The first time I heard anyone make a plea on behalf of the "Living Stones" of the Holy Land was in the mid 1980s during one of the trips my wife, Sis, and I made to the region as members of a series of fact finding delegations. The aim was to observe and comprehend first hand and up close conditions of life-or lack thereof-in the West Bank and Gaza.
It could have been Mar Elias Educational Institutions' founder Abuna Elias Chacour from whom we heard it first, or Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center founder Reverend Naim Ateek, or human rights advocate Jonathan Kuttab, or perhaps someone else; I am not sure anymore. Who said it first, however, is the not the point. What they said is.
It is not enough-they emphasized back then and during the long increasingly bitter years which followed-to come to the Holy Land only aiming to examine the inert remnants of the past, its "Dead Stones:" those crumbling, religious and secular edifices of antiquity, or the only slightly less ancient medieval and post medieval sites, monuments, and artifacts. More important for people passing through, they urged, would be to visit, observe, and come to understand the Holy Land's "Living Stones:" the human flesh and blood remnant hanging on here fitfully-perilously in fact-to the present.
The human context of the "Dead Stones," they argued, can only be understood-and the terrible conditions here transformed-when the dreadful experience of the "Living Stones" of today has been acknowledged and effectively communicated.
Although this has been critically relevant for the precipitously shrinking Arab Christian population of Palestine and Israel, it is of equal importance to Muslims here too, and also the steadfast Israeli Jews who, over the years, have been struggling in Israel as well as in the Occupied Territories to alleviate the suffering and raise the visibility of the debilitating cultural, social, and political dilemma cruelly baffling and ruining the lives and livelihoods of their Arab neighbors.
So what those articulate eloquent Palestinian spokespeople wanted additionally from us was a concerted effort to try to convince the multitude of other would be travelers to the area to do more than eyeball the "Dead Stones," and then, calling it a day, head home.
Of course, that is what observer/activists from overseas had been doing all along and are still trying to do. But their voices then and now, although devoted, have been few, ignored, and often ridiculed. So those committed to the task have never constituted the critical mass needed to help foster a change in the itineraries of the main body of people visiting the Holy Land.
Tourism, which has accounted for most of the visitors to the region, and which flourished until the violence and counter violence of the current uprising killed it off, never was able to meet the challenge or the need, because too many visitors to the region were mainly bent on coming here solely for the history of the place. That has been especially true of the multitude of so-called sacred tours of the Holy Land. Suggestions-often pleas-to do otherwise met with very limited success, if not downright indifference or hostility.
So too few of those who have flocked to the "Dead Stones" of either Israel or the West Bank and Gaza for an untroubled inspirational holiday have not detoured down that critical other road, which as a result has been far less traveled, either because they were simply unaware of its existence or by design.
Most sacred Holy Land tours in the main have been antiseptically planned to intentionally funnel pious sightseers to only the dead vistas and venues of yesteryear. Tour packagers have meticulously channeled their devout charges away from any potentially distasteful, distressing, eye opening, politically, culturally, or theologically challenging contact or experience with the "Living Stones"-those marginalized Palestinians and their Israelis partners struggling to survive and resist the confiscatory and demeaning occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
The effects of having been steered clear or having allowed oneself to have been steered clear of the Palestinian reality in homes, refugee camps, villages, towns, and cities has been to perpetuate Ostrich-like a grave international experiential void when the opportunity to do otherwise has been available.
But those speaking on behalf of the "Living Stones," never intended that the pleasure, the awe, the inspiration, and certainly the excitement of journeying to the inanimate venues of the "Dead Stones," where so many consequential beliefs originated, should be avoided. They understand the importance of the attraction of the "Dead Stones" to the all important tourist trade in both Palestine and Israel. And ironically, because distances, relatively speaking, are minimal in the Holy Land, when compared to the United States, one did not (and does not) have to detour far off the beaten path leading to the "Dead Stones" to encounter the reality of the misery of Palestine's "Living Stones"
As a result, given the endurance and persistence of the violent colonialist and nihilist extremist mentality to be found in varying degrees amongst both Israeli and Palestinians, the effects of which too many travelers to the area are still avoiding, use of the terms "Holy Land" and "Living Stones," has in effect come to be exercises in naïve nostalgia and futile longing. It certainly can be claimed that these days the name "Holy Land" is an oxymoron; and given the increasing magnitude of the death and despair here of the so called "Living Stones," that term also, these days, hardly applies
Due in part to a failure to effectively motivate the urgent need for people outside the region, especially the United States, to come, see, comprehend, and ultimately identify with the plight of all the "Living Stones," what we have here and now in the West Bank and Gaza-and also one can claim in Israel-are the "Dying Stones" of the not so "Holy Land."
"Dying Stones" are the norm here now. "Dying Stones" are the defenseless children, women, and men in both Palestine and Israel, who have become the predictable and unwilling victims of the no end in sight violence of resistance, oppression, and inevitable revenge by both the oppressor and the oppressed. And the "Dying Stones," of course, are also the increasingly radicalized young but lethal Palestinian slayers of the unarmed and their young Israeli conscript counterparts gunning down civilians, each of whom has been persuaded of the necessity to take leading roles in the existentially illogical blood letting leading to nowhere.
Despite the reality of the "Dying Stones," one of their most incredible and inspiring traits, which continues to astonish us despite the fact that we encounter it every day, is their capacity for hope. These amazingly resilient Palestinian and Israeli human beings, resilient it seems to me beyond all logic and comprehension and current signs to the contrary, nevertheless continue to harbor the hope that enough people to make a difference will-despite the risk, the cost, and even their skepticism or bias-decide to come here long enough to experience and comprehend the terrible truth of the "Dying Stones."
In the past the powerful example of such deserving hope has brought the dying and the dead back to life. It can happen again.