|
Tell us about the work you do in the Middle East.
I have been assigned as the United Methodist liaison to Jerusalem for the
General Board of Global Ministries since 1996. Primarily my job assignment
is justice education, contextual education. One of the main components of
that has been to try to get tourists who come to the land that we call holy
to not treat it like a museum or just as the place that Jesus walked, in the
past tense, but to recognize that Jesus might still walk here today and that
one can encounter the living Christ here in the people and the places and in
the pain and struggle. It is important for us as Christians in the world to
engage the contemporary context, to become more informed and have a more
nearly complete picture of the reality in this place. That has been a main
portion of my work. That work is done in cooperation with the Presbyterian
Church (USA) and with Catholic Relief Services.
I am also currently assigned to the International Center, which is an
outreach ministry of the Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem and is where
I spend most of my time. The International Center has a variety of programs
in art and music and dance and cultural history. One of the pieces I am
working on is the international intercultural exchange program, developing
programs for seminarians to come from around the world to do joint studies
together as well as with local Palestinians. We are also developing a
similar program for clergy and lay people and trying also to create some
sabbatical space, where people can do a sabbatical study in Bethlehem and in
the Holy Land. This program would include some work in the arts and theology
as a part of their time of service and renewal. I also help with the
pastoral work at the Evangelical Lutheran Church, when the pastor requests.
Here in the United States we are quite a bit removed from the reality you
are living in. Please give us some idea what conditions are like.
The entire city of Bethlehem, including Bayt Sahur and Bayt Jala, as well as
a number of other Palestinian cities, is currently under complete curfew,
which means that no one is allowed out on the street. The curfew in
different parts of the city is lifted for two or three hours about every
four days for people to shop at nearby stores, if they have money still to
get food. I could probably try to go home, but our offices at the Lutheran
Church are completely inaccessible right now because they are in the section
of Bethlehem in the Old City and have themselves been heavily damaged. The
situation is very desperate at this point. A large number of Israelis have
died over the last three weeks in a variety of suicide attacks, creating a
great deal of pain and fear within the Israeli society. This is also true in
the Palestinian society, since over the last seven weeks, with the exception
of one week, Israeli tanks, helicopters, and F-16 jets have been heavily
engaged across all of the Palestinian cities and territories. Beside the
large amount of damage to the infrastructure -- with trees and water lines
and houses and shops being damaged or destroyed -- we also have the
psychological trauma of almost two million people basically being locked in
their houses for three weeks, not being able to sleep because of the ongoing
presence of the tanks rolling around and causing noise. So there is a very
tense and very dangerous situation currently.
Many Christians are torn between a desire to support Israel and a feeling
that Israel is not dealing justly with the Palestinians. How can we sort out
those conflicting feelings?
The theology of land is a very complicated piece in this context. Any
equating of the biblical Israel to the current nation-state of Israel is
very dangerous. You've raised a point that is very critical. For those who
accept a strictly literal interpretation with regard to Old Testament
promises of land to the Jewish people -- I always try to remind them that if
you work primarily out of that, then you need to go past Joshua and not just
look at the story of the conquest of the land, but also to refer to books
such as Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel. The prophets have something to say
about how one lives in the land. It's not a gift that is given to do
with as we wish. The prophets understood the covenant as a promise of
stewardship, and in that context of stewardship of the land they condemned
the misuse of the land. One can find in the prophets issues of justice,
issues of mercy, issues of how one treats "aliens" in the land. Those
scriptures have an essential critique of the use of land and the way in
which the current state of Israel is dealing with the Palestinian
inhabitants.
Another issue, and something that many of the rabbis who work in areas of
human rights in Israel lift up, is that land can become an idol. Eric Ashman
in particular, who is currently the head of Rabbis for Human Rights, states
that if land becomes an idol that we worship more than human life and human
compassion, then we violate the covenant and we stand at risk of losing the
blessing.
One has to look at the broader context here and see that, until pretty late
in the century, religious Judaism did not regard the formation of the state
of Israel as something that was biblical. In fact, for a long time in
orthodoxy it was considered, and there is still a group today that believes,
that Jews have a right to come to the land of Israel, but the state of
Israel is something only the Messiah can create. So even within Judaism
there is a split, although since the 1967 war that split has been narrowed.
In the 1967 war, Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip; but of course,
for Judaism, the West Bank is biblical Judea and Samaria, so that's partly
why there is such a struggle. The vast majority of what is the current state
of Israel was not biblical Israel.
What can people of faith do to support a just peace in Israel and the
occupied territories?
To find a way to negotiate in such a bitterly contested conflict, as people
of faith, I think we have to use our sense of common humanity and seek to
recognize the common elements of human suffering that exist in both
communities. The only real tool we have is the negotiated international law,
which is recognized internationally. That's the closest we can get to
impartiality. Many in the Jewish Israeli community recognize that the best
thing that can be done is to consider creating a Palestinian state on the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and that Jerusalem be shared as a capital.
That way both Israelis and Palestinians can have access to the holy sights,
of course; but there will also be a shared sovereignty of the city. There
must be some sort of a just solution found for the overwhelming numbers of
Palestinian refugees. There has to be some way of to deal with this, the
largest refugee population in the world, that is fair and equitable to them.
Finally, we have to find a way to negotiate the issues of sharing resources,
particularly water, which is the one that is most critical.
I think it's important that we not be afraid of engaging our Jewish brothers
and sisters, as well as our Muslim brothers and sisters, in conversations
about this place. I know it's very hard, given the historic reality of the
horrors of Jewish suffering, not just in the twentieth century but
throughout many centuries. The whole issue of engaging in discussion about
Israeli state policy is very hard for many Christians because they don't
want to be misunderstood and don't want to be seen as anti-Semitic. But it's
vital for us to begin to engage stories, not only that we listen to what our
Jewish bothers and sisters feel and think about the situation but also to be
able to share with them what our Palestinian brothers and sisters are
experiencing, what they are feeling and thinking as Muslims and Christians
who live in both in Israeli and Palestinian societies, their sense of what
leads to a just solution. For a long time this has been an area that we have
been unwilling or afraid to engage in, because we didn't want to hurt people,
didn't want to ask sensitive questions. But I think as Christian-Jewish
dialogue matures this is a topic that we cannot ignore. For the health of
our relationship we need to discuss it, so we can be clear that, when people
say things against Israeli policy that are anti-Semitic, we criticize it and
say it's not acceptable. There has to be a differentiation so that we can
mutually work at trying to stop anti-Semitism and also trying to stop human
rights violations by a nation state, to hold it accountable to the same
rules that we hold all nations to. That's another important piece to include.
There is a growing recognition, even among Israelis, that the source of all
the violence we are seeing currently is really the Israeli occupation of the
West Bank and Gaza Strip and the Jewish-only settlements that have been
established there. The only way to move out of the cycles of violence is to
end the occupation.
How do you, in the current situation, see God at work?
Sometimes we just have to say, "Lord, where are you?" If you look at the
overarching context, it can be easy to lose sight of any holiness, of the
presence of God, of the presence of anything that has a divine spark in it.
And yet, it's in the hearts of the people who are living through so much
suffering that I find it most tangible that God has not given up on us and
we have not given up on God. An example is the agencies that now are working,
particularly the international and local church communities who are working
at supplying food, water, medicine, and the basic resources of sustenance to
the millions of Palestinians who don't have anything and whose livelihood
has been taken away, who have had no access to food and water.
Within the Israeli society, I see a sign of God's presence in the reaction
of some of the reserve soldiers. There have been a number of Israeli
reservists who have been happy to serve their duty in the Israelis Army,
which they are required to do every year. But they are now no longer willing
to serve inside the occupied territories. They see the occupation as the
root of all of the violence, whether it's Israeli or Palestinian initiated,
and they feel that if they are to continue serving as an occupation force
that they not only do not bring security to their people, but they also
increase the insecurity and increase the risk to Israelis. That is a very
tangible sign of people who are wrestling with really trying to get to the
root cause of violence.
On the Palestinian side, I see people who in spite of having no jobs, no
schools, whose church buildings are attacked, who have lost their homes, but
are still able to say that what we want is peaceful reality for our children
and for Israeli children. These people still believe that Palestinians and
Israelis could still live side-by-side in security with each other and are
willing to still work for that, even in the midst of literally everything
about them being in shambles. There is a very powerful story about a man and
his family in Bayt Sahur, the traditional site where the shepherds received
the first message of the good news of the birth of Christ. This man's name
happens to be Joseph and he happens to be a carpenter. His house was one of
the first to be completely destroyed by the constant shelling of tanks. He
was at a camp on the eastern edge of the Bayt Sahur and I had a group
visiting there. It's been about a year, and the house was just in shambles
at that point. He said, "We look at those soldiers there and we were
neighbors, so I have to ask: Why did they have to do this to my house? They
know me. They know my children. But they are still my neighbors, and I still
want to live with them as neighbors and to live in peace with their children.
I don't want my children to learn to hate." It was very powerful that, in
the middle of the rubble, he could still talk about those who had destroyed
his home as his neighbors and not his enemies. It is those kinds of stories
and encounters, whether with Israelis or Palestinians, that we see God's
presence breaking through in spite of all the human ways with which we try
to close God out. |
