BEIRUT — “A commandment of love” was the theme that the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Michel Sabbah, stressed when I asked him last week about what Arab Christians should be doing to address the many challenges and threats in the Middle East today. I was especially interested in the role of Arab Christians because their plight is highlighted this Christmas week, while a delegation of UK church leaders makes a timely Holy Land pilgrimage.
Christians experience the same pressures and challenges as the majority Muslim Arab people living under Israeli occupation, the assault of Western armies, or the incompetent, autocratic mismanagement of their own Arab political leaders. A strangled Bethlehem, though, is likely to catch the attention of Western citizens and church leaders more than a stressed Alexandria, Aleppo or Casablanca. The four pilgrims are Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Westminster Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Moderator of the Free Churches the Rev. David Coffey, and Primate of the Armenian Church of Great Britain Bishop Nathan Hovhannisian.
The focal point of their four-day visit is a pilgrimage to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Their trip and witness will help Christians and other people of good faith around the world better appreciate the impact of the Israeli occupation on all Palestinians, including Christian communities.
His Beatitude Michel Sabbah welcomed the pilgrimage and noted that, “At a time when our communities in the two Holy cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem are separated by a wall and checkpoints, the visit of the churches’ ecumenical delegation is a reminder to us, to the Israelis and the Palestinians, and to the world, that the pilgrims’ path of hope and love must remain open.”
Hope and love stand in sharp contrast to the Israeli colonization and control policies in and around Bethlehem that have shattered the physical, spiritual and economic integrity of the community — cutting off the built-up areas from thousands of acres of agricultural land and water resources. The main culprits are Israel’s separation wall fencing in the Palestinians, and an associated system of smaller cement walls, 27 Israeli settlements, and a network of electric fences and Apartheid-vintage, “Jewish settlers-only” roads and checkpoints, almost all built on land confiscated from Bethlehem’s previous owners. The result is a prison-like environment for the people of Bethlehem, 70 percent of whom now live below the poverty line. After Israel’s attacks and reoccupation of Bethlehem in 2001-2002, some 3000 Christians emigrated, representing 10 percent of the local Christian population.
Leila Sansour, the Palestinian chief executive of the Open Bethlehem project that works to preserve the city’s physical, spiritual, demographic and economic integrity (www.openbethlehem.org), wrote last week: “A UN report into Christianity in Bethlehem predicts that our community will not survive another two generations. We live from pilgrimages, and our city is closed. We have traditionally stored our wealth in land, and our land behind the wall has been seized. Our lives are intimately bound up, economically and socially, with the Christian community in Jerusalem, yet we are forbidden to enter that city, which lies only 20 minutes away.”
When I met with Patriarch Sabbah in Larnaca, Cyprus last week, I asked him if he saw a particular role that Arab Christians can and should play. His reply was clear, and challenging: “My vision is that we are Christians, whatever are our numbers, are Christians in and for our society, which is a Moslem Arab society. Christians have something specific to give as Christians, because of their belief in Jesus Christ and all the values that Jesus Christ taught us. This is an obligation. Our commandment is a commandment of love, and it is shows the way to build a society. Christian love is about accepting the other or not accepting him. It is about building with the other or refusing to build with him. All the Christian Arabs can bring to Arab society this love as a power of cohesion within the society to love themselves and show how to live together with the Moslems who are the majority in these societies.
“There must be a broad project, a social, economic, political project so that people together can see how they can prepare a country and homeland, and enrich every citizen so that he or she feels at home, content and secure, without any fear of the other. All citizens must have the same place and opportunities in terms of their social and political rights.
“We Christians can be a true bridge through all the churches that are present in the world,” he replied to my question about Arab Christians playing a role as bridges with the West. “All of us together can have an impact. We have an obligation to understand Islam for what it is, therefore we have the obligation even to have alliances with Moslems, in order to build a new type of society, and bring this as a model of coexistence to the West.”
Love, indeed, seems worth a try. In that spirit, I say Merry Christmas to all, and early Eid Al Adha greetings and Happy Hanukah wishes to my Muslim and Jewish brothers and sisters, hoping that all of us together will respond to Michel Sabbah’s call for an ideology of love to replace this time of war.
Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.
Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
—————-
Released: 22 December 2006
Word Count: 877
—————-
For rights and permissions, contact:
rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.212.731.0757