Israeli impressions cont'd

As anticipated, new impressions and opinions of Israel/Jerusalem have bubbled up in my noggin since last I wrote. Last night I had a facebook chat with my oldest friend and expressed some of the things I was feeling when I came home while they were still fresh. I copied some of those ideas here and expanded on them. When thoughts are whirling about inside my head and kicking up emotions every which way, I find it impossible to edit content and make it neat, so here you go, the raw blog diet: 

I think it might feel easier if I'd had an opinion on the conflict before coming here

I am just so monumentally saddened by how evident it is that there is no solution, no compromise possible

anything anyone does or could do is just salt in someone's wound

but tonight I witnessed Jerusalem Day celebrations at the Western Wall

they're commemorating the capture of the Wall by Israel from Jordan during the Six-Day War

the Hasidic men were dancing and singing at the tops of their voices

and I remembered the longing I felt all throughout my childhood for a tradition that went back as far as Judaism, a tradition that hadn't changed

I remembered all those years of reading nothing but Potok

I remembered yearning, gut-wrenching yearning to have been born into an identity

and I saw the joy in their faces as they celebrated having reclaimed the epicentre of their homeland, even though that epicentre is still incomplete; it is the closest they can come today to what was once the temple, but it is not the temple

and I saw the policemen

and I saw the army

guns and guns and guns

and I walked through the security gates

and I thought of Isaiah and Lamentations

and the words of Jesus to the women of Jerusalem

and Revelation

and Weep No More

and And God Shall Wipe Away All Tears

and how the Zionists obviously hope to bring about the healing of the land and the restoration of the land, to fulfill the ultimate purpose of the land, by bringing Judaism back home to Jerusalem

but that with all that has happened since 1948, I cannot believe the establishment of Israel to be the fulfillment of biblical prophecy; I don't think that those prophecies will be fulfilled until the day when heaven and earth are finally renewed, because something like that can't be forced 

and I was overcome with the hopelessness of the situation, the sense that the killing and fear will never end

that two groups of people not just in Israel and the Palestinian Territories but all over the world seem incapable of achieving peace, and that every act from one party will always result in retaliation and payback from the other party. 

and I hope it gets easier to deal with, but at the same time I think that that would make it seem less important somehow. I don't want to feel less strongly, even though what I'm feeling is changeable at best and ambiguous at worst.