Two friends, Israeli and American, built a bench for the Jabber family whose
second house was demolished on September l6. They laid the bench parts on
the side of the hill between the ruins and next to a small tent flapping in
the cooling wind of October.

Atta Jabber remarked that his original house had been built
by Palestinians, Israelis and Internationals, its destruction
therefore doubly a blow to peace. But many hands also put the bench together,
and, as conversation shifted from Arabic to Hebrew to English, spirits lifted
and bonds tightened with the bolts.

The bench is a composite of gifts: the wood tossed up by the sea, the
washers created from foreign coins, the whole a harmony of comfort and
artistry.

But it is also full of ironies: a large, polished bench planted on a hillside,
surrounded, not by walls and roof, but by broken cinder blocks and torn
wiring. Sitting on it one can see bulldozed land where a few weeks ago an
orchard grew. Is it an illegal structure? changing facts on the ground? a
threat to security?

After all, the bench-sitter can look down upon the bypass road which itself
plowed through the family's cauliflower fields. Will it be hacked to pieces
by the same chainsaws that killed the olive and fig trees? Should we by some
magic suspend this bench in the air so that it does not "improve" the land?

Whatever happens, the real fact on the ground of our collective lives is that
nothing can destroy what was built there: a "home" on a hill where at least a
few people of many nations can gather as one.