"As we talked later in my hotel, LeRoy told me I was hearing only one perspective of the situation in Israel and Palestine. He asked if I would travel with him the next day into the West Bank, first to Jericho, and then up to the Golan Heights.
"He explained that we would drive along the highway along the Jordan Valley, an excursion the AJC had not included on my itinerary. Since I was paying my own way (thankfully), my AJC host had no grounds to object to my breaking away from my next day's meetings to go off on my own. ...
"Driving northward from Jericho, [Leroy and I] stopped along the highway to look the fertile fields of Israeli crops that lay between us and the river. Leroy had a banana farmer he wanted me to meet.
"We left the highway and drove on a dirt road up a hill to the home of a Palestinian farmer, who was sitting in front of his house. I remember him as rather elderly. I was struck by the resigned sadness in his manner.
"He pointed up the hill to the well that provided water to his modest-sized field. I was reminded of a Georgia sharecropper's well. This farmer's well was connected to a pump that provided water for his field.
"Quite a distance farther up the hill was an Israeli well, surrounded by barbed wire and enclosed in a concrete casing. That well was much deeper, LeRoy explained. Pipes carried its water down the hill where we could see it spraying onto the Israeli fields in the Jordan Valley.
"I knew enough about aquifers to know that the deeper, more sophisticated Israeli well (its pipes buried beneath the soil) would soon leave the farmer's shallower well, with its open, above-ground pipes without water.
"That was my epiphany on the Jericho road.
"What I experienced that morning has shaped all of my subsequent understanding of the region. This was the strong dominating the weak: this was control in the hands of an occupying military force, backed by an American ally where a congress, a media and all mainline Christian religious communities sided totally with the military occupier.
"Something was seriously wrong with that picture. The existential reality of injustice witnessed first-hand, as LeRoy knew when he invited me to travel up the Jericho Road, is a far more powerful teaching tool than injustice heard or read about. ...
"That initial visit was in 1973. Thirty-seven years later [in 2010], Israel continues to control the aquifers which it still rations to Palestinian villages, cities and farms in amounts far below the standards set by the World Health Organization. ...
"I continued to learn a lot from Israelis. I remember one early visit with an official in the Israeli Foreign Ministry who told me in what appeared to be the strictest confidence: "You should talk to the leaders of his new group called Hamas. They are doing good work with social services for the Palestinians."
"That was in the early 1980s, when Israel still viewed the PLO, led from Lebanon by Yasir Arafat, as its major enemy. The strategy called for Israel to build up Hamas, a strategy that included supplying funds to Hamas, as an alternative to the PLO.
"That was then; today Israel makes it very difficult for journalists to get into Gaza where Hamas is the ruling political party. ..."
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What impact did this one 2010 talk from one moment in history, have on the small group in Naperville, Illinois? I have no idea. None of us knows what impact we have in support of a passion we wish to share.
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