(FinalCall.com) --On our recent delegation to the Middle East, we heard a young Palestinian student at Bethlehem University tell us that the students there have stopped using the word "tomorrow" because tomorrow may be meaningless, since you may well find yourself trapped in your home during a curfew, unable to attend school or go to work or to even go out and get bread and milk.

Instead, she said, they use the words "Day Seven," symbolizing the next day they might return to some semblance of normality. She was a young, beautiful and articulate young woman, who so far has been able to keep her optimistic attitude. But, like others at the university, she was taking her exams nearly a month late because of the curfews.

We also heard the stories of some of the families who had lost loved ones in the suicide bombings. Mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers and aunts and cousins telling of the pain of losing a young person, who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, in the prime of their lives. An Ethiopian Christian family as well as Jewish families torn apart by the pain. Or, on our last day when we heard of the bombing at Jerusalem University, Rev. Jesse Jackson suggested that we go to the hospital and inquire about the injured. When we arrived, the hospital administrators took us to see some of those injured and we stood and prayed for their recovery and healing. We saw the x-rays of nails and screws imbedded in injured bodies and saw medical personnel, weary from such events, working hard to save lives.

There is so much pain on both sides that it is almost unbearable to stand amidst it. Yet, that is what our delegation felt called to do. To try to bring a message of hope and presence to Palestinians who are in despair after months of entire towns being under curfew, sometimes for days on end.

They are in despair as the details of a study done by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) shows that more than half of Palestinian children are suffering from malnourishment since their parents are without work and unable to get food. They are in despair as their own health officials predict outbreaks of disease because garbage and trash is not being picked up or taken to landfills. They are in despair because the unemployment rate for Palestinians is estimated to be around 70-80 percent and because they continue to see illegal settlements being built by Israelis and no one doing anything about it.

It is clear that the occupation of Palestine must end in order for the violence and for many of the horrible conditions of Palestinians to end.

Yet, we also felt the need to try to bring a message of hope to ordinary Israelis as well, people who are trapped by their very real fear of increased terrorism in their midst. Many Israelis have never been to a Palestinian territory and have no idea what a curfew means. They see curfews and checkpoints as the only way to protect themselves from suicide bombers. They recite over and over the decades old stories of Palestinian leaders threatening to drive them to the sea and other stories, some true and some untrue, told again and again until they become real.

Yet, as one member of the Knesset acknowledged to us, the Israeli young people who are a part of the occupying forces are also losing their sense of humanity in the midst of it all. It made me remember a statement by Archbishop Desmond Tutu that White South Africans, while clearly not suffering to the extent of Blacks, were also losing part of their humanity as a result of apartheid.

We had hoped to try to bring a message of non-violent resistance to Palestinians—to help them see another form of protest against occupation.

We had hoped, even after the Israeli defense force’s F-16 attack, to talk even to the most militant of Palestinian groups and urge them to stop the unending cycle of violence. President Arafat and his cabinet, which met for the first time in five months while we were there, denounced the bombings and called for an end to the violence. But before we could get to our meeting with the leaders of Hamas, the Jerusalem University bombing occurred.

Yet, even as I write this, I see in the papers that President Arafat and Palestinian leaders seem to be continuing the quest for a cease-fire. I see that members of the Israeli defense ministry are continuing talks searching for ways to move Israeli troops out of some of the re-occupied towns.

And I think that perhaps some of the seeds that we planted might have fallen on fertile ground.

But then I see that Adam Shapiro, a young Jewish American married to a young Palestinian American, who both helped to begin a non-violent international solidarity movement in Jerusalem, was arrested and held in prison for a week for a non-violent demonstration in Nablus. He has returned home to the U.S. and expects his wife to soon join him. And I wonder—will they ever find a way out of the cycle of violence? (Bernice Powell Jackson is the executive director of the Commission for Racial Justice.)