"Ouch," the Unkindest Cuts of All

Department

Art

Document Type

Editorial

Publication Date

11-24-2020

Abstract

During the years of my Jerusalem childhood I was raised in the Antiochian Orthodox tradition. My brothers and I served as altar boys in the St. Simeon's Qatamoun Orthodox Church, a church we attended until the harassment, harangue, and stone throwing by interloping male Jewish children and adults became life-threatening.

Eventually we'd attend St. Andrews Church of Scotland as well as services at the YMCA, a prominent Jerusalem landmark. Most of the itinerant preachers at the YMCA were visiting tourists, mostly from the United States. The latter had to have been charismatic end-of-times preachers touched by Jerusalem's beautiful landscape, a landscape that has been blighted by Israel's destruction of Palestine's rich and variegated architectural heritage. The rolling hills of Jerusalem and Palestine are now dotted with obtuse 21st century high rise structures, phallic edifices that have usurped and disfigured the quaint and serene Palestinian landscape in the same manner that Palestinian lives have been uprooted and brutalized by a so-called Holocaust surviving tribe.

Publication Title

CounterPunch

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