On a Clear Day in Bethlehem You Can See the Obstacles to Peace

By Brother Thomas Cooney

At the start of the academic year in September, our faculties of nursing and education moved into an adjacent property, a beautiful Bethlehem family mansion built in 1910 and now fully restored. Like so many other local Christians, the Hirmass family which owned it emigrated to South America even before the outbreak of World War I, a process which has continued with the effect that Bethlehem's Arab Christians have remained below the 10,000 mark and two-thirds of the population is now Muslim. The building itself subsequently served as the district commissioner's residence until 1948, and then as a school for the blind. It sits on a small plateau astride the watershed between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea, with the land falling away sharply on three sides. Its face is set toward Jerusalem to the north, and the views from the balcony are spectacular.

The hillside hiding Jerusalem is at present bare, but in the weeks ahead work is due to start on the first of the 7,000 housing units destined for a new suburb called Har Homa. The land has been expropriated from the Arab village of Umm Touba and now becomes part of the 28 square miles annexed by Israel from the West Bank to be part of "East Jerusalem." The view to the west looks along the Cremisan valley, dominated by the towers of the new bridge which, with its associated tunnels on either side, will form the settlers' bypass to Bethlehem. It links roads to the new Jewish settlement of Betar Illit are hurriedly being carved out, and its extension down to Kiryat Arba involves the expropriation of 700 acres of vineyards and olive groves—the latest act in creating "facts on the ground." The view to the east takes in the vista of the Judean wilderness, with the hilltop settlement of Ma'ale Adumin controlling the road down from Jerusalem to Jericho. In the distance beyond, across the deep rift of the Jordan valley, the mountains of Moab stand out clearly at this time of the year, and at night the lights of Amman seem much closer than their 45 miles.

From this same balcony, Jerusalem itself seems so near yet so far. The checkpoints set up around it in March 1993 have served their purpose. "Separation" has become a reality. For those travelling from Ramallah in the north to Bethlehem in the south, the road now runs down toward Jericho and up through the Wadi Nar instead of directly across Jerusalem. The journey used to cost 6 shekels; by the indirect route it now costs 36 ($12). This effectively cuts the West Bank into two halves, with serious consequences for the future, especially if the fledgling Palestinian National Authority relocates from Gaza to the Ramallah area. The PNA already faces profound problems in trying to harmonize the Egyptian administrative and legal practices of Gaza with the Jordanian practices of the West Bank, without this added complication. Regaining access to East Jerusalem is not just a question of holy places. Al-Quds, the Holy City, is also the City of Peace, and it has its own healing role to play in creating that reality. Seen in that light, Jerusalem is the natural capital and it needs to be shared.

A Matter of Permits

For Palestinians living in Jerusalem, coming and going is not complicated, but for those living on the West Bank or in Gaza it has become a matter of permits. Obtaining them is time-consuming, and all too often they are revoked. For four weeks in 1995, starting with the Jewish New Year, they were unobtainable, and at any time of crisis closure is immediate and indefinite. The effect on local families is dramatic. As the opportunities for wage-earning are stopped, unemployment is put at 61 percent. Study is no longer sufficient reason for a permit, and so the university bus and its nursing students are unable to get to the hospitals on the Mount of Olives for practical training. More importantly, the same is true for those in need of routine treatment, jeopardizing the existence of what traditionally have been the main central Palestinian hospitals and throwing an enormous burden on to less adequate local facilities.

Last summer, nursing mothers and their babies figured increasingly among the patients suffering from the effects of dehydration caused by the cuts in the water supply. Thanks to some investigative journalism by the Israeli media during August, there was a public outcry. As a gesture in response, the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin ordered some tankers into Hebron and promises were made to increase the number of days on which the water flowed. We did not notice much improvement in Bethlehem; in the six months from May to October, water flowed through the mains only every 12th day. The per capita amount officially allowed to Palestinians is considerably less than that used in Israel and by the settlers, and it costs more. The water question exposes the inherent selfishness of Zionism as practiced, and it underlines the difficulties now faced by the more extreme among its adherents in accepting the need to share the Holy Land.

Some such thought was in my mind around Balfour Day, when our community here held its annual All Souls' Day commemoration to remember before the Lord the 90 brothers who lie buried in our crypt. From 1893 to 1967, the campus was the central house of Near East Province, and it continues to serve as the burial place of brothers who die in Jordan, Israel and the occupied territories. Those who gathered here this year did not expect their thoughts to be overtaken a few days later by the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and with the uncertainties it brings. The peace process needed the presence of this former military hawk in order to legitimize it in the eyes of many Israelis.

In the world around us Nov. 2 is commemorated as Balfour Day, the day on which in 1917, with Beersheeba freshly captured and General Edmund Allenby's forces poised to the south of Gaza, the British government issued its declaration favoring the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. Home is a comforting sort of word, and the process was to be effected in a way which would not prejudice the civil and religious rights of "existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." Given the way it worked out, the name of Balfour is one of opprobrium for our Arabs, Christians as well as Muslims.

I do my best to defend him. As prime minister, he brought in the 1902 Education Act which gave church schools entry into the maintained sector of education in England and Wales. He had the wider interests of his people at heart. As ennobled elder statesman in the 1920s, he organized the constitutions of the Dominions, to allow them freer development. But the awkward fact is that his name is indelibly attached to a classic piece of Realpolitik; as unelected foreign secretary in 1917 he had to make the decisions regarding protection of the Suez Canal and the passage to India. The Declaration was never approved by the British Parliament, but it became inscribed in the Mandate approved by the League of Nations in 1922. The crucial date, I tell my listeners, is not Nov. 2, 1917 at all; it is Feb. 3, 1915, when some 25,000 men of the Ottoman Fourth Army under Jamal Pasha attacked the Suez Canal.

For Palestinians, the Balfour Declaration opened the door to their dispossession.

It does not really convince them, even if one adds that the other crucial date is February 1947, when Britain announced its intention of surrendering the Mandate for Palestine within seven days of announcing independence for India. For Palestinians, the plain fact is that the Balfour Declaration opened the door to their dispossession, and their instinct tells them that it was intended to do so. They are probably right. Balfour's letter to Lord Rothschild in which it was published went well beyond the bounds of expediency. He called it "a declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations" to be brought "to the knowledge of the Zionist federation."

Thirty years later, no doubt with the horrors of the Holocaust much on its members' minds, the General Assembly of the United Nations cut through the convoluted knot still holding Palestine together. It voted in favor of partition and awarded 54 percent of the land to the Jewish state, ironically leaving the heartlands of Old Testament Israel to the planned Arab state. Within 12 months Israel had won 75 percent of Palestine, and 20 years later it took the rest. Yitzhak Rabin will be remembered for his part in bringing the earlier aspirations to fruition. As a young brigade commander in 1948, he kept open the road to Jewish West Jerusalem and was also responsible for the Arab expulsions from Ramla and Lydda, which amounted to 10 percent of the total refugee numbers. As chief of staff in 1967, he captured the Old City and the West Bank, which was quickly renamed Judea and Samaria.

The Golan Heights were captured at the same time and subsequently annexed (along with the Old City of Jerusalem and the area around it). Security considerations were offered as the reason, but events soon showed that water resources figured largely in the strategic thinking. The Sea of Galilee became a mare nostrum once Syria had lost its riparian rights in the northeast quadrant. At the northern end of the Golan, Israel ensured the safety of the headwaters of the Jordan River, now acquired for its exclusive use. At the southern end, its state of war with both Syria and Jordan enabled Israel to seize the waters of the Yarmuk River which marked the boundary between them. It diverted them northward into the Sea of Galilee, prior to pumping into the National Water Carrier serving the coast and running down to the Negev desert. Although hotly denied, its self-declared security zone in south Lebanon may be serving a similar purpose, by supplying waters from the Litani River, the Leontes, into the National Water Carrier.

The West Bank sits on top of the reserves of the Eastern aquifer, and one does not have to subscribe to the conspiracy theory of history to match the siting of many of the Israeli settlements to that of the wells and pumping stations. Although the world was told more than two years ago that all settlement building would halt, it was not told about the "dispensations." Private housing starts (even if subsidized) have continued, and there has been a flurry of activity in settlements which are claimed to be within "Greater Jerusalem," most notably to the south of Bethlehem around Herodion and in Efrat and the Etzion bloc—all major pumping centers. Information on precise water extraction figures is classified, but as much as 90 percent is thought to be taken by the occupying authorities for their own purposes, in Israel itself as well as in the settlements.

The question of the inadequate water supply to the Palestinians was addressed in a protocol to the Oslo II accords. Unfortunately its arithmetic on replenishment seems too convenient in precisely matching anticipated demand. The major step forward will be to have a forum at which the issues can be more fully considered, but this awaits the final status negotiations. These are due to start by May and to run for up to three years. We face the prospect of several more long dry summers.

The Fourth Geneva Convention includes provisions designed to prevent this annual crisis, but for over 25 years Israel has gotten away with its extraordinary claim that the Convention does not apply because the occupied territories were not previously sovereign. All other signatories had apparently reached the point of challenging this in 1990, when the process was interrupted by Saddam Hussain's invasion of Kuwait. It is tempting to think that the matter has since been rendered academic by the signing of the peace accords, but the reverse may yet prove to be the case. The operative word here at present is "redeployment" not withdrawal, and the end of occupation is not in sight.

"Redeeming the Land"

"Redeeming the land" has been a prime aim of Zionism since its inception. Inside Israel proper, this has effectively ensured inalienable possession for the Jewish people by vesting ownership in the Jewish National Fund. Following the expropriations of the land left by the refugees in 1948 and subsequent Land Acts, some 93 percent of the surface of Israel is so held. What is not commonly realized is that the same sort of process has been occurring on the West Bank. Historically, a high proportion of the land was communally held as a defense against Ottoman tax laws. Since 1967, such land (as much as two-thirds of the total area) has been treated as state land, i.e. State of Israel land in breach of the Geneva Conventions, and the evidence shows that ownership has been vested in Hemnutah Ltd., a subsidiary of the JNF. It is probably no coincidence that Area C of the Oslo II accords, where for the present Israel retains full territorial jurisdiction, amounts to 66 percent of the West Bank. The present frantic activity on building new roads to the settlements suggests that it will be in no hurry to hand it over, a point now confirmed by the new foreign minister within 24 hours of his appointment.

Area B, where Israel retains overall responsibility for security and the Palestinians for civil affairs and public order, accounts for a further 27 percent. Area A, the seven separate towns including Bethlehem where the Palestinians are assuming responsibility for security and for civil affairs, covers about 7 percent. The optimists speak of cantons but, with extremists among the American Jewish settlers talking of the "Wild West Bank" as if the territories were awaiting statehood, it may be more realistic to think of Area A as native reservations.

Commentators on the peace process often contrast the different approaches of Hafez Al-Assad of Syria and Yasser Arafat of Palestine. Assad seems intractably opposed to accepting any Israeli withdrawal from the Golan by stages as happened in the Sinai peninsula after the Camp David agreement. To this day in the Sinai, the soldiers (1,000 Americans and 100 Italians) of the multinational force are strung out along the median line from El Arish to Sharm al-Sheikh "like pelicans in the wilderness." The Golan might be more hospitable for a similar multinational force, but Assad evidently fears that a two-stage Israeli withdrawal might never get beyond stage one, and he does not see the Americans as honest brokers. Their support of Israel since 1948 has been unquestioning and massive—at present more than 30 percent of total U.S. world aid for a small country of 4.5 million inhabitants. The intention may have been to provide a bastion against Communist encroachment into the Mediterranean and a platform to protect U.S. oil interests in the Gulf, but it constitutes the second round in Realpolitik and again the victims have been the Palestinians.

Arafat, on the other hand, cannot afford to wait and knows that the Palestinians have powerful European backers urging them on. Perhaps it is the Ben-Gurion gambit of taking what is offered now and hoping to add to it later, but if so, the Palestinians are relying not on past Biblical promises but on the present natural justice of their cause. The basic problem, however, remains the same as in 1917—the country is simply not big enough for two separate states.

The legacy left by Mr. Rabin may prove to be an honest attempt to confront the dilemma. His assassin is sure that his act was required by halachah, since the Oslo accords seem to diminish the full Zionist claims to Judea and Samaria. The majority of Israelis, on the other hand, seem ready for some sort of compromise, but its nature remains unclear. It was probably unclear to Mr. Rabin himself, as he struggled to carry his people with him. Nobody, after all, likes to risk cutting off the branch on which he is sitting. Concentrating minds is the demographic picture. Within 20 years the Palestinians will again be in the majority, and Israel cannot rely indefinitely on their factional divisions, however hard it tries to promote them.

There is a steady diatribe against Islamic fundamentalism, and to deal with it deportations, kidnapping and even assassination seem permissible. It also must be said that reports of deep divisions between Christians and Muslims seem part of the same effort. In fact, unlike the Israeli entity, the state proclaimed by the Palestinians is a secular one. Sadly, the apprehension which has developed in the Christian community this past year is the fear of violence from Zionist extremists. The damage to the Church of All Nations adjoining the Garden of Olives was followed in late May by an armed attack on the Franciscan Parish Church down in Jaffa, where 300 bullets did their worst. The same Israeli soldier seems to have been responsible for both attacks, claiming them to be a protest against idolatry. An elderly Franciscan died during or after a different incident, possibly robbery, on the Mount of Olives. In August, the interior of the Scottish Church in Tiberias was badly damaged by arsonists, thought to be haredim extremists seeking possession of the church's land bordering the lake.

None of this reflects the Judaism which I learned from those who lived it before I came to Bethlehem eight years ago. One of them, a teaching colleague at the time, gave me the book entitled Judaism written by his father, the Rabbi I. Epstein. I read it regularly to remind myself of a gentler understanding of God's chosen people and of their traditional concern, in the diaspora at least, for the rights of minorities. The postscript to the 1945 edition makes an eloquent plea for the survivors of the Holocaust to be allowed to make their home in Palestine. In an earlier chapter, he describes Zionism as having become accepted owing to the "dynamic of events," and he retains a universalist approach in seeing anti-Semitism as symptomatic of a low level of morality among the nations of the world.

At a conference last summer in Washington, DC, Bishop Kenneth Cragg, the great Anglican historian of Islam, suggested that the politicization of Islam can be explained in part as a reaction to Zionism, which he called the "tragic politicization of the Jewish faith." He held that, by adding an overtly political element to Judaism, Zionists have changed the nature of the Jewish religion as it is practiced in Israel and among Israel's supporters. As a result, he concluded, "Judaism is no longer a religion; it's a state with a polity." The problem is not simply a matter of frontiers.

This latter realization was brought home to me forcibly one Sunday in mid-October at the end of Succoth, when our local Israeli checkpoint reversed its normal practice and made it temporarily impossible to enter Bethlehem. Twenty busloads of pilgrim Zionist Christians were parading around Rachel's Tomb half a mile to the south, with banners proclaiming "Bethlehem will remain always Jewish." Unreality is always dangerous, and it looks as if the road to sharing the Holy Land will be long and arduous.

Brother Thomas Cooney, a member of the De la Salle Christian Brothers order, is vice president for development of Bethlehem University, a Roman Catholic institution of higher learning which draws its Palestinian Arab students from Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.