St. Mark’s Presbyterian
June 15, 2008
On the 4th day our Peace Pilgrimage to the Holy Land, our little band of Presbyterian pilgrims left Jerusalem to cross over from Israel into the occupied territories of Palestine. We would spend the next 5 days in Bethlehem in the place of Christ’s nativity. Of the many and varied Holy Sites that we would visit, I really came to appreciate Shepherds field in Bethlehem where archeologists know that for millennia, shepherds have kept their flocks in a number of caves. Each morning before the activities of the day would begin, I would walk over to Shepherds field. Sitting among the ruins of a 4th century Byzantine monastery, I gazed out upon the fields where the shepherds might have first heard the angel’s joyous proclamation of Christ’s birth and the good news of peace on earth. But gazing upon this tranquil scene required a kind of tunnel vision. If you looked around Bethlehem spread out in every direction, you were confronted with a very different reality. Because Bethlehem is a part of the occupied Palestinian territories, you see abundant evidence of Israeli control and domination. You have to look no farther than the wall that encircles the city. The reality of Israel’s military occupation of Palestine that has gone on now for 60 years, in defiance of international law and innumerable rulings by international court of justice and by the United Nations is largely invisible to the US public. This occupation can best be described as a system of institutional violence that affects Palestinian society at every level. Jimmy Carter has evoked a firestorm of controversy by naming the demon of occupation as an apartheid system. Was Carter right in making this claim? Let me share with you a little of what I saw in Bethlehem and other occupied territories and you make up your own mind.
This wall now almost completely encircles the Palestinian territories in both Gaza and the West Bank. This wall not only surrounds the Palestinian homeland but it cuts it up into lots of different pieces. Why is there a wall? Israel can make a pretty persuasive case that the wall is a necessary defense against Palestinian bombers. And that since the wall was constructed the number of bombings has dropped dramatically. Hard to argue with this. But when we talked to Israeli human rights groups they said that 80 % of the wall has nothing to do with security. One day we traveled from Bethlehem to a remote village called Baqa to see what the wall had done in that community. The wall was built in such a way that it broke the back of the town and literally destroyed the central market. The wall divided into two halves separated neighbors from neighbors, family members from family members, people from their shops’, farmers from their fields. And in some cases the wall separated people from their very houses. We saw a house cut in two by the wall. And the family that lived there could no longer go on their roof which had become an Israeli military observation point. But of course this family might think themselves fortunate because their next door neighbor’s entire house had been taken over as an Israeli security outpost. The neighbor’s house on the other side was left untouched. Except that there were two very large lamps mounted on the wall, shining directly into the 2nd floor master bedroom. It was hard to imagine what legitimate security concern would be served by the wall through Baqa.
How does a Palestinian get through the wall? Well most Palestinians don’t. Most cannot go from Bethlehem to Jerusalem for example. We talked to the headmaster of the Bethlehem bible college the most gentle Palestinian educator you could imagine who can’t get permission to attend the graduation ceremonies of a second campus that his college has opened in Galilee. Other Palestinians who do get permits must go through the checkpoints as our tour guide did each time we returned to Bethlehem. These checkpoints are places of bureaucratic arbitrariness and petty humiliation. Rami our tour guide says he gets hassled regularly and once had a soldier finally agree to let him pass through by tossing all his papers on the ground and telling Rami to pick them up. Across Palestine there are 63 permanent checkpoints, and at any given time 50 surprise checkpoints. We had one Christian Palestinian professor of theology ask his students, what would Jesus do at a checkpoint? It’s a difficult but very relevant question. At these checkpoints, people are delayed from all that they must do if not stopped from doing it altogether: Farmers who can see their fields from their homes but most go 30 miles around to attend to them. Students miss a final exam because they can’t get to class on time. Even mothers in labor have delivered their babies at checkpoints because of the interminable wait. But for all the inconvenience and daily humiliations, the checkpoints can be deadly places. The day before we were to go from Bethlehem to the Palestinian town of Nablus, a killing happened at the main check point into that town. It was all over the Israeli media; an Israeli settler showed us the headline: young suicide bomber with pipe bombs strapped across his chest is killed at checkpoint and said this is why we need the wall. We went on to Nablus the next day and were having a meeting with the local Muslim Sheik, a remarkably enlightened man that I will tell you more about in this series. And someone in the delegation expressed sadness to him about the violence at the checkpoint the previous day. The Sheik said that his daughter worked as an investigator with a Palestinian human rights group that documents violence at checkpoints. She went immediately to the checkpoint after the killing to try to ascertain what happened. And what she learned was this: the 15 year old boy was on his way to visit relatives. He had been talking on his cell phone to his father who was worried about him being out. The boy had actually told his father that he was already through the checkpoint because he didn’t want him to worry. He came through and was still talking on the cell phone as teenagers are wont to do when a soldier seeing a wire coming out of his shirt challenged him. Guns were raised and despite the pleas of all the other Palestinians in the checkpoint area, 6 shots were fired that killed the boy. The investigator’s immediate question, if the boy had pipe bombs across his chest why was there no explosions when he was shot? The investigator found after gathering all the evidence that she could from the Palestinians who witnessed the event, that the alleged pipe bombs were only cell phones, the one in the boys hand and another under his shirt. This account is now available on the internet but to my knowledge there was never a correction or retraction of the story.
South Africans who have visited Palestine have been asked if the occupation of the Palestinian territories reminds them of the apartheid system that they lived under in South Africa. They said, this is much worse. In South Africa, we had large territories that we could use and live in. It wasn’t good land, it wasn’t the prime agricultural land but at least we had it. But the occupation in Palestine is much worse they said because the occupied territories are so cut up and discontinuous. You see there are Israeli settlements everywhere. These illegal settlements are anywhere from large towns of 30,000 to small villages of 100 families. Some of the settler’s are simply economic settlers who were interested in Israeli offers of cheap housing. Other settlers are more militant, believing that Israel has a divine right to all of Palestine and they are willing to fight for that right. The settlements are not a huge geographical percentage of Palestine. But their impact on Palestine is far greater than the actual sites of the settlements. You see each settlement has a security zone surrounding it that is two or three times bigger than the settlement. And then there are the roads that connect the settlement to Jerusalem or to other points in Israel. These very nice highways are only for the settlers and their commute to Israel It is illegal for a Palestinian to be on these roads. And the roads themselves further dissect the Palestinian homeland. The question of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied territories is so critical to the peace process because through the settlements, Israel has a lock not just on the best land but on the most precious resource there is in Israel-Palestine: and that is water.
It’s hard to describe how different are these two societies living on either side of the wall. One Palestinian theologian Jonathan Kuttaub who was invited to address our General Assembly this month. Said it is almost as if Israel has a split personality, or schizophrenia. One the one side of the wall is evidence of this admirable Israeli idealism: Israel has a strong tradition of progressive almost utopian values. And from this value system, Israeli’s have built a democratic state with a sophisticated judicial system. But on the other side of the wall administered and controlled by the Israeli’s there is an entirely different reality for Palestinians. The laws and policies that govern Israel are superseded by the military occupation. At any time, Palestinians can be arrested without charges for 8 days. And this arrest without charges and without access to legal counsel can be extended by a military judge for 180 days. It is now widely documented that well into the 90’s Israel has practiced torture of the most brutal kind. I will spare you the details of the testimony that we heard from victims of torture. Out of a total population of 3.8 million Palestinians 700,000 have at some point been arrested or detained. Almost every Palestinian family has some direct experience of imprisonment. What we began to grasp is this: that two systems exist on either side of the wall. One is just governed by judicial law. And the other radically unjust governed by the law of the jungle.
On one side of the wall you have a relatively small nation of some 7 million citizens with an economy that almost rivals China, according a recent column by Thomas Friedman. But on the other side of the wall there is the economic deprivation with unemployment up to 35 % in the Palestinian territories. One of the most important aspects of our time in Bethlehem was the opportunity to stay in the homes of ordinary Palestinian families. Johnny Ahmad and his wife Dinar were my hosts. Johnny was a P. Christian (80% of the Palestinians in Bethlehem are Christian); Johnny spoke very good English and was quite a personality with a lively sense of humor. I teased Johnny that he should run for mayor of the city because as he drove us around Bethlehem he honked, waved and talked to everyone. While Johnny’s wife Dinar had a regular job as a social worker, Johnny often didn’t have work. He was very capable construction guy with a specialty in stone work but there was not much work. He shared the story of his brother who immigrated to Denmark where there are lots of jobs. Johnny asked him on the phone when he was going to come home and get married and stay. His brother said, what is there for me? If I came back and got married, then what? What would I do? As Johnny shared this with over breakfast I realized how much not having work weighs on him. Especially when his extended family has exhausted all their resources trying to find the money to pay for his mother’s chemotherapy. I noticed that Johnny was not eating his breakfast and he said he loved to eat more than anything else but that he often had a bad stomach. And then this seemingly fun loving guy with Palestinian bravado gave me this quick glimpse into his soul, “I am always nervous, just wondering what is going to happen next”.
Was Jimmy carter right? Is the Israeli occupation of Palestine a system of apartheid? Let’s not take his word for it, or my word for it. Let’s take the word of an Israeli attorney general Michael Ben Yair who on March 3, 2002 said yes of course this is an apartheid system. That is its very design and purpose. And let’s hear the word of Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa who spoke at the Sabeel Palestinian Liberation theology Center: Quoting selections from that speech. “I have been deep distressed in all my visits to the Holy Land, how so much of what was taking place there reminded me so much of what used to happen to us blacks in apartheid South Africa”. Tutu said he felt a sense of déjŕ vu when he saw a security checkpoint which Palestinians have to negotiate most of their lives. Or when someone pointed out a Palestinian home that has been taken over by the Israeli’s. Tutu said I can rehearse what we all know. “I could have bemoaned the illegal wall that has encroached on Palestinian land, separated families, divided property and made what used to be a short walk to school turn into an expensive nightmare voyage running the gauntlet of checkpoints.” Tutu said I could rehearse all of that but I choose not to. Instead Tutu said that while fighting apartheid in South Africa he drew inspiration from the Jewish struggle in the Bible. “Spiritually I am of Hebrew descent”, Tutu said. “When apartheid oppression was at its most vicious, and all but knocked the stuffing out of those who opposed it, we turned to the Hebrew tradition of resistance: and the belief that good will triumph over evil, and that a day of freedom from oppression will come he said. “There is a cry of anguish from the depths of my heart to my spiritual relatives, (the Jews). Please, please hear the call, the noble call of our scripture. Don’t be found fighting against this God, your God, and our God who hears the cries of the oppressed”.
So where is God in all of this? Sometimes I wonder why a congregation like St. Mark’s dares to care about the struggles of the world. When we hear about the conflict between the Palestinians and Israeli’s we could easily say, I can’t do anything about it. I’ve got enough challenges of my own. But in the midst of all this tragic situation in Palestine and Israel. In the midst of a world that is busy constructing walls between the rich and the poor, constructing walls that separate and divide and alienate humanity, we dare to proclaim the good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The God of Israel, the God of all peoples was born in Bethlehem. We dare to proclaim the story of Good News: “In that region there were shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night. And an Angel appeared to them and said, I bring you good news of a great Joy which will come to all the people, for to you is born this day in the city of David, a Savior who is Christ the Lord, And suddenly there was a multitude of the heavenly host praising God saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth Peace!”. This God who comes into the world and is born in Bethlehem is word made flesh. And this Word made flesh is a word of peace that has the power to dismantle all walls of hostility. The walls that separate us from God, the wall that separates us from our own best self, the walls that separate us from each other, the walls that separate one people from another. For this Christ is our peace, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility that he might create one new humanity in place of the two, so making peace. The Christ child born in Bethlehem is the Crucified and Risen One who is Lord of the universe and is everywhere dismantling walls of hostility that divide and alienate humankind. No wall can ultimately stand up to God’s loving power and the saving grace made visible in Jesus. By the gracious power of God’s love and justice the Iron curtain that separated Eastern and Western Europe did not stand. By the gracious power of God’s love and justice, the wall of segregation that separated blacks and whites in the American south and in Apartheid South Africa, that wall did not stand. The Wall that is being built on our US –Mexico border, by the gracious power of God’s love and justice that wall will not stand. And the Wall that separates Palestinians and Israeli’s by the gracious power of God’s love and Justice, that wall will not stand. We are gathered here this morning to worship the God who makes walls tumble down. A God who overcomes every power to hurt or divide us, A God who is born to us in a vulnerable child in Bethlehem, and who is faithful to the divine promise to bring peace on earth. Thanks be to God.