It is Friday night in Tekoa, and my friend Nachshon’s mother lights the nerot shabbat. From the kitchen window, I can see the minarets of Beit Lechem—Bethlehem—where the muezzin sounds the evening prayer for the first Friday of Ramadan.
Tekoa, an Israeli settlement considered illegal under international law, sits atop the Wadi Tekoa, a vast flood canyon that winds through the Judean Hills to the Dead Sea. Tekoa’s immediate neighbor, Teqoa, is controlled by Hamas, and the buses that run past it to the settlement are protected with bulletproof glass. While many settlements in the West Bank are populated by the ultra-Orthodox, some are secular in nature, or mixed, like Tekoa.
The motivations for settlement are as numerous as one people’s desires, and the roots of this conflict go far deeper than religion. As we hike the wadi Sabbath morning, the crack of a gunshot resounds from Teqoa. It will not be reported, it will not be explained, but it resonates through the canyon around us, just as the spectral melody of the call to prayer did mere hours before.
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