A dozen of us had a very full weekend trip provided by Siraj.
Sadly, our Siraj hosts could not come with us - they are Palestinians and do not have permits to enter Israel.
So they got us a guide who is an Israeli-Arab with permission to drive there.
There was a dual purpose for this trip of pilgrimage to the traditional places in the Holy Land in the Galilee region and of seeing the sites of lost and unrecognized Palestinian villages in Israel.
We traveled along the outskirts of The Wall, up the Western side of Palestine.
When we reached the Galilee I was finally in old familiar places, recalling past pilgrimages, remembering things like renewing Baptismal covenants in the rain in the Jordan river, scary rides with crazy taxi drivers to the top of Mt Tabor (our driver this time was more cautious!) The old sites are mostly unchanged -- but on the way up to the Church of the Transfiguration you pass crowds of hang-gliders now!
And at the Mount of the Beatitudes most of the open fields are now being filled with a visitor center and tourist store.
And at Cana they have now opened up an area under the church to see the previous Byzantine church which the present church is b
uilt on top of...And all along - we opened our Bibles and followed the life of Christ around the region. For me it was a return, for the rest of the group it was new -- and I delight in seeing the Bible stories come to life (of course especially for Baird & Payne...)
We stayed at St Margaret's Anglican guest house, and began our Sunday morning at Mary's Well and the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth.
Then we went to some places I've not been before. Akke is an old walled city on the Mediterranean. And there are new, spectactular gardens of the Bahai in Haifa.
Then we went on to lunch in an unrecognized Palestinian village. We were stuffed full to bursting in mid-afternoon - then sat down to see a video of the struggle for the village to be recognized. If Israel does not recognize a village they have no public electricity, water or roads, no legal access to schools, and anything they build is illegal, so periodically bulldozers arrive to demolish their homes (thank you, Caterpillar, for the machines specially designed for this purpose). This particular village was finally recognized after over 50 years of intense lobbying -- but there still isn't a decent road to it.
Our last major stop of the trip was the most moving of the day. It was the site of the former village of Tantura. In 1948 it was a lovely Mediterrean seaside town with prosperous houses dating to pre-Ottoman times. Today there is just the shell of one of those houses. There's a big fence around the area and where homes used to be there are now these funky vacation pods - they look sort of like concrete igloos. I admit I didn't see the point in getting out of the bus and trying to go in and walk around the resort. At first I just looked around in disgust, unable to imagine anything but the way it looks now that the vacationers have taken over every
thing. But then an old man emerged 
from the water and began to speak with our guide. Turns out he was one of the residents of Tantura in '48. He now lives in a new, inland village, but regularly sneaks back here because it Is his beach. He pointed to various spots -- "there is where they made the men dig a big pit. Then they shot them and buried them in the pit. There is where my house used to be. There is where we used to have the school...."He cannot live here anymore, but he revisits familiar places and remembers.
Re - members: through his words he puts the pieces together for us, in our minds.
And passes on to us the challenge to help the massacred village of Tantura be re-membered by others as well...
