A Cry for Hope for Palestine
Sabeel-Kairos is an advocacy-based Christian human rights charity promoting a just peace in Israel and Palestine. Lynn McAllister, who is our link with he charity, writes about a call to decisive action we can all join:
“We cannot serve god and the oppression of the Palestinians”
Lynn McAllister at the Palestinian Lives Matter protest in Liverpool on 16th May 2021
Cry for hope: A call to decisive action is the title of a recently published urgent call from Christians in Palestine to Christians, churches and ecumenical institutions around the world.
Cry for Hope asks Christians to engage in a process of study, reflection and confession concerning the systematic deprivation of the Palestinian people and the use of the Bible by many to justify it, and act to formally reject such oppression.
I’m delighted that our Team Rector, Miranda, has signed this, and would like to ask you also please to read and consider signing this call here.
The Cry for Hope call with signatures will be presented to the September 2021 World Council of Church’s General Assembly to ratify the goals of the Call and plan for decisive action at the Assembly.
In the words of Abu Nidal, a wood carver in Bethlehem.
“It feels like there is no life left for us here, no future for our children. No happiness and no hope left in our hearts. My family have always lived here. Every generation going back as far as we can know of have lived here in Bethlehem. But this occupation, this violence, this suffocation and this indignity…I don’t know if we can take anymore. Soon all our churches will be empty and there will be no more Christians left in the Holy Land.”
Abu Nidal’s story is not unique. Instead, it is the norm for Palestinians who live each day under the Israeli occupation, experiencing significant loss of normal freedoms that you and I take for granted; visiting their families, travelling abroad, getting to work and school, and accessing healthcare. Instead they face checkpoints, delays, roads they can’t drive on, bombs falling on their homes, soldiers intimidating their children and being refused access to their farmlands. This has resulted in:
745 Palestinian children arrested by Israel’s occupation force in 2019.
218 days of Israeli bombs dropping on Palestinians in 2019 and 2020, killing and injuring hundreds (including children), destroying many families.
15,400 olive trees uprooted or destroyed on Palestinian farms by illegal Israeli settlers and the Israeli occupation forces in 2019-20, shattering the livelihood of hundreds of Palestinians.
“When the Church hears the cry of the oppressed it cannot but denounce the social structures that give rise to and perpetuate the misery from which the cry arises.”