Printed in the Smoky Mountain News last holiday season.
Reprinted with permission from the author, Doug Wingeier.
Some years back I spent the Christmas season in the Land of
the Holy One. (It is not the land that is holy, but the One who was born,
lived, died, and rose there.) This was one of my several sojourns in
Israel/Palestine over the years. My strongest impression at that time (and
conditions have only gotten worse since) was of the oppression my
Palestinian Christian brothers and sisters--along with their Muslim
neighbors--were enduring under the Israeli occupation. I was struck with how
similar this was to the Roman oppression of local inhabitants in the time
of Jesus.
On Christmas Eve, worshippers, both pilgrims from abroad and
local Palestinian Christians, had to pass through checkpoints on the way from Jerusalem to Bethlehem,
manned by rude, trigger-happy teenage Israeli soldiers.. Some were barred
entrance and turned back. Entering Manger
Square, where several choirs from around the world
were to sing Christmas music to be broadcast worldwide, we were subjected to
frisking, metal detectors, and body searches. Israeli soldiers mingled with the
crowd and stood on rooftops ringing the square, Uzis at the ready. A mood of
apprehension, fear, and suspicion trumped the joy, peace and love one would expect
at this season.
Earlier, I had visited a Palestinian Christian village in
the West Bank that featured a home very much
like one in Jesus' time. Cows and sheep were housed under the same roof as the
family--reminiscent of the time when a baby was born in a stable to a peasant
family forced to journey through the winter rains by an imperial edict
requiring tax registration. Midway on the road between Jerusalem and Bethlehem,
archaelogists were excavating the site of a fourth century Byzantine church, built
on the traditional site where Mary and Joseph had paused to rest before
continuing on, only to find "no room in the inn." (Excavations
complete, the site has since been covered over.)
More recently, the Israelis have erected a huge, forbidding
16-foot wall with armed checkpoints (euphemistically called a "security
fence"), separating Palestinians from their farmland, schools, jobs,
relatives, medical care, and places of worship. Our Palestinian friends tell us
this really puts them in a large prison, with their movements strictly
monitored and controlled.
Too many pilgrims go this "holy land" only to see
the "places where Jesus walked," and are led by Israeli guides who
shield them from meeting the "living stones"--Palestinian Christians
whose ancestors were the contemporaries of Jesus who became the first
Christians. Many of their villages were demolished by the Israeli military.
The homes that survived are now occupied by Jewish immigrants, while their
original Palestinian owners still hold the keys, hoping one day to return and
claim their rightful property.
Later, I returned to teach a semester at Bethlehem Bible College,
where my students were young Palestinian Christians preparing for
ministry with their people. One, Ala'e, was from a Muslim family who had
accepted Christ as Savior, attended the Nazarene
Church in East
Jerusalem, and was trying to remain a faithful member of both
faith communities. Another, Gabriel, was a talented musician, who had decided
not to pursue further education because he "saw no future" for
himself there. A third, Jusuf, one day asked me point-blank in class,
"Must we forgive our enemies?" A classmate later explained that,
as a boy of seven, he had seen his father dragged from their home by Israeli
soldiers and shot dead before his eyes.
And then there was Tony Nassar (later married to classmate
Nisreen), who took me several times to the farm seven miles south of Bethlehem
owned by him and his two brothers--devoted members of the Christmas Lutheran
Church in Bethlehem. Their farm was surrounded on all four sides by Israeli
settlements. Each time I went I saw where more of their land had been
confiscated by the settlers. They had shot his horse, and blocked the
access road to the farm with huge boulders, so that the Nassars had to go
several miles out of the way to reach their land. Their olive trees, some
centuries old, had been uprooted by Caterpillar bulldozers. Holding deeds and
tax receipts from Ottoman, British, and Jordanian governments, they had proof
of their ownership, so had already spent thousands of dollars in legal fees and
court costs to defend their land, and were determined to hold onto it.
One of the Bible College faculty, Salim Munayer, conducts a
ministry called "Muslahala," which brings together Palestinian
Christians with Messianic Jews (who do not identify as Christian but accept
Jesus as Messiah and Saviour) to hear each other's stories, get to know each
other as human beings and fellow believers, gradually overcome their mutual
fears and suspicions, and build the kind of relationships that are the only
sure basis of a lasting peace in that troubled land.
A growing number of Jews in this country, such as the young
people in Jewish Voice for Peace, have lived with Palestinian families in the
West Bank, suffered with them the same indignities and persecutions at the
hands of Israeli settlers and military, and returned home to tell their
synagogues that what they have seen there "violates the Jewish values
with which we were raised." They are joining with growing numbers of
Christians in a campaign of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS)
against US corporations like Caterpillar, Motorola, and Northrop
Grumman that contribute to the illegal occupation, and products and
services originating in the occupied West Bank--like Veolia (bottled water) and
SodaStream (home carbonization machines)--similar to the worldwide campaign
waged in Nelson Mandela's time against the oppressive apartheid regime in South
Africa.
Of course, violence originates from both sides in the
turbulent Middle East, so that, in this
Christmas season, it is sometimes difficult, above the din, to hear the angels
sing "peace on earth, good will to all." But if we wish genuinely and
effectively to contribute to peace with justice there, we will listen
openly and fairly to all sides; seek to meet, get to know, and hear the stories
of Palestinian Christians, the "living stones" (and their
Muslim friends and neighbors); let our expenditures be guided by BDS
principles; reject both anti-Arab prejudice and anti-Semitism (while at the
same time opposing the unjust policies and practices of the Israeli government
and settlers), and live in the spirit of this verse from the carol, "O
Holy Night":
"Truly he taught us to love one another;
His law is love and his gospel is peace.
Chains shall he break, for the slave is our brother.
And in his name all oppression shall cease."
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