Yesterday, shortly after Donald Trump’s plane took off from Ben Gurion Airport, Israel’s President Rueven Rivlin, opened the 50th annual Jerusalem Day Celebrations.

Earlier Prime Minister Netanyahu had stated that “we didn’t occupy Jerusalem, we liberated it.”

Fifty years ago (long before the advent of insta-communication), Iris Keltz received a telegram from her mother in New York.

IRIS STOP WAR IMMINENT STOP GET OUT NOW STOP TAKE FIRST PLANE OR BOAT TO CYPRUS STOP MOM

But for Iris, in that place, at that time, there was no going back

Iris Keltz is a long-time Taos resident. Her first book, Scrapbook of a Taos Hippie is an award-winning memoir documenting the counterculture in Northern New Mexico, In the foreword to her documentation of Taos’ singular place in the annals of Hippiedom (this summer San Francisco celebrates the 50th Anniversary of The Summer Of Love), Fugs member, poet and journeyman Ed Sanders, writes that she “has an eye for detail. Her honesty reinforces her arguments that the commune movement has something to say in 2000 and beyond.” 

The Zeitgeist of the 60’s changed the way we would see the world and live in it. Bob Dylan’s anthem The Times They Are A’Changin‘ would be replaced by the prophetic, A Hard Rain’s A’ Gonna Fall. The Peace, Love and Good Vibrations of that highly mythologized moment in time was equally backdrop to some of the darkest moments in modern history; Malcom X, Martin Luther King, Jack and Robert Kennedy – all voices for change – had been brutally silenced and more Helter Skelter horror was soon to follow.

In the Old City of Jerusalem, families who had lived there for centuries, were already living in a waking nightmare which certainly did not resemble Liberation as described by the Zionist Prime Minister in his remarks yesterday. Iris recalls hearing the gun fire and explosions from the direction of Mount Scopus or possibly the Temple Mount. Yesterday Israeli Media reported that artillery shells and bullets had been discovered during excavations on and around the Temple Mount where the Dome Of The Rock has stood since 691 CE. Built by Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik on the site of the Roman temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, which had in turn been built on the site of Herod’s Temple, on the alleged site of King Solomon’s Temple, first captured from the Jebusites by his father, the Biblical King David.

This tangled history continues to confound many, both those with knowledge of the centuries of conflict and conquest and those without.

When Iris found herself caught in the crossfire, little did her mother know, she had already stepped over to the “other side” and had married the proverbial “enemy.”

After a whirlwind romance of less than three weeks, they were married and were planning their honeymoon when the Six Day War began. On the day when Israeli soldiers barged into the basement apartment (in Ramallah where they were visiting Faisal’s mother), where the newlyweds had found sanctuary with other Palestinians, Iris was frozen with fear. She had thought of calling out, “I’m Jewish, American and these are my friends.” She says her fear-induced silence in the moment, compelled her to write this book.