I am torn. As a lad growing up in Iowa, even through my college years ('53 - '57), I heard often of the amazing accomplishments in Israel. We were told of the Jews who were coming back to the Holy Land turning the barren wasteland into productive farms. It was even called a miracle. I continued to find this narrative important for my understanding of the Middle East for the next several years, at least. By that time I had begun to serve on the Friends United Meeting Wider Ministries Commission, and even filled in for the Wider Ministries Associate Secretary, Harold Smuck, while he was on sabbatical leave during 1975. And of course, during those years of close association with FUM missions, I heard much more about the Friends Schools in Ramallah.  But in 1985 when I became the FUM Associate Secretary for the World Ministries Commission, I began to see it up close and real.

During my first trip to Ramallah in 1987 as Associate Secretary, when the First Intifada ("uprising") was just getting under way, a member of the Ramallah Friends Meeting pointed to a cluster of buildings on a hill top not too far away, and said to me that it was an illegal Israeli settlement, and that someday, because the Israeli government was not stopping this kind of illegal action, these kinds of settlements would surround Ramallah. It has come true.