Vatican puts holy sites before people, he says - Elias Chacour, a Melkite priest from Galilee laments the irony of the dwindling number of Palestinian Christians in the major place of Christian shrines - Brief Article

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 31, 1997 by Kate Casa

Special to the National Catholic Reporter

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- The "cold stones of the Holy Land" mean more to Vatican officials and many tourists than the lives of the dwindling population of Christians who live there, a prominent Melkite priest from Galilee has charged.

That harsh assessment came from Fr. Elias Chacour, on the last leg of a three-stop visit to the United States in late September. He claims that diplomatic ties between the Vatican and Israel, established in 1994, were aimed primarily at maintaining Rome's access to holy sites in Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Galilee.

Chacour was a featured speaker at an event in Dallas sponsored by World Vision, an international relief agency. He had made an earlier appearance in Chicago before arriving at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Sacramento, a church that had sent a group of young people to Chacour's parish in the summer of 1996.

Overlooked by Rome, said Chacour, was the plight of Palestinian Christians, 60 percent of whom have left Israel, the West Bank and Gaza over the past two decades. Just 25 percent, or 160,000, of the former Christian population remains, he said.

For 50 years, the Vatican has done little if anything to help Christians, many of them Catholic, remain in the Holy Land, said Chacour, author and two-time nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. "I've been a priest for 33 years in Galilee and I've never been helped by a Vatican agency in my efforts to keep Christians in the country."

Chacour credits the rapid rate of Christian emigration to harsh policies Israel continues to impose on Palestinians, both Muslim and Christian, in Jerusalem, the West bank and Gaza. Border closures keep Christian business owners who commute from Bethlehem, Biet Sahour and Beit Jala from reaching their shops and businesses in Jerusalem for months on end. And the confiscation of Palestinian land for settlements has proceeded unabated, despite the Oslo Accords.

The pressures have squeezed Palestinians to the breaking point, Chacour said. Many of those with opportunities to build a life elsewhere are now willing to do it.

"To have the earthly country of Christ without Christians, while hundreds of thousands of pilgrims travel to visit the shrines and holy places is to leave the Holy Land handicapped," Chacour told NCR. He maintains that until the world, and particularly Israel, treats the Palestinians as equals, there can be no peace.

In July and September, Palestinian suicide bombers believed to have ties to the extremist Hamas movement struck in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, claiming 25 lives in the latest in a string of attacks against Israel that have helped pummel the peace process to its knees. The attacks came after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed in March to allow construction of thousands of new homes for Jews in an Arab East Jerusalem neighborhood. Despite protestations from the West, Netanyahu recently pushed even further, allowing 300 new homes to be added to an existing settlement in the West Bank.

Chacour pronounced the Oslo Accords "dead and buried" and predicted that major catastrophe is ahead. "If Israel does not want to deal with the Palestinian administration with dignity, respect, esteem and some kind of humility, they will soon have to deal with Hamas, the most intransigent Palestinians. And then those Palestinians might start speaking the language of many Israelis -- bombs, explosions, massacres, terror."

In recent weeks, Palestinian officials, under pressure from Israel to clamp down harder on dissidents, reportedly shut down a kindergarten, sports club, TV station and 15 other institutions allegedly run by Hamas.

Most Palestinians have accepted as fact that their ancestral land can no more belong solely to them, Chacour said. "Now the Jews have to understand that `Greater Israel' can no longer belong to the Jews alone."

Chacour, 58, draws his remarks from a well of painful experience. In one of his two books, Blood Brothers, he describes stumbling across the mass grave of two dozen Palestinians in the abandoned village of Gish. He was 8 and arrived in Gish just after a visit from Israeli soldiers. The discovery set him on a lifelong quest for peace.

After Chacour's ordination as a priest in the Melkite church, an Eastern Byzantine faith in communion with Rome, Chacour was assigned to the village of Ibillin in Galilee, where he still lives and works, operating a school for 3,600 students. Although he is officially an Israeli citizen, he calls himself "a Palestinian refugee, a deportee who has suffered from persecution and land confiscation."

Such experiences have authored in him, and in many Palestinians, the dignity and pride of the survivor rather than a sense of self-pity, he said.

Chacour believes that helping Americans to understand Palestinian oppression is key to change. He feels that pressure from the U.S. government could eventually persuade Israel to negotiate with Palestinians in a manner that will bring both justice and peace.

Palestinians hope travelers to the Holy Land will look beyond the stones, will seek out and meet the people who live there. "Contact us, pray with us," he said. "If we ask one favor of visitors when they leave it will be to give us their address, to keep in touch."