News,
articles and documents from the Holy Land
Issue No. 167 - Saturday, 10 August 2002
Dear Friends, Brothers
and Sisters,
You will find
herewith the news reported by Ha'aretz Service and The
Associated Press about the visit of our Patriarch today to Gaza and his meeting
with the Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, founder and spiritual leader of the Islamic movement
Hamas. You might ask way this visit in this particular time? My answer is very
simple: lack of vision by the political leaders, no peace agenda, no way out of
this deadlocked dilemma of violence and counter-violence in a cycle of revenge,
hatred and destruction. Therefore, the Patriarch and his two colleagues, Bishop
Riah Abu-Al-Asal, the Anglican bishop of Jerusalem and Bishop Mounib Younan
took this initiative and risk to go and meet Hamas leaders and discuss with
them what to do in order to find a way out of this situation. They didn’t only
want to convince Hamas to stop the attacks against Israelis, but also to invite
them to work for peace. You might ask: what was the result? Of course there is
no immediate result, but at least they felt that Hamas is ready to stop if the
Israelis will stop also, which means that a further step is requested: to visit
the Palestinian Authority leaders and the Israeli leaders and tell them: if you
want and end of violence we are ready to mediate, but please give us a chance
or a good will.
In
fact, immediately, returning from Gaza the Patriarch and the bishops continued to
Ramallah and met President Yasser Arafat who showed his readiness to help and
collaborate. Therefore, I think that the next round would be a visit to Sharon
or his colleagues. But, you have to know that this is not very easy for a
simple reason that you need to wait for weeks in order to fix an appointment in
order to meet him or to reach any high rank personalities. I think that this
initiative is a step forwards towards a contribution from the religious leaders
to help the political leader to find the way out to peace.
If
these steps will not succeed soon, the Patriarchs and heads of churches in
Jerusalem found another way to make a difference: it is the PRAYER FOR PEACE.
In fact, like we have done last year from 14th of August to 28, a
prayer service will be held every evening at 6 in one of the churches of
Jerusalem. This same invitation is extended to all our faithful in the Holy
Land and in the world.. Moslems and Jews are also invited to join, each one in
his way… You will see the text of the appeal with the program.. if you are in
Jerusalem come and pray with us, if you are faraway, you can at least pray for
us.
You
will find in today’s Olive Branch the following documents:
1)
The
news about the visit of the Patriarch to Gaza and his meeting with Sheikh
Yassine.
2) The A CALL TO PRAYER FOR PEACE BY the
Heads of Churches with the program.
3) The last article by our dear friend Dr.
Harry Hagopian who speaks about the “Shaken Hopes & Stirred Visions?”.
I was in Beit
Jala at the Seminary these three last days working in our printing press to
finish my book which is a collection of 85 articles that I have published in
Al-Quds Arabic newspaper. I hope that it will be completely finished with the
end of this month. I share this with you in order to tell you that living under
curfew is very useful for intellectual work, but I doubt that it is possible to
live without food when 80% of the people of Bethlehem are jobless since two
years and under curfew since four months!
With my best and cordial prayers… please
pray with us and for us Fr.
Raed Abushalia
Latin patriarch asks Hamas leader to end
suicide attacks
By Ha'aretz Service and The Associated
Press
A delegation of Christian clerics led by Jerusalem
patriarch Michel Sabbah made a rare call Saturday on the spiritual leader of
the militant Hamas movement, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, in a bid to stop suicide
bombings against Israeli targets.
With the two-hour meeting at Yassin's house, the patriarch was
attempting to revive consultations among Palestinian leaders to seek an end to
the attacks, said a Patriarchate official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
There had been speculation that Palestinian militant groups
were on the verge of declaring an end to suicide attacks before a July 23 air
strike on Gaza City that killed the leader of the military wing of Hamas, Salah
Shehadeh and 14 others, among them nine children. The impending declaration was
apparently called off in the wake of the attack and all consultations put on
hold.
Hamas claimed responsibility for the subsequent bombing at the
Hebrew University in Jerusalem, in which seven people, including five American
citizens, were killed and for the suicide bombing on an Egged bus in the north
of Israel, in which nine people died. The group said the attacks were
retaliation for the killing of Shehadeh.
Sabbah was the first Palestinian to hold the senior church post
in Israel. He has frequently criticized the Israeli occupation of the West Bank
and Gaza Strip and said that Palestinian violence would not end until Israel
withdrew to the borders it held before the 1967 Six-Day War.
"We are not seeking promises from any human being, we are
hearing and making dialogue with everyone and depend on God and our Lord Jesus
Christ," Sabbah told reporters as he left Yassin's house.
Yassin insisted that Hamas could not stop its attacks while
Israel continued to carry out punitive policies in Palestinian towns.
"We can't offer any initiative in this time while the
Zionist enemy hasn't withdrawn from our land, hasn't freed the prisoners,
hasn't stopped building settlements and hasn't stopped demolishing
houses," Yassin said.
Among those at the meeting were representatives from the
Anglican and Catholic churches, Hamas spokesmen Mahmoud Zahar, Ismail Abu
Shanab and Ismail Haniye.
It was the second time the two religious leaders have met. The
last meeting took place in 1996 when Sabbah visited Yassin to congratulate him
on his release from an Israeli prison.
A CALL TO PRAYER FOR PEACE
BY HEADS OF CHURCHES IN
JERUSALEM
Jesus said:
“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you;
Do not let your hearts be troubled or
afraid” (John 14/27)
Very many people
in this land are alarmed at the way the situation is moving further into
conflict with the hopes for peace and reconciliation being dashed.
Bloodshed and
violence abounds and sufferings of innocent people is daily intensified.
Already we have
made a direct approach to the Prime Minister of Israeli and his colleagues
concerning Closure and Curfew which are currently bringing untold hardships to
thousands whether it be in regard to employment, the purchase of food supplies,
attention to medical needs or the freedom to worship.
The picture
presented to our children and young people is one of the wholesale dis-regard
for human life and dignity as murder, assassination and destruction of homes
continue.
This in turn is
intensifying the desire for revenge on both sides – Israeli and Palestinians
alike, whilst at the same time encouraging hatred rather than respect and
mutual understanding.
We are convinced that God alone can rescue all of us from this intolerable position which is why we are calling upon all our people throughout this Land, to join us in intensifying our prayers for peace, with justice and reconciliation. Hopefully, our Moslem and Jewish friends will feel able to add their prayers too.
So, we have
arranged a period of daily PRAYER FOR PEACE at 6pm from Thursday, August 15th
to Wednesday, August 28th in the churches across the City.
We again invite
our brothers and sisters around the world to link their prayers with ours at
this special time and thank them for their understanding and support.
+ The Patriarchs & Heads of Churches
Communities & Institutions in Jerusalem
THE PROGRAMME OF THE DAILY PRAYERS FOR PEACE
AT 6 PM
We appeal also
to our brothers and Sisters around the world – many of whom have already
offered generous support – to link their prayers with ours at this special time
according the following proposed program for Jerusalem:
Thursday, Aug. 15th Armenian
Cathedral of St. James,
Old
City, Armenian Quarter
Friday, Aug. 16th Chapel
of Tantur Ecumenical Institute,
Road of Bethlehem
Saturday, Aug.
17th Lutheran
Church of the Redeemer,
Old City near Holy Sepulcher
Sunday Aug. 18th
Greek
Catholic Church of Annunciation,
Old City near Jaffa Gate
Monday, Aug. 19th
St.
Andrew’s Church of Scotland,
near Railway Station.
Tuesday, Aug, 20th
St.
James Church,
Nablus Road – Beit Hanina
Wednesday, Aug,
21st St.
Anthony’s Coptic Church,
Old City, near Holy Sepulcher
Thursday, Aug,
22nd Dormition
Abbey,
Mount Sion
Friday, Aug, 23rd Ethiopian
Orthodox Church,
West Jerusalem, off Prophet Street
Saturday, Aug,
24th Pater
Noster Church
Mount
of Olives
Sunday, Aug, 25th Anglican
Cathedral of St. George,
20, Nablus Road.
Monday, Aug, 26th
Catholic
Syrian Vicariate,
6,
Chaldean Street, Nablus Road
Tuesday, Aug, 27th St.
Mark’s Syrian Orthodox Church,
Old City, near Jaffa Gate
Wednesday, Aug,
28th Maronite Vicariate
Please continue to pray for a just peace &
reconciliation to be implemented in this Holy Land.
+ The Patriarchs &
Heads of Churches,
Communities &
Institutions in Jerusalem
Shaken
Hopes & Stirred Visions?
Dr Harry Hagopian, KSL – KOG
It is true that
summer is often referred to as the silly season when activities are quite
sluggish! However, I must admit that last week was pretty much another brisk
summery one for me in terms of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict!
To start the week, I
went to the Duchess Theatre to see a play written and performed by David Hare.
It was entitled ‘Via Dolorosa’ and offered an account of Hare’s enlightening
trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories in 1997. The play re-created his
encounters with thirty-three men and women from different backgrounds who held
widely dissimilar political and religious viewpoints on the conflict between
Arab and Jew. During ninety minutes of an incisive monologue, David Hare
painted a sketch of the inner tensions, inequities and contradictions bred in
that small but self-possessive land. And at the end of the performance, though,
I felt that David Hare was left questioning his own values as searchingly as
the powerful, deep and at times violent beliefs of the people he had met there.
Later in the same
week, I went to the Young Vic to see the much-acclaimed ‘Alive from Palestine’.
This wrenching and potent play consisted of Palestinian stories under Israeli
occupation. They were performed by different actors in a series of monologues
that drew from interviews with ordinary Palestinians living under conflict.
They were stirring, poignant and at times quite funny stories, but billowing
through them all was a sense of bewildered horror and rage. There was almost a
complicit resignation that the violence had become far too ‘normal’ for many
people.
Whilst David Hare’s
‘Via Dolorosa’ was the accurate but understated view of an outsider who talked
to all sides in this conflict, ‘Palestine Alive’ was presented by Kasaba
Theatre Company from Ramallah [in the West Bank] and represented a dramatic
report from the inside. So
impressive and engrossing were both plays that they had received huge
plaudits. The New York Magazine
had written, ‘I could quote forever from this Via Dolorosa whose every other
line is quotable’. Along the same vein at least, the Independent had praised
Alive from Palestine as ‘the most life-changing experience in drama this year.’
The Guardian had added, ‘How often do you see a piece of necessary theatre?
These stories fall precisely into that category. Under the satire of the show,
there is fierce anger and sadness.’
However, despite the
vivid and high-octane productions, let alone the seamless acting and black
humour, I emerged with a heavy heart and carried with me a final impression of
sombre death. Perhaps that was also the strength of both plays, since they
typified to me an Israeli-Palestinian conflict so morbid in its mundane
realities and yet so mundane in its morbidity too that it has now come to
accept death, violence and injustice with frightening equanimity.
That sense of
morbidity struck me again this week as I was having a conversation with an
Israeli teacher. She had just been to Turkey alongside eighty other Israeli and
Palestinian teachers to participate in a Peace Education Programme workshop
organised by an Israeli-Palestinian co-institute [IPCRI] that seeks to create a
bottom-up peace process between the two feuding sides. The teachers had just
completed their programme for the day and were having dinner when they were
informed that a bomb had exploded at the cafeteria of the Hebrew University in
Jerusalem. The terrorist attack had claimed the lives of seven students. Faced
with this latest recycled tragedy, the teachers were forced to cope together
with their grief and spent time consoling or encouraging each other.
Alas, it seems to me
that humanity as a function of sanctity has lost all veneer of decency! If
anything, Via Dolorosa confirmed to me the self-destructive inanity of the
positions held by those who cannot see beyond their noses and who are so
involved in their own today that they cannot even perceive the tomorrow of
others. Indeed, talking to those men and women must have shown to David Hare
the absurd intransigence that has been inculcated into peoples’ minds and
hearts. Even the souls have become
bereft of hope or vision. Equally, Alive from Palestine was a vibrant depiction
of the way men and women were being traumatized in Israel and Palestine, and
how the thin line distinguishing victim from prey becomes lost in the egregious
environment of war, injustice and cruelty. Today, the younger generations are
being coerced willy-nilly into lives of servility and servitude to the
political masters of doom and gloom.
But the two plays,
let alone the IPCRI peace program, also fingered the only way forward! The
solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is as clear to spot as it is easy
to implement on the ground. Land for peace, or justice for security, were the
solutions back in 1967, and they still remain the same today after thirty-five
sad years of bitter and murderous conflict. The re-packaging and labels might
have altered, but the issues - settlements, refugees, Jerusalem, security,
resources, borders, terror - have stubbornly remained the same! Most
politicians know the answer, but refuse to overstep their mantras to
acknowledge the truth! So two peoples are sadly sacrificed for the political
designs of the few! If this does not stop, the latent prophecies of both plays
will become even more biting and pungent.
Is it not high time
to shake some hope, and stir some vision, into peoples’ minds and hearts? Is it
not?
© harry-bvH @ 4 August 2002
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