wfn.org | Church of Wales delegation expresses shock after visit to Middle East

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2000-145

Church of Wales delegation expresses shock after visit to Middle East

by James Solheim

     (ENS) A delegation of 80 members of the Church of Wales returned from a 
10-day visit to the Middle East, expressing "genuine moral shock" at what they 
saw and heard, according to Archbishop Rowan Williams, primate of the church.

     After visiting projects that the church supports, including refugee settlements 
and clinics for children and the disabled, Williams said in a speech to his church's 
governing body, "It is impossible to come away from such places without a 
sense of anger and heartbreak about the Palestinian situation--and a sense
of impotence, since there seems no possible peace plan that will give them the 
assurance of ordinary care, stability and justice."

     Williams also addressed charges that support for Christians in the Holy Land 
"was being represented in some quarters as anti-Semitic. We were accused of 
accepting without question one side of a complex story, even of undermining the 
Israeli Government's efforts towards peace." A visit to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, 
a grisly reminder of what happened to Jews during the Holocaust, "was an almost 
unbearable reminder of just why Israel exists, and just why any suggestion that the 
Israeli state lacks moral or political legitimacy creates such anger," he said.

Who are the victims?

     It is not easy to identify the real victims in the area, Williams said. "The 
Palestinians suffer outrageous privations in the shape of restrictions on their
 movements, their access to fresh water, and their rights to social and medical 
welfare," he added. "There can be no dispute that they are the victims of 
day-by-day Israeli policy."

     That situation must be balanced by persecution of Jews who "have been 
outsiders and victims for centuries of bloodshed and torment." Because they 
have been "victims for too long, now they must learn to be agents of their own 
destiny."

     Williams said that he is convinced that the two communities "can have no 
security that is not a shared security. A strong Israel, free from the constant, 
high-pitched anxiety that it will be pushed into the sea by its neighbors, 
needs a secure Palestinian population not seething with bitterness, an easy 
target for the wildest propaganda of Islamic militants."

     As believers we have "the unenviable job of trying to hear and interpret the 
wounds of everyone involved and to ask not simply for justice, in the sense of 
reparation or retribution, but for the justice of the Bible, a situation in which 
each acts for the good of the other. And this, believe it or not, is what the 
church is supposed to be and show--a place of justice," Williams said.

--James Solheim is director of the Episcopal Church's Office of News and 
Information.