. He knew a neighbor who was killed "escaping" his own home. He was shot in the back and left to die. No one could attend to him because they would also have been shot.
It is difficult to come across a person like this, a person who is our age, and feel speechless. What do you say? How do you explain to them that you know nothing of what they have lived? How do you explain that your country of residence supplies Israel with approximately $3 billion every year which is equivalent to $8.3 million a day (this is about 1/5 of the total US foreign aid budget)? How do you make up for the fact that the US, your home country, knows that about 3/4 of this foreign aid given to Israel is spent on military and weapons? How can we really say we want peace in a region of the world where we are promoting a bully scenario and feeding bombs, guns and other military equipment into one side?
But he already knows. He's known a long time. I did not until this year, a few months before meeting him in class. I still do not know much, and I was humbled by his hospitality. I wanted to apologize. It is the people--on both sides of this conflict--that have suffered so much. Too much.
He knows this too. He craves peace. He hopes for it, but his eyes show he is skeptical.
He will return back home, to his wife and daughter. He will work for peace, and live with a reality of life and death being a matter of luck.
And I will do what? I will write, I will share. About him. About his life experiences. About the other side. About the people on both sides. And I will be thankful for the many things I take for granted: a general sense of peace, safety, a house to live in with my husband and son, food that is accessible in one of many locations, family and friends, my education, a lack of thoughts regarding a reality of war and aggression, a lack of thoughts about whether someone I know and love will be killed by a bomb, a lack of thought as to whether I can return to my country and if I return if I will ever be allowed to leave its borders again.
See, I've worried. I've worried about many things. And this conversation made me realize that most of those things are not worth the time I spend on them. Instead: gratitude, gratitude, gratitude. We (Luke, Tyler and I) do not have hard lives. We have had hard moments and challenges, but even those cannot compare to having our house blasted in the middle of the night. It was important for us to realize that at this particular juncture in our journey.
We have so much, and it's important that we make every effort we can to share it.
For more information on the Israel-Palestine conflict check out the websites below:
