Frequently Asked Questions
+ What does it mean to be "friends of Sabeel?"
Sabeel is a grassroots movement founded in East Jerusalem by Palestinian Christians working for a just peace in Palestine and Israel. It has offices in the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in East Jerusalem and in Nazareth, Israel. Sabeel fosters a spirituality based on nonviolence, justice and reconciliation and promotes an accurate awareness of Palestinian Christians. The name comes from the Arabic word “sabeel,” which means “the way” and also can mean “a spring of water.”
Sabeel is not affiliated with any political party, but it approaches politics from a faith perspective, seeking to speak ecumenically for Palestinians in the occupied territories and in Israel.
Friends of Sabeel groups around the world support Sabeel by spreading its message of nonviolence, education, and advocacy on behalf of a just peace. Friends of Sabeel-North America (FOSNA) is one of these international groups.
Visit Sabeel's Website for more: sabeel.org
+ What is "liberation theology"?
Liberation theologies affirm that faith addresses the whole of personal and social life. Thus a Palestinian liberation theology necessarily addresses the political and social systems that are obstructing justice and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, and it seeks to transform those into social and political patterns that foster just relationships.
+ Does FOSNA support BDS?
FOSNA is committed to nonviolent means to end the oppression of Palestinians in Israel and in the occupied territories. Boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) are nonviolent methods of working for justice, and FOSNA supports the use of these in the campaign against Israeli settler colonialism and discrimination. These are the same methods also used to target apartheid in South Africa, racial discrimination in the United States and colonial rule in India.
The Kairos Palestine document, a cry for help from the churches of Palestine, calls for divestment and boycott as “peaceful resistance” to oppression and as “tools of nonviolence for justice, peace and security for all.” Sabeel’s founder, Rev. Naim Ateek, was one of the signers of the document.
Learn more about the BDS movement at bdsmovement.net
+ Do Sabeel and FOSNA support two states, one Israeli and one Palestinian?
For many years Sabeel and FOSNA supported the “two-state solution,” which envisioned two neighboring states side by side, with Palestine occupying the West Bank and Gaza. But since Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, Israeli settlements and their supporting infrastructure have confiscated more than 40 percent of the land and broken it into dozens of enclaves. As the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem states, “Israel’s dramatic alteration of the West Bank map has precluded realization of Palestinians’ right to self-determination in a viable Palestinian state.”
Moreover, many Israeli political leaders (and the majority of Israeli citizens) have declared their opposition to a Palestinian state, and those officials who say they support “the two-state solution” declare that, at best, a Palestinian state would have no standing military, no control of its own airspace and no land bordering on other Arab states. In negotiations, Israel has also refused to relinquish most of the settlement blocs that have divided the West Bank into separate entities.
With these facts in mind, FOSNA calls for a solution that provides equality and justice to all residents of the Holy Land, whether they are ultimately found in one state or two.
+ What does FOSNA say about violence?
FOSNA does not condone any form of violence — Israeli, Palestinian, American, or other.
Following the teachings of Sabeel, FOSNA maintains that the primary way to discourage violence is to end conditions of injustice. It insists that all people, Israelis and Palestinians, should live in peace and security but that this is brought about by just relationships, not by the repression of one people by another, which foments resistance.
FOSNA also notes that in the vast majority of cases, Palestinians are the victims, rather than the agents, of violence. For detailed and current information see the website of the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem.
+ What is the Nakba?
The Nakba is the Palestinian term for the events of 1948 that established the state of Israel. It means “the catastrophe” in Arabic, underscoring the fact that some 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes to make way for the new state and over 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed.
The official history of Israel has often falsified the actual story or told it in a manner to legitimize the occupation of Palestinian land and the displacement of Palestinians. Since the last decades of the twentieth century, however, Israeli revisionist historians have brought the facts to light (even as Palestinians and Palestinian scholars have been speaking of such realities for decades). Israeli works include Simha Flappan's The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities; Benny Morris’s The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949; Avi Shlaim’s Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine, and The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World; Ilan Pappé’s Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948–51, and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine; and Tom Segev’s One Palestine Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate.
These histories confirm the reality of Palestine's historic and ongoing ethnic cleansing. The purpose of these histories is not to demonize Israel or to “delegitimize” it but rather to recognize the injustice done to Palestinians in the creation and maintenance of the State of Israel. Ultimately, as this historical context comes to light in the West, it should lead to a more accurate perspective on the situation.
In June 1967, Israel defeated Egypt and occupied the West Bank, the Syrian Golan Heights, East Jerusalem and the Gaza strip. Palestinians call this the “Naksa,” the “setback,” because some 400,000 were displaced, half of them refugees from 1948. Many say that the Nakba has never ended, that it was repeated in dramatic fashion in 1967, but continues inside Israel and within the occupied territories today, with land confiscations and the ethnic cleansing of entire villages. Immediately after the Naksa, Israel began to colonize the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
