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Recently, Barack Obama spent several days in the Middle East on a fact-finding trip, including a little more than a day in Israel and an hour in Ramallah, the governmental seat of the Palestinian National Authority.
 
His visit to that West Bank city coincided with our annual work/study trip to Israel and the Palestinian territory sponsored by Friends United Meeting, the international Quaker body that operates the Friends Schools in Ramallah — schools that grew from a mission beginning in 1869 to educate Palestinian girls.

When we learned that the day Obama was to visit with Palestinian leaders was also the day we were scheduled to work at the Quaker meetinghouse, we invited his campaign to consider sending him over to lend a hand washing windows and mopping floors! For some reason, they declined.

Had the presidential hopeful, keen on offering “change” in U.S. response to the world, spent 30 hours with us in Ramallah, equal to the time he spent in Israel, here’s a little of what he might have experienced:

During our work detail at the meetinghouse, we were organized by a conservative Muslim mathematics teacher at the Friends School, supervised by a Canadian Mennonite working for the Friends International Center in Ramallah, a Quaker peace organization.

In our work crew, there were students and older adults from Muslim, Jewish, and Christian backgrounds. This mirrored the reality we had seen in Palestinian society at large: a comfortable mix of religions and deep respect for those of Muslim, Jewish and Christian faith.

But Obama would have heard, as did we, the deep concern of Christians (and Muslims!) that the Christian community is being drastically reduced by the impact of the continuing military occupation of the West Bank. 

 
Those with closer ties to the West have been leaving. The once thriving Quaker congregation now has an average of three native attendees on any given Sunday.

Spending time with us after our work was done, Obama might have heard Omar talk to our group about the evolution toward creative, nonviolent response by Palestinians to the occupation. Organizer of a surprisingly successful world-wide economic and cultural boycott movement, he was so compelling that he had us reading bar codes of all products we bought afterwards!
 
Or he might have attended a thrilling performance by a youth troupe of the debke, the Palestinian folkloric dance, increasingly used to express pride of place and culture — another expression of nonviolent Palestinian resistance and persistence.

He might have listened in to one of our morning devotions, as we read from the ancient Hebrew prophets about the desire for all peoples to live under their own vine and fig tree, in peace and unafraid — and then 
witnessed the thousands of acres, thousands of homes, and hundreds of thousands of olive trees bulldozed for settlements, bypass roads, separation barriers, and collective punishment.

And through it all, he would have heard the deep longing for a just peace that would see a Palestinian state emerge on the 22 percent of historic Palestine comprised of Gaza and the West Bank — a hope rapidly disappearing as land is annexed by the separation barrier and settlement expansion.

If Obama had stayed for worship in the historic meetinghouse Sunday, he would have heard the oft-requested hymn “A Song of Peace,” and the poignant lyric, “My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean, and sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine. But other lands have sunlight too, and clover, and skies are everywhere as blue as mine. O hear my song, thou God of all the nations, a song of peace for their land and for mine.”

And having spent as much time there as in Israel, he would have known that the sentiment was sincere.

Max L. Carter is director of the Friends Center at Guilford College