Holy Land Report
(George Wesolek, director of the archdiocesan Office of Public Policy and Social Concerns, took part in a fact-finding trip to the Middle East Sept. 21 to Oct. 6 sponsored by Catholic Relief Services, the overseas relief agency of U.S. Catholics. Following is the last of three reports on that journey.)
The 14-year-old Palestinian boy did not hesitate when I asked him the question, “How long have you lived in the refugee camp?” He said, “Since 1948.”
Sometimes they resisted and many of those who did were killed. Most often they fled. They fled the homes that had been theirs for hundreds of years, their olive groves, their land.
Our Catholic Relief Services delegation had the opportunity to meet with Melkite Archbishop Elias Chacour of Akko, Israel, the spiritual authority of most of the Christian minority living in the West Bank. The Melkites are an Eastern rite church united with Rome.
The archbishop tells the haunting tale of his family’s expulsion from their village. He speaks about his father, who when he heard about the armed men coming into his village, was adamant about receiving them as guests, peacefully. But the armed men demanded that they leave the village; so, his father and mother packed up their 11 children and went to sleep in their olive grove.
After a few days, his father and other men of the village went back and said they wanted to return to their homes. They were met with this message: “Leave now and cross the border (into Jordan). If you return, you will be killed.”
There is a special and serious concern over the fate of Christians in the Holy Land. The proportions of Christians in the Palestinian territories have dropped from 15 percent in 1950 to just over two percent today.
More and more of the Christian population are still fleeing. Because of the Israeli military occupation, the severe inability to travel and, therefore, to have any kind of viable economic system, young Christian Palestinians are leaving their homeland for other places. They flee also because of intimidation by their occupiers, because of the endless personal humiliation as they try to cross the checkpoints at “the Wall.”
One young man told me that he had never been to Jerusalem to worship at the holy sites even though he lives only a few miles away.
Since they are such a minority, Christian Palestinians are especially hard hit. Some say sadly that Christians will be almost nonexistent if the climate does not change soon.
The hostility of some Israelis, especially illegal settlers, is based on their conviction that this is their land, given to them by God. They could care less where the Christian Palestinians go.
The Christian erosion continues at an alarming pace. The village of Emmaus, the place where Jesus revealed himself to his disciples after the Resurrection, has been extinguished and has become a “park.” There is danger that the village of Aboud in the mid West Bank that we visited will suffer the same fate. In this small village is the lovely and ancient church of Our Lady Mother of Sorrows, which has been a holy site since the earliest centuries of the Church’s existence.
It is said in Aboud that Jesus himself passed through their village. But “the Wall” and the settlers have encroached, illegally, on the land of these villagers, controlling the water source, making it almost impossible for them to care for their small farms. In the process of building the wall and the settlements, hundreds of olive groves were uprooted, erasing a cultural and economic reality of a thousand years.
The pastor of Our Lady Mother of Sorrows, Father Firas Asib Aridah, thinks that the Christians will be gone in 10 years. And, thus, so would the village of Aboud.
(By George Wesolek)
