The ‘Living Stones’ of the Holy Land

In the sixth part of his series on the Pilgrimage of the Peacemakers, GÜNTHER SIMMERMACHER looks at the situation of the Christians of the Holy Land – the ‘Living Stones’.

“Alluha Akhbar!”  Our ears perked up.  The Palestinian priest had just said — at Holy Mass! — the words which Western minds associate with hirsute jihadists driven by murderous rage.

“God is great,” the 91-year-old priest said, by way of praise for the Lord of Life. The diminutive but sprightly Mgr Sleiman Samander was the main celebrant at a Mass in Arabic, the language of the Christians in the Middle East, in the church of Our Lady of Sorrows on the Mount of Olives which our Pilgrimage of the Peacemakers group attended with local Catholics.

Mgr Samander has been a priest for almost 68 years, entering the clerical life just seven weeks after the state of Israel was founded in 1948.

Attached to the parish is a home for disabled elderly people, run by the Sisters of Notre Dame des Dolours. Our group visited the home. One resident told every one of us as we passed, “I love you”, another greeted us with the word habibi, Arabic for “friend”. Our visit meant more to these people than we can imagine. No doubt word spread throughout the parish and the Christian community of Jerusalem that day about our visit and presence at a local Mass, especially since that also involved our Archbishop Stephen Brislin.

The story of the Palestinian Christians, a fast-diminishing community due to low birthrates and emigration, is rarely told.

The world sees the conflict between Israel and Palestinians as being about religion, Jews versus Muslims. But Israel makes no such distinction: Palestinians are oppressed and humiliated without regard to their religion. Palestinians are robbed of their land or assaulted by settlers regardless of whether they are Muslim or Druze or Christian.

The Christians are also feeling the pressures of being a minority within a majority of Muslims, in an environment where group identity is important in the competition for limited access to scarce resources. They are caught between the hammer and the anvil, with Israel as the hammer. As long as the hammer strikes, as it relentlessly does, the anvil isn’t the bigger problem. In fact, the Christians of Palestine share the experience of oppression and dispossession with their Muslim neighbours.

They share the experience of the Nakba, a word that means catastrophe and refers to the expulsion of Palestinians from their ancestral homes by Jewish militias and then the Israeli army that preceded and followed the founding of the state of Israel. Bands of militia or troops would commit selected massacres in Palestinian towns and villages. With the threat of more to come, the terrified residents of neighbouring village would then flee, taking the keys of their houses with them. But they could never return.

The refugee families have kept these keys, and many Palestinian towns have public displays of a key as a reminder of the Nakba and a symbol of the claim for the Right to Return (a demand that is a fundamental sticking point in any negotiations, as I’ll explain next week).

Israel is still taking Palestinian land by force today in the West Bank through its illegal settlements that are built in contravention of international law. One such case, in the Cremisan Valley near Bethlehem, has prompted much protest by the Catholic Church and even Western governments after Israel expropriated land belonging to the Salesian order to build the Separation Wall. The plans to build the illegal settlements that will be protected by the wall are already in place.

Four Palestinian categories

In the Holy Land there are four categories of Palestinian Arabs; three of these groups include sizable portions of Christians.

♦ Firstly, some Palestinians are citizens of Israel, making up 20% of the state’s population.

Nominally they have the same rights as Jewish citizens, though most would say that this does not always correspond with reality. When Israel or its supporters reject the accusation that it is an “apartheid state”, it refers to these citizens.

These citizens, whom the state refers to as “the Arabs of Israel”, can travel freely on their Israeli passport, but they must obtain permits to visit their friends or families in the West Bank or Gaza.

For Christians this becomes a problem if they want to travel from, say, Nazareth in Israel to Bethlehem in the West Bank to visit family or pray in the church of the Nativity at Christmas. There never is a guarantee that all family members will receive a permit.

 

♦  Most Palestinians live in the West Bank — the area Israel annexed from Jordan after the 1967 war — in towns like Bethlehem, Bethany, Nablus, Ramallah and Hebron, and in many villages. Some parts of the West Bank are subject to Israel’s military occupation. Other parts are governed by the Palestinian Authority, currently led by the corrupt Fatah (corruption goes with the territory: Israel’s former prime minister, Ehud Olmert, was jailed for corruption, joining in prison a former president convicted of rape).

The Israeli Defence Force commits many documented human rights violations in the West Bank, from the detention of children—detention without trial, sometimes for years, is common among adults — to collective punishment (razing the house of a family whose son committed an act of violence, such as throwing stones), to burning down olive groves, to plain murder.

West Bank residents may leave their area only with the permission of Israel. Very often, they receive no such permission.

♦  Virtually all residents of Gaza are Palestinians, though the priest who runs the Catholic parish there at present is an Argentinian.

An enclave on the Mediterranean Sea, Gaza is governed by Hamas whose deplorable practice of firing their ineffectual rockets into Israeli territory has been met by sustained hi-tech bombing by Israel in 2008 and 2014, which has destroyed much of the region’s already poor infrastructure.

Churches are allowed in Gaza. There are only just over a hundred Catholics in Gaza, yet the Church there runs educational facilities, used mostly by Muslim children. These facilities are co-ed, with the permission of Hamas.

Gaza is under a blockade, which means that influx of everything, from food to medicine, is controlled by Israel. Leaving Gaza requires a rarely granted permit. Entering Gaza isn’t easy either. In January a group of Catholic bishops, including Archbishop Brislin, were held up for eight hours at the border before they were allowed in.

♦  East Jerusalem is the Palestinian part of the Holy City, though Israeli settlements are now being built there in violation of international law. Palestinians registered as residents of East Jerusalem are stateless. They have neither Israeli nor Palestinian citizenship. If they travel, they do so on Israeli and Jordanian travel documents.

Importantly, East Jerusalemites are allowed to travel freely within Israel. They lose that right, however, if they live in the West Bank. So one might have a nice house in nearby Bethany or Bethlehem, but must rent at high cost in East Jerusalem in order to work in Israel.

Solidarity with Christians

Living under these conditions, which affect Christians and Muslims alike, it is not difficult to see why Palestinian Christians see Israel as the primary aggressor. And that is why Palestinian Christians feel the pain when other followers of Christ choose loyalty to Israel, a state that disenfranchises and dispossesses them, over the community that can trace its history right back to the places and times of Our Lord in places like Bethlehem, Nazareth and Jerusalem.

The Palestinian Christians feel the pain when Catholic pilgrim groups turn up in these places with a Jewish instead of a local Christian guide, of whom there are many. It is a puzzling choice; surely a Christian guide identifies with the faith of the pilgrim better than a guide who is not Christian. It is the difference between a pilgrimage as a journey of faith and a pilgrimage as faith-themed tourism.

An example: on a previous pilgrimage our Roman Catholic Palestinian guide, Rimon Makhlouf, entered the church of the Annunciation and knelt down as he gazed upon the grotto where the Archangel Gabriel talked to Our Lady. Rimon began praying: “Hail Mary, full of grace…” It was the act of a devout Catholic guiding us through the medium of prayer to a sanctified place.

But there is another reason to use Christian Palestinian guides and, where possible, Christian Palestinian services: in order to show solidarity with the descendants of Christ’s first followers and sustaining an economy that will keep them in the Holy Land. The Christians of the Holy Land are known as the “Living Stones”. If we allow the Living Stones to disappear, it is often said, the ancient stones — the sacred shrines — will be no more than museum pieces.

To my mind, when Catholic pilgrimages don’t use Christian operators, they are failing their fellow Christians and their Church. And so are some of the shops at Catholic sites. The store on the Mount of Beatitudes, a Franciscan site, sells T-shirts and souvenirs extolling the oppressor of the local Christians: the state of Israel. That is unconscionable! Imagine a souvenir shop on Robben Island selling items of apartheid nostalgia.

A beautiful community

The Palestinian Christians are a beautiful community. The rest of the Christian world has much to learn from them. Their faith is strong and devout. They are proud of their Christian traditions.

And unlike the Christians that come to the Holy Land from afar to have petty fights in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Palestinian Christians love and support one another, as Christians should. Among them, sectarian differences are entirely unimportant. The great feasts are celebrated together, if necessary more than once, as at Easter or Christmas. Where the church of the Holy Sepulchre is a teeming mesh of division and tension, the faithful of Palestine truly are one, as Christ calls on us to be.

This is not an idealised view. We find this unity practically everywhere where Christians are a persecuted minority. But where the persecution in most of the Middle East comes from radical Islam and in India from nationalistic Hinduism, in the Holy Land it is political.

They are indeed caught between the hammer and the anvil, and many have escaped that intolerable situation by emigration. But some have returned from the rich and free West, like the beer-brewing Khoury family from Taybeh whom I mentioned in the article on Samaria, or Sam Hallhu, who produces gourmet salt from the Dead Sea.

The Christian roots in the land are deep. These are the descendants of the first Christians, and of the Jews from the Old Testament, and they love their land deeply.

The Christians of the Holy Land see themselves as agents of peace in a land that should be shared by all who live in it. Every Christian we spoke to about the conflict said the same thing: this is not about Muslim or Jew, or Arab or Israeli. This is about peace and justice. The Christians of the Holy Land want to act as builders of bridges.

And all of them ask of their fellow followers of Christ: “Please do not forget us!” Indeed, we must not forget them.

Alluha Akhbar!

 

Last Week: Bethlehem

 

Günther Simmermacher is the author of The Holy Land Trek: A Pilgrim’s Guide, published by Southern Cross Books (order from www.holylandtrek.com). Join The Southern Cross on the Year of Mercy Pilgrimage to the Holy Land in October, led by Fr Larry Kaufmann CSsR. For details and illustrated itinerary see www.fowlertours.co.za/kaufmann