PALESTINIAN Christians are figuring out what it means to be a Church in a time of war, the Archbishop in Jerusalem, Dr Hosam Naoum, told the General Synod on Tuesday.
“Every a part of our lives and our ministries is roofed with the shroud of death,” he said. His Church was “resisting and ministering in multiple life-threatening situations concurrently”. In Gaza, the diocese runs the Al-Ahli hospital. Recently, a surgeon there was killed on his way home from work, the Archbishop said.
The Church within the Middle East was “committed to peace-building and reconciliation”, he said. “These are alien terms that folks across the divide refuse to speak about and even hearken to. Yet we’re deeply committed to our Lord’s teaching and message of peace and love.”
Dr Naoum decried the killing of a whole lot of Palestinians who had been waiting to receive aid in Gaza in recent weeks (News, 4 July). The current means of aid distribution, he said, “looks like Hunger Games”: the dystopian novels and movies wherein children are forced to fight to the death to avoid starvation.
An answer needed to be found that brought a everlasting ceasefire, the discharge of all hostages, and the restoration of aid supplies under UN supervision, which must not involve the “ethnic cleansing that’s presently being discussed by the Israeli and US governments”, he told the Synod.
The Synod stood to applaud Dr Naoum each before and after his address. He told the Church Times that he was “really humbled by this glorious and gracious welcome. For me, coming here is coming amongst sisters and brothers in Christ.”
It was “like a homecoming”, he said; and he had “a variety of love for folks that I do know have been a lot supporting our ministry in Jerusalem, and me personally as well”.
There had been much talk before and in the course of the meeting in regards to the lack of a debate on the situation within the Middle East. Last week, a priest in Dr Naoum’s diocese, the Revd Fadi Diab, said that the choice to not timetable a Carlisle diocesan-synod motion for debate “communicates that our suffering, our displacement, and our cries for justice usually are not well worth the Church’s time” (News, 11 July).
Dr Naoum said on Tuesday: “If that is the last likelihood that we discuss this issue, I might agree.” But he could see that it was an “ongoing discussion and conversation”, and hoped that the time would come when the entire Synod would call on the UK Government to recognise Palestine as a state.
That call has already been made by the House of Bishops, which, in an announcement in May, said that the Government “should now formally recognise Palestine as a sovereign and independent state”.
In his address to the Synod, Dr Naoum thanked the Bishops of Chelmsford, Gloucester, Norwich, and Southwark for a letter that they wrote to The Guardian calling for motion in response to attacks on Palestinian people, property, and land by Israeli settlers.
The 4 bishops have all visited east Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank up to now yr. Such a “ministry of presence” was vital for the Church within the Holy Land, Dr Naoum said, and the experience also granted those bishops credibility once they made statements to newspapers or asked questions within the House of Lords. “There’s an enormous difference between saying it from a cushty chair, theoretically, and saying it from personal experience.”
The same was true of church leaders from Jerusalem, including the Greek Orthodox and Latin Catholic patriarchs, making a visit this week to the West Bank village of Taybeh, in solidarity with the Christian-majority population, which had been subjected to increasing attacks from Israeli settlers, he said.
If he had not been in York, Dr Naoum would have been on the trip, he explained, but he had helped to draft the statement from the Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in Jerusalem. It called for the settlers “to be held accountable by the Israeli authorities, who facilitate and enable their presence around Taybeh”.
The statement said: “These actions are a direct and intentional threat to our area people in the beginning, but in addition to the historic and spiritual heritage of our ancestors and holy sites. In the face of such threats, the best act of bravery is to proceed to call this your property.”
“I DON’T understand using bombs in the primary place,” Dr Naoum commented on Monday evening, at a fringe event organised by Christian Aid. He was speaking alongside the Bishop of Gloucester, the Rt Revd Treweek, to an audience of about 40 Synod members, including the Archbishop of York.
Dr Naoum condemned violence “from whichever side it comes, whether from Hamas or Israel”. Hamas didn’t represent all Palestinians, he emphasised. “Extremism on either side is like fire,” he said, and paraphrased Ezekiel: “the hearth consumed each the green and the dry”.
The situation within the West Bank was deteriorating, he said, and he spoke of a recent incident wherein Israeli settlers had raised their guns at his automotive, and one other wherein rocks had been geared toward Fr Diab’s automotive.
“The most vital thing for us is that we’d like to call things by name. We must speak in regards to the end of the occupation of Israel within the West Bank. This is something we’ve got to be very clear about,” he told the gathering.
“We’re running out of time,” he said, close to preserving the Christian presence within the Holy Land.
He thanked the audience for his or her prayers and support. “It means the world to us. We will proceed to be a witness for you in Jerusalem, even when I’m the last one there.”
In his interview with the Church Times the following day, he elaborated on what had, for Christians, been “an existential crisis for the reason that end of the Second World War”. The “flight” of Christians from the region “continues to be our biggest concern, our nightmare even: to think in regards to the Holy Land without its Christian presence”.
Young people especially were subject to restrictions on their movement due to being denied permits, he suggested. He offered the query: how could he, in good conscience, encourage people to remain, when conditions were becoming so hard within the West Bank?
“That’s one of the vital difficult questions for me,” he said. “In my ministry as Bishop, I made youth ministry a priority from day one. We have managed to place aside a fund for youth ministry, and hopefully we’ll construct that up to incorporate all youth activities, education, scholarships, and likewise starting small businesses after graduation.”
This, he hopes, shall be a “tangible way” of telling people: “The Church needs you, the Church wants you to remain, because you’re a living witness within the Holy Land.”
He said that his own identity might be a option to “invite people to think much deeper into the conflict”, and move beyond the binaries that were often applied to it.
“I’m an Arab, but not Muslim . . . I’m a Palestinian, but not a terrorist. And I’m an Israeli, but not a Jew,” he said. “If I can reconcile myself as each Palestinian and Israeli and Arab and a Christian, that signifies that we will live together as Israelis and Palestinians. That’s something we will do.
“We have done it for a lot of centuries, actually, as Jews, Christians, and Muslims within the land of the Holy One, and we will do it again, but we should be determined to walk the trail of peace.”
