Book: Letters from Apartheid Street: A Christian Peacemaker in Occupied Palestine

In the winter of 2012, Michael McRay interned for two months with the Christian Peacemaker Team in Hebron and then traveled to Nablus, Ramallah, Qalqilyah, and other locations in the West Bank. His time in Hebron coincided with the arrival of a particularly brutal battalion of the Golani Brigade and McRay helped put a report together about its abuses that was widely distributed by the United Nations and other international groups

McRay kept an extensive journal about his experiences that became his new book, Letters from Apartheid Street: A Christian Peacemaker in Occupied Palestine. Several of the reflections in the book first appeared on CPTnet. In 'Welcoming the Enemy', he writes of the first time he monitored soldiers with automatic weapons while they swept through Hebron’s Old City, detaining men and checking their IDs:

'As they approached the end of the Old City, one of the soldiers in the back turned and quickly pointed the barrel of his weapon into an elderly man’s shop. The storeowner sat out in front, his head just beneath the level of the gun’s barrel. He simply looked up at the soldiers passing his shop, bowed his head, lifted up his hand, palm upwards, and said, “Ahlan wasahlan (you are most welcome).” His response so caught me off guard I laughed out loud. Here was an Israeli soldier, a member of the military occupying this Palestinian man’s land, who walked the streets of Hebron to protect the Jewish settlers who were illegally taking more and more land from this man and his people. In short, there walked his enemy.'

McRay is donating 20% the profits of Letters from Apartheid Street to Christian Peacemaker Teams. It is available from all good bookshops and can be ordered on-line from Amazon at: www.amazon.co.uk/Letters-Apartheid-Street-Christian-Peacemaker/dp/1620326256