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Episcopal Church Delegation Finds Discouraging Prospects for Middle East Peace

Episcopal News Service. April 7, 1995 [95065]

(ENS) Druse villager Dr. Tha'er Kenge swept his arm across the snowy valley on the Golan Heights, nestled at the base of Mount Hermon near the cease-fire line with Syria. He pointed out the Jewish kibbutz below with its pond of precious water, its apple orchards.

"This was my land," he said.

A few hours later and some miles to the south, Marla Van Meter, resident of the Jewish settlement of Afik and a representative for Golan's 14,000 Jewish settlers, proudly laid out the accomplishments of the Israelis who pioneered on the high plateau following its capture from Syria in the Six Day War of 1967. Since she immigrated from the United States in 1983, "I've put roots down in more ways than one," she said. "It's not only a place to live, it's people who have made their living out of the land."

Such competing claims for land, for water and for truth clashed throughout a two-week fact-finding tour in March to Israel, Jordan and the Occupied Territories of Gaza and the West Bank by delegates of the Episcopal Peace and Justice Network. In a grueling schedule of nearly 40 meetings with religious leaders, politicians, peace activists, students and Druse, Palestinian and Jewish residents of the Occupied Territories and Golan Heights, the network's steering committee was steeped in the issues that threaten to derail the region's progress toward peace.

Discouraging words

Even the few voices that spoke hopefully of the prospects for real peace admitted that failure was just as likely. "It's a very difficult process, and likely to be a bloody process and likely to be an extremely frustrating process," said Rabbi David Rosen of the World Conference on Religion and Peace. He warned against unrealistic expectations. "It's a manic-depressive situation," he said. "The higher up you are, the lower you go."

Formed five years ago to coordinate peace and justice efforts in the Episcopal Church, the network initiated the trip to take a pulse of the current critical stage in the struggle toward peace. Its focus follows the lead of General Convention resolutions and other church statements calling for peace through an autonomous homeland for Palestinians, and echoes the personal concern about the region of Presiding Bishop Edmond Browning and his wife, Patti.

Despite the steps toward peace made with the accord signed in 1993 in Oslo, Norway, by Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Chairman Yasser Arafat and Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the delegation found a discouraging pattern of frustrated hopes and escalating violence.

"In terms of social conditions, the situation is getting worse after the peace accord," as negotiations to implement the agreement seem mired in delays, and the Israeli Defense Force cracks down on residents of the Occupied Territories with severe restrictions on travel in the name of security, observed the Rev. Hanna Mansour, a deacon who serves St. Matthew's Episcopal Church in the West Bank town of Zebabde.

Largely cut off from employment and services in Israel and especially Jerusalem, the Palestinian population suffers both economic and psychological hardship in an unequal struggle for rights, observed the Rev. Brian Grieves, the Episcopal Church's peace and justice officer. Ann Thompson of Cary, North Carolina, a member of the delegation, who visited the area in 1989 at the height of the intifada or grassroots Palestinian revolt, said "the hardest thing was to go back and see that things were worse." Earlier she saw "a lot of hope and a possibility of resolution," but now her strongest impression was one of "despair, frustration."

Settlements create a reality of possession

Settlements -- the stones, mortar and families that are solidifying Israeli claims on the Occupied Territories and East Jerusalem, even during the negotiations that could turn the areas into a Palestinian homeland -- continue to spread rapidly, the delegates found. Since 1967, the Israeli population of the Occupied Territories and East Jerusalem has grown from essentially zero to 300,000 people in more than 114 settlements.

In the weeks before the delegation's trip, Browning joined seven other Christian leaders in calling specifically for an end to the settlements in East Jerusalem, criticizing the creation of "facts on the ground" that threaten Palestinian claims on the city. The statement, which has been sharply attacked by several Jewish organizations, calls for an end to the shift in land ownership by "annexation, expropriation, and private purchases, often coercive or of questionable legality."

The Zionism that feeds the growth of settlements "should be declared a heresy," said attorney Lynda Brayer of the Society of St. Ives, a legal resource center for human rights in Jerusalem, who represents Palestinians whose property has been confiscated and homes destroyed in the settlement construction. A former Jew who converted to Catholicism, she said she now recognizes a certain blindness about the effects of Zionism. "People do not understand, in the biblical sense of 'to know,' what they are doing," she said.

Building a city

Like Van Meter in the Golan Heights, settler Bob Lang, another American, proudly presented the community he has helped build. On a bus tour of Efrat in the West Bank, he showed off what resembled an American suburb of laid-out roads and neat stone houses with red-tiled roofs. Since the first family settled 12 years ago, he said, the population has grown to 1,000 families or 6,000 people. "Our goal is to be 15,000 people, which will make us a city," he said.

He challenged the term "Occupied Territories" since it suggests that "Israel is here illegally." He asserted, "My claim to be here and my claim to be sovereign here is equal to anyone's."

While the value of the Golan as a bastion of military defense for Israel may seem less critical in an era of long-range missiles, Van Meter said it is still important for defense and even more precious as a major source for Israel's water, with tributaries that flow from the heights into the Sea of Galilee. And after 28 years and three generations of Israelis, the settlers who see themselves as defining Israel's borders by Syria "are reality," she said. "We are a fact that must be taken into consideration."

But standing in the house built by his grandfather, a leader in the struggle against French domination in the 1920s, Kenge recalled the "more than 100,000 people in more than 100 villages" who lived in the Golan before 1967. Most of the villages, he said, were destroyed by the Israelis who left eery ghost towns of bombed out homes. Now only 16,000 Druse still live in the area.

He spoke bitterly of confiscated land, of water fees imposed on even the rainwater the Druse collect, and expressed the hope that his village would some day again be a part of Syria. He showed the group the cease-fire line near his house where separated family members call to each other, hold funerals and sometimes weddings.

The future for the Druse depends on any peace treaty between Israel and Syria, rather than the creation of a Palestinian state, but "we think we have the same future," Kenge said. "If the Palestinian problem will not be solved, our problem will not be solved."

Scenes of squalor in refugee camps

In stark contrast to the settlements, refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza Strip presented pictures of densely packed poverty. With the outbreak of the 1948 war that led to the creation of Israel, more than 700,000 Palestinians "fled for their lives or were pressured to leave," said the Rev. Robert Assaly, an Anglican priest serving in Jerusalem. More were displaced in the subsequent conflicts.

The refugee camps established in the Occupied Territories and Jordan nearly 50 years ago, he said, have long since become permanent communities attempting to function with what was intended to be temporary infrastructures. On their tours of several camps, the delegates stepped over open sewers and around piles of garbage. Moving from the camps to the settlements in Gaza "you get the feeling you are moving between two planets," Assaly said. "You're talking about heaven and hell juxtaposed."

The camps were the center of some of the fiercest fighting during the intifada, and their residents had some of the harshest stories to tell. In their visits to homes in the Jalazon Refugee Camp in the West Bank, the delegates saw rooms permanently sealed by the Israeli Defense Force as collective punishment to the family of an imprisoned intifada fighter, saw pictures of sons killed and heard stories of sons disabled.

Of the nearly one million residents of Gaza, 650,000 are considered refugees, with about half living in the crowded refugee camps. At Beach Camp in Gaza, where 50,000 people are squeezed into one square mile, Mahmoud Okshiyya of the Near East Council of Churches translated for a woman who showed a bare concrete room that was home to 14 people. Asked what the delegates could do to help when they returned to their congregations, she answered, "What you have seen, tell them."

Restrictions chafe during the wait for peace

A bad situation became worse during a year of increased pressure from Israeli forces, the delegates were told. With the signing of the Oslo accord the intifada officially ended, to be replaced with a less frequent, but more dangerous type of violence. As suicide bombs took the place of stone-throwing, movement for Palestinians between the Occupied Territories and Israel has dropped precipitously under heightened restrictions of martial law.

The restrictions on travel permits have caused huge unemployment in the West Bank, especially as the tightest restrictions are around East Jerusalem, a center for West Bank employment and activity. Palestinians found in the city without proper permits face fines and jail.

"There is free access to Jerusalem to all the people of the world, but not to us," said His Beatitude Michel Sabbah, Latin Patriarch in Jerusalem and a Palestinian. "All of our daily life is disorganized because of this permit system."

With the closures, Gaza in particular is described as "a prison where the guards have moved to the perimeter," noted Assaly. Unemployment there now hovers between 60 and 65 percent.

Closures, said Yasser Arafat, who met with the delegation at his office in Gaza City, have sealed the borders of Gaza for 170 days in the past 10 months, with an estimated cost to Gaza residents and businesses of $4 million a day. Trucks sit idle at checkpoints, unable to deliver products -- including a main Gaza export of fresh produce -- to market, he said. "This closure is a collective punishment for my people," he said. "They are not punishing these fanatic groups. They are punishing their allies. We are allies now."

A woefully inadequate medical system of only 912 beds to serve nearly a million people is being further taxed by the restrictions, said Suhaila Tarazi, director of Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza run by the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem and the Middle East.

"One week ago, a woman, 25 years old, passed away because we were unable to get a permit to transfer her to a hospital in Israel," she said.

"Unless they get justice, there's going to be more bloodshed," said delegate Richard Kerner of Dallas, Texas. "Parents unable to feed their children are going to resort to violence." "It's a matchbox about to explode," agreed Lou Schoen of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Slow movement on accord increases pressure

The restrictions are especially galling because there is little evidence of positive movement in the peace negotiations, said Sabbah. As the delays continue, "many of the Palestinians are not supporting the peace process, and some are going to violence," he said. "Why Israelis are not giving more peace to the Palestinians, this is what I can't understand. It is not just for the peace of Palestine, it is for their own good."

"We are being very flexible, very patient, we are being quite nice," said Bishop Elia Khoury, retired suffragan bishop of the Diocese of Jerusalem, who proudly sports his nickname of "the terrorist bishop" as a member of the executive council of the PLO. Stalling negotiations in response to terrorist attacks makes matter worse, he complained. "We can assure them that we will do our best to keep things in order," he said, but "we can not guarantee we can kill terrorism. We don't have the means. When the Israelis were in Gaza, were they able to stop terrorism?"

His words were echoed by Arafat. He tells those who are most frustrated that "we have no other alternatives" beside the peace accord. "Sooner or later we will achieve the peace," he said. He urges patience, while admitting that "patience has limits."

His own patience is drawing thin, he confessed, especially around the issue of elections for a Palestinian council to govern the emerging autonomy of the Palestinian people. "The election was supposed to be last July," he said. "We are in need of this election. I am in need of a mandate from my people. If not me, someone instead of me."

"Security is not a four-letter word"

But members of both the conservative Likud and more moderate Labor parties in the Knesset argued for caution.

While calling the peace process "the light at the end of the tunnel," Uri Orr of Labor, chair of the Knesset's foreign affairs committee, reminded the delegation, "We don't have a peace treaty with the Palestinians. We have a Declaration of Principles. It's a beginning, a very important agreement, but we need a thousand details to fill in the substance." In the interim, he said, "the people in Israel are very sensitive about security."

He answered Arafat's familiar complaint that his job is made more difficult, if not impossible, by delays in paying promised donations from foreign countries, including the United States. "They still didn't build the administration, the tools to take the money from the donors," Orr said. "We'd like to see all this money accountable to create jobs, to build schools."

"Security is not a four-letter word," said Dan Meridor of Likud. "It's a very important part of our society. We have to be strong. I would not advocate strength at the expense of justice, but justice without strength is not enough." He defended Israel's human rights record throughout the struggle with the Palestinians, noting that while considering itself at war, the country still has put army personnel on trial in cases where they "have exceeded the lines or the orders they were given."

A pledge to help

The delegation returned committed to sharing what they experienced, and clinging to the glimmers of hope found in an otherwise bleak picture. "We have a ministry of facts, of telling everyone when we go home what we've seen and heard," said Schoen.

And while really hearing the discouragement is "an important piece of sharing the pain," as Margaret Lehrecke of Tappan, New York noted, the delegates also took some solace in the examples of hopefulness they did see: the ministries to ease the suffering, and the quiet efforts to keep dialogue open.

A sense of the region's trauma must be brought home to the church in the United States, the country that both supplies the greatest financial aid to Israel's defense force and has taken on the prime responsibility for brokering the peace process, said Thompson. "I think we're all diminished by what's going on here," agreed the Rev. Bill Exner of Goffstown, New Hampshire. If there is to be peace, it has to be an equal peace, a peace with real justice, he said. "It's a hollow victory that's won at the expense of others," he said.