Spirit and StoryWelcome to Spirit and Story, where you can find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the contours of our contemporary spiritual journeys. To access the CLAL Spirit and Story Archive, click here.
Thesis: The recent increase in tourism to Israel, of
Jews and non-Jews, is at the same time deeply reassuring but also
potentially disturbing. I posit that while we must welcome and encourage
tourism, we cannot allow ourselves to become inured to the reality we live
in. We must promote tourism in spite of it, recognizing the daily pain and
suffering on all “sides,” and working even harder to break the status quo
and bring Peace to the Holy City and the region it inhabits. In the late ‘90s,
tourism in Israel, and specifically in Jerusalem, was at an all time high.
In the wake of Oslo, a peace treaty with Jordan, and a booming economy
around the globe, tourists poured into Jerusalem – our rush hour was
dependent on how many tour buses were going from here to there. And then a
domestic tourist broke upon a simmering, pent-up frustration from certain
elements in Palestinian society. In September 2000, long before 9/11, Ariel Sharon
toured the Temple Mount in a direct sign of confrontational claims of
sovereignty, and helped to spark what became known as the Al-Aksa Intifada,
or to many the longest war Israel has waged. Oh sure, there were awful,
horrendous attacks by anti-peace terrorist forces during the
‘90s, but they were few and far
between. From September 2000 forward we have been at war, both externally
and internally. My children have grown up these past four years with this
war as a brutal reality, on the front lines: armed guards at all the coffee
shops, restaurants, and schools. As the level of violence increased, tourism plummeted.
Except for some seriously dedicated supporters in the Orthodox Jewish and
Evangelical Christian communities, people stopped coming. Conventions were
cancelled, and community missions were delayed one, two, and three years.
Bar mitzvah trips were postponed, and business meetings were moved to
Cyprus, London or New York. To those of us living in Jerusalem, life did go on,
even in the face of death. Did we feel a sense of abandonment? Definitely.
We felt as if we had contracted an awful, contagious disease (and were
fighting within our society about the remedy) – and our family members were
refusing to visit, perhaps legitimately, in fear of catching our disease,
which in far too many cases is terminal. And remember – this was not just a case of bruised
emotions between family members, who “stop talking” for years at a time (all
too often we experience those situations as well). The abrupt cessation of
tourism to Israel, by all of its real and potential constituencies,
destroyed an entire economic pillar of Jerusalem. Until 2000 tourism
accounted for approximately a third of the jobs in Jerusalem, and an even
higher percentage of the infusion of “hard currency” (mainly dollars) into
the economy. Consider just one very telling statistic – in 1999-2000 there
were over 3.5 million hotel nights in Jerusalem, but in 2002-2003 there were
less than 50,000. Yes, repeat those numbers a few times in your head – a
wipeout of that segment of our economy. Thousands and thousands of families
were left without a means of income, in both West and East Jerusalem.
Palestinian cab drivers, hotel owners, souvenir dealers, tour guides, etc.,
were just as directly affected as their Israeli counterparts. Okay, with all that as background, what’s happening
today? Well, after four long years, tour buses are shaking off their dust,
hotels are re-opening floors long closed, and restaurants are actually
crowded, with what we long wrote off – tourists. The first to come back the
past few months were the Jewish communal missions, but then came the bar
mitzvah groups and, yes, the investors and business groups. Tourism is up almost 100% from a year ago – still a
long way to go to get to the late ‘90s,
but a refreshing sight. Or is it? Growing up on Long Island, I often would hear people in
my community discussing current events, even flip through a newspaper, with
a single question: Good for the Jews or Bad for the Jews? Of course, I never
quite understood what they meant by that question – if something was bad for
Jews, wasn’t it bad for all people? And the reverse as well – if the mission
of the Jewish ethic is tikkin olam (repairing the world), then
something good for Jews should be good for the world! And then I came to realize that our stated mission as
a people and our conduct as a people were not always in sync – at times we
cast off our self-description of A Light Unto the Nations, and instead
wanted to be “like everyone else,” a “normal people.” To tell you the
truth, looking at the history of peoplehood around the world, this does not
seem like such a noble pursuit. And now back to our city in the here and now. How could
tourists coming back to Jerusalem be anything but good for the Jews, you
say, and more so, how could it be bad for the world? Where, in short, is my
question coming from? Well, sometimes what is good from one perspective is
morally debilitating from another, if recognition and respect are not paid
to the immoralities that exist simultaneously. For four long years we (Israelis and Palestinians) have
been caught in a daily conflict, a war if you will. From the Israeli point
of view, Jerusalem has suffered the worst of the back and forth violence,
with the majority of terrorist attacks taking place here. Waves of terror
have swept across the city, at times a daily occurrence. Besides destroying
the tourist economy, these waves have slowly chipped away at our moral and
ethical outlook. We, the residents of West Jerusalem, became desensitized to
buses and coffee shops blowing up, death and destruction becoming a fact of
life. And to the East, Israeli security responses to the constant attacks on
Jerusalem made life a horror for tens of thousands of Palestinians – with
walls and roadblocks becoming their reality. (And while I am not at present
considering the justice of those measures, they did “work”; terror attacks
on Jerusalem have been radically reduced after those security measures were
put into place.) What does it mean, over time, to accept a status quo
that consists of death and suffering? It means that we have lowered our
moral standards – we have started to integrate immorality into our moral
being, and evil has lost its shock value. It was after a bus bombing a few blocks from my house
back in February that this really broke into my consciousness. I was with my
business partner on our way to a meeting, and we went straight instead of
turning left, taking the more scenic route to our destination -- a hotel
just outside the Old City. A few seconds after passing through the
intersection we heard and felt a “BOOM” from behind us, and being veterans
of this, we immediately knew what it was – but what to do? We were separated
by several cars from the bus that blew up, and emergency services were
already on their way. And we had a business meeting to attend. . .so we kept
moving, and in under a minute we were walking into the hotel to meet an
American business colleague from Texas. The sirens were coming fast and
furious, heading back to where we came from. We went on with our meeting, and then a little less
than two hours later, I was back in my office. I turned on the television
to see that the bus which had blown up had already been removed from the
area, that the intersection had been “cleaned up,” and that traffic was
moving again. It was as if nothing had happened – but for the twelve people
who died, and the dozens who were seriously injured, something had
happened. But the soul of Jerusalem had become so battered already that this
was simply a disturbance to traffic that lasted for less than two hours. “Gevalt!” I cried out to myself, after the network
correspondent said to the anchor that what truly was horrible about the
attacks, after three+ years, was that everyone knew his/her place. Our
response had become a well oiled machine, almost devoid of emotion. And it goes on and on. A quiet period in Jerusalem
these days consists of a few months when we manage to stop most of the
suicide bombers at roadblocks – in fact, just the other day a terrorist
tried to get into the city, was stopped at a roadblock, and so set off his
explosives there at the checkpoint, killing two Palestinian bystanders, and
injuring over a dozen Israeli soldiers. That, my friends, is considered a
success! So what to do – what do people who still have some
humanity left tell their friends, family, the world, about coming to
Jerusalem? A good friend of mine, a former Jerusalemite, Rabbi
Mordechai Gafni, talks in these terms: When a family member, a close friend,
is sick, really sick, perhaps even with a contagious disease, and is laying
in bed – what do we do? Ignore him? Carry on as if nothing is happening?
No, we take some precautions, maybe a face mask, and we go and visit. Not
because we can cure the physical sickness, but because nobody should be
alone in a time of deep pain. Let me take Rabbi Gafni’s words and continue.
These visits do not take place in a vacuum – we do not act as if our
friend/relative was not sick – but rather we visit in spite of the sickness,
and perhaps think about what can be done to remedy the ailment. My friends, Jerusalem has been, and still is, very
sick. Let’s not forget that for a moment. And remember that even when the
disease seems to be in remission, its causes are still there, every day, and
the effects of the awful cancer are only being held back by a terrible set
of measures, which in the long-term might be very bad for the body, but
bring some short-term respite. Should Jerusalem be abandoned in its time of woe? No,
not physically, spiritually or politically. The world needs to be with
Jerusalem in all ways, which includes being there in person. But we cannot
become deadened to causes and effects. I have lived in big cities and seen
thousands of “good” people walk straight past dozens of homeless people
begging for some food and respect, only to be absolutely ignored. We know
that in order to make a difference, to raise the overall quality of life of
all humanity, we must not ignore homeless people in the street, or the
causes of their homelessness. Theoretically, according to many media reports, the
“Jerusalem” issue was and is one of the key blocking points to progress in
the formal negotiations between the Israeli government and the Palestinian
Authority. The current Mayor of Jerusalem, Uri Lupolianski, says that the
terrorist forces know that Jerusalem is the heart and soul of much of the
world – and thus they strike out at Jerusalem. But what Mayor Lupolianski
doesn’t always point out is that the terrorists strike at the earthly
Jerusalem, while for much of the world – especially the politicians – the
heavenly Jerusalem is more real. In order to live, we need to bring together
the earthly and heavenly Jerusalems. So, I ask again, is the renewal of tourism in Jerusalem
good for the Jews? Only if it is a journey with eyes wide open, recognizing
the daily pains and sorrows of all the residents of Jerusalem -- Jewish,
Muslim, and Christian. Look beyond headlines to the humanity of hundreds of
thousands of people living with walls between families, to three hour
checkpoint-filled journeys to school for ten year old children. And do not
become desensitized to the hundreds of families who suffered horrible losses
as a result of terrorist activity, and the thousands of “survivors.” If we promote tourism with an acceptance of the “status
quo,” I believe that such an increase in tourism is very bad for the
long-term health of the Jewish people and its God given mission. We did not
pray for thousands of years to return to Jerusalem, we did not threaten to
cut off our right hand rather than forget Jerusalem, only to look the other
way or get “used to” a level of violence and terror. Every tourist to Jerusalem should be required to walk
the walls -- not only the Old City walls, but the new walls that are being
erected -- and decide whether the future of Jerusalem is to build more
walls, or to ensure that there are gates in these walls. Going back to Mayor
Lupolianski, he has been saying that the most important part of a wall is
its gates, that we know the Old City by the gates in its walls. Mayor
Lupolianski calls the new walls of Jerusalem “Gates of Life.” Yes, we need
to secure the safety of the residents of Jerusalem – but we also cannot be
cut off from our neighbors, families, and friends. Yes, there can be safety
with humanity, there can be security and respect for human dignity. It is in our hands to show that Jerusalem can be a
beacon of peace, not some old buildings in a war torn area, that manages to
pull the heartstrings of foolhardy pilgrims. If there is any value to
pilgrimage, it should be to increase peace – and that can only come about
when tourists/pilgrims are fully aware and cognizant, and maybe even
sometimes remind us, who live here, of the possibilities for a different
tomorrow. I bless us that we soon reach an era when good news for
one people is good news for all people. (Jacob Ner David is an Israeli
entrepreneur and writer who was raised on Long island and lives in
Jerusalem.) |
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