Thought for the Week: Hope in the Holy Land
Anna Seifert reflects on Israel-Palestine
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never put it out John 1:5
Last year I returned from another working visit to Israel-Palestine. This time it was with Friends on a Quaker working retreat. From year to year the injustice and darkness of occupation policies becomes more offensive: the expansion of settlements and the separation wall, the eviction of families and the demolition of homes. The Beit Arabiya Peace Centre, rebuilt a fifth time last summer, has again been demolished.
It is as if the voices of the Hebrew prophets announcing God’s justice for all fall on deaf ears, whereby human rights and dignity are denied. As too many people, including Christians, remain silent in the face of repression and military control, the darkness in the land of the Holy increases.
One day in my hostel on the Via Dolorosa I could hear the prayerful chanting of Christian pilgrims: ‘Jesus remember me when you come into your kingdom…’ I can only hope that some of the pilgrims will also remember the ‘living stones’, Christian communities in the occupied Palestinian territories, and make time to hear their stories of hope and faithfulness to the gospel despite the daily hardship of occupation.
Today, there is much darkness in the Holy Land, yet many chinks of light are shining through the gaps of physical and emotional barriers. A quiet sense of hope and dignity seems to energise many small, yet significant, gestures: when a farmer replants young olive saplings after his trees have been cut down by settlers, when Daoud from Tent of Nations installs solar panels, digs cisterns and transforms caves to live in to overcome the many refusals to build on his land.
Hope is alive for children who attend a place called School of Hope and for students at Ramallah Friends School that offers ‘a taste of normality, dignity and hope’. Hope is also rekindled every day as families struggle to survive and as women bake bread and pickle the freshly harvested olives. Light shines in the darkness when courageous Jewish people, Christians and Muslims pray and act for a just peace.
In Isaiah 6:8 God asks: ‘Whom shall I send’? The prophet answers: ‘I will go! send me!’
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