c. 2000 Religion News Service
JERUSALEM _ Cedar Duaybis, a grandmother of five, always swore that she would never flee again.
In 1948, as a child, her Palestinian Christian family left the Mediterranean city of Haifa amid fighting between Arab forces and the newly declared state of Israel, winding up as refugees in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
But recently, Duaybis fled again, as Israeli helicopter gunships were poised to attack the Ramallah headquarters of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, just some 100 yards from her home, in reprisal for the Palestinian killing of two Israeli reserve soldiers. She grabbed her granddaughter and a number of her friends and ran to Ramallah’s Anglican Church compound to spend the night.
“The thing I think about most is the children,” said Duaybis, the widow of an Anglican pastor. “I remember how I was so scared and frightened in 1948, and no adult had time to explain what was going on. Now I have a grandchild and she is going through the same thing.”
Long avid proponents of the peace process, the West Bank’s tiny Palestinian Christian community of some 45,000 people has become deeply embroiled in the current wave of disturbances, which are striking dangerously close to home. Most of the West Bank’s Christians are concentrated in Ramallah, Arab east Jerusalem and the Bethlehem district _ areas that have proven to be flashpoints in the current unrest.
In particular, the Bethlehem suburb of Beit Jallah has been drawn deeply into the chaos. Palestinian snipers have used this border village as a staging ground for attacks on the nearby Jewish Jerusalem suburb of Gilo. In one of the worst incidents so far, snipers fired for several hours onto Gilo, drawing repeated Israeli retaliatory raids from helicopter gunships. The attacks have sown panic and fear in the middle-class Christian village known for its political moderation.
With their towns and homes under virtual siege and intermittent fire from Israel, Christian religious leaders are both rallying to the Palestinian national cause, and issuing pleas for help from the West.
“As the Lutheran bishop in Jerusalem, I appeal to you, as sisters and brothers in Christ, DO NOT LEAVE US ALONE,” wrote Lutheran Bishop Munib Younan in a recent appeal to Lutheran communities in the United States.
“Hospitals are lacking medical materials and equipment. High unemployment is prevailing,” Younan added. “Christian schools cannot collect tuition fees, and the Israeli shelling of the Bethlehem area is paralyzing the life of Palestinian Christian towns, creating horror and terror in the hearts of families.”
War, economic instability and religious fanaticism have long been the plagues of Christians across the Holy Land and the Middle East. Fifty years ago, an estimated 15 percent to 25 percent of the Palestinian Arab community was Christian. Today, in the West Bank, Christians comprise only about 1.5 percent of the total population.
While suffering under attack from Israeli gunfire, Arab Christians have occasionally become the target of Islamic extremists as well. Christian-owned liquor stores in Gaza have been attacked. Radical Islamic preachers occasionally have included Christians in now routine messages of anti-Jewish hate. But the perpetrators of anti-Christian propaganda, unlike anti-Jewish hatemongers, have been quickly silenced by the Palestinian Authority.
Already, in the course of the recent conflict, hundreds of Palestinians, mostly Christians from the Bethlehem area who hold foreign passports, have left the country, according to Israeli government reports.
Those reports have been hotly denied by Arab church officials, anxious to demonstrate Christian loyalty to the Palestinian cause. But it is undeniable that Christians, who enjoy a somewhat higher economic status, better education and links through business and marriage to the West, can travel abroad more easily than most Muslims. Now, more than ever before, Christians fear becoming a “museum piece” in the land of Jesus’ birth.
For the vast majority of Christians who remain, the reports of emigration are an ugly stain on their national loyalties, in a period when the Palestinian national revolt against Israel has taken on a distinctly Islamic flavor. This, after all, is a dispute that began with Muslim-Israeli clashes at Jerusalem’s key Islamic holy site, al-Aqsa Mosque. Conflicting Jewish-Muslim claims to the area, regarded by Jews as the ancient Temple Mount, have played a major role in fueling the conflict, dubbed the “al-Aqsa Uprising.”
“The Arab Christian community in the Palestinian Territories is an integral part of the Palestinian people,” said the Rev. Raed Abusahlia, chancellor of the Latin (Catholic) Patriachate in an outraged letter denying the reports that Christians are emigrating. “It suffers with it, rejoices with it, and shares with it the same hopes and aspirations.”
“Our position is that nobody should emigrate or leave,” added Younan, the Lutheran bishop. “They should stay in this country with all of the difficulties. This is the `Way of the Cross’ of our people, and I am sure that afterwards, there will be a resurrection.”
In the general atmosphere of fear, siege and suspicion, churches here are intensifying their efforts to reach the Western Christian community and the international media with their message. A new e-mail service launched by the Roman Catholic church, is providing readers with daily reports of the trials and tribulations that Christian Palestinians in Bethlehem are suffering, alongside their Muslim brethren.
Palestinian Christian leaders such as Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah, have come out forcefully in support of the Palestinian cause.
“There is no freedom and no justice when it is on account of others, and on the account of what is just for others,” said Sabbah, speaking on Tuesday (Oct. 31) at the Vatican.
“In these difficult days, in the midst of the actual conflict, we say that the Palestinian people should regain his freedom and justice, which are part of his legitimate rights.”
For most Palestinian Christians like Duaybis, who have always lived alongside Muslim neighbors in mixed communities like Ramallah, the feelings of allegiance to the Palestinian cause, and even Islamic symbols, are integral to their own self-identity.
“Al-Aqsa, that’s me, my identity card,” said Duaybis, referring to the Muslim holy site. “If you take away my purse, and then offer to return it without my i.d., I won’t feel complete. Israel has already taken 78 percent of what was once Palestine. I don’t want to only get pieces of Jerusalem.”
Duaybis is a member of a Christian prayer group that meets every week at an east Jerusalem Christian institution known as Sabeel, which promotes a Palestinian form of “liberation theology,” developed by the center’s founder, Dr. Naim Ateek, a former Anglican church canon in Jerusalem.
Meeting in a small stone room off a back street in east Jerusalem, these middle-class Palestinians, attired in conservative suits and pantsuits, share the Eucharist, sing hymns and talk about their feelings of the ongoing conflict, in a style reminiscent of the early Christians.
For these Christians, the Palestinian struggle today against Israel is the struggle of Jesus against an unjust Rome, or of the Old Testament prophets who proclaimed freedom and justice against the wishes of temporal rulers and kings. Seen from their perspective, the Israeli retaliatory strikes with tanks and missiles have been an extreme reaction to the Palestinian demonstrations featuring stones and molotov cocktails, and even to Palestinian sniper gunfire.
While Israel has portrayed its recent peace offers to the Palestinians as a magnanimous gesture, Nora Carmi, another member of the prayer group, still sees the negotiating process as one-sided.
Years of Israeli land confiscation, settlement building, road blockades and Arab home demolitions, left popular frustrations to simmer as negotiations dragged on, she said. Last summer’s peace offer by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to Arafat was seen here as a humiliation.
The offer called for dividing Jerusalem’s Old City and the mosque site into separate sovereign zones or spheres controlled either by Israel or the Palestinians.
“These seven years of peace negotiations have been very unbalanced for Palestinians, who wanted to see the fulfillment of their dreams and didn’t see it happen,” said Carmi, who is also a program administrator at Sabeel. “It drove us to the edge. In Camp David, people felt that the peace that they were offered was merely a `surrender.’
“It was very clear people would react. We didn’t know how. But thanks to Ariel Sharon, a direction was found,” she said, referring to the Israeli opposition leader’s Sept. 28 visit to al-Aqsa, that touched off the first round of riots.
(OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)
Carmi’s personal story is typical of many Christians in this region who are forced to navigate through the tumultuous currents of Middle East history. A tall, gentle-faced redhead, she was born in Jerusalem to an Armenian family, which fled to Palestine in 1917 from Turkey, escaping the Turkish genocide of the Armenian community.
Her family was forced to flee again from a west Jerusalem neighborhood to the city’s eastern Arab sector when the city was divided between Israel and Jordan in 1948. And thus Carmi became a refugee in the city of her birth.
Like many Christians here, Carmi has tried to maintain a balance between her commitment to tolerance and reconciliation and her quest for justice for the Palestinians even in these difficult times. Both, she says, are rooted in her Christian faith and experience.
“I grew up among the historic sites and the monuments. I studied in the school Ecco Hommo, located in the place where Jesus was put on trial,” she observes. “For me, these are not just tourist sites but living, breathing places,” she said.
“Yet sometimes, I feel that this fight over Jerusalem is not a fight over people loving Jerusalem,” she said. “It reminds me of the Bible story of the two women who came before King Solomon, each claiming the same newborn baby, and how the real mother protested when Solomon said that the baby should be divided into two. I don’t want this baby, called Jerusalem, to be killed.
“I remember standing at the Mount of Olives overlooking Jerusalem’s Old City with a group of Presbyterian tourists at 8:45 Thursday morning, Sept. 28, when Sharon first entered the al-Aqsa Mosque compound. We could see the soldiers around the mosque, and the helicopters flying around, and my silent prayer was `Oh God, not another massacre.”’
DEA END FLETCHER
