CPTnet
7 July 2007
AT-TUWANI BLOG: Independence Day in Tiberias

[NOTE: The following blog entry by CPTer Heidi Schramm has been edited for
length. To see her original entries and accompanying photos go to
http://heidischramm.livejournal.com]

25 April 2007

Jill and I just returned from a fabulous holiday in the Galilee. We headed
out on Monday and arrived in Tiberias a few hours before Israeli
Independence Day. Once we got out of our Tuwani clothes, it really started
to feel like a vacation. We wandered around the city--built up around a
seaside promenade--all evening, stopping for a seafood dinner where we got
to practice our Arabic with a waiter from Nazareth.

When we checked into the hostel in the afternoon, workers were setting up a
stage and a few hundred chairs in an open space across the street. No one
seemed to know who was playing, so, after dinner, we went to check it out
for ourselves. A junior high band was playing Israeli patriotic songs, and
as we stood there, looking for seats, I felt a strange mixture of
understanding, guilt and confusion. Understanding because if the flags were
different, I could have believed I was in the States. How many John Philip
Sousa songs have I played for various public holidays throughout the course
of my life? And just as I never played those songs thinking "I'm so glad my
forefathers decimated the original inhabitants of this land in order to
create this country," I don't think those kids were celebrating the murder,
displacement and continued oppression of the Palestinians. But that is what
this day means to Palestinians.

And here enters the guilt. I've tried to hold myself to a standard whereby I
never do anything during my time off that I would be ashamed to tell my
Palestinian friends about (except, of course, having a beer with dinner),
but I could never confess to being at such an event. And yet, I was
enjoying myself. It was nice to be away from the village. It was nice to
feel the freedom of summer's approach. Hence the confusion. These feelings
stuck with me the next day, as we rented bicycles and rode around the sea.
In spite of how geographically close Tuwani and Tiberias are to one another,
none of what I experienced these last few days is even a remote possibility
for anyone else in my village.

We stopped at Capernaum, the town that Jesus made his home base during his
three years of ministry. Not surprisingly, there is disagreement over where
the town really was, and the "Orthodox Capernaum" is half a kilometer to the
northeast. But what seems to be indisputable is the location of the
synagogue. I tagged along with several different tour groups during the
time we were there, and, in that way, managed to learn a thing or two
without having to read the plaques. Capernaum, of course, was the location
of many of the miracles chronicled in the Gospels, and the hometown of most
of the disciples. Having lived in Tuwani for the last year, it is much
easier for me to look at the ruins and really picture what the town probably
looked like.