Peacemaking

The Dysfunctional Family of Abraham

A Christian Peacemaker Teams colleague talks about the dysfunctional family of Abraham. This resonated for me while moving through a course offered by St. George’s College Jerusalem called ‘Abraham: Yesterday and Today’. During our visit to Hebron we had an opportunity to go up on the roof of the CPT apartment, where I reflected on CPT’s work amongst this dysfunctional family of Abraham.

After Sarah’s death at Hebron, where Abraham’s family had been residing as strangers and aliens, Abraham insisted on paying fair price for the field and the cave of Machpelah for a burial site. Abraham made the purchase and buried Sarah. Upon Abraham’s death, Isaac and Ishmael together buried their father in the Cave of Machpelah.

Hebron today is a majority Palestinian Muslim city in the southern West Bank, population about 120,000, with four Israeli settlement enclaves, population around 400-600, plunked down in the midst of and near the Old City. The Jewish community today are some of the most ideologically radical of the settlers, mostly Americans.

A teammate tells about Yossi, an Israeli Jew who lives in a settlement close to Hebron. His ancestors settled in Hebron in the late 15th century, after they, along with Muslims, were expelled from Spain by the Inquisition. These Palestinian Muslims and Jews lived peacefully together. The Jewish community says that in 1929 their Palestinian neighbors massacred 69 of the Jewish community and, shortly after, British Mandate authorities expelled the rest. Others recount that it was Arab villagers from outside Hebron who targeted political Zionist immigrants and not the indigenous Palestinian Jews.

The Israeli military has demolished Palestinian homes in order to build a paved road along which settlers can walk to the Ibrahimi Mosque/Cave of Machpelah. Israeli authorities have forced Palestinian shopkeepers out by welding shut the doors to their shops. Settlers in Avraham Avinu, the settlement enclave which backs up to the Old City, have sometimes broken through the back walls into these shops and vandalized them. Many Palestinian families with the means to do so have moved out of the Old City to avoid settler vandalism and assaults and harassment by Israeli military and law enforcement. It is clear to many that the Israelis plan to force out the Palestinians still living and working in and around the Old City so there will be one contiguous area of Israeli settlement from the east side of Hebron through the Old City and the settlement enclaves along Shuhada Street up to Tel Rumeida, site of King David’s ancient capital.

The Israeli settlers say their movements are restricted, their rights violated. They can’t buy property unrestrictedly. They don’t have free access to the Cave of Machpelah complex and are not permitted to make improvements in their section while the Palestinian Muslim community can in theirs. They are, they say, being squeezed out by the program giving Palestinians free rent and utilities in restored houses in the Old City. They are unfairly prosecuted for minor infractions of the law while Palestinians are not held accountable for theirs.

Society is breaking down. Rarely mugged or assaulted by Palestinians in the past, we’ve been mugged for cameras and cell phones. Women - Palestinian and international - face physical and verbal sexual harassment. (There are still men and women who sometimes call the boys to task.) We see small boys playing with toy guns on the streets. It’s an accident waiting to happen.

Israeli settler children attack us as well. One Shabbat while on school patrol, a teammate bent over and reached out a hand to greet a settler boy, 8 years or so old, walking with his father. The child took a step back, balled up his first and shook it, grimaced and spat at him.

Today, we see descendants of a people persecuted and killed over the centuries who demand their ancestral lands back. We see descendants of a people who have lived there for centuries who saved an earlier generation of those persecuted people from massacre in 1929. Israelis work along with Palestinians for a peace with justice. Palestinians have offered hospitality to their Jewish neighbors. There are persons of violence on all sides.

CPT’s motto is ‘getting in the way’. We work to model a way of living in a faith-based nonviolent community, to support practitioners of nonviolence - Israeli, Palestinian, internationals - by listening to what they need and want, working side by side with them, getting in the way when this part of the dysfunctional family of Abraham is not able to see that which is of God in the other, and struggling ourselves to see that which is of God in the other and to love our enemies as Jesus calls us to do.

Sometimes, reading releases from the Jewish community of Hebron which describe how they are wronged by their own government and by Palestinians, and listening to accounts from Palestinians of the settlers’ violence towards them, I can almost interchange ‘Palestinian’ and ‘Jew’ as they tell of their pain, fear, and anger.

A recent ‘Prayers for Peacemakers’, sent out on the CPT network, said, Israelis and Palestinians both have visions of their people living on their own land in obedience to God’s law. Pray that what is in common in these visions might overcome the differences.”

Let it be so.

Durham NC
21 February 2007
Ash Wednesday

Editors note: For other thoughts on the Children and Family of Abraham, you might want to listen to a recent episode of Public Radio International's show "Speaking of Faith" called Children of Abraham which includes an extended interview with Bruce Feiler is a journalist and author of several books, including Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths.

© 2003-2007, Saint Philip's Episcopal Church
Mailing Address: P.O. Box 218, Durham, NC 27702
Telephone 919-682-5708, Fax 919-683-1857

Webmasters: Jack Mitchell, David Smith