U.S. Handbell Choir Members Who Went to Palestine “To Spread Music” Returned “Spreading the Truth”

By Roxane Assaf

It’s a typical Protestant post-service coffee hour: Sunshine beaming through clean glass windows, well-dressed folks milling around with Styrofoam cups, a table under siege because there’s something to eat on it. But this day’s coffee is chasing down hummus, baba ganoujsh and tabouleh. And the fashion corral of prim Sunday best is peppered with starch-pressed red- and-white scarves which appear to be of the style worn by Yasser Arafat.

That’s because they are.

The handbell choir of the First Presbyterian Church of Evanston in suburban Chicago went on a Christmas mission last year to their sister church, the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church of Bethlehem. Their plan was to donate three octaves of handbells to their distant Christian brethren, and to coach the members of that church in how to use them. But as one of the 20 traveling musicians, Pam Pettibone, describes it, “It was a mission that became a double mission. We went to spread music, and we did. Then we came back spreading the truth about what’s going on over there.”

The consensus among the group that went is that the Palestinians in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories need more than music lessons. They believe the Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied area just west of the Jordan River are being denied basic freedoms by the Israeli government and are suffering harsh injustices at the hands of Israeli military officials. The group was so surprised at what they found, they came back stirred to action. Says Pettibone, “I saw with my own eyes the oppression suffered by the Palestinians, and that made me really sad. I used to just breeze by all the newspaper stories about the Middle East no matter what the headline. Now I want to read everything, and tell everyone what I’ve discovered.”

First Presbyterian Pastor David Handley says that while the purpose of the trip was not political, he had anticipated the group’s reaction. Handley describes himself as having been “raised on Leon Uris and the romance of Zionism.” He recalls Uris’ book Exodus, a novel about the birth of Israel, as a “staple of Americans growing up in the 1950s.” But a visit to Jerusalem in 1966 changed his attitude toward accepting the notion of the “heroism of Zionist terrorism.” And he believes the exclusionary tactics the Israelis have continued to employ have since “ghetto-ized” the West Bank, where many of the nearly three million Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories reside.

At the church coffee hour people gather to peer at a bulletin board with a map and photographs from the trip. Standing near the map, a souvenir scarf about her shoulders, Pettibone points to what looks like a series of grey puddles of odd shape and size to the left of the Dead Sea.

“These are isolated Palestinian territories. The people who live here can’t go from one neighborhood to another without so much harassment and intimidation, they just grow weary trying and stay home,” she says. “They need permits, which are nearly impossible to get. So they can’t go to work or do business in other areas. They feel defeated.” And since the entire country is only slightly larger than the state of Massachusetts, these puddles represent punishing restrictions when their inhabitants are forbidden to attend the weddings, births and funerals of family and friends nearby.

Rev. Donald Wagner, director of the Center for Middle East Understanding at North Park University in Chicago, explains, “They have checkpoints. Your town is surrounded, and you have to go through a checkpoint if you want to get out. And if you don’t have the documents, you’re sent back in. If you try to break through, you’re shot. It’s apartheid.”

Someone in the church assembly asks Pettibone if the church’s pastor, Dr. Handley, explained this to the group before going. “No,” Pettibone replies. “When we went on one of the tours, we asked the guide some personal questions. His story of how his land had been confiscated was so compelling, we took him to dinner and talked some more.”

The tour guide’s lament is not a rare one. According to Ali Abunimah, vice president of the Arab American Action Network based in Chicago, “Every single day the Israelis confiscate land to build Jewish settlements without asking permission of the owners of the land, and they do not compensate them for what they take.” Abunimah also says the Palestinians whose homes are demolished or confiscated are not given housing in place of their loss.

Pettibone is frustrated with the United States’ apparent endorsement of the unfairness. “The Israelis just keep throwing them out of their homes and building on the hilltops. Just because you interpret something in the Bible, that’s not all yours to claim. And we, as Americans, are supporting the oppressors. What they are doing is distinctly contrary to everything we grew up valuing. And we’re funding it, on top of that,” she marvels.

A congressional report by the U.S. Agency for International Development reveals that the U.S. spends $13.5 billion a year in cash and military aid to the world. Three billion, or 22 percent, of this goes to Israel. This means Israel receives $8 million a day which, combined with loan guarantees and other forms of aid, amounts to $13 million a day, far more than the U.S. gives any other country in the world.

Abunimah poses the question, “Can you imagine a road in this country where only whites can drive? And they’re using our American tax money to pay for these settler roads.”

Furthermore, the figures stated do not include U.S. tax-exempt individual contributions to Israeli institutions by American Jewish donors. Says Abunimah, “I think a lot of good-hearted, well-meaning, honest people support Israel simply out of ignorance. I think anyone who goes there would have their eyes opened immediately unless they go on an Israeli propaganda tour.”

There is agreement that what the bell choir witnessed was apartheid. Jennifer Bing-Canar, director of the Middle East program for the American Friends Service Committee, a social justice organization founded by the Quakers, says that such discoveries anger people who previously felt they had the whole story.

“They come back and say, ‘Well, I didn’t know houses were being demolished and olive groves were being uprooted for new Israeli settlements that Palestinians can’t even use. I didn’t know that apartheid exists, basically.’”

She believes the Israelis do themselves a disservice. “By covering up the facts, what happens is that people go there and see for themselves, and they feel they’ve been lied to.”

The way the ongoing conflict is presented by the American media, Bing-Canar says, has led to stereotyping the Palestinians as terrorists. She says of the church visit, “It’s the kind of context that Americans need, so that when somebody drives a bus over a cliff or stabs a soldier in the back in the Old City, they understand where the rage is coming from. That is not to condone that kind of behavior, but you have to put it into a context, and I don’t think the U.S. media does that well at all.”

Abunimah, who spends much of his time analyzing the media, considers a biased press to be the reason the church choir members were alarmed. “In Jerusalem and the area around it they’ve systematically confiscated something like 80 percent of the Palestinian-owned land. The purpose is to keep a Jewish majority in the city. It’s really administrative ethnic cleansing. This is stuff that is known to the international community, but in the U.S. press it is almost taboo. I think they just deny the fact that the Palestinians were completely dispossessed.”

He raises the point that even the daily Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz published an article on the demolition of Palestinian houses, the prevention of Arabs from entering their fields, and the denial of health benefits, describing the “detailed precision with which ostensibly bureaucratic procedures, anchored in ostensibly fair and rational legislation, provide a cover for systematic, thoroughly conceived oppression, imposed to further [Israeli] nationalist goals.”

A Rational Rationale

And Israeli officials do present rational defenses for their actions. For example, while they are aware of instances of deaths and even births occurring while Palestinian civilians are held up at checkpoints, they assert that security measures must be upheld.

As Andrew Shoenthal, assistant director of B’nai B’rith’s Anti Defamation League, describes it, “When you have bombs going off in buses and in schoolyards, I think your reaction is, ‘We have to close down borders.’”

Abunimah considers this a shrewd public relations ploy which is, nonetheless, easy to dispel. “The people going to the checkpoints are not terrorists. They are old women going to market with their vegetable baskets to make their living. They are people going for medical treatment or to pray. Someone who’s trying to breach the security of Israel isn’t going to go past the authorities. None of the suicide bombers went through a checkpoint. The suicide bombers sneak in. And even the old women sneak in to sell their vegetables in the streets of Jerusalem.”

There is no question, however, that violence does take place. But what are the numbers? An Israeli human rights organization, B’Tselem, whose express purpose is to provide information to the Israeli public and the international community about violations of human rights in the occupied territories, documents the casualties.

Their numbers reveal that from the beginning of 1993, when the Oslo peace negotiations took place, to the end of last year, 190 Israeli civilians were killed by Palestinian civilian attacks. Another 60 were Israeli military casualties. In the same period 482 Palestinians were killed by Israelis. Approximately 70 of those killings were committed by Israeli civilians. The rest were by the army and police.

Reverend Wagner says the situation has improved insofar as in the areas turned over to the Palestinian Authority the Israeli army is no longer patroling the streets, picking people up and beating them. However, the economic climate has worsened for the Palestinians, who are not granted the permits required to work and engage in enterpreneurial activities.

But an unnamed source at the Consulate General of Israel in Chicago disagrees. “Since Israel conquered the area in 1967, the economic situation of Palestine has improved by far,” the Israeli source says.

Yet the same source confirms that Palestinians are not living as well as Israelis are. “No they are not, but you must ask yourself what was the starting point of Israelis versus the starting point of Palestinians. I don’t want to say that the Israelis are more sophisticated…”

Sophisticated or not, says Abunimah, “You can’t promote security by imposing more and more hardship. It’s part of a bigger strategy to choke and strangle the Palestinian population.”

Bing-Canar agrees. “Jerusalem used to be the commercial center for the Palestinians. Now their businesses have been forced to leave. You can relocate a business, but you can’t relocate the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.”

What Pettibone discovered was that even some tourists were being steered away from spending their money with the Palestinians when they went to Bethlehem, which is under Palestinian Authority administration, but is surrounded by Israeli rule. “I was told that when they got on an Israeli tour bus at their Israeli hotel to go to Manger Square, they were warned that they would be ripped off by the Palestinian shopkeepers. So they were to see the square, get back on the bus, and they would be taken to the nice shops outside the borders,” she says.

But ADL’s Shoenthal is skeptical of what the choir members claim to have discovered on their trip to Bethlehem. “Whenever I go on a tour I always sit back in my chair and I wonder, ‘What is their agenda? What do they want me to take away from this?’ Bethlehem is a large city with many diverse groups and competing interests. I can imagine that this church group went there under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority. And that would make sense to me, because if I were a PA official, I would want to make sure that they take my message back to the U.S. If I were Yasser Arafat’s head of tourism and I knew someone was coming to my area, I’d make sure that they were taken care of. Sometimes you’re duped. Sometimes you don’t know you’re being used as a tool of propaganda, and that’s when it hurts.”

Wagner, who helped organize the trip, responds, “This group was not under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. They were the guests of the Christmas Lutheran Church, who put together the itinerary and took them around. And the emphasis was on the Christian experience in Palestine. It’s doubtful they even met anyone from the Palestinian Authority. They were neither manipulated, nor were they duped. They simply saw things as they were. They lived the experiences that Palestinian Christians live every day, and they drew their own conclusions, which they were left the freedom to do.”

The pastor of the host church in Bethlehem, Mitri Raheb, heads the International Visitors Center, which was founded upon the philosophy of “authentic tourism.” The goal is to offer an alternative way of seeing the holy places that does not exclude the peripheral life of the community. Raheb and others view the currently dominant style of tourism as unreal and vacuous.

Bing-Canar concurs. “They just come on Israeli-sponsored tours or through their churches, and they see the old churches and the footsteps where Jesus walked, but they don’t see the people who remain. They go to see relics, but not a living community,” she says.

Furthermore, as foreigners and U.S. citizens, the members of First Presbyterian were at liberty to visit the Garden of Gethsemane, to see various tombs and to walk the Via Dolorosa, a sacred street where holy processionals take place on Christian holidays. It puzzles them to discover that the Christian Palestinians who live in the Holy Land are not permitted the same basic freedoms in a territory they believe to be their own.

The spokesperson from the Israeli consulate says that Israel doesn’t agree that the Palestinians have any rightful claim to the West Bank. “Israel conquered this land from Jordan in 1967. There was never Palestinian rule historically on that land. There was Jordanian rule. The main issue is to understand that it’s a very complicated situation. I assume if the army decided to take land from one region or another, there is some explanation for it. Maybe there was a terrorist attack. Maybe they had to cut down olive trees so terrorists could not hide. Israel is a democratic state. One officer doesn’t decide to wake up in the morning wanting to cut down trees. He is receiving orders from politicians. I suggest one leave the issue alone.”

But Abunimah doesn’t leave it alone. He says the standard reason given for a house demolition is that it was built without a permit. “Every country in the world enforces its planning laws, so this sounds very reasonable to most Americans. But it’s not, because first of all, they don’t grant any building permits to Palestinians. Secondly, Jews in the western part of Jerusalem routinely build houses without permits, and then they are given retroactive permits. They only demolish Palestinian houses. When they say it’s illegal, that’s according to their law, but their law is illegal under international law. According to the United Nations Security Council, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem are under illegal Israeli occupation.”

“That’s an opinion,” Shoenthal concedes, but he contests it. Surprisingly, he equates Israel’s position that it can do what it chooses with Palestinian lands with Serbia’s position that it can do what it wishes in Kosovo. “When the United Nations Security Council issues a resolution, it’s obviously the opinion of the Security Council body or the Assembly Hall,” Shoenthal says. “There’s international law and then there’s national law. For example, let’s go to Kosovo. We may say it’s international law that dealing with ethnic cleansing is illegal, but the Serbian government is adhering to its own laws in carrying out policies that it sees fit.”

Pettibone is baffled that the United States would support Israel’s willful defiance of international law. Abunimah points out that a wave of public conscience is offset by powerful entrenched forces in Washington: “The Israeli lobby, and I don’t say the Jewish lobby, because it also includes a strong Christian Zionist group, is very powerful in this country. And it is the guilt that the U.S. didn’t do more to prevent the Holocaust. They didn’t allow Jewish refugees to come to the United States in the years before the war. They didn’t allow them to come here in the years after the war. There’s a lot of guilt among the people who run this country—middle-aged white men who are the same guys who, during their days in college, were actively excluding Jews from clubs and the like,” he contends.

That having been the case, some believe it is the current goal of the Israeli government to use the guilt to turn the tables. According to LAW, a human rights organization founded by a group of Palestinian lawyers, the Israeli government employs a “housing balance” policy advocating a “preference for Jewish housing with the eventual aim of making the Arab population a minority in East Jerusalem.” The thousands of Palestinians losing their residency rights in Jerusalem by having their identification cards revoked, LAW believes, is further evidence of this motive.

Shoenthal disagrees that such deliberate measures are being taken. He explains, “Basically what is slowly occurring is a transfer of power to the Palestinian Authority, and this can’t be an instantaneous thing, because the Palestinian Authority can’t handle it instantaneously. They need to have certain access to things we take for granted. An airport has to be built. You can’t just transfer land over, because you do have Israelis living in certain territories.”

At the coffee hour, the hall eventually is filled to standing room only. The lights are subdued, and a slide show begins. Sunny images of sand-colored structures behind smiling Americans flash onto the screen, still by still. Handley recounts, “Around the middle of the week as the social awareness grew, we determined we had to go to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum, to get a perspective on other people’s suffering historically. It was powerful and saddening. But we couldn’t help seeing the parallel between what they had suffered and what the Palestinians are suffering today. The persecuted became the persecutors.”

However, Handley also recognizes the role the United States played in the tragedy of the Holocaust. Pettibone recalls her shock and disappointment at finding out this truth. “They needed a place to go, and the U.S. wouldn’t let them in. Give us your tired, your poor, but not your Jewish. But now,” she opines, “they think it’s okay to annihilate someone else.”

Pettibone, who also sings in choral groups professionally, says she feels differently now when she sings in the synagogue for High Holy days. “Even here in the U.S. Jews talk about the ‘homeland.’ Secular, conservative, and reform Jews. Why was a nation established for one religion? And why at the expense of innocent others?”

Handley acknowledges the sentiments that have arisen in his group since the excursion. “It presents a complicated dilemma,” he ponders. “We have a good relationship with the Jewish community here, and we want to keep that strong.”

A video plays. The sound comes in first. It’s a handbell choir chiming in harmony and descant “Gloria in Excelsis Deo.” The faces of the Palestinian musicians come alive on the screen. They do exist. They smile and learn and get excited. And they like this music just as their mentors from the West do.

Then the scarf-wearing ringers standing around the room show up on the screen inside a candle-lit stone church wearing concert attire: red blouses and shirts, black pants and skirts, white gloves. They stand with the bells at their shoulders. And as the music peals in cacophonous splendor, sniffles fill the room and find their places in the rhythm.

The handbell choir of the First Presbyterian Church of Evanston is planning a reprise of its mission for Christmas 2000. “We feel a lot of hope,” Handley says. The fact that the number of Christians in the Holy Land is dwindling, he feels, underscores the importance of what they were doing there. “We need to let them know that they are not alone.”

Roxane Assaf is a free-lance writer and video producer living in Bethlehem.