Bethlehem and the Burden of Knowledge

Hey Blog Readers, Josh here for the last time. :(

Well we are back in the U.S.! The plane ride from Amman to Chicago was great and we split up from there to travel to our homes (or in some cases the Burg).

We had an amazing four days in Bethlehem. The first day we arrived turned out to be the 170th celebration of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Israel. And the celebration presentation just happened to be 2 floors below our hotel rooms in the Lutheran guesthouse/media center. It was a pretty big event and the highlight was speeches by Mitri Raheb and Bishop Younan- who are both head honchos in the Lutheran church and two of the strongest voices for peace and justice in the Middle East.

The rest of our days we spent touring Bethlehem and talking with the locals, here are some highlights from our stay:

Our hotel was connected to Mitri Raheb’s church and a college! Every day we met some people our age from the college and had a great time chatting about politics, life in the Middle East, archeology, and the Bible.


It was incredibly moving to be in Bethlehm, the birthplace of Jesus. The Church of the Nativity was very interesting. One oddity though was the milk grotto. It is a place where Mary supposedly spilled some breast milk while feeding baby Jesus and where it landed a flower grew. It may not have been true, but it sure was interesting ( I always get a kick out of Catholics).

Majdi is a good friend of Dr. Bouzards and we had a lot of fun visiting with him, buying from his shop, and we were even invited to lunch at his house one day. He has traveled the world and knows many different people and languages. He could be off doing anything he wanted but he is a very humble shop keeper, raising his sons, and using his very precious free time to talk with us. He is unlike anyone any of us had ever met. I wish I could describe him in this blog, but you’ll just have to talk to one of us in person if you want to learn more about him.

Another “highlight” of our stay in Bethlehem was a visit to a refugee camp. They were Palestinians who had their land stolen… I mean occupied by the Israelis. These people, through no fault of their own, lost everything because of the Israeli occupation. And now for almost four generations these refugees are still living in poverty and the only thing they have is the hope to return to the land they still have legal deeds to. The worst part of the visit was pictures from the time of the first occupation; they were almost identical to ones we saw in the Holocaust museum of Jewish ghettos. Does history teach us nothing? You would think the Jews especially would know what abuse and oppression looks like. And even though the visit was a little depressing we learned a great deal about biases in politics. While Israel is a nation, and one that we helped establish, we can not allow them to abuse innocent people. When we were in Israel, the locals told us that Israel soldiers never did anything wrong and that the Palestinians were to blame for the violence, anything else was propaganda. The exact opposite was said while visiting with Palestinians. But after seeing both sides (actually physically seeing it) and talking with all sorts of people we can unanimously come to the conclusion that no one is innocent. Everyone has committed faults, made mistakes, and ignored the other side. Each side has played a part in putting up walls, both physically and mentally. I think almost everyone on this trip would agree with President Barack Obama in that the only reasonable solution is to keep moving forward and to agree to a two state solution. Now the logistics of that all will be hard to settle on, be we can’t let anyone- Israeli or Palestinian, Jew, Christian, or Muslim- be unjustly persecuted. That includes traveling rights, land rights, curfews removed, etc.

Every where we visited I made sure to ask, “what is the most important thing we can do now, after talking to you and hearing your story?”, and the answer every time was “spread the new, talk about it”. So I encourage each and everyone one of you to talk about it. Pick up a newspaper, talk to your Middle Eastern friends, and especially to talk with any of the 14 people from Wartburg who went on this trip, and after- keep spreading the news. I know this was technically an Archeology and the Bible course, but the reason we learn about history is so we can know where we came from and where we are going. Mitri Raheb talks in his books about the dead stones of the past (the dig sites, the ancient Roman cities, etc.) but he stresses the much more important living stones- the people here and now, and those to come. So I beg each of you to become educated on the matter, talk with people, spread the new, pray for peace and justice, and most importantly stay hopeful.


May justice come quickly and peacefully to Israel, Palestine, and the World. :)


-Joshua Stibb

joshua.stibb@wartburg.edu