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  | The following article was posted on Saturday January 29th 2000 at Midland Reporter - Telegram Newspaper in Texas, USA. Christians without a country
West Bank resident talks about plight of Palestinians Mention the Holy Land, and the image brought to mind depends on your cultural heritage. Holy for Jews, Moslems and Christians alike, the area, especially Jerusalem, is the site of the temple mountain marking the site of Solomon's temple, now topped by Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam's holiest shrine after Mecca and Madieneh. It is site of the Western Wall, holiest of all Jewish sites, a remnant of the outer wall of the Second Temple courtyard, where Jews have come for centuries to pray and mourn. And Christians almost immediately think of the manger scene, of peaceful fisherman of in small grayed boat, the Baptizer standing waist deep in the Jordan, and always, always, the church of the Holy Sepulcher.
All this is against a backdrop of industrious Israelis, building communities, rebuilding a nation long scattered and persecuted, but now, on the rise, and even now, actively engaged with peace talks with their neighbors. Here, Christians can walk where Jesus walked, pray where he is purported to have prayed and worship where he may have been laid to rest, and from whence he rose. Yet, not all Christians are afforded this privilege. Palestinian Christians, who make up less than 3% of the population of the West Bank, are not allowed. Descendants of the first people to look on the face of Christ, they are excluded from worship at the holiest of Christians sites because of their ethnicity. And for an overwhelming majority of these Christians without a country, even the church that serves them does so at arm's length. The Greek Orthodox Church, traditionally the vehicle of their faith, allows Palestinians to worship but not to govern. Palestinians may become priests, if they are married, but to be a bishop in the Greek orthodox faith, you cannot be married. Still, Palestinian Christians, maintain their faith, hanging onto hope for peace with justice and a better life while the wheels of progress turn around them, disrupting their lives and quashing dreams and initiative with the efficiency of the bulldozers that routinely demolish their homes and communities. Recently, one of these Palestinian Christians visited Texas, and while in Midland, he spoke to various church groups in hope of generating support of the peace-with-justice movement going among human rights activists and church groups. Ghassan Andoni spoke last Sunday at First United Methodist Church. Andoni, a professor of physics, Christian and social activist, doesn't cause any interior bells to ring when he shakes hands or greets the people waiting to hear his message. He speaks conversationally in a quiet voice and establishes eye contact with just about everyone in his audience. He eases into the telling, speaking conversationally in a voice so quiet that it has a quietening effect on the room. "Our town comes from two major families, so in this town everyone is my cousin or my uncle," he explains. "It's a nice environment if you can handle privacy problems. Our life is oriented around the church, more socially than religiously. I have to be in every wedding in the town of about 15,000 people, and every funeral, so I have to be in the church 10 to 20 hours a week. "This is a town where you know everything about everybody. We don't have CNN there, but we have lip service and there are no secrets." Now his audience is comfortable, smiling. Andoni continues . "There are nice things about this community. We don't have to worry about whether our kids are going to get into drugs, or use alcohol, or get involved with a rough crowd, because they're all relatives. "What we do worry about is who is going to be killed next, where the next bomb will explode, what will happen tomorrow. That is a real worry for everyone of us. "And every now and then, the problem is a bit of a lack of privacy, when you badly need time for yourself to do work, because people are jumping into your office all the time, wanting to talk, or to have coffee." Andoni lives in the Palestinian village of Beit Sahour, on Israel's West Bank, just a stone's throw from Bethlehem and the Church of the Nativity, a half hour's drive from Jerusalem. But he cannot go there without a permit. His ancestors were among the shepherds who heard the angel's announcement of Jesus' birth, who rushed down the hill to the stable to see him, but Andoni cannot go there. Not without a permit. His ancestors were there when Jesus was sentenced to death and led on the dreadful walk to Golgotha. They heard the news in much the same way as they would hear it today -by lip service. But they cannot go to worship at the Church of the Nativity, or of the Holy Sepulcher. Not without a permit. And permits, according to Andoni, are hard to come by. "It's easier for me to come to Midland, Texas, than to go to Jerusalem and pray in the Holy Sepulcher," he says. "I would have to apply for a permit, I would have to come up with a very good reason." "Praying in the church is not a good reason. If I have a serious illness and can not get medical help here, I might have a small chance of getting a permit." Andoni, who is a physics professor at Birzeit University just north of Jerusalem, would seem on the face of things to have a very good reason for traveling through Jerusalem. Yet, he can't get a permit. Jerusalem is closed to Palestinians; therefore, to get to work, Andoni travels in a wide circle east from his home every each morning toward Jordan, then just before reaching Jericho, he turns and takes a road leading north, then finally turning south to Birzeit. The drive takes two hours or sometimes less. Restrictions aren't limited to mobility, Andoni says, but to almost every daily activity. Palestinians for the most part are forbidden to engage in commerce with anyone except Israelis. To establish a business or develop a factory takes a permit. Especially problematic, Andoni says, is the ownership or real estate. He explains that this is probably the most crippling restriction of all the Palestinians. "We don't have oil in our area, and no minerals, no high-tech industry, so the criteria for wealth is land." "In little towns like ours , and most Palestinian towns are little towns, if you have land you are wealthy, and if you don't have land, you are poor. Yet a small officer can sign a paper that will cause you to loose your land immediately without the chance to be compensated, or to fight for it legally. Within 24 hours, the family is bankrupt." Andoni described the constant threat to homes and property as a feeling akin to being caged. "This is a very difficult situation, because you feel that you have lost all dignity. That's why there are often protests, and even clashes, which are always seen as a challenge to authority, which is not allowed." Yet, times are marginally better now than in the past, and eve in the worst of times, Palestinians use their wit and their humor to alleviate the suffering. Andoni illustrates his point with a story from the Intifada days of 1987, when Palestinians erupted and fought back by throwing stones and demonstrating against the tight control. "At that time, the little town of Beit Sahour was either under curfew or siege, with major problems. We hadn't enough food and we were worried about the children. "A group of us thought of a very easy way of taking care of the children - by starting a little farm. "We were mostly professional people, not farmers, and we hadn't a clue what a cow needed, but we went to an Israeli kibbutz and bought 18 cows, and brought them back to Beit Sahour. "We prepared them a place and hired someone to care for them and milk them. Young people volunteered to take bottles of the milk to every home with children. "But the third or fourth day, we were visited by the military commander of the area. He said, 'This is illegal. This is a security threat of the state of Israel.' We said we needed time to get rid of them, and he left. Later, soldiers came back with cameras, and they took pictures, front and side of each cow, with the numbers that all Israeli kibbutz cows have. We didn't understand why they took those pictures. Were the cows terrorists? "They threatened the neighboring villagers where we had been getting water. So at midnight, we took our trucks to the place we had built for them, and took the cows away. "We had made an agreement with a butcher in the town to hide the cows in his cave. If the army found the cows, he was to say that he had bought them , and was going to slaughter them. "Now, suddenly, the commander realized that before, he had known where the terrorist cows could be found. If there is anything worse than having a terrorist cow in your town, it is having a terrorist cow somewhere and you can't find her. "They began to take people to prison, and to torture them, and in a few days, they sent choppers out over the hills to try to find the cows. Finally they did find them, and the butcher told the story as he had agreed.. But he said that he couldn't slaughter the cows just yet, because they were pregnant. The commander was frustrated. He took the butcher to prison. They tortured people. They wanted the cows out of there. "Then, we tried something else. We stopped paying taxes, and we separated the cows. Taking two to one place, two to another, most to places out of town, and making it very difficult for the soldiers to find our cows. "Finally, the commander must have decided that since the cows were missing again, they would drop the matter." Andoni said he saw the military commander two years later, at a meeting in another town. "He had been promoted. He recognized me as one of the people he had put in prison, and the first thing he asked me was, 'Where are the cows?'" Since that time, Andoni has continually worked toward the establishment of a workable relationship between Palestinian and Israelis. He said relations between Palestinian Christians and their Muslim neighbors are amiable, made palatable by centuries of living together. A recent effort has been the establishment of rapprochement centre, where Palestinians attempt to communicate with Israelis on a peaceful basis. "We said, 'OK, guys, we are engaged in a fight, we don't deny it, and we are the bad guys, because we want our independence. We can't tolerate you, and therefore we are going to fight against you. "But why don't we fight in the morning and chat in the afternoon? At least, we will be humans to each other, so that when you pull the trigger, you will know who it is you're shooting. When we throw the stones, we will know who it is we're stoning." Andoni said that while the centre has made some headway, he was imprisoned by one of the men involved in the talks. "A man who was involved in the Holocaust Museum had the authority to arrest people. But he shook my hand before he arrested me and delivered me to the prison, and I have no hard feelings. He was apologetic and he was trying to be nice. "We realized from the beginning that this is not a talk between allies, this is a a talk between enemies." Andoni is also involved in the promotion of a Palestinian tour organization called "Alternative Tourism," which conducts tours of the Holy Land from a different perspective than the Israeli tours. "In 30 years, there have been about 60 million people tour the Holy Land," he said. "If Palestine can get 3 percent of the tourists who come here, we could add about $1 billion to the Palestinian economy. "On the other hand, we want to see people look at the area more objectively, to get to know both sides, so that we can overcome some persistent stereotypes. We bring tourists not only to Christian towns, but also to Muslim towns. We want to show people the Holy Land as it really is." He said another aim of the Alternative Tourism group is to bring appeal to Palestinian Christians. "Thirty years ago, Christians made up about 10 percent of the population of Palestinians in the West Bank. Now there are less than three percent," he said. "I visited Santiago, Chile, two years ago, and while I was there, I discovered that there are more than 100,000 Palestinian Christian living there, and most of them came from Bethlehem. There are only about 50,000 Christians living in Bethlehem now, so I can see that if we don't find some way to offer employment opportunities, and to make life better, there will come a day when there are no Palestinian Christians left in the Holy Land, where Christianity started." Story by Johnnye Montgomery | ||||||||||||
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