Peacemaking

Parishioner Donna Hicks is a reservist with Christian Peacemaker Teams, an ecumenical initiative to support violence reduction efforts around the world. To learn more about CPT's peacemaking work, please visit the website at: http://www.cpt.org. Photos of projects may be viewed at:  http://www.cpt.org/gallery. 

As a reservist, Donna is committed to a three year period of service, and she serves on the team in Hebron, West Bank, Palestine, for three months each year. Reservists are also responsible for raising the funds to support their period of service.  Additional background on the work that Donna and CPT do in Hebron can be found in Donna's reflection from 22 November 2005.

Donna's reflections and meditations are posted here, both while she is in Hebron and while she is home in Durham.  The most recent reflection appears below, and links to past reflections are at the right below. 

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Hands like these

14 April 2008
Durham NC

Hands like these
Were hammered on the Tree:
Feet like our feet
Were pierced: a head like our head
Bore the shameful thorns.
 

Holy Week has been a struggle for me since I started traveling to Israel and Palestine in 1991. We rarely hear the stories about how people got to Jerusalem for Holy Week or how many were denied entry, who were tear-gassed or beaten or detained. On one of my earliest trips, the shared taxi in which I was riding was stopped by Israeli police or soldiers at a flying checkpoint near Bethany and the Mount of Olives. (A flying checkpoint is a temporary road block at which individuals’ documents are checked for ‘security’ purposes.) Three years ago when I was shepherding a CPT short-term delegation around to meetings with Israeli and Palestinian colleagues, I asked a Bethlehemite when he was last in Jerusalem. He replied, “Legally, eight years ago. Illegally, last Palm Sunday.” Today Bethany, Al Eizariya, is cut off by the Wall. A couple of years ago, you could still get there on foot by going up to the Mount of Olives, squeezing through a gap near an Israeli checkpoint, and cutting across the grounds of two convents. Some of the Palestinian staff at St. George’s College, an Anglican continuing education center in East Jerusalem, have to obtain permits to get through the checkpoint and on to East Jerusalem to work. Others are Israeli citizens or have the blue Jerusalem ID card which allows them access to Jerusalem. Some of the families are in limbo, without a blue Jerusalem ID, without Israeli citizenship, without an orange West Bank ID. They have no legal way to get from Al Eizariya to Ramallah, north of Jerusalem, in the West Bank, and are denied access to Jerusalem and its services.

Routinely on Fridays, Israeli soldiers and police stand at the Damascus Gate entrance to the Old City and check Palestinian men’s ID’s as they try to go for Friday prayers at Al Aqsa Mosque. Last month after a Palestinian shot and killed eight Jewish students at Merkaz Harav Yeshiva, Palestinian men under 45 were denied entrance.

A Palestinian Christian woman watched with me last year as a Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance was delayed at an Israeli checkpoint in Hebron. Its passenger was a Palestinian woman returning home from the hospital. The ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) had coordinated with Israeli authorities in advance for its safe passage. The soldiers delayed for so long that the patient had to be transported to the hospital to be stabilized. My companion, a resident of Jerusalem, said, “I have heard of this happening. Now I have seen it.”

While the Israeli settlers of Hebron enjoy the protection and support of Israeli military and police, and the men carry automatic rifles as well as handguns, the Palestinian community faces harassment and violence from them. When I once offered sympathy to a pregnant woman who had suffered the effects of tear gas in her home, she replied, “It is my fate.” This is not ‘fate’ in the sense of resignation or acceptance. It is fate in the sense of steadfastness, sitting sumud. When I thanked our primary translator for sitting down and translating her extensive notes from Arabic into English after a long day in the field documenting house demolitions, she said, “No thanks are necessary: it is my duty.”

Many Palestinians with the means to do so are emigrating. The Palestinian Christian community tends to have more means than the Palestinian Muslim community to do so. On my last day in Jerusalem earlier this year I headed to Shu’afat, to Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center for their Thursday Eucharist and to say my goodbyes for the year. I was talking with a staff member about how much more entrenched the Israeli occupation was, how the situation seems never to get better, how it drags everybody down. I said, “I can leave.” She replied, “We choose to stay.”

During the Roman Occupation of Palestine, Jesus took on humanity to stand with the people and to suffer for and with them, and to die for them. Paul in his letter to the Philippians says, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death - even death on a cross.”

As we move through the Easter Season, let us remember

Hands like these
Were hammered on the Tree:
Feet like our feet
Were pierced: a head like our head
Bore the shameful thorns.
Gwenallt, Gwreiddiau (Gwasg Gomer 1959); English translation in Brendan O’Malley, ed., Welsh Pilgrim’s Manual (Gomer 1989) from Bread of Tomorrow, edited by Janet Morley


Adapted from a reflection spoken Palm Sunday 16 March 2008 at the Episcopal Center for NC State University, Raleigh NC

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