March 2001

Dear Family and Friends,

Recently I was privileged to be able to speak in many churches and presbyteries while back in the United States, and grateful to have had the invitations from these churches. Three months of speaking engagements and home leave passed rather quickly. I am now back at work in Jerusalem and back in my Middle Eastern home in Bethlehem. But the Holy Land is reeling from almost six months of unrest, violence, and bloodshed. To date, over 441 people, most of them Palestinians, have been killed. Over 10,000 Palestinians have been seriously injured. The Israeli army has divided the West Bank into 50 separate cantons, by means of 91 newly established military checkpoints added to those already in existence prior to September 28, 2000. Today, I carry three separate identity cards issued by Catholic Relief Services—one in English, one in Arabic, and one in Hebrew to facilitate passage from one area to another. For the Palestinians, however, travel is much more difficult, and has been hampered by trenches, ditches, dirt barriers and concrete cubes that act as barricades and prohibit the freedom of movement from one town or village to the next. Every aspect of Palestinian life has been affected and disrupted. One of my greatest concerns has now become a reality—I have returned to a country that is drastically different from the one I left.

On my first night back in Bethlehem, the towns of Beit Sahour and Beit Jala came under heavy Israeli fire. Friends had come by to welcome me back, and we sat in my living room listening for hours to the heavy bombardment of tanks and machine-gun fire being directed at these two predominantly Christian towns. Palestinian friends quipped to me the following day that the Israeli military was providing "fireworks" in order to welcome me home!

In the days and weeks since my return, I have visited many of the areas shelled by Israeli tanks and strafed with submachine-gun fire since the Al Aqsa intifada began last fall. Many of these nightly attacks occurred before I departed for the U.S. last November. During my absence, the bombing and destruction of Palestinian homes, churches, and public buildings intensified.

On a recent visit to the YMCA Rehabilitation Program in Beit Sahour, the town of the Shepherd’s Fields, I saw first-hand the destruction and devastation caused by the almost nightly shelling. Areas of this predominantly Christian village have been left looking like Beirut of the 1980s. Nader Abu Amsha, the Director of the YMCA Rehabilitation Program, collected fragments of the Israeli missiles and bullets that hit the YMCA last October. He had them pasted on a poster board in the shape of the YMCA logo, seeking to demonstrate that out of despair and destruction there springs hope. The village of Beit Jala has also come under nightly shelling from Israeli tanks. Neither churches nor homes have been spared the destruction. Only days ago, 18-year-old Usama al Kurbi was killed as he slept in his bed when an Israeli tank shell brought down the entire roof of his family’s home. It took rescue workers several hours to pull his lifeless body from the wreckage of the destroyed house.

I have seen some very offensive journalism concerning the violence here. Take, for example, the stories that were circulating in both the local and international press last fall, which alleged that Palestinian mothers were sending their children into the streets to be killed. But, as Abdul-Jawwad Saleh, an elected member to the Palestinian Legislative Council refuted, "if willingness to sacrifice their children makes the Palestinians something less than animals, what are the civilized Israelis who are more than eager to massacre those children?"

While in the U.S., it was discouraging to encounter a lack of honest and impartial media coverage of events. How can the foreign press and journalists, whose overly disproportionate presence in a tiny country the size of Israel (in comparison with their presence in a country the size of China, for example), fail to accurately report news events? Sadly, many Americans I spoke with accepted this lack of journalistic integrity with complacency. In his Lenten message to local Christians, and obviously pleading to the Israeli government over its policy of a disproportionate use of force against an unarmed, Palestinian population, His Beatitude Michel Sabbah, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, implored the Israelis to "destroy our churches but spare the homes of our faithful. If you must impose, at any price, collective punishment and if there needs to be a ransom in order to procure the tranquility of innocent children and families, we offer our churches: Destroy them; we will find other places in which to pray and we will continue to pray for ourselves and for you."

I am alarmed that these senseless acts of shootings, bombings, killings and collective punishments are likely to continue for the foreseeable future. As the tragic circumstances here continue to unfold, and as Ariel Sharon (the man whom Palestinians view as directly responsible for so much bloodshed) now assumes the office of Prime Minister of a right-wing Israeli government, many fear that the worst is yet to come.

Douglas Dicks

The 2001 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 143