A Jew, A Muslim, and Israel: Cracks in the Wall
I awoke on Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023 to news of the Hamas attacks on Israel and everything that occurred thereafter. It broke my heart. In light of this war now breaking out, I decided to share an essay I wrote several years ago called, “Cracks in the Wall.” It’s an excerpt from my book that just published on Sept. 9, 2023, The Condemned: A memoir told through selected early works of short stories, essays, and poetry.
I’ll let you draw your own conclusions after reading my story.In America, you live in a movie. But then you come to Israel, to the Middle East, and you see reality.
Amir’s words still echo in my mind today, after eight years from that evening in a cramped hotel room, crossed knees jammed against crossed knees, an acoustic guitar resting next to Amir’s lap.
It was January 2009 when I first travelled to Israel, at the height of Operation Cast Lead — known as the Gaza Crisis … a crisis so bloody, no one within the walls of Jerusalem or Tel Aviv would speak of it. The lesson I’d learned on that trip now echoes in my thoughts, among the rhetoric that has come to plague my beloved America in 2017.
However, eight years ago in that hotel room, my mind drifted back only days earlier, when I stood upon the vortex of merging worlds — watching the sun set from the stone ground of an Israeli military base, gazing over barbed wire into the West Bank.
Staring at the Wall.
A mosque, draped in white purity and exuding a green ambiance from the crowning dome, topped a nearby hill. As the sunset’s warmth enveloped the Arab town, protected by its towering mosque, men’s evening prayers echoed throughout the hilltops in a mesmerizing harmony.
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