I attended a talk tonight at the Haston Library by Octavia Taylor, whom I knew from when I worked at Clark University; she graduated from Clark with a master’s degree in International Development in 1993.  Her topic was “Life in Palestine” so I thought it would be interesting to hear about what has been happening there recently.  The talk seemed rather timely, as I am in the middle of reading a compilation of journalism pieces on the Mideast and North Africa which were written almost twenty years ago.  “Palestine” isn’t listed as one of the countries covered in the book, so maybe it comes up in the chapter on Israel (I haven’t gotten to that one yet).  When I thought about the past two decades, I wondered if conflict is endemic in the Middle East, or if there’s hope for peace.  Perhaps I will find out tonight, I thought, as I made my way to the library.

About 20 of us gathered in the library reading room where a screen was set up for the Power Point slide presentation.  Ms Taylor began by telling us that she and her husband are mostly retired now and wanted to do something with their time that involved travel and the Middle East (they had lived in Syria and the Emirates for a few years previously, and Octavia had bicycled through the area).  So her husband took a job teaching at Birzeit University, and she worked with Jeff Halper, Co-Founder and Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.  In the fall of 2014, the couple lived in Ramallah in the West Bank and traveled around the region.

Ms Taylor showed slides of the people and places she came to know: monasteries (many called St George), ancient cities like Jericho, Jerusalem, Hebron, and Bethlehem, terraced wineries, olive groves with two hundred-year-old trees, spice markets, Bedouin camps, cafes and food stalls selling falafel, the national dish.  The families she met were friendly and hospitable; many were deeply attached to their traditions and heritage (Ms. Taylor brought with her an exquisitely embroidered handbag, which I would have loved to own).

The modern history of Palestine is stark: following World War I, the British were awarded the mandate to govern the region; tiring of this responsibility after World War II ended, Britain opted out, and in November 1947, the UN adopted Resolution 181 recommending partition into an Arab state, a Jewish state, and the City of Jerusalem.  After the 1948 war, Israel captured and incorporated more territory than was allocated by the UN; Jordan got Judea and Samaria which became known as the West Bank; and Egypt got the Gaza Strip.  In this war, entire villages were destroyed and 750,000 Palestinians found themselves homeless.  In the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel defeated both Jordan and Egypt and completed the acquisition of the land originally allocated to the Arab state.

The 1993 Oslo Accords were an attempt at an agreement on the principles which would lead to the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  In terms of land, three types of territory were acknowledged: land (A) under full Palestinian Authority control (18% of the West Bank), (B) under Palestinian Authority civil control (22% of the West Bank), and (C) under full Israeli control (60%).  Thus, the total land area that was supposed to become the new Palestine was far smaller than it was in 1948, and Palestinians living in areas (B) and (C) ended up living under Israeli occupation.  This has been a disaster for Palestinians.

For Palestinians, living in the Occupied Territories means red signs, walls, guard towers, checkpoints, Israeli roads, demolition of their homes, and Jewish settlements and outposts on formerly Palestinian land.  In addition, refugee camps established in 1948 and administered under the UNRWA, United Nations Relief and Works Agency [for Palestine Refugees], still exist.  In fact, Gaza hosts eight camps with a population of 1.2 million, while the West Bank has nineteen camps holding 741,400 refugees.  For those living in these camps, UN Resolution 194, which discusses the right of return in Section 11, probably seems like a pipe dream.

The perceptions of “the other” on both sides are actually very similar, and similarly distorted.  So is there any hope for resolution of this conflict?  Ms Taylor reported on what might be called “resistance movements”:  there are organizations like the Women in Black Movement which defies government restrictions on fraternizing with the enemy; there are courageous individuals who open museums and create art works; there are groups who start businesses and create cities like Rawabi; there is the attempt by the BDS (boycotts, divestment, sanctions) movement to foster international condemnation of Israel.

Ms. Taylor urged us to educate ourselves on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, so I picked up some literature on my way out. By chance, for Book Club this month our group is reading a novel which discusses the Good Friday Agreement of April 1998, which ended the Troubles in Northern Ireland, but I am now wondering if more than masterly diplomacy is needed in the Middle East.

Most everyone who lives in Worcester County knows the name Higgins; in fact you can search this blog and you’ll find a post describing a visit to the Higgins Armory Museum in Worcester, which was founded by John Woodman Higgins, the prominent industrialist who created the Worcester Pressed Steel Company in 1905.  John’s son Carter became president of the steel company in 1949 and served in that role until his death in 1964.

I did not realize there was a connection between the Higgins family and North Brookfield until I attended a lecture at the Haston Library this evening, titled Against the Current: How Albert Schweitzer Inspired a Young Man’s Journey.  Clarinda “Rindy” Higgins, together with William “Bill” Armstrong, recently published a short book about Mark Higgins, Rindy’s cousin and the son of Carter Higgins.  It’s the story of their efforts to discover more about the life and death of Mark, who perished in October 1960 while on an African journey.  The Higgins family lived and worked in Worcester, but Carter Higgins built a cottage on Brooks Pond in North Brookfield, and the family often spent quite a bit of time there.

Mark, who was nine years older than Rindy, graduated in 1958 from Milton Academy, a private school in the Boston suburbs.  He understood that he was expected to work at the family business and eventually take over as the company president, but at age 19,  he was not ready for that yet; he wanted to have different experiences, particularly in another culture.  So in 1959, he traveled to Gabon, which was then part of French Equatorial Africa, to work at the clinic in Lambaréné founded by the remarkable German medical missionary Albert Schweitzer.  Most people know Schweitzer as the Nobel Peace Prize winner and proponent of the “Reverence for Life” philosophy; due to my background, I am more familiar with his contributions to music and theology.

Mark’s letters home described his daily activities at the clinic: clearing brush, gardening, building a house for tuberculosis patients, caring for patients at the leper colony.  After he gained more experience at the clinic, he was promoted to medical assistant, responsible for giving injections.  He also befriended people, observed the village rituals, and helped with a cardiology study.  In one letter he spoke of having discovered the “blessing of service,” a phrase that still resonates.

After a year in Gabon, Mark decided to embark on a 2000 mile solo trek across Africa toward Israel, where he planned to work on a kibbutz (Mark’s stepmother was a Holocaust survivor).  It was a bad time to be in the Congo.  Belgium finally granted its former colony independence in 1960, but the transition was not easy; the names Patrice Lumumba and Mobuto Sese Seko are familiar to most US citizens who remember the proxy wars with the Soviet Union.  In October 1960, the Worcester Telegram and Gazette headlined a news story “Executive’s Son Missing in Africa.”  The news got worse: the family soon learned that Mark had been killed.  The story became front-page news across the United States.

Rindy and Bill knew the outlines of Mark’s story, but they still had questions which they decided they wanted to answer.  They embarked on a journey of discovery: they wanted to find out more about what Mark’s life in Africa was like, how he traveled, who reported him killed, who killed him and why.  They became like the history detectives, with serendipity and chance playing a part in their success.  They discovered family papers they had not known about, and in 2014, they traveled to Africa to visit Gabon’s Albert Schweitzer Hospital.  They visited the site of the leper colony, as well as remote villages, searching for older residents who may have known Mark back in 1959-1960.  Eventually, they did learn how Mark died: he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and was shot accidentally (not hacked to death with a machete).

Mark’s life was cut short, but Rindy assured us that his legacy lives on, in the tribal lives extended through simple heart surgery (one result of the cardiology study), the school founded in his memory, the scholarships for young people to study in Gabon, and even the Peace Corps connection (President Kennedy signed Executive Order 10924 in March 1961, less than a year after Mark was killed).  She and Bill were inspired by Mark’s story, and I think all of us in the room felt that way too.  May we all continue to incorporate the attitude of reverence and the impulse to service into our daily lives.