6th International Sabeel Conference
Travel diary entry by Greg Jenks, Sabeel Australia

Friends:

The sixth international Sabeel conference, The Forgotten Faithful, has now ended.

Most of the 300 international participants from 29 countries will now have returned home and the process of reflecting on all that we experienced is now underway. I know that I have come back home with a deeper sense of the human tragedy that has unfolded in Palestine over the past 100 years, and a renewed commitment to play some small part in supporting those from both the Jewish and Palestinian communities that are engaged in the struggle for justice, peace and reconciliation.

A statement from Sabeel is being drafted and will be released shortly. When it is available I shall distribute it through our email network.

It was a particular pleasure to spend some extra time with Nazareth members of Sabeel, and to hear more about their work in the Galilee. I shall write further about Nazareth, and our partnership with with, in the next few weeks.

For those in SE Queensland, we have an event planned at St Francis College, Milton at 7.00pm on Friday, 24 November when those of us attending the conference will report back on the experience to other Sabeel members and friends. As opportunity allows we shall also seek ways of doing this in other locations.

My online travel diary will also provide some additional glimpses into the experience. For those unable to access the site direct from this email, the URL you need is:

http://wiki.faithfutures.org/index.php/Jerusalem_2006_Travel_Diary

I shall also paste below the text of a short piece prepared for the Anglican newspaper here in Brisbane.

Best wishes,

Greg Jenks

THE FORGOTTEN FAITHFUL

Take 300 international participants and combine them with an equal or greater number of local participants. Then move them around in buses to visit villages and towns in an area under military occupation for almost 40 years. No, this is not a recipe for disaster. It was the successful formula for the sixth international Sabeel conference held in Israel and Palestine last month.

Local participation in the 2004 conference was affected by Israeli restrictions on access to Jerusalem by Palestinians, so this time around we went to the places where Palestinian Christians are to be found: Bethlehem, Taybeh, Aboud, Fasouta and a dozen other villages on the West Bank and in Galilee. On the Sunday morning during the conference, we joined local Christian communities in the Ramallah area. This was a special experience for us internationals and a powerful expression of support for the fragile Christian community that often feels forgotten by the global church.

The conference participants came from 29 different countries, and the numbers would doubtless have been higher had it not been for the recent conflict in southern Lebanon and the continuing attacks on Gaza. With two young men ambushed and shot dead by Israeli snipers in Bethlehem the day before we met there, and many more killed in Gaza during the conference, the violence was never far from our minds. But it is the sustained low-level harassment that lingers most powerfully in my memory. One story may suffice to illustrate.

I was travelling in a convoy of three buses from the village of Aboud on the West Bank to various villages in northern Galilee. At a checkpoint on the “Green Line” that separates Israel from the occupied territories one of our buses was turned back because there was an elderly Palestinian woman on board. She was in her seventies and had all the required papers to allow her to travel into Israel, but the two adolescent soldiers with large guns enjoyed their opportunity to intimidate her and to humiliate her. There is no right of appeal when soldiers refuse to allow a Palestinian through a checkpoint; and there are now more checkpoints on the West Bank than there are villages! So the bus turned around and went to another nearby checkpoint where it was allowed through without incident and then rejoined us as we travelled north on national highway 6 to the Galilee.

Please hold all the peoples of Israel and Palestine in your hearts. Pray for the victims of Israel’s ethnic cleansing program that has now been in place for 58 years. Pray also for the Israelis being brutalised by their participation in the tragedy of occupation and dispossession. And pray for the indigenous Christians of Palestine, as they seek not only to resist the occupation non-violently but also to serve as agents of reconciliation so that all the peoples of the Holy Land may live together in peace and justice.

The Revd Dr Gregory C. Jenks
President, Friends of Sabeel Australia Inc

http://www.faithfutures.org/sabeel.html
sabeel@faithfutures.org
(+61) (0)408 767 344