Palestine struggle

10-day visit last month - not Holy Sites but fellow Christians. Guest of a Palestinian friend who is the Anglican priest in Ramallah in the Occupied Territories. I also visited Jerusalem and Bethlehem. I met Jewish people, Israeli and American, as well as Muslims, but spent most of my time with Palestinian Christians. As you will know, the flow of overseas visitors and pilgrims to the Holy Land has all but dried up, just at a time when the number of Church members is dwindling fast, and those left behind feel increasingly isolated from the rest of the Christian world.

The Church is of course overwhelmingly Palestinian. They are scattered around the land, mostly members of the Eastern Orthodox Churches, but there is an Anglican Diocese, as well as a RC Church and Reformed congregations. But one thing they all have in common with all other Palestinians: they live their lives under severe military restrictions.

For instance, roads from place to place are all controlled by soldiers at Checkpoints. Your ID card is stamped with the name of the town or village in which you live, and you cannot leave it without passing a roadblock. At some Checkpoints vehicles can't cross without advance permission. When I went by car between the Palestinian towns of Ramallah and Birzeit we had to park the car on one side of the Checkpoint and then walk 10 minutes to the other side where we took a taxi. No through traffic allowed at all, and tanks are parked there to discourage you from chancing your arm. Even ambulances may not cross, and patients have to walk or be carried across, and the same with trade vehicles. It doesn't take long to imagine the impact of this on the social, commercial and family life of the Palestinian community. Towns and villages are like Open Prisons.

I was always treated with courtesy and respect by the Israeli soldiers, but not so my companions. On two occasions, once at a Checkpoint between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and once at the entrance to a Settlement called Har Adar, soldiers threatened to shoot my companions, for no offence that they or I could see. I was shocked but they were not - it happens every day. It is the unofficial part of the official government policy of Collective Punishment. Besides violence against the person, CP includes closures and curfews with minimum warning, demolition of houses and olive groves to make way for highways and Jewish Settlements, revoking of residence rights, and forcible deportation - all of which is contrary to International Law and the Geneva Convention. Human Rights organisations, Israeli and Palestinian, work hard to collect evidence, take affidavits, document and publicise abuses and violations, so that wider world knows what is going on. So the violence against Palestinians is collective, arbitrary, indiscriminate and of course illegal.

I mention the violence committed against Palestinians first because the number of Palestinians killed and wounded far exceeds the number of Jewish people killed. The appalling suicide bombing of the extremist Palestinian groups, like Hamas and Islamic Jihad take a terrible toll, and no political agenda can possible justify such terrible crimes. They are regularly condemned by the Palestinian Authority who disown these extremist groups and all that they do. But of course there is no comparison between the two sides in terms of armaments: Palestinians may have rifles and grenades, even a mortar, but these are no match for tanks, helicopter gunships and missiles - all supplied incidentally by the US.

So you have to ask yourself what can the Palestinian community do to get justice. Their land annexed, their homes confiscated, their economy 40% below the standard of Israel's economy, and their life controlled by an illegal occupying power, plus a serious humanitarian disaster looming. They appeal to the international community, and the UN Security Council repeatedly passes resolutions requiring Israel to withdraw from land they have invaded, and to protect the human rights of occupied peoples. The resolutions are ignored. Not surprisingly Palestinians accuse the West of selective double standards. If the justification for acting against Iraq is the authority of UN Resolutions, why do member states continue to disregard UN resolutions relating to Israel/Palestine?

A new peace initiative is desperately needed. All sensible people favour the so-called Two-State Solution (Israel and Palestine living side by side as two sovereign states), but this objective becomes steadily less realistic as more and more Palestinian land is seized for new Israeli Settlements and the highways that link them together. Thus the Palestinian community is being divided up into small separated parcels of land and the possibility of a coherent, viable and sovereign state for Palestinians gets more and more remote.

There is of course so much else to say. Very few Palestinians and Israelis dispute the right of the others to parts of the land: the question is which parts, where, and when. So the tragedy continues to deepen, a tragedy for Jews as well as Arabs, because the wonderful Jewish traditions of strong family and community life, their wonderful cultural and business achievements which have so vastly enriched Western life, are being steadily undermined (as the Chief Rabbi put it recently). The fact is that the only way Israel can hope to live in peace and security with its neighbours is by giving justice to the Palestinians, or in the words of Isaiah (32:16) It is justice that brings peace, and the fruit of justice shall be confidence and quietness for ever.

David Haslam

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