New Videos of Palestinians Under Occupation

By the Reverend L. Humphrey Walz

The Middle East Council of Churches (MECC) has just released two videotapes on present-day Palestinian life on the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The informal style of both—almost like that of skillfully produced home videos—allows intimacy, spontaneity and candor and contrasts refreshingly with TV network reporter interviews, "talking heads" overviews, and momentarily timely newsbites.

"Christian Families of Palestine," 34 minutes long, lets members of two Arab families speak for themselves and for all of the 120,000 indigenous Christians presently living under Israeli rule. The Arrankeh family has lived in Taibeh and the Musleh family in Beit Sahour throughout the centuries those Christian villages have kept records.

Both villages are steeped in New Testament lore. Taibeh tradition says that Jesus used to come there for respite from his demanding ministries in Jericho and Jerusalem. In Beit Sahour, adjacent to Bethlehem, the spot now pre-emptively posted "Military Command, Ministry of Religious Affairs. . . Field of the Shepherds" has long been pointed to by local Christians as the site where, at the birth of Jesus, angelic song proclaimed, "Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace." In neither place today, however, is there much respite or peace. The camera records the villagers' undiluted faith and vibrant worship. Sadly, it also reveals circumstances that recall the Psalmist's question, echoed by the dying Jesus, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Psalm 22:1; Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34).

"Christian Families of Palestine" shows what emigration is doing to village and family. Forty years ago, when the state of Israel was created, Taibeh had 4,000 people, Catholic and Christian Orthodox. Today it has perhaps a bare 1,000. Just since the filming, featured Ghassan Arrankeh's father and his two remaining siblings have emigrated. Whether or not one uses the loaded term "ethnic cleansing" for such departures, we are shown clearly their immediate cause: Jewish settlers have taken the high ground and are expanding down into the surrounding orchards, pastures and other farmland as fast as the Israeli government can expropriate acreage for new housing and for the roads serving Jewish settlements. The methods are vividly depicted for video audiences by Ghassan Arrankeh's memories of the decisive year 1988.

Settlers set fire to villagers' orchards, he recalls. Putting out the flames took long, concerted efforts by residents. The young men then organized to protect the trees against further depredations by their Jewish neighbors. When some settlers returned to continue the destruction, the Christian villagers threw stones. This led to Israeli military intervention, in the course of which Ghassan's son died with three Israeli fragmentation bullets in his body. When Ghassan, who remains adamant about his right to live in his village, started building a small house on family property, the military government (officially called the "Civil Administration"!) stopped construction. Three times they also subjected him to "administrative detention," meaning indefinite imprisonment without trial or presentation of evidence. The burdens this imposed on Ghassan's wife, children and grandchildren were predictable. Still, to assert the right of Palestinians to their native soil, members of four generations of their family stay on, refusing to join the exodus.

In Beit Sahour, another largely Christian village, the entire citizenry is united in the face of provocations by the military government. Tired of being taxed by Israel for governmental services it never receives, the entire populace—Catholic, Orthodox and Lutheran—decided to withhold further payment of taxes pending delivery of services. The Israeli military promptly cracked down, seizing the furniture and appliances from rebellious homes. (The video does not mention the commandeering of goods off shop shelves or of equipment from workplaces, which has been covered by U.S. network television. Nor does the video allude to the auctioning off of all expropriated items at Ben-Gurion Airport.)

As an example to community leaders, high school principal Michel Musleh was "administratively detained" and has been deprived not only of his job, but also his accumulated retirement benefits. His wife is barred from teaching or other educational employment. The family business has gone with the wind. Still, the Muslehs and the people of Beit Sahour hang on and, in keeping with their Christian faith, refuse to hate their Israeli tormentors. Asked if she'd be willing to live on neighborly terms with foreign Jewish settlers, should a basis of legal equality be developed, Mrs. Musleh gives a thoughtfully weighed affirmative answer. (The home-video style, in this instance and throughout, gives an authenticity of character and feelings far more convincing than professional interviewers or a docudrama would be likely to convey.)

"Disabled for Palestine" offers 21 minutes of even stronger medicine. Sponsored by the MECC's Regional Health Committee, it is concerned over the West Bank's growing medical needs—many intifada-related—and deteriorating medical services under Israeli "iron fist" occupation policies. TV footage shows free-firing teenaged Israeli troops pursuing even younger Palestinian stone throwers. Also shown are surgically extracted Israeli bullets—high velocity bullets, fragmentation bullets, tissue-destroying dumdum bullets and thinly coated metal bullets often referred to as "rubber" or "plastic" bullets.

These fortify the video's pleas "that the cure for the crisis in medical services there lies in ending the occupation." They also reinforce its appeal for wider humanitarian responses by Arab society to the circumstances of the conflict's victims. The film's most compelling impact, however, comes from its quiet, intimate conversations with some of the casualties in their homes, the hospital or the limited rehabilitation centers available.

Soft-spoken Palestinian neurosurgeon Dr. Nasry Klioury has had many of the occupation's victims under his care from the time they were incapacitated. In his company, we see their conditions, hear their accounts of how they were hurt, and learn how the resultant handicaps have changed not only their own shattered lives, but those of their families.

Some of the most severely maimed, and also the most accepting of their conditions, are those uninvolved bystanders who inadvertently became targets for Israeli instant collective punishment. A small boy whose shaven head reveals entry and exit bullet holes was tending his goats on a rocky hillside when somebody threw stones at an Israeli army patrol. The soldiers saw the boy. They shot him. A now-paralyzed young matron was sitting beside her husband in their family automobile when they were stopped at a military checkpoint. When someone began stone-throwing, her husband started to turn back. The soldiers fired at their car and one bullet damaged her spinal cord. A man who now trembles at the sight of an army uniform cannot remember how he came to be shot in the face.

With equal cogency, the plights of those Palestinians wounded in deliberate, unarmed struggle against the occupation— or shot at while trying to rescue its victims—argue for urgent outside intervention to stop the horror. So does the flesh-and blood reality the interviews give to such statistics as that for every one of the 1,300 Palestinians—mostly young folk—killed between December 1987 and mid-1993 by the Israeli military occupiers, an astonishing 125 have been injured. By this time, not a single West Bank family has escaped death or injury.

As the cassette's narration summarizes: "Their stories are a window on the long-term human and medical costs of occupation. It becomes clear that their health and their futures depend ultimately on peace." To conscientious American viewers—especially those who have, since March 31, followed the devastating impact of "closure" on the occupied territories— the videotape clarifies the catastrophic effects on its victims of Israel's American taxpayer-supported "iron fist" policy.

It is reassuring to know from other sources that Orthodox Jewish members of the Neturei Karta community in Jerusalem are among Beit Sahour's boldest supporters. Similarly, most of the American and Israeli Jews who write regularly for the Washington Report, or who participate in other Middle East peace activities, have adopted their positions after first-hand observation of what is actually happening to Muslim and Christian Palestinians under occupation. For those unable to see these realities at first-hand, the possible positive results of viewing either or both of these video productions should not be underestimated.

"Christian Families of Palestine" may be purchased for $23.50, postpaid, from Ecufilm, 810 12th Ave. S., Nashville, TN 37203, (800) 251-4091. "Disabled for Palestine" is available at the same price through the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, 4201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20008, (202) 244-2990.

On Palestinian and Israeli Sorrows, Suffering and Hostility

Quaker pastoral counselor Gene Knudsen-Hoffman heartily agrees with Longfellow's conviction that, "If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we would find in each person's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility." She kept this wisdom especially in mind when, in 1980, her work first took her back and forth across the Green Line between Israel and the occupied territories. It helped her see the Palestinians and Israelis as "two traumatized peoples who have both suffered and committed acts of violence against each other."

Later that year she came to know—and gain helpful insights from—Dutch psychiatrist Jan Bastianns, whose therapeutic work with Holocaust survivors had led to his pioneering studies on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). That complex of behavior patterns includes, in its most readily observable form, the abused child who grows up to be an abusive spouse or a child-beater or possibly even an impulsive killer. Its most terrifying manifestation is by "national leaders intent on war" to express revenge feelings stemming from "very old personal wounds."

Beneath these and its other outward behavioral symptoms, she sees great pertinence in the writings of Dr. Eliezer Yitztum, senior psychiatrist at Ezrat Nashim Hospital, Jerusalem, author of 7he History of P7SD and the Israeli Army. "There is a direct connection," he believes, "between the Holocaust and much of the tragic behavior against the Palestinians."

She finds further supportive insight from American Rabbi-psychologist Yonassan Gershom: "On a conscious level, the Israelis are not purposely punishing the Palestinians for the Holocaust," he wrote in the Washington Report of February 1992. "The very suggestion is horrifying to most Jews: 'Didn't we collectively say "never again" would such a thing happen?'

"True. But it is also true that people who have been abused will, when they come to power, abuse others because they do not have healthy models for exercising power . . . The abuse cycle is not logical. It is a set of totally irrational behaviors based on fear, shame, guilt and anger....Unless there is some way to break the cycle, when the Palestinians do get a state, they are just as likely to abuse whatever minorities dwell within their borders because a whole generation of Palestinian children have grown up knowing only the humiliation of military occupation where war and violence seemed normal."

Dr. Knudsen-Hoffman's views were summarized at length in the March Fellowship magazine, available for $1.50 from the U.S. office of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, P.O. Box 271, Nyack, NY 10960.

Middle East Christian Churches, Then and Now

On the invitation of the Middle East Institute and the Smithsonian's Resident Associate Program, national capital audiences heard American and Middle Eastern authorities present eight weekly lectures on the history and theologies of the ancient churches still lively in the geographical cradle of Christianity. Symbolizing both heritage and present vitality, refreshments after the June 9 concluding session consisted of foods traditional to the six global communions dating back to Middle Eastern antiquity. Though "often isolated, sometimes persecuted, occasionally exploited and almost always forgotten" by their Western brethren and sisters, the MEI reminded its constituents, 12 million Christian church members remain in the Middle East.

The series provided overviews of pertinent history, theologies, beliefs, practices, liturgies, languages, geography, ethnicity's, art and architecture. It opened with a study of the Syrian Church of Antioch where "the disciples were first called Christians" (Acts 11:26). It closed with consideration of almost 17 centuries of unique Armenian intertwining of church and nationality. In between, it dealt with the efforts of the Ecumenical Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon to solidify unity in Christ, the Maronite bridge between East and West, the Arab Greek Orthodox, the Melkites, Assyrians, Chaldaeans, West Syrians and Copts. All eight lecturers focused on the centrality of the nature of Jesus Christ, variously perceived, in all of these traditions.