Mennonite Weekly Review

On Election Day in Israel, schools are closed. So as we toured the Kerem Shalom kibbutz, which borders Gaza and Egypt, a little girl followed us. She wore an oversized turquoise sweatshirt and struggled to ride a bike too big for her.

Kathleen Kern, of Rochester, N.Y., serves with Christian Peacemaker Teams.

From the ridges of her emerging front teeth, I guessed she was about 6. The 12-year old with us was too sophisticated to hang out with a child, so the younger girl — I’ll call her Tamar — became my friend instead.

Having recently emigrated from Canada, she said her Hebrew was not good, so she had had to repeat first grade. I asked if she liked Kerem Shalom. She said she did except for the bombings — missiles and mortars shot over the wall by Hamas militants in Gaza.

“Now that the war is over, things will be better,” she said.

That wall between Gaza and Kerem Shalom had been erected relatively recently. In previous decades, Gazans and the kibbutzniks frequently walked over the border to visit each other. Kerem Shalom residents would smuggle produce into the Gazan refugee camps during times of closure.

When the Israeli government banned the politically themed work of Palestinian artists during the first Intifada, Kerem Shalom provided studio and gallery space for them. Residents sometimes hid Palestinians wanted by the military because of their political opinions.

Tamar showed us the bomb shelters in Kerem Shalom that people went to when sirens signaled an approaching missile. But she was more interested in telling us which families owned the dogs accompanying our group and pointing out the mural of a school bus near the entrance of Kerem Shalom. The mural was funny, she said, because a baby was looking out one of the windows, and babies don’t go to school.

A former resident of Kerem Shalom had driven us down to the kibbutz in a van designed to accommodate his Muscular Dystrophy. As we prepared to leave, Tamar watched with interest as the van’s lift raised him up in his wheelchair. He invited her to look at the touch screen that enabled him to drive.

When she came out of the van, she asked why he was in a wheelchair. I told her. She paused for a moment and then said, quietly, “I have CF [cystic fibrosis]. That’s why we moved here.”

Parents of children with CF often move to dry, hot climates, hoping that the air will add a few more years to their children’s lifespan — currently about 36 years. Knowing her diagnosis, I understood why she seemed underweight and why I had seen the adults on the kibbutz treat her with a special tenderness.

Then I thought of the thousands of Palestinian children on the other side of the wall. Four hundred ten of them were killed by Israeli shells and missiles this winter. Their parents love them and want to protect them as much as Tamar’s parents want to protect her. But the Palestinian parents have no bomb shelters to run to, nor the ability to leave for a safer place.

I like to think that on the other side of the wall Tamar would find friends her age. I wonder if the day will come again when she can walk over to Gaza and her Palestinian friends can come to Kerem Shalom. I wonder whether the grownups in Israel and Palestine will decide that all of the children in this small region deserve protection.