Justice put first in Middle East peace bid

By SIMON COLLINS

Being a Christian in Palestine sounds rather like being a vegetarian at a barbecue - but much more difficult. Like the vegetarian, the Christian lives outside the majority culture, as just 2 per cent of the people of Israel and Palestine are Christian.

But life for Palestinian Christians is made much more difficult because what the Bible says about the Israelites makes Christians seem to be traitors.

Take the Christian Benedictus, which says: "Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people."

Or the story of the Exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt to the Promised Land - a story which many Jews and Christians interpret literally to indicate God's support for a Jewish state in Palestine.

Dr Naim Ateek, a Palestinian Anglican theologian, has written a book reinterpreting the Bible, Justice and only Justice: A Palestinian Theology of Liberation. He was here this week, attending the two-yearly world conference of Anglican peace and justice coordinators at the Vaughn House retreat at Torbay.

In his theology, Jesus' Jewishness is played down, and Jesus emerges as a model for living in an occupied country - peacefully, but siding openly with the poor and the oppressed.

That is how Ateek believes Christians should live today in Israel, and in the West Bank and Gaza - territories which nominally belong to the Palestinian Authority, but where Israeli troops guard large, high-rise Jewish settlements, the roads connecting them and numerous checkpoints.

"From my perspective, all forms of violence are unacceptable," Ateek says.

"But I would personally say that today the major violence is the violence of the occupation itself, and that's why I insist personally that violence must stop first, so that there is no reason for the people to resist."

Ateek, 64, says his Palestinian ancestors have been Christian since the earliest days of the Church almost 2000 years ago. In the days of Constantine (circa 286-337), most of the population was Christian, but Christians shrank to a minority after the Arab-Muslim conquest in the seventh century.

Ateek's father was brought up in the local Eastern Orthodox Church, but was converted to Anglicanism by British missionaries in the town where he lived, Beisan (Beth Shean) near the Sea of Galilee.

When the British ended their United Nations mandate in Palestine in 1948, Beisan was occupied by Jewish soldiers. Ateek says the town's Muslim families were expelled to Jordan, and the Christian families including his own were moved to Nazareth, allowing Jewish settlers to take over Beisan's houses and land.

Later Ateek did his theological training in America, then served as a parish minister in Galilee for almost 30 years. He now heads Sabeel, a multi-church centre in Jerusalem which "strives to develop a spirituality based on justice, peace, non-violence, liberation and reconciliation for the different national and faith communities".

Justice comes first in that list, because Ateek believes that peace will be possible only when people are no longer subject to injustice.

"The Arab Palestinians in Israel have always been rather like second-class citizens because they are not Jewish," he says.

Only Jews, not Palestinian families who were pushed out in 1948, have an automatic right of return to Israel. Only Jews are called up to do military service. The state pays stipends to thousands of Jewish religious scholars.

The one million Palestinians who are Israeli citizens are constantly under suspicion by the five million Jews. Several of Ateek's Galilee parishioners have been jailed over the years "for almost nothing".

"They were not involved in any acts of violence. They were just resisting the occupation. They were speaking out," he says.

But to Ateek, these are minor issues compared with the plight of the 2.5 million Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza.

These areas are tiny. These days the West Bank is within commuting distance of Jerusalem, stretching a distance equivalent to that from Warkworth to Te Kauwhata. The Gaza Strip is even smaller.

The modern apartment blocks of the fenced-in Jewish settlements within the West Bank are linked by motorways to Jerusalem, where many of the settlers earn international salaries in government jobs or in Israel's advanced high-tech sector.

But only cars with Israeli number plates can drive on these motorways.

Meanwhile, the Palestinians who live on the land in between the settlements till the soil with wooden ploughs and work in crafts that have hardly changed since Jesus' time. Many families depend on money sent home by men working in the Persian Gulf.

"The difference is huge. Israel today has become a first-world economy, but for the Palestinians, even the economy that they had is now almost shattered because of the occupation," Ateek says.

"Unemployment is more than 50 per cent, in some places much higher. And now, because of the [road] closures in some places very few people are working."

The West Bank and Gaza are divided into a patchwork of A, B and C zones, with only 18 per cent of the territories in the A zones (Palestinian-controlled). Israel controls the C zones and, although B zones are shared, these days Israeli soldiers run checkpoints at most crossroads.

"It has become like different small Bantustans. It's very difficult to come in. It's very difficult to get out," says Ateek.

"If you are travelling on a trip that would normally take half an hour, it might take you four or five hours because of the delays on the checkpoints, or the Army might prevent you from continuing.

"It's just unbelievable. I don't think people would believe the humiliation, the dehumanisation, the oppression that takes place every day."

Ateek believes that this situation "dehumanises" the young Israelis doing their national service as much as it does the Palestinians.

"Oppression is not just bad for the oppressed, it's very bad for the oppressors," he says.

"When we talk about liberation, we are talking about freedom for both. We want the oppressed to be free. We also want the oppressors to feel free and to live a normal life."

Ateek argues that Old Testament passages about the Promised Land and "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" need to be read in the light of clear New Testament messages that God is a universal God, not for Jews alone, and that we should "do to others what we would have them do to us".

"They reflect an early stage of human understanding of God's revelation that conflicts with the Christian's understanding of God as revealed in Jesus Christ," he writes in his book.

"When confronted with a difficult passage in the Bible or with a perplexing contemporary event, one needs to ask such simple questions as: Does this fit the picture I have of God that Jesus has revealed to me? ... If it does, then that passage is valid and authoritative. If not, then I cannot accept its validity or authority."

As Ateek sees it, the God revealed to Jesus is a God of "justice with mercy", willing to forgive people's sins provided that they also forgive the sins of others.

He calls on Palestinians to accept Israel's existence as a Jewish state, even though anti-Semitism and the Holocaust which gave rise to the Israeli state were perpetrated by Europeans, not by Palestinians.

He also accepts that Israel should keep its pre-1967 borders, giving it 77 per cent of the original land of Palestine and leaving only the West Bank and Gaza for the Palestinians. Even though Jews were only a third of the population in 1948, they have become a majority of those living in the land today.

A set of principles promoted by Sabeel proposes that Jews living in the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza should be able to stay there, provided that they accept Palestinian citizenship - just as Ateek and other Palestinians living inside Israel are Israeli citizens.

However, it insists that the Palestinians who left Israel in 1948 must have a right of return, plus compensation and an apology.

"If I have done you wrong, I need to say I'm sorry. Israel has never said that," Ateek says.

"I'm not saying that when it comes to reparations, Israel would be alone. Many countries in the world can help.

"But it's part of the healing process to say, 'I'm sorry, I have done you wrong'."

www.sabeel.org

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