Travelling as an act of soft-power diplomacy

What two years in Palestine taught me about loving your neighbour

For email readers… Substack tells me that this post is too long for email, so please do head to Substack if you’d like to see all the photos and read the essay to the end. 🙏

For two years, from 2010 till 2012, I spent my days walking around in the Old City of Jerusalem.

I loved revelling in the city’s history. For a girl who was brought up Catholic in rural Western Australia, it was unfathomable that I was living within walking distance of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

I’d walk around the Old City ramparts, watching the city from above, searching in vain for any semblance of spirituality in the streets below. There was too much going on there for spiritual peace to exist - too much competition among the world’s gargantuan monotheistic faiths, too many people vying for property and prestige and piety, using whatever weapons they had at their disposal - words or rocks or machine guns - to push each other out of the way, to get front-row seats to God’s historical theatre on earth.

Old City ramparts

Al-Aqsa Mosque

Wishes pushed into the Western Wall

For two years I had French lessons at the French Cultural Centre (now the French Institute) on Salah ad-Din Street, the “beating heart of East Jerusalem”. Next door to the Cultural Centre was the Educational Bookshop, where I used to go to surround myself with my favourite things and my favourite kinds of people. One day my phone was stolen out on the street, and it was the staff from the Educational Bookshop who went in pursuit of the thief, and searched their CCTV footage for evidence. They couldn’t find the guy in the end, so they walked me to the police station at the end of the street.

I guess it was officers from that very police station who raided the Educational Bookshop last week, and arrested the men who, twelve years ago, had spent so much time trying to help me. The police never bothered to look for my phone, but they did manage, last week, to bag up books as evidence of the crime of bookselling. They can’t, after all, have children’s minds being corrupted by the act of colouring Palestinian flags in revolutionary shades of black, white, green and red. And in any case, Salah ad-Din Street has been targeted for erasure by Israel’s city centre plan, so I suppose it no longer requires the blood that flows through the veins and arteries of its beating heart.

Damascus Gate, from where I’d often enter the Old City after French classes or visits to the Educational Bookshop

For two years I witnessed the enormous mutual benefits of civil society. I was friends with people who worked for the UN, for the International Committee of the Red Cross, for USAID. They were good people, all of them. They cared enormously about the world and how we move through it, and how we cooperate with one another to create equitable outcomes for all. CHF International, now called Global Communities, was busy “Building a Better World”. I once had a beer in the Old City of Taybeh, the restoration of which was “funded by the American people…for the benefit of the Palestinian people.” Imagine. What an incredibly beautiful thing.

A peaceful beer in Palestine. The world is full of gorgeous surprises.

For two years, I’d visit historic sights and tourist attractions. For a while I thought of the world’s oldest city as just a part of the directions I’d give fellow travellers looking to get from East Jerusalem to the Dead Sea – “Drive as far as Jericho,” I’d say, “and turn right”. But then we went there, to Jericho, and took the cable car up the mountain where Jesus was said to have fasted for forty days and forty nights and been tempted by the Devil. We visited the Greek monastery built into the mountainside, and bought tiny clay vases to commemorate our trip.

Jericho

St George’s Monastery

From Jericho we’d drive on to Masada, where some believe that hundreds of Sicarri rebels once took their own lives to evade capture by the Romans. Then we’d visit the Dead Sea, and we’d smother ourselves with healing mud, and float in the sea’s oily saltiness.

A rainbow over Masada

Masada and the Dead Sea

For two years, I’d drive our German car from our home in Palestinian East Jerusalem to the modern, mixed-up streets of Tel Aviv. I’d work in an office with Israeli colleagues, who were kind to me. I’d finish work and walk along the beach, from the Intercontinental Hotel, past the muscle-bound men in brief bathing suits and the beautiful women in bikinis, past the constant tok-tok-tok of the matkot players, past the beach bars where tourists sat drinking cocktails, all the way up to the mosque and the historic streets of Jaffa. I celebrated my 40^th birthday on that beach. Mike proposed to me on a hotel rooftop in Jaffa. And it was also in Jaffa that we attended the wedding of my beautiful Australian friend and his beautiful Israeli husband.

Tel Aviv on my 40th birthday

Jaffa

For two years I was friends with our housekeeper, Sana. Sana and I shared stories about our efforts to create families. I was having IVF, being treated by a doctor at Hadassah Hospital in the Jerusalem Hills, who was trying to create new life for patients from Palestine, from Israel, from everywhere. Sana was struggling to conceive because her husband was living in Egypt, trying to earn money for the family they hoped to create together. One day I drove Sana home to the house she shared with her family of origin. She showed me how to make makloubeh - Palestinian upside-down rice. She took me to a church in her neighbourhood. She was Muslim and I was brought up Christian, but she was better versed than me in the traditions of her local Christian church. She told me that my head had to be covered there as a sign of respect, and gave me a gift of a scarf to put over my hair. I still have that scarf now, and I think of Sana when I wear it.

Our fridge was always well-stocked with hormones for my daily regime

Palestine was the first place that I lived with Mike, and we’ve lived in many places since. Our children were born in Switzerland and have lived in France, Pakistan, Fiji, China and Indonesia.

The best thing about travelling, for me, for them, for all of us, is that it opens our eyes to the experiences of people whose lives and cultures differ from our own. When you’ve met and engaged with people in their own homes and cities, you can no more imagine fearing and persecuting them than you can imagine fearing and persecuting your own family. You see that we all want the same things - love and hope and safety - and that battles over land and resources and money and religion just get in the way of us seeking those things together.

So I implore you…

Please keep travelling, people. You might travel across the world, or if you neighbours have different cultures and traditions and clothes and language and culture to your own, it might just be across the threshold of your neighbours’ houses. Invite your neighbours into your home. Eat together. Tell each other your stories.

Please, please, please keep opening your mind and heart to the beliefs and experiences of those around you.

Please keep challenging those fearful, small-minded and bullying folks who’d pit us all against one another, who’d use our fear of the other to distract us from their own nefarious agendas.

Because when it comes down to it, folks, there is no other. There’s just us. Just citizens of the world, all of us. All of us striving for love and hope and safety.