The last time I read my bible was at the Sea of Galilee. My mom had given it to me when I turned fourteen, and I brought it with me to Israel. I sat on the hill where archaeologists think Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount and flipped to a well-worn page covered in underlining and highlights, “You have heard it said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who hate you. If you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even nonbelievers do that?”
Noticing an older woman sitting nearby and thinking she was a German tourist, I asked what brought her. She was actually Palestinian. Again and again in Israel, I was surprised by my inability to determine who was who based on appearance. Palestinians in particular caught me off guard with their fair features.
In reality, Betty’s identity was far more complicated than Palestinian. She moved from neighboring Lebanon to marry a Palestinian doctor in Jerusalem and spent four decades running a hospital on the Mount of Olives across from the Lion’s Gate in the forboding stone wall that encircles the Old City, a life she wrote in her book—A War without Chocolate. We laughed at meeting so far north since we both lived in Jerusalem, and she invited me to visit her home.
A few weeks later I crossed to East Jerusalem with a bottle of arak under my arm. Her memoir describes her family drinking this clear anise liquor under their olive trees after harvests. She took the bottle I brought with a smirk and produced her own unlabeled bottle. “Try this one.” When she put a droplet of water in my glass, the arak clouded milky white. It tasted like licorice.
When she told about huddling on her living room floor protecting her children as Israeli soldiers pounded on the door during the war of ‘67, I realized she meant the living room we were sitting in, the door I had come through. I haven’t lived in one place the way she has, nor have I lived for more than ninety years.
As she spoke, the power went out, and she simply continued. I listened in the dark, rapt. In response to the outage, she said she has no ill will towards Israelis. She believes those words Jesus preached where we met. She prays for Israelis.
Her son came in with a candle and said it’s always been this way, that the news does not reflect the traditional harmony. He said he’d heard that, a hundred years ago, to knit their neighborhoods closer together, Muslim and Jewish families in Jerusalem would exchange their newborns to nurse with the neighbor mother for a few weeks.
I turned to Betty for confirmation, her face lit by candlelight. She was pouring me another glass of arak, and with a droplet of water, turned it from clear to milky white.
