PALESTINIAN Christians are working 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 part of our lives and our ministries is covered with the shroud of death,” he said. His Church was “resisting and ministering in multiple life-threatening situations simultaneously”. 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 in the Middle East was “committed to peace-building and reconciliation”, he said. “These are alien terms that people across the divide refuse to talk about or even listen to. Yet we are deeply committed to our Lord’s teaching and message of peace and love.”
Dr Naoum decried the killing of hundreds of Palestinians who had been waiting to receive aid in Gaza in recent weeks (News, 4 July). The current process of aid distribution, he said, “looks like the Hunger Games”: the dystopian novels and films in which children are forced to fight to the death to avoid starvation.
A solution had to be found that brought a permanent ceasefire, the release of all hostages, and the restoration of aid supplies under UN supervision, which must not involve the “ethnic cleansing that is presently being discussed by the Israeli and US governments”, he told the Synod.
The Synod stood to applaud Dr Naoum both before and after his address. He told the Church Times that he was “really humbled by this wonderful and gracious welcome. For me, coming here is coming among sisters and brothers in Christ.”
It was “like a homecoming”, he said; and he had “a lot of love for people that I know have been so much supporting our ministry in Jerusalem, and me personally as well”.
There had been much talk before and during the meeting about the lack of a debate on the situation in the Middle East. Last week, a priest in Dr Naoum’s diocese, the Revd Fadi Diab, said that the decision not to timetable a Carlisle diocesan-synod motion for debate “communicates that our suffering, our displacement, and our cries for justice are not worth the Church’s time” (News, 11 July).
Dr Naoum said on Tuesday: “If this is the last chance that we discuss this issue, I would agree.” But he could see that it was an “ongoing discussion and conversation”, and hoped that the time would come when the whole 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 a statement in May, said that the Government “should now formally recognise Palestine as a sovereign and independent state” (News, 23 May).
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 action in response to attacks on Palestinian people, property, and land by Israeli settlers.
“Settlers aren’t defying the state: they are doing its bidding,” the Bishops wrote, describing the attacks as “state violence by any other name”.
“The current Israeli government appears to support these violent settler acts through the military and police not intervening,” the letter said. The attacks were “part of a wider strategy of control and coercion rendering life unviable for Palestinians across the occupied territory”.
The four bishops have all visited east Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank in the past year. Such a “ministry of presence” was important for the Church in the Holy Land, Dr Naoum said, and the experience also granted those bishops credibility when they made statements to newspapers or asked questions in the House of Lords. “There’s a huge difference between saying it from a comfortable 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 local community first and foremost, but also to the historic and religious heritage of our ancestors and holy sites. In the face of such threats, the greatest act of bravery is to continue to call this your home.”
“I DON’T understand using bombs in the first 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 did not represent all Palestinians, he emphasised. “Extremism on both sides is like fire,” he said, referring to an Arabic proverb: “The fire consumed the green and the dry.”
The situation in the West Bank was deteriorating, he said, and he spoke of a recent incident in which Israeli settlers had raised their guns at his car, and another in which rocks had been aimed at Fr Diab’s car.
“The most important thing for us is that we need to name things by name. We need to speak about the end of the occupation of Israel in the West Bank. This is something we have to be very clear about,” he told the gathering.
“We’re running out of time,” he said, with reference to preserving the Christian presence in the Holy Land.
In his interview with the Church Times the next day, he elaborated on the “existential crisis” for Christians in the Holy Land.
“It’s been an existential crisis since the end of the Second World War,” he said. The “flight” of Christians from the region “continues to be our biggest concern, our nightmare even: to think about the Holy Land without its Christian presence”.
Young people especially were subject to restrictions on their movement because of being denied permits, he suggested. He offered the question: how could he, in good conscience, encourage people to stay, when conditions were becoming so hard in the West Bank?
“That’s one of the most challenging questions for me,” he said. “In my ministry as Bishop, I made youth ministry a priority from day one. We have managed to put aside a fund for youth ministry, and hopefully we will build that up to include all youth activities, education, scholarships, and also beginning small businesses after graduation.”
This, he hopes, will be a “tangible way” of telling people: “The Church needs you, the Church wants you to stay, because you are a living witness in the Holy Land.”
On Monday evening, he thanked the audience for their prayers and support. “It means the world to us. We will continue to be a witness for you in Jerusalem, even if I’m the last one there.”
He said that his own identity could be a way 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 am a Palestinian, but not a terrorist. And I am an Israeli, but not a Jew,” he said. “If I can reconcile myself as both Palestinian and Israeli and Arab and a Christian, that means that we can live together as Israelis and Palestinians. That’s something we can do.
“We have done it for many centuries, actually, as Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the land of the Holy One, and we can do it again, but we need to be determined to walk the path of peace.”
Listen to the full interview on the Church Times Podcast
