Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 2000, Pages 66, 69

Special Report

Church Groups Offer “Beacons of Hope” to Palestinian Communities—If the “Beacons” Can Get Through

By Alan L. Heil Jr.

“ One month ago, Israeli Acting Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben Ami released a statement assuring humanitarian organizations that Israel would not block their efforts. We in the aid community were greatly relieved—until the reality proved to be much different from the promises. Authorities are detaining winter clothing, food and emergency surgical supplies at Ben-Gurion Airport, the Ashdod port, the Allenby Bridge from Jordan, and the Gaza checkpoints. Food and clothing are needed by families whose fathers haven’t worked in more than a month (because of Israeli closures) and medical supplies are intended for more than 9,000 people lying in overburdened Palestinian hospitals. The world must know that the least-told story of this crisis is the illegal humanitarian siege that adds to the rage of an occupied people.”

—Tom Getman, Director in Israel/Palestine, World Vision

“The indications show there are no more tourists coming. They have cancelled. Even on Christmas, I am sure that we will have only a few hundred visitors, compared with 20,000 last year. In order to secure the safety of residents in this and other towns across the West Bank, Israelis and Palestinians must return to the negotiating table. Neither side can achieve their goal through fighting and therefore there is no alternative other than to make a lasting peace.”

—Hanna Nasser, Mayor of Bethlehem, in an interview with the Voice of America

This was supposed to have been the brightest and most festive Christmas in the Holy Land in many years, the climax of the Millennium 2000 observance. Instead, it is a bleak and often dark holiday—with checkpoints cutting off visits to Bethlehem, and its neighboring towns of Beit Jala and Beit Sahur ravaged by daily blockades, nightly artillery attacks and Israeli shelling which has cost lives and damaged scores of homes. What was to have been the best of Christmases became the worst Christmas in more than a decade in the rugged hills which for centuries have been a symbol of peace and goodwill.

Since Sept. 28, when Israeli Likud leader Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem set off Palestinian protest demonstrations and preponderant use of force by the Israeli army, some 300 civilians have been killed and thousands wounded, most of them Palestinian civilians. Non-governmental and church aid organizations have been stretched to the limit to help victims of the violence.

Solomon Nour, director of the Mennonite Hope School, recently wrote an update to the United Methodist Liaison of Jerusalem which, he said, contained good news and bad news:

“First, the good news. On Wednesday, Mohammed Atia, our eighth grade student who was shot in the abdomen during the first week of the conflict, was able to return to school. We are very glad to see him. He is still pale and tires easily, but he wanted to get back to a ‘normal’ life. School is still going on. Most of the students are able to pass by the soldiers stationed just outside the school without too much difficulty. They all wear school shirts to identify them as students here.

“Now for the bad news: Shooting generally begins only at night, making it very difficult for our students to study and sleep. Usually, gunfire and missile attacks last from 6 to 10 p.m., although once this week it started at 3:45 in the afternoon and lasted until after midnight. The uncertainty of this time is very stressful. Many houses were damaged and water tanks and cisterns cracked. There is a general internal migration from the northern area of Beit Jala closest to the fighting to the southern area. The mounds of rubble and stone blocking the roads between Beit Jala and the school are removed and replaced at the whim of the soldiers. Currently, the roads are clear; we pray it will stay that way.”

Among a number of other non-governmental and Christian organizations assisting Palestinians in critical need this season is The Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation (HCEF). Following its second annual conference Oct. 20-21 in Washington, DC, attended by Christian leaders both from across the nation and the Middle East, HCEF is moving out on a number of fronts to offer support to war-torn Palestinian communities in the West Bank and Gaza. Initiatives include:

• A rapid expansion of a scholarship program to aid Palestinian Christian children at a time of grave crisis in their daily lives. Under this Child Sponsorship Program, denominations in more than 30 cities across the United States have granted $300 scholarships to 73 Palestinian Christian elementary and high school-age students for the 2000-2001 academic year. The number is growing each week. For many of the students, classes have been interrupted because of Israeli shelling of Palestinian schools, power cuts, or because students’ homes have been damaged. Under these circumstances, and with fathers out of work, scholarship aid is especially critical.

• Sale through HCEF member churches of handicrafts (including olive wood crèche figures, Christmas cards, ornaments and other products) at a time when every bit of income may help supply basic necessities for Palestinian artisans. HCEF leaders in the Baltimore, Maryland area have been particularly active in preparing exhibits of Palestinian artwork for sale at churches this Christmas season—a vital source of much-needed assistance.

• A national tour by HCEF co-founders Father Emil Salayta of the Latin Patriarchate School of Jerusalem, and Rateb Rabie of Silver Spring, Maryland to raise funds for the assistance of Arab Christian communities in Palestine and Jordan. The two leaders, who established HCEF about two years ago, recently visited Atlanta, Houston, Detroit and northern New Jersey to encourage formation of regional HCEF organizations and to raise critically needed funds for emergency relief in the Holy Land. Salayta and Rabie emphasized that both moral and financial expressions of support are necessary “to show Christians there that their brothers and sisters in the West support them in this time of great crisis.”

The Beacons of Hope scholarship program of the Child Sponsorship Program, according to the HCEF’s Duane Burchick, is a particularly important long-range initiative. He hopes it will build lasting friendships, long after the present fighting has stopped, between Arab and American Christian students. The Beacons of Hope project involves not only contributions of money to enable Palestinian and Jordanian children to attend school, but it also encourages “pen pal” relationships between young people in the American donor churches and their contemporaries in the Holy Land.

One example is Heritage Presbyterian Church in Alexandria, Virginia. It has awarded two scholarships, one to eight-year-old second grader John Moris Mattar in Beit Jala, and another to 15-year-old eighth grader Yousef Hanna Yousef Awad in Beit Sahour. As part of the church’s education program, elementary and high school students at Heritage are exchanging letters with the scholarship recipients. “The exchanges,” says HCEF’s Burchick, “are like life preservers at this time of great stress in the lives of Arab children and their families. The letters show that American Christians care. We feel we are developing lasting ties, special relationships for a new generation.”

An instrumental link in the current exchange of letters is Maher al-Atrash, a close associate of Father Salyata who delivers and picks up correspondence between Palestinian and American Christian young people in the Bethlehem area. The church worker, whose home in Beit Sahour was badly damaged in a recent Israeli artillery attack, ventures out at night to pick up letters to America from scholarship recipients and deliver responses to them. “It is very difficult and somewhat risky to drive in such a situation,” al-Atrash reports. “With headlights on, we become a target for the Israeli guns…with lights off we are in danger of a serious accident.”

He recently evacuated his own family one evening after a terrifying Israeli aerial attack on their home and others in his neighborhood.

At a recent HCEF board meeting, Rabie and Father Salayta observed that Americans who have become acquainted with Palestinians and their plight during visits to the Holy Land almost invariably return with vivid memories of the injustices, and these days the escalating violence, which plague the region. If the shooting stops, the two hope next spring to be able to organize a visit by a substantial delegation of HCEF leaders to Palestine and Israel. The group’s goal: to visit schools which have benefited from the Beacons of Hope project, view the situation in the region firsthand, and enlist support for the descendants of the first Christians, the so-called “living stones,” in churches throughout the United States.

Alan L. Heil Jr. is a former Middle East correspondent for the Voice of America and member of Heritage Presbyterian Church in Alexandria, Virginia.