Borders, Walls and Expropriation

The Life of a Christian in Palestine

BETHLEHEM — Good news for Christians in the Holy Land generally comes with a subtext of anguish.

The only Catholic parish in the Gaza Strip — a 26-mile-long slice of territory on the Mediterranean squeezed between Israel and Egypt — managed to get permits for 857 Christians to travel to Bethlehem and Jerusalem.

That’s about 66% of Gaza’s entire Christian population of 1,300, which includes some 130 Catholics.

Product of a tumultuous recent past, Gaza has been blockaded by Israel since 2007. Many of the people who received the unexpected 45-day travel permits, especially men under age 35, have not been allowed to leave the Palestinian territory, twice the size of Washington, D.C., in eight years. Israel fears they could be terrorists.

Just two border crossings link Gaza with the rest of the world: In the north, the Israeli military controls access, and in the south, Egypt has it locked.

“We praise the Lord for this grace,” said Father Mario de Silva, a priest at Gaza’s Holy Family Church, who helped prepare permit applications. It was the first year Catholics managed the process on behalf of the Catholic and Orthodox communities. Most Palestinian Christians in Gaza are Orthodox.

 

Devastating War

Two years ago, during the 50-day war between Israel and Gaza, Holy Family Church was in the news because it was damaged under air attack. Nearly half the population had homes damaged or destroyed by relentless bombing.

War-related destruction still cripples life in Gaza, mainly because basic construction materials, including concrete and cement, aren’t locally available and are restricted by Israel and Egypt, which say radicals might use them.

Gaza has the highest unemployment rate in the world — about 43% for adults and 60% for youth. The population is very young: 43% of Gaza residents are under age 15. A recent United Nations report describes the dense area’s future as “unlivable” by 2020 based on the lack of water, housing and jobs. Even leading Israeli publications include articles on the unacceptable living conditions in Gaza.

Unable to see a future, many try to leave the Gaza Strip for good, despite loving their homeland.

A delegation of bishops and staff from around the world, sponsored by the Holy See, visited Gaza in January as part of the annual Holy Land Coordination pilgrimage, started in 1998 to support Christian communities in the region.

The delegation toured transitional wood houses built with Catholic Relief Services’ (CRS) support. Hundreds have been completed in Gaza and the town of Khizaa, but, the delegation learned, the program is imperiled by an Israeli ban on imported wood.

According to press reports, Israel bans wood to prevent militants from using it in tunnel construction, designed to evade border checkpoints.

 

Reversal

The Holy Land delegation’s 14 bishops also visited the West Bank, on the Jordan River, 25 miles away. Although the land is not contiguous, the Gaza Strip and West Bank together comprise the state of Palestine, recognized by the Holy See last June.

Some believe Vatican recognition of Palestine has led to more harsh treatment of Christian communities by Israeli officials, especially Christians who live near the Israel-Palestine border.

For example, a year ago, the army planned to build a 25-foot concrete separation barrier in the Cremisan Valley, a rare swath of green, agricultural land south of Jerusalem, where the West Bank’s only winery is run by a Salesian monastery. The proposed wall would divide the monastery from a Salesian convent and school. It would separate the school from its Palestinian students, and it would allow Israel to confiscate productive, ancient land from 58 Palestinian Christian families. A legal battle over the wall went on for years. The Israeli Supreme Court ruled against the government.

Catholic media and the Christian press trumpeted the ruling last April as an important victory.

The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Fouad Twal — effectively, the archbishop for all Latin-rite Catholics in Israel, Palestine, Jordan and Cyprus — was ecstatic, having supported the legal defense of the Salesian Sisters and mounted a global campaign on the fundamental injustice of separating sisters from brothers, students from school and landowners from vineyards.

 

Land Confiscation

So it was a shock last summer when the Israeli Supreme Court reversed itself and gave the army a green light to build the intrusive structure. Under the latest scheme, the monastery and convent remain, technically, accessible to each other on the West Bank side of the wall, but private land, including fruit-bearing trees, will be confiscated and taken for the Israeli side.

Digging started last August, beginning with the harsh uprooting of ancient trees, just weeks before they were due for harvest. Christians comprise less than 2% of the population in Israel and the West Bank; taking away their land and livelihood is tantamount to evicting them, say local observers.

Auxiliary Bishop William Shomali, vicar of the Latin Patriarch, told Agenzia Fides he suspects the distressing reversal could be “a reaction to the recent official recognition of the state of Palestine by the Holy See.”

When Holy Land Coordination bishops, including Bishop Oscar Cantu of Las Cruces, N.M., tried to get close to where Israeli bulldozers had knocked down olive trees on Christian Palestinian land, Israeli border police in an armored vehicle arrived and refused the bishops entry to the area, according to witnesses.

Security forces pushed the Catholic delegation away aggressively and interrupted on-site conversations with landowners, although they were not physically violent.

Back home, on Jan. 20, Bishop Cantu wrote to Susan Rice, White House national security adviser, to “highlight the injustice being perpetrated in the Cremisan Valley,” describing what the delegation witnessed as confiscation and arguing that Israel should build its security wall on Israeli land instead of “compromising the ministry of Christian institutions and the rights of Christian landowners.”  

 

Church of Calvary

Patriarch Twal often refers to the Church he leads as a “Church of Cavalry.”

He amplified the elements of suffering during the World Meeting of Families last September in Philadelphia: Christians face confiscation and occupation of lands, the Israeli wall, travel restrictions, checkpoints, detentions, emigration and religious fanaticism from both radical Muslims and Jews.

As the patriarch said, “We pray, we weep, we suffer, and we wait.”

Two ominous trends have marked an escalation in violence in Israel and the West Bank: Muslims have committed random stabbings of Israeli citizens in the last six months, and Jewish extremists have carried out so-called “price tag” attacks on Christian churches and Islamic sites since about 2012.

The Holy See blames the spiral of violence on the lack of “sustained negotiations entered into in good faith,” as the Vatican’s representative to the United Nations said in a January speech.

Catholic leaders living in the Holy Land are more direct. In a statement posted on the Latin Patriarchate’s website, the region’s Catholic ordinaries, who met in Amman, Jordan, in March, declared: “The root cause of the problem is occupation, which is deprivation of freedom and human dignity.”

 

International Protests

Israel has been appropriating significant West Bank land tracts in the Jordan Valley this year, causing the governments of France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States to protest.

U.S. State Department press spokesman John Kirby said, “This decision is, in our view, the latest step in what appears to be an ongoing process of land expropriations, settlement expansions and legalizations of outposts that is fundamentally undermining the prospects for a two-state solution.”

The seizures began in January, according to Reuters.

“Considering America’s enormous leverage, the U.S. should be morally compelled to use its influence on Israel to stop the continuous seizure of Christian lands, which contribute to our extinction,” a Palestinian priest, who spent many years in New York, told the Register by phone from the West Bank.

He recommended all U.S. Catholics read Patriarch Emeritus Michel Sabbah’s Holy Week prayer, a sermon he gave on the Wednesday of Holy Week at St. Etienne Church in Jerusalem, to see how Christians try to coax both Jews and Muslims to see God in each other.

The patriarch emeritus said, “We pray for all those who suffer under the occupation, those Palestinians who go to die in these days, for all prisoners who are being tortured, for all those who have had their houses demolished.”

“Israel may tell us: ‘All these people are terrorists; you cannot be in solidarity with them.’ We say: ‘All these prisoners, all those who go to die, all those [who are] exiled or have their houses demolished, are people whom you oppress, who ask for their freedom and human dignity,’” the priest continued.

“Moreover, they are human beings created in the image and resemblance of God. Furthermore, in you also, our occupiers and our oppressors, we see the image of God. You, too — you are created by God in his image and resemblance. You, too, are called to see the image of God in yourself, so that you become able to see him in others. With this vision only, the vision of God in every human being, a just peace can be achieved for everyone.”

Senior Register correspondent Victor Gaetan is an award-winning international

correspondent and a contributor to Foreign Affairs magazine.