"YOU WERE ABSENT, BUT PRESENT:
YOU LEFT AND ARE NOT ALLOWED TO COME BACK"
Ric Rosow
Sunday, March 3rd, 2003

Imagine for a minute that there was a war raging in Minneapolis and you had to evacuate your home and leave for a place of safety. When you return some of you find not only your homes destroyed but the whole community in which you lived, not by the war, but as part of a deliberate effort to keep you from coming back. Some of you find that your homes have been given to others and that you are not allowed to reclaim it. You remain a citizen of your country and your community. You build a make shift home for your family several miles away and every day as you travel to work, you pass your old home. The government passes a law: “Absent but present” and under this law you are not allow to reclaim you home. Your new home and the community that you and your neighbors build are unrecognized by the government. You receive no municipal services - no water, electricity, telephone, roads, garbage pickup or schools for your children. You do pay taxes. For the next 50 years you work to have your community recognized. The government tells that to recognize your community you need to develop a comprehensive plan. You do this. The government rejects it because it conflicts with its plans that have classified your land as a national park, military land, agricultural land or archaeological sites. Your new community does not exist on any official map. This is not merely a nightmare. I met the people to whom this happened. They are Arab citizens of Israel.

When I heard George say that he, Julie and Michael Madden were going to Palestine, I immediately knew that this was a journey that I needed to take; a journey that I wanted to take. There were 16 of us in the Fellowship of Reconciliation delegation. We were Christians, Jews, Muslim, and humanists. As part of a rigorous schedule we met with numerous Palestinians and Israelis, most of who were actively working for peace. It is a small part of their continuing story I wish to tell today.

To understand what I saw it will help to know a few facts. First, today there are over 3.8 million Palestinian refugees who have not been allowed to return home. One third of the refugees live in refugee camps. Second, in the 1967 war Israel occupied all the remaining Palestinian land outside of Israel that is known as the West Bank and Gaza. Since 1967 it has built hundred of settlements, moved new Israeli immigrants into these settlements in the Occupied territories and built infrastructure to support the settlements, including highways on which only Israelis can travel. Denying Palestinians the right of return and settling the Occupied Territories is a violation of international law and every United Nations resolution passed since 1948 regarding Palestine.

When I left for this journey I did not know my mission would be as messenger for Palestinians and Israelis I met, who asked that I bring their voices back to you.

We met Hanna, after walking through the Shatilla refugee camp in Beirut and standing in silence at the mass grave site where 1,500 Palestinians are buried following the massacre in 1982 carried out by the Lebanese Christian Phalangists who were allowed to enter the camp by the Israeli forces commanded by Ariel Sharon. Hanna said:

“Tell everyone we are human being, we are human beings….I am a mother, not a monster. Tell people I am not a terrorist. We love our children; we would never push our children to die. "
Hanna introduced us to two survivors of the Shatilla massacre. Siham described how she saved her brother from being taken away for questioning by the Phalangists forces. She could not save her 65 year old father who she discovered when she returned home. He had been murdered with an axe-blow to the head, left lying on the street. “Not only fighters were killed, but anyone who got in their way” said Siham.

Im Mohammed was the second survivor to talk to us. She told us that she lost 16 members of her family that day.

“I found two of my sons, my brother, my son-in-law, a cousin and 12 other members of my family. I found them among the dead. I can’t forget it. Even if you have a dozen children, you cannot replace a lost child. Politicians cannot understand the human feelings and human suffering.”
As disturbing as those words are, the life for the people who live in the camps is simply miserable. In two days I visited three refugee camps in Lebanon. The images in my mind of these three camps all blur together. Lebanon’s 12 camps are home to over 400,000 refugees. Bourj al-Shamili holds 19,000 refugees alone. It was built to hold 6.000. There are thousands of children in these camps. In two days in the camps I saw no green spaces, no playgrounds, no bicycles, no one playing soccer or kick ball as there was no place large enough to do that. There were really no sidewalks; only narrow alleys between concrete buildings. In the alleys, quarter inch water lines run along the ground. It was raining while we were there and the water lines were covered by the rain water running down the alleys. Electrical lines hung everywhere in a patchwork manner, hanging out from ceilings and crumbling portions of the building. The only child’s play structure I saw in two days was a plastic sand box on the fourth floor of a building used as a school.

But as dire as the living conditions were, the people were proud and noble They were clean and friendly. The small children were eager to have their pictures taken; bright, smiling faces in the midst of depressing conditions. There is a high level of depression in the camps and no mental health services. In Borj El-Barajneh there are over 700 cases of cancer, for which there is no treatment or painkillers. A few days prior to our arrival a young woman died of breast cancer.

Later in my journey I stayed overnight with an Israeli couple in Netanya, a city where there has been 15 suicide bombings in the past two years. Both of my hosts were professionals, the woman was a psychoanalyst. They asked about my trip and I told them about the refugee camps. I was stunned when the woman turned to her husband and asked why, more than fifty years after the 1948, war people were still living in refugee camps. Undoubtedly she did not know of refugee camps that existed in the West Bank itself.

In Israel we heard the voices of Israelis working for peace. One was Gila Svirsky. “We refuse to be enemies. The time has come to end it.”

Gila is the Israeli organizer of the Women in Black who demonstrate every Friday at midday at a busy intersection in Jerusalem with signs that say “Stop the Occupation.” Our delegation stood in solidarity with them one Friday. We were told by every Palestinian group and every Israeli group save one, that the Occupation is the cause of the violence today. However many Israelis are oblivious to the Occupation. Most Israelis never travel to the Occupied Territories and are not witness to its oppression.

“It is not destiny. We can change it. Our blood is the same blood. Our pain is the same pain. Our tears are the same tears.”
These are the words of an Israeli father, Rami Elhana. His daughter Smadar was killed in a suicide bombing on September 4, 1997. He told us that his life was changed forever. He had two options. One was the way of hate, anger and revenge. The second was the way of understanding, why this took place and what should be done to prevent it from happening to others. He chose the second path, the most difficult thing he has ever done. What would make someone so bitter and angry to blow himself up and take his precious 14 year old daughter in the same act, he asked.

Smadar’s paternal grandfather perished in Auschwitz. As a five year old she accompanied her mother to demonstrate with the Women in Black. Her maternal grandfather was an Israel general and respected as a man of peace, a true Israeli patriot who believed that Israel would not exist by power but by understanding and reconciliation with fellow Arabs. When he died, every major Israeli and Palestinian leader attended his funeral. When Smadar was buried next to him, Israeli and Palestinian leaders attended her funeral and mourned her death. How can the leaders of both sides join together to mourn the death of an innocent child yet not decide that enough blood has been shed? Rami believe peace will happen only when the price of peace is exceeded by the price of war. He left us with a strong message:

“Sixty years ago when her grandfather was led to the ovens, the world looked away. Now two nations have lost control of their destiny. Our only hope is that you put pressure on our government to stop this conflict. The world must not stand aside." He concluded, “I did not forgive the killer of my daughter. It is not about forgiveness. It is about what should be done to prevent it from happening.”
After he spoke to us I approached him, held his hand and told him I am the father of a daughter who was 16 in 1997. I thanked him, one father to another, for his courage, his work for peace and wished him Shalom.

There is not time to tell you of the other people we met with:

Let me conclude with the words Rita Giacamen, a Palestinian resident in Ramallah.
“What is it like to live this every day? I am a Mom first. Human beings come first. My child is the future. It is too late for us.” She continued: “Your coming to Palestine keeps us sane; thank you for coming and listening to us. In the short term our struggle will be hard, but in the long term we have hope because you are with us.
The message that our presence brought hope was repeated often. After this experience I know that my life will never be the same. Every day since I have returned I remember the people in the refugee camps. I wear a wooden dove of peace around my neck that was made in the Dheisheh Refuge Camp in Bethlehem. The challenge for me is what next. And what is it you can do to bring hope to the people of Palestine and Israel. There is another delegation going back in April. For now, pray with me the words I prayed at the tombs of Abraham, Sarah and Jacob. Pray for people living under oppression, who work for peace;
May your strength give us strength
My your faith give us faith;
May your hope give us hope;
May your love bring us love.
AMEN

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