Communio Viatorum 2004/I. [antikvár]

LAND, NATION AND FAITH It was still at the beginning of the second intifada that I happened to visit Jerusalem just after Easter. My hosts took me to some of the places, where the tensions were the highest at that moment: some streets in Ramalah, a part of Bethlehem or East Jerusalem. It was sad to walk in the Basilica of the Nativity of the Lord all alone, while outside the desperate Palestinian merchants waited, hoping to sell some of their souvenirs to the only tourist in town. In Jerusalem I entered a bookshop after a visit to the Western Wall. I found some books that I was looking for and so I went to the counter. Again I was the only customer, though in a bookshop one worries less than at a holy site. The owner, perhaps happy to have his conversation of the day, certainly content with the trade, gave some comments on the books and then asked me where I came from. As I told him that I had arrived from Prague, he took a closer look at me with some enthousiasm. "Czechs have always been good to us," he said. "It is not their fault that so many Bohemian Jews died in the concentration camps, because they were send there by the Nazis. In fact, some found shelter in the homes of Czech people. Moreover, the Czechs were also the victims of the Germans, just like us in that time." And of course he mentioned the delivery of weapons to the new state of Israel in 1948 by the Czechoslovak Republic, so the Israeli Forces could beat the armies of the neighboring Arab states. He appeared well informed about the modem history of Central Europe, as he went on with his comments. "You did well after the Second World War with the German minority in Czechoslovakia," he said. "It was a perfect measure to expel! the Germans from your land. They did not belong there, you took what was rightfully yours and established security by that. We should leam from you and do the same to the Palestinians here. We have to get rid of them and take what belongs to our nation," he proposed, standing just a hundred meters from the al-Aksa Mosque. I tried to indicate that these things are not as simple as they seemed to him and that they tend to return after years of even decades as unhealed memories which we have to face with pain and trouble. I was not able to express these comments.