Supplements

Commentary

By Liz Quirin

Living the Via Dolorosa Every Day

What part of “stop the Israeli-Palestinian conflict do people fail to understand? Admittedly, the situation exceeds the definition of “complicated,” but the time to stop the continued killing and maiming of innocent people has surely come. And, what part do we, as a nation, play in this mayhem?

Unfortunately, we play more of a role in arming the Israelis and isolating the Palestinians than we should. What’s the old saying? “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” or something to that effect. We have marginalized the Palestinians and given them more status in the wide world of terror. At least, we now have a special envoy to the Middle East who is talking to both sides and other interested parties.

The problem every Catholic should have with the on-going debacle in the Middle East rests in the fate of Palestinian Christians who don’t belong in the armed Hamas camps or the better armed Israeli camps. They belong to us, all of us, and as a group, we have done practically nothing to promote their cause, which can be summed up as a longing for peace in what for us is the holiest of lands.

They are the living stones that walk the streets that Jesus and his disciples walked. Some of us have had the privilege of visiting the Holy Land. We walked the Via Dolorosa. Palestinian Christians have been living the “way of sorrows” for longer than they can remember. If we don’t stand in solidarity with them, future visits to the Holy Land will find few if any Christians to share the stories of their faith and ours. Church leaders exhort them to stay in the Holy Land, to continue to risk their lives to keep a Christian presence there. I would be hard pressed to stay if my family lived every day in such peril.

A web site called jewishvoiceforpeace.org offers hope that some Israelis and Palestinians can work together for a common cause, the only worthwhile cause: peace. When I look at the topics on the web site, I don’t see anything about Palestinian Christians, a group perhaps too small for them to mention. However, in January 2007, Christian leaders wrote to then-president George W. Bush and spoke of their concern about the emigration of Palestinian Christians. Nothing was done; in fact, more violence followed. It has to stop for everyone’s sake.

This may be the moment when all sides choose to sit down together to talk not only of a longer cease fire but of extending to all citizens of the region a chance to live as neighbors in safety, in security, and someday in peace.
Sometimes the words of a song can pull the threads of a discussion together, making the point so clear: “My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean, and sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine; but other lands have sunlight too, and clover, and skies are everywhere as blue as mine. O hear my song, thou God of all the nations, a song of peace for their land and for mine.” (Second verse of Finlandia or “This Is My Song.”)