A Time to Speak – Israeli-Palestinian situation ‘unstustainable’

Lockhart-wOn Jan. 20, Bishop Oscar Cantú from the diocese of Las Cruces, N.M., wrote in a letter addressed to National Security Advisor Susan Rice, “Having just returned from a solidarity visit to Israel, Palestine and Jordan, it was clear that the status quo is unsustainable. It is dangerous for both Israelis and Palestinians.”

In the letter, he quotes the document “You Are Not Forgotten: Statement of the Coordination of Bishops’ Conferences in Support of the Church in the Holy Land,” writing, “To those Israelis and Palestinians who seek peace, you are not forgotten. The right of Israel to live in security is clear, but the continuing occupation eats away at the soul of both occupier and occupied.”

After my latest six-week stint as a human rights defender in Hebron, Palestine, I can affirm that Israel’s military occupation “eats away at the soul of both occupier and occupied.” Through three stints in the last three years with Christian Peacemaker Teams, I have witnessed the erosion of humanity and hope.

“Underlying the principle of the common good is respect for the human person as such, endowed with basic and inalienable rights ordered to his or her integral development.” (Laudato Si’ 157)

Since the beginning of October, violence in Israel and Palestine has significantly increased. In the last 4-and-a-half months, about 180 Palestinians have been killed while carrying out attacks or alleged attacks against Israelis or during clashes; nearly 30 Israelis have been killed.

More than 16,000 Palestinians and several hundred Israelis have been injured. Stories of some of these deaths and injuries have been in the U.S. news.

But the news stories do not offer a complete picture. During my last stint, I saw clearly the effects of an increasingly more brutal military occupation under which the principle of the common good was violated daily in ways I can only begin to explain:

I saw Israeli soldiers ransack Palestinian homes and heard stories about how Israeli forces raided some homes three times in a single night, terrorizing the young children living there.

On a nearly daily basis, I watched Israeli soldiers shoot teargas and sound grenades at Palestinian children as they were going to school. Often the soldiers were responding to a few children throwing a few stones toward an Israeli checkpoint. However, sometimes the soldiers shot without provocation.

Either way, these were cases of heavily armed adults using massive force against children who were unarmed or armed with nothing more than stones.

On more than one occasion, I saw Palestinian schools close because Israeli soldiers fired teargas in the schoolyard or close enough to a school that the gas fumes blew into the classrooms, making learning impossible.

I saw two brothers, 10- and 11-years-old, arrested for alleged stone-throwing one day and 13- and 14-year-old boys on another. I put my arm around the mother of one boy, trying to comfort her as she worried her son would be beaten while in Israeli custody.

I sat in a solidarity tent with Palestinian families who came together because Israel had not returned the bodies of their loved ones who were killed in the recent violence.

Some families had waited months for the return of the bodies so they could begin the grieving process in earnest, say their final good-byes and bury the departed.

One father said that when they neared the checkpoint where his older daughter was shot dead, his 3-year-old daughter asked, “Will they kill me like they killed my sister?”
On Jan. 1, Israel released 23 bodies to Palestinian families; 17 of those families were in Hebron.

“What is the law of the People of God? It is … the acknowledgment of God as the one Lord of life and, at the same time, the acceptance of the other as my true brother (or sister), overcoming division, rivalry, misunderstanding, selfishness; these two things go together.” (Pope Francis, general audience, June 12, 2013)

I also watched one Israeli soldier guide a Palestinian toddler back to his home and another try to give candy to a Palestinian child. Such moments of humanity across the Israeli-Palestinian divide are rare in Hebron.

Such moments offer glimpses of what could be.

However, until Israel ends the occupation of Palestine, peace is impossible.

Cory Lockhart is a member of St. William Church, a program associate with JustFaith Ministries and a reservist with Christian Peacemaker Teams.

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