It might take a moment to absorb what’s going on in this photograph. Maybe your eye, like mine, first goes to the tallit, the Jewish prayer shawl over the head of the man standing by the big tree on the right side of the frame. Maybe that’s because I’m Jewish like that man, an Israeli lumberjack named Eitan.
Perhaps you wonder why he seems to be praying to a tree, and then maybe your eye falls on the man in the foreground, who is also praying — on his knees, head to the ground.
It is morning in Jerusalem, and in the hilly forest beyond it, in beautiful Beit Zayit, Eitan and Amjad, a Palestinian from a village near Hebron, are doing the same thing differently, as people do. They have come at sunrise to cut down a tree — a job with biblical roots that remains one of the world's most dangerous despite sophisticated tools — but first, they pause to pray.
“They do not pray together. They share one space,” said the photographer, Rina Castelnuovo, who lives in Beit Zayit and scrambled out of bed one recent morning to capture the moment. “Amjad turns to Mecca. Eitan turns to Jerusalem.”
The dog, a Schnauzer-mix from a village near the Lebanese border where disabled children care for dogs as part of their therapy, followed Rina out the door that morning. Her name is Coco.
It has been another unsettling week in this most challenging year for Israel and for all who care about its future.
Anti-government protests continue to convulse the streets. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refuses to compromise on his plan to undermine the safeguards of democracy. President Isaac Herzog’s visit to Washington only underscored the growing fissures in the alliance of our nations, the increasingly elusive notions of Jewish peoplehood and Middle East peace.
Rina, a veteran photojournalist who I worked side-by-side with during my four years as Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times, described the lumberjacks at prayer as “an uplifting scene,” and it is — to a point. Israel advocates often hype partnerships like Eitan and Amjad’s as harbingers of hope for a coexistence that could be.
But Amjad, who is 50, rushed to shield his face from Rina’s camera and only spoke to her on the condition his last name not be published, for fear that his work with Eitan, 56, could be misinterpreted in his West Bank village as collaboration with the Zionist regime.
Eitan’s last name is Wassrzug, and his willingness to share it reflects the inherent imbalance in such relationships due to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. The situation reminded me of a frustrating experience Rina and I had while trying to tell a different story of Arab-Jewish relationships eight years ago, during the so-called “stabbing intifada” in fall 2015.
It was near the end of my time in Jerusalem, and there was a terrifying eruption of scores of Palestinian attacks on Israeli Jews — lone actors wielding knives — and a fierce crackdown by Israeli security forces.
As we covered the twin narratives surrounding the attacks (and the broader conflict), Rina and I had the idea for a series highlighting pairs like Amjad and Eitan, Jews and Palestinians with human-to-human connections across the deadly divides. We wanted to understand both the backstories of these relationships and how they were being tested by the upsurge in violence and the harsh new security measures hardening the ethnic boundaries within our shared holy city of Jerusalem.
We started with a pair of surgeons at Hadassah Hospital. Israel’s health-care system is a famous showcase for Israeli-Arab collaboration; its workforce is almost 50-50, Jews treat Arabs and Arabs Jews — you may have heard some of this before.
These particular surgeons had been working as a team for years, and had recently treated both the attacker and one of the victims in a stabbing on a public bus. They were compelling characters, fascinating to interview; one detail I remember is that the Arab doctor’s teenage daughter no longer felt comfortable waiting for the bus in a Jewish neighborhood while wearing the uniform of her Palestinian private school. Also: They conversed only in Hebrew — the Jewish doctor never learned Arabic — and the Palestinian had been to the Jew’s home many times, but never the reverse.
The story was never published. It fell apart because the Palestinian surgeon did not feel comfortable with us visiting his home (he lived in the same village as the attacker on the bus) or, ultimately, identifying him by name. Rina and I tried to find other pairs to profile — Jews and Arabs work together in construction, markets and garages, play pickup sports or music together — but kept running into similar obstacles.
