NEWS STORY: Aid Worker Dan Simmons Has Been Going to a Lot of Funerals Lately

c. 2003 Religion News Service JERUSALEM _ Dan Simmons, director of World Vision in Israel and the Palestinian territories, has been visiting Israel, the West Bank and Gaza regularly for the last 23 years. But he says this current period is the worst he has experienced in terms of both the overall levels of violence […]

c. 2003 Religion News Service

JERUSALEM _ Dan Simmons, director of World Vision in Israel and the Palestinian territories, has been visiting Israel, the West Bank and Gaza regularly for the last 23 years. But he says this current period is the worst he has experienced in terms of both the overall levels of violence and its impact on children.

And all too often, that violence has touched people who were part of World Vision’s outreach efforts.


“Just recently, I had to pay a condolence call to the family of 11-year-old Christina Sa’adeh in the Bethlehem suburb of Beit Sahour,” Simmons said. “She was the daughter of the principal of the local Greek Orthodox school, an institution that we assist. Christina was shot to death in her family’s car in Bethlehem’s Nativity Square by Israeli soldiers, who mistook the vehicle for that of an armed Palestinian. The mother, father and older sister were also injured. But Christina died.”

Then there was the case of Faher, a 10-year-old boy from the Gaza refugee camp, Rafah. The boy was shot in the face a year ago by the Israeli army, and yet managed to recover his sight thanks to a World Vision initiative, which sent him to Egypt for an operation to remove shrapnel from his eye.

“Then one night last autumn there was another Israeli military assault on Rafah,” Simmons recalled. “The following morning, it appeared that the army had withdrawn, and Faher set out for school.” But when Faher arrived at school he found it closed and on his way home with schoolmates, the path was blocked by a tank. Soldiers armed with machine guns opened fire on the crowd of youngsters. “Faher,” said Simmons, “was shot in the head and killed instantly by a 50-caliber bullet.”

“I was here in the first intifada, and by comparison, Palestinians and aid workers could move around relatively freely,” Simmons recounts. “Today, the level of violence is so high that we’ve had sniper guns and tanks trained on our food aid convoys _ even when we notified the army in advance that we were coming. When we unload food and medicines, people often have a hard time coming to pick them up.”

“We are a child-centered organization,” Simmons said of World Vision, a Christian NGO operating in more than 100 countries, “and it is the children who have suffered the most in this intifada. As someone who is opposed to the killing of all civilians, Jewish or Arab, one thing we should be able to agree on is that children should not be targeted.”

Simmons, who sports a white cowboy hat that betrays his Montana roots, was a parish pastor in Missoula when he first became interested in the Middle East conflict in the early 1980s.

Shuttling back and forth to the region on various missions, he became convinced a close reading of gospel teachings vis-a-vis the poor and the downtrodden also implied support for Palestinians, living under Israeli occupation.


An evangelical, he has remained something of an anomaly in a world that is usually heavily identified with support of Israel’s policies. But he believes many evangelicals at the grass-roots level would like to see a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict that takes into account Palestinian needs and aspirations.

The “road map” being touted by Bush remains an unknown entity in terms of how it will play itself out, he said, while warning that postponing the resolution of painful issues like settlements to some future date could lead this new peace initiative into a quagmire, as happened with the 1993 Oslo Agreement.

“I think that most Palestinians would be all too happy to live alongside Israel in a separate state involving the West Bank and Gaza, and resume normal life again,” Simmons said. “But the Oslo Agreements was a prescription for disaster from the start. It cut up the West Bank and Gaza into many different areas, and that was really the beginning of the restrictions on Palestinian life and movement, restrictions that have become more and more severe.”

Simmons also believes there is a growing Palestinian weariness with suicide bombings and new _ quiet _ support for nonviolence. He hopes that grass-roots activities by organizations like World Vision can reinforce such trends on both sides of the Jewish-Arab divide.

“I’ve met … with Israeli Jewish parents recently whose children were killed by recent suicide bomb attacks. They started a circle of bereavement including Palestinians,” he said. “Those Israeli parents, as well, are absolutely against the occupation. They said it is the occupation that killed their children.”

DEA END FLETCHER

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