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Palestinian General Delegate appeals to church leaders for help
02 May 2002
Church representatives of the British and Irish Churches were given a clear message by Afif Safieh this week. The Palestinian General Delegate to the United Kingdom and to the Holy See told the Churches Together in Britain and Ireland gathering: ‘The Palestinian Churches are evaporating. Today there are more Palestinian Christians in Sydney, Australia than there are in Jerusalem. The violence of every day life is driving out Christians. The fate of the Christian community is totally linked to the peace process.’
‘But you can make a difference,’ he told those gathered at Ushaw College, Durham. And he appealed to them for help. One small thing they could do for instance was to encourage the Israeli Ambassador to issue a work permit to Colin South, Director of the Society of Friends’ School in Ramallah. ‘Thirty three phone calls or emails from the British and Irish Churches to support this man will make a difference. This man is not a security risk,’ he said. ‘He is needed by the children at the school.’
The lives of Afif Safieh and Colin South reflect the dwindling pattern of the Christian community in Israel-Palestine. The diplomat is excluded from living there because he was out of the country in 1967; now he can return only as a tourist; and the headteacher is excluded because he has not been issued with the correct work permit despite having left and entered the country ten times previously.
Afif Safieh spelled out the clear role for Christians in peacemaking and in nation building: there are Christians in the executive committee of the Palestinian Authority, the legislative council and the entourage of Chairman Arafat, he said. Dozens of schools, hospitals and colleges had been started and were run by Christians and they were run for the benefit of all people.
‘We the Christians of the Holy Land feel we are the forgotten faithful and insufficiently loved by the west,’ he said. ‘Some in the west are sympathetic to our plight but not to the group to which we belong.’ He paid tribute to the work of Sabeel, the Palestinian contextual theological centre in raising awareness and to pilgrims who had taken care to visit the living stones and not just the holy places. And he thanked British and Irish Christians who had tried to understand the Palestinians’ situation. ‘We became the victims of the victims of European history and now some people are afraid of expressing sympathy with us.’
In the days before the Oslo peace process Mr Safieh was responsible in London for introducing to each other those who would negotiate. Today he is Palestinian General Delegate to the United Kingdom and to the Holy See. Distressed by the failure of Colin Powell’s initiative, he believes the Israelis and Palestinians cannot reach a solution themselves. ‘ I would say to the Israelis “the invasion took six days: you can withdraw in six days and rest on the seventh day to leave us to get on with nation building”.’
‘There is an unbridgeable gap. We have tried to negotiate to a mutually acceptable solution. May be a solution which is mutually unacceptable is better. We are all entitled to dream as long as the dream does not become the nightmare of the other.’
As a Palestinian Christian from Jerusalem he is often asked when was he converted. So he pre-empts the question: ‘I am a descendant of the early Christians.’
He tells a joke fashionable in Palestinian circles at another stagnating time in the peace process. It goes like this: Yasser Arafat went to God and told him ‘God almighty, will there ever be peace in Palestine?’ Apparently God looked at him melancholically and said ‘yes, yes of course, but not during my lifetime’.
He adds: ‘Accredited also to the Holy See, I have it from reliable sources that God would not mind being proven wrong. At least in this case.’
That same despondent realism was reflected in His Excellency’s words when he addressed the Church Representatives’ Meeting of Churches Together in Britain and Ireland. He is a diplomat and his words were measured but his anguish at the failure of the ‘permanent peace process’ was matched by that of Colin South, who described to the Church Representatives the trauma of the current Israeli incursion in the West Bank.
‘When I was a child I collected marbles. Now the children in my school collect used bullets from around their homes,’ said Colin South. As a member of the British Yearly Meeting his work has always been a witness for non-violence. His school in Ramallah feels enclosed by Israeli settlements but they have engaged their neighbours in peaceful dialogue. The second Intifada has made that impossible. He joined the staff of Ramallah in September 2000.
‘I don’t think any people should have to live through the humiliation, fear and terror of the past 18 months. Our experience is of violence all around us. Since September the town has suffered nightly shelling, sometimes for three or four hours. Sometimes Palestinian snipers would fire at Sergot settlement and the Israelis would respond with a cavalcade of shelling. By then the snipers would be gone. ‘It has been impossible for the children to sleep; they’ve been crawling under their beds to avoid the bullets.’
Israeli-imposed closures around Palestinian towns and villages have made it difficult for children and teachers to get to his school. ‘And if they climb over the hills and through the mud instead of waiting at checkpoints, they get fired at.’ Since January the town has suffered daily and nightly helicopter raids. Staff try to help the children deal with the traumatising effect of the Israeli helicopters. ‘You hear them arriving, then they hover waiting to select a target and you do not know what they are going to strike. I’ve become a specialist in recognising F-16s, radar aircraft and helicopter gunships,’ he said. ‘The Palestinians are peace loving people, they want peace with integrity.’
Colin South spoke of the terror of the Israeli’s incursion into Ramallah. ‘You never know whether the soldiers will break down your door and ransack your house. It is brutal, it is cruel and it is disastrous as far as creating a final settlement based on trust between two communities.’ Children in Ramallah started back to school last Tuesday. And their head teacher wants to join them.
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