Today we met with Anat Hoffman, leader of Women at the Wall and former Jerusalem city council member. I found her and I to be very much on the same page but what I enjoyed most (to the extent that it challenged my narrative) was actually the level of pessimism in her presentation. She was a very entertaining speaker, some might say too entertaining, but ultimately her message was rather bleak. Her pessimism came from years of experience in this region and was a very different kind of pessimism than we’ve been exposed to in the last few days. We’ve heard from Palestinians who have no hope because they feel that their lives are infringed upon everyday and from right wing Israelis who have no hope because the animosity they see on the other side. Maybe Anat wasn’t all that different, but I thought her pessimism was more critical than many of the others we’ve heard from recently. For Anat, a religious woman and a Zionist, pessimism about resolving the conflict was about unrealized potentials.
Anat spoke about how the Biblical Zoo was the only place in Jerusalem that was holy. She could look at all the holy sites and could see these histories in them, who had died for it, what causes had mobilized around it and for her, that striped the places of it’s holiness. For her the Biblical Zoo was holy because it was the one place where a board of Jews, Muslims and Christians had managed to come together and take care of the animals, one of the only places in Jerusalem that’s financially profitable without city support, and one of the only places where children might escape the segregated lifestyles of their parents and interact with each other. It’s also a place where an ancient jewish law requiring jews to donate 1/10th of their crops to the priests of the Jewish temple found new life, as thanks to Anat, religious Jews now donate, rather than throwing away, their produce to the animals at the zoo. Now I have no idea how people have managed to come together over animals of all things, but for Anat, this place offers hope and the possibility of peace in the future. Even that glimmer of hope is obviously very motivating for her. As interaction between Israelis and Palestinians dwindles, and both sides, willingly or not, find themselves increasingly segregated, I wonder how long these holy happenings will exist for those caught in the conflict, and what it will mean for the world if they disappear.
Hunter