Jerusalem, guns and indifference “but here you either party or go to war”
The journey of the faithful who arrived from Bologna and other Italian cities led by Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, archbishop of the Emilian city and president of the CEI
JERUSALEM – While walking down one of the narrow streets of the old city of Jerusalem towards the Wailing Wall, between two wings of colored shutters, all lowered, the Bolognese religious man >, a ‘veteran’ of pilgrimages to the Holy Land, observes: “What is impressive is the indifference. If we didn’t know it, we wouldn’t understand it” from people’s behavior , “that there is war a short distance from here”. It’s the evening of the feast of the Jewish Pentecost, it’s hot and so are the streets that They are usually crossed by Arabsnow they see a mix of observant Jews in black suits, braids and hats. If they were days of tension, they would not take this route to reach the wall, they would follow other, safer routes, away from the risk of ambushes. In any case, two or three of them are walking with long automatic rifles slung over their shoulders. It can be done. And to an outsider’s eye the thing catches the eye.
“BETWEEN THE DUNES A GIRL ASKED US FOR DIAPERS, WE DIDN’T EVEN HAVE THOSE”
Everything normal, though. However, it is not normal to see closed shops (in the evening or morning) or near Gethsemane long lines of parked buses: they have not unloaded tourists, they are stopped because they have none to transport; they stop there because parking elsewhere would cost thirty euros a day, too much for those who haven’t had work for months. The absence of tourists is an immediate ‘metric’ to measure the impact of the war here. “This is a land where either you celebrate or you wage war”, recalls a Christian Arab. And in fact it doesn’t take long for the echoes of war to resonate. Meeting the pilgrims who arrived from Bologna and other Italian cities led by CardinalMatteo Zuppi, archbishop of Bologna and president of the CEI, Andrea De Domenico, head of the Ocha Office for the coordination of UN humanitarian affairs for the Palestinian territories, tells of harsh scenes. “What are the Palestinians asking us? To stop the bombing, they answer, but no one listens.” You can try to give aid. Easy to say. De Domenico says he met a girl in the dunes who was walking away from a burning village. Her husband killed, she was just left with no money but four children. “Do you know what he asked me? If I had any diapers, and we didn’t even have those.”
A Pakistani boy from an NGO, someone who comes “from a place always at war”, couldn’t believe his eyes when he opened a bag for transporting corpses and found inside >two charred bodies embracing each other; an adult and a child. To separate them they would have had to break bones, they didn’t. “He told me: ‘I’ve never seen things like this’.” But violence is always ‘lurking’: 500 meters from the hotel that hosts Italian pilgrims there was a shooting against an Arab trader.
AT THE HOLY SEPULCHER: “THE CENTER OF EVERYTHING”
The violence in the West Bank has also increased. And all this ‘precipitates’ on the second day of the pilgrimage which begins with a mass in Zuppi at the Holy Sepulchre, the “centre of everything, where the death of Jesus condenses the suffering of many men”. Here, in the place that is described as the church of divisions (Christians, Catholics and Copts), but which must be seen as the church of unities that unite, even physically, despite their differences (faith unites, not culture or races), Zuppi says: “We want to follow in the steps of Jesus. This asks us not to remain in the foolish security of the relatives of Nazareth, not to judge based on nets and boats, to free ourselves from the practical disillusionment of having already tried in vain so many times”. And the pilgrimage made of testimonies serves to visit places through people. “Only in this way do we understand the choice of peace”.
At the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher there is Calvary and “staying under the cross”, says Zuppi, is a way today to seek peace. “The disciples were unable to stay awake in the face of great pain. They also run away by thinking of discharging responsibilities, of attributing them, of arguing about who is to blame, of cultivating hatred, of caressing the sword. ..They don’t know how to put their ego aside to choose life.”
Staying under the cross, however, means remaining “in silence, listening, praying”, peace comes “by facing evil, not avoiding it, not remaining in peace , but experiencing the pain as one’s own. Only if two pains become a single love, only if the tears are all the same do we find the path to peace”; if “we don’t see the cross, the crosses, the wars, the faces, the stories, the tortures, the weapons, we will never truly understand, we remain in love with our ideas”.