My companions each had their own, sad tale. A slim, Muslim American law student in a tightly wrapped headscarf had been plucked out of a human rights course she helped to organize and plan. A young Filipina, her face scarred by acne, her belly six months swollen with child, had overstayed her visa and is being sent away from her Arab lover. A Siberian gynecologist, after eight years in Israel, instructed me to drink her Orangina and shrugged her shoulders.

“Lawyers, no good,” she told me. “Shekels, shekels, shekels.” She rubbed her fingers together in the universal sign for coins. “If they want you to go, you must go.”

I had my pocket Tarot cards with me, and I read for the pert blonde from Moldova who had been there for a month while her lawyer shepherded her case through the courts. She was so radiantly cheerful that I wondered what her life must have been like outside these walls. I read for two young Filipina sisters, delicate and beautiful as birds, and saw their scared, sad eyes light up for a moment, with hope and visions of the world outside the walls.

Their transgressions are economic. Having closed her borders to the Palestinians, the closest pool of chap labor, Israel now attracts the poor and ambitious from around the globe. They work as domestics or sex workers or field hands, or earn more money in skilled professions than they can possibly make back home. Until they stay too long.

I found myself in their company for other reasons. I am now a member of a small, exclusive club—the ranks of Jews not welcome in Israel.

As a Jew, there are many things I can be faulted for. Reviving the Old Religion of the Goddess may be my worst theological transgression, although in the eyes of my family it barely counts against my far worse failures: to marry a Jewish man and produce a Jewish child. Yet none of these were at issue on the day I was denied entry.

The reason I was given was that my past work with the International Solidarity Movement, a group that supports Palestinian nonviolence. The ISM brings internationals to support demonstrations and civil resistance, for their presence adds a slim margin of safety that makes this method of protest possible. Founded by Palestinians, Israelis and Americans, it is one of many groups that has helped nurture a nonviolent movement that daily grows stronger in spite of its near invisibility in the media and on the international scene.

Members of the ISM have stood witness in refugee camps under siege by the Israeli military. They have camped beside Palestinians and Israeli allies in the path of the bulldozers clearing land for the ‘security’ wall which confiscates Palestinian farmland without compensation. They have marched in demonstrations, organized activities for children confined and frustrated by months-long curfews, negotiated with soldiers at checkpoints, and reported on a side of the occupation rarely seen by outsiders. Two have been killed in the course of their actions: Rachel Corrie, crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer when she attempted to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home, and Tom Hurndall, shot by an Israeli sniper in Rafah as he ran to the aid of a group of children under fire.

The wall which Israel has been building for more than four years wanders deep into the territory once reserved for a Palestinian state, protecting Jewish settlements which themselves grab crucial territory and sit atop vital acquifers. As it has progressed, a nonviolent movement has grown as village after village in its path has resisted with peace camps, demonstrations and civil disobedience instead of rockets and suicide bombs. They invite Israelis to join them, and many do, crossing the lines of division and cracking the entrenched belief that Israelis and Palestinians can never get along.

“We are not Israeli or Palestinian,” one young protester said to me. “We are people working together against injustice.”

I see this movement as a tiny ray of hope in the entrenched bitterness and despair of an intractable situation. I’m proud to have had some small part in it, though the journey to get there was not easy.

For someone born and raised in the post-war Jewish community of the fifties—even for a flagrant Pagan-- the existence of Israel, of a refuge, a safe haven in a potentially hostile world, has always been a deep, unconscious ground of security. To consider that Israel might be doing wrong, might herself be oppressing another people, is excruciatingly, emotionally painful.
And yet it is the values of my Jewish upbringing that pushed me toward involvement. I am Jewish and Pagan, and both sets of values are in me, inextricably intertwined. They deeply make me who I am.

“Justice, Justice, You shall pursue” is one of the Biblical verses that stays with me, always. To me, that means an obligation to go where truth and justice lead—even into places that are painful and hard to face.

Ironically, I had come to Israel this time not to work with the ISM, but with the intention of teaching and learning from Green organizations. I had been invited by three Israeli groups to present my work in permaculture and ecological design, and to learn from the innovative work they are doing.

For On Faith, I had hoped to talk to people about their faith and its role in the struggle. I wanted to ask a spectrum of people three questions: What do you believe in? How does that belief affect your choice of how to fight? And how does it affect your relationship to the land?
Lying in jail, unable to sleep through the long, tense, night, I ask myself those questions.
What do I believe?

I believe the sacred is present in the world, in nature and in every human being, moving through us as love, creativity, and the thirst for justice: powers ultimately greater than the gun and the bomb. Because of that belief, I choose nonviolence as my method of struggle, for it allows me to honor the sacred even in those who oppose me. And I believe that nonviolence is a powerful strategy for breaking the vicious cycles of attack and revenge that trap us. Nonviolence is unexpected.

What is my relationship to this land, which I have now been banned from, and where I can no longer seek refuge?

It is the land of my ancestors. I love it, but I do not wish to own it or claim it or exclude others from it. Those who truly love the land will build soil, not walls, and plant trees, not bulldoze them down. And they will take the risk to love all the peoples of the land, to dare to bridge the divisions and together pursue justice.