wfn.org | Church leader accuses Israel of ‘ethnic cleansing' of Palestinians

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Note #6225 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

20-October-2000
00364

Church leader accuses Israel of ‘ethnic cleansing' of Palestinians

by Stephen Brown
Ecumenical News International

GENEVA -- A Palestinian church leader has accused Israel of practicing
"ethnic cleansing" against Palestinians, and has called for solidarity from
Christians and churches around the world.

	Archimandrite Theodosios Hanna, of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of
Jerusalem, told a public briefing yesterday (19 October) at the Geneva
headquarters of the World Council of Churches (WCC) that Palestinian
Christians "are suffering, because they are Palestinians and they want to
stay in their homeland in Palestine".

	Archimandrite Theodosios was representing Patriarch Diodoros, the Greek
Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, as part of a Palestinian ecumenical
delegation invited by the WCC to Geneva where the United Nations Commission
on Human Rights met this week to consider the Middle East crisis.

	The delegation also included Bishop Riah Abu El-Assal, of the Episcopal
Church in Jerusalem and the Middle East, and Dr Marwan Bishara, a Nazareth
journalist who is a research fellow at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en
Sciences Sociales in Paris. (The delegation was accompanied by Georges
Tsetsis, a member of the WCC's central and executive committees, and former
representative of the Ecumenical Patriarchate at the WCC's headquarters.)

	Three other Palestinian Christians who were invited were unable to come to
Geneva because of Israeli military's closure of Palestinian territories.

	Speaking through an interpreter, Archimandrite Theodosios said: "Israel is
practicing ethnic cleansing against the Arabs, Muslim and Christian.
Everyone thinks that there is a conflict between Arabs and Israelis. It is
not a conflict between Arabs and Israelis, but an occupation by Israel."

	Calling on churches to hold special prayers on Sunday, October 22, for the
Palestinian people, Archimandrite Theodosios said: "We are asking all the
churches in the World Council of Churches to make visible the pain and
suffering of the Palestinian people and to support the Palestinian people in
the struggle for a just peace that guarantees all their rights."

	He added: "This Palestinian people should be enjoying all the rights of any
other nation ... and should be enjoying their independence in their own
state, the capital of which is Jerusalem."

	In a written statement to the human rights commission, the WCC's Commission
of the Churches on International Affairs said that events following the
"provocative visit [of the Israeli opposition leader, Ariel Sharon] to
Al-Haram Al-Sharif have again shown that the consequence of this repeated
defiance [by Israel] of international law, of continuing systematic
violations of human rights ... has been to incite to violence and to deny
peace and security to both peoples".

	Interviewed yesterday by ENI, Dr Bishara warned that the peace process
initiated by the 1993 Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestine
Liberation Organisation had run its course.

	"Forget Oslo. Oslo is dead," he told ENI. "The peace process in the last
seven years hasn't delivered to goods for the Palestinians ... a better
standard of living, access to
education, access to health, access to the job market. 

	"None of that has improved in the last seven years. In fact, according to
World Bank figures and data, unemployment has risen, GDP [Gross Domestic
Product] has fallen."

	The recent "excessive use of lethal force" -- Israel's response to riots --
had turned the expression of Palestinian frustration "into a much wider
confrontation, engulfing not only Palestinians in the occupied territories,
but also Palestinians inside Israel".

	The idea of a peace process as a slow, cumulative process "no longer
works", Dr Bishara  told ENI. "It is now essential for the parties to move
towards physical, geographic, but, most importantly, legal separation
between two sovereign, independent states. This is the only way we can stop
the violence."

	The declaration of Palestinian statehood, he said, would be "a first step
for the strengthening of Palestinian society and to allow Palestine to
negotiate with Israel on a list of issues, without being on the other side
of an Israeli [gun] barrel".

	Dr Bishara, who is a Roman Catholic, stressed that the conflict was not a
religious conflict between Jews and Muslims, "but a racist and colonial
conflict touching Christian communities as well as Muslim communities".

	Describing comments from  members of the ecumenical delegation, he said:
"They made it clear that Israeli bullets did not, do not and will not
distinguish between Palestinian Christians and Palestinian Muslims ...
Crimes against Palestinians are also crimes against  Christians."

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