An Open Door Beckons in the West Bank

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/24/world/middleeast/an-open-door-beckons-in-the-west-bank.html

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BEIT JALA, West Bank — Before dishing out her homemade freekeh soup, Khadra Zreineh cracked open the front door despite the December chill. There was a fire in the pot-bellied stove, but she attributed the room’s warmth to her unusual lunch guests.

Seated around the table were three Israeli women, a half-dozen foreigners living temporarily in Israel, and their guides from Breaking Bread Journeys, a year-old joint Israeli-Palestinian venture pitching off-the-beaten-track tourist experiences often focused on food. They had come from neighboring Bethlehem, the Israelis needing special permits to enter this part of the West Bank that is under Palestinian control.

Mrs. Zreineh, herself a guide to the local landmarks, calls her home “the house of the open door.” Sometimes she returns to find stray cats curled up on the couch. On this day, she had made a huge pot of the Arabic upside-down rice dish makluba, garnished with her own personal peace miracle.

It was the Friday before Christmas, but her tale was of an Easter miracle — a story of courage and hope told after a war-stricken summer and terror-scarred autumn that have destroyed much of both. The story was impossible to verify — Mrs. Zreineh declined to name the others involved for their protection — but perhaps its truth is less the point than its telling.

“If you don’t believe in miracles here in this holy land,” she told the group, “you are not a realist.”

Mrs. Zreineh, 58, a Christian mother of four and grandmother of four, started with a bit of background.

Born in Germany to Palestinian parents, she said she spent childhood summers in Beit Jala — her father would buy a big Mercedes in Bonn and drive seven days across Europe and the Levant, then sell it for three times as much in Amman, Jordan, and take taxis for the final 50-mile stretch.

When she was 15, the family finally received Israeli permission to stay in the West Bank. She ditched her dream of becoming a pediatrician after getting engaged a year later to an auto electrician.

“We had many Jewish customers,” she said of the days before Israel built a concrete barrier around most of the Bethlehem area and barred its citizens from entering.

They still have Jewish friends. “When I have permission, I go visit them,” she said. “They come here, even though it’s not allowed.”

In 1998, one of her sons, then a senior at the German-Lutheran Talitha Kumi school in Beit Jala, participated in a rare exchange program in Israel. Mrs. Zreineh used her contacts at the German Embassy to arrange for two Jewish boys he met there to come to the house of the open door for dinner.

Four years later, at the height of the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, the Israeli military imposed a tight curfew on the Bethlehem area during its 39-day siege of the Church of the Nativity. Mrs. Zreineh remembers that “every 10 days, we had three hours to go out and buy bread” before loudspeakers in the streets warned residents to return home.

Orthodox Easter came on Day 34 of the siege. Mrs. Zreineh could not keep her door closed. She led six of her female neighbors, each with two or three daughters, to a nearby church for Mass.

“When we reached the main street, an Israeli tank came,” she recalled. “I looked at them, they looked at me. They didn’t do anything.” After Mass, “they were waiting for us — to escort us,” she added. “We felt very safe.”

The tank hovered as Mrs. Zreineh dropped each of the neighbors at their homes. She sent her two daughters upstairs, too, then hesitated.

“If I’m a Christian and I believe, so I have to do something,” Mrs. Zreineh explained all these years later. “I only wanted to turn around and say ‘thank you.’ Israeli soldiers looked out, and in this time, all my courage is flying away.

“And then one of them put his helmet out and was talking to me,” she continued. “He said, ‘Mrs. Zreineh, don’t be afraid of us. We are the two friends of your son. We were in your house.”’

The house of the open door.