I just finished helping one of the groups in my class get ready for their presentation about the Israel-Palestine conflict. They are doing a really good job out of making sense of this complicated issue. I guess it’s because I was just helping some students attempt to understand the situation in Israel, that I feel like writing about Israel again in my blog.

While I was living in Jerusalem in 1999, I was a bartender at a cool little pub called “Strudel”. As a bartender at Strudel, I met a lot of people. This especially helped me when I found out that I had to move out of my apartment in the German Colony area of Jerusalem. I didn’t know where to go, and soon I was going to be homeless. Luckily one of the customers in the pub had a really big two bedroom apartment that he lived in alone. He heard about my problem, and he told me that I could stay with him for as long as I needed to. I felt very grateful that my friend could help me out, but there was only one problem, he lived way in the northern part of Jerusalem in an Arab village called Shu’afat. However, I decided that a place to stay is a place to stay, and I moved in with my friend.

Shu’afat is north of Jerusalem, and it took me about an hour to walk to work. There were no direct busses from Shu’afat to the pub where I was a bartender; however, I could walk through the village first to get into a Jewish part of the city, and then take a bus. It was a hot and dusty walk to the bus, but I didn’t complain seeing as I was living with my friend for free.

Anyway, one day, I was walking through the village to catch the bus and there were two little girls with walking ahead of me on the road. They must have been about 10 or 11 years old, and at that age when little girls have an intimate best friend with whom they share all their secrets. They were walking slowly, arm in arm. As they walked, their heads were bent closely to one another, and their shiny black hair fell forward to cover their faces. You could see they were chatting about all the things that must seem so important to little girls all over the world. As they were chatting and walking they would giggle from time to time, and they were wandering slowly from one side of the road to the other as they moved they way forward, dust rising with their soft footsteps. I was walking quickly up behind them. They must have heard my heavy footsteps because they looked behind them, saw me, and started to giggle. I could hear the soft Arab lilt of their speech as they began to whisper together in earnest. I must have been a sight that they didn’t often see in that Arab village. A big tall guy with sandy blond hair, light skin and green eyes.

They started to walk even more slowly as they became more and more involved in their animated conversation. I soon overtook them. Once I was a little bit ahead of them, I suddenly heard a tiny little voice squeak from behind me.

“Shalom.”

At first I didn’t really believe my ears, and I walked on a couple of more steps.

“Shalom. Shaaaaaalom.”

It was one of the little girls. She gave the word shalom a high pitched musical quality. She was saying hello to me in Hebrew. Hello in Hebrew is the same word as the word for peace. I was a bit surprised that they were speaking to me, and I stopped a second and turned around, mustering as big a smile as I could. “Hello,” I said in English. They didn’t say anything, but they smiled back at me. I turned around and kept walking to the bus, feeling strangely hopeful because a little girl said hello to me in Hebrew.