Mark Johnson's blog

The bus ride to Jerusalem from Rosh Pinna is a beautiful rollercoaster of a drive down into the Galilee Valley along the Sea to Tiberius and then back over the Judean Hills through Afula to Jerusalem. It is a bit like riding a troop transit, however, and a bit unsettling when most passengers on the bus are teen agers in khaki with their hands on the trigger of Uzis.

The next day I made my way to Safad (Tzafat) which became one of the havens for the Jews expelled from Spain at the end of the Andulusian period. It was a place that grew to preserve the cosmopolitanism and the spiritual depth of the Jewish people when they were forced to flee from Spain in 1492.

I have been to Israel and Palestine a half dozen times in the last ten years, often for a month or more at a time, and have visited from the deep Negev to the Galilee, but never before the Northern Galilee (with the exception of one afternoon visit to Capernaum and the Golan in 2005).

The crowds yesterday and today in Tahrir Square, Cairo, obscure the experience of a visit in recent weeks. Tahrir has a raw worn look these days, not as hospitable as two years ago when a small group of activists from around the world practiced their own occupation and celebrated New Year’s Eve with a candlelight service.

The metaphor of spring as an awakening is certainly not lost on the Arab world, harking back as it does to early 20th-century efforts to throw off the yoke of colonialism.

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Report on IFOR Delegation to Egypt, January 2012.  Hope Against Hope – Egypt Part I

There has been a delightful clarity of visibility this past week in Cairo, the Pyramids of Giza often in view from the center of the city and the Nile’s green borders and the city from the ruins in Giza. A rare expierience in a city which houses one-quarter of Egypt’s 85 million citizens with all the impact on air quality that industry and transportation would suggest.

Forty years ago, returning to Beirut, Lebanon — with the support of members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and other mentors — I registered as a conscientious objector to war.

At a time when my country was sending hundreds of thousands of my peers to fight in Vietnam, I formally joined the peace resistance.

It is at the intersection of our personal and professional lives that our most precious and enduring friendships form; where that distinction of work life and private life is completely blurred. The public tributes to Scott Kennedy already have and will continue to put a spotlight on the same experience I  had in getting to know him.

The arts of propaganda are alive and well in the turbulent world let loose in the Arab Spring and now circling the globe in an Autumn of Our Discontent.