Letter: Easter for Palestinians

Source: Sabeel, Kairos Palestine

"Every Good Friday, my grandmother would sit in her ornately carved wooden chair and sing 'Stabat Mater Dolorosa' and we would all sit on the floor around her feet and listen, crying as the words moved us so much", my mother recalls the Easters of her childhood growing up in Jerusalem. She is telling me these stories of Easters past as we sit in my kitchen in Buckinghamshire making mamoul, a Middle Eastern sweet that is traditionally made for Easter.

"The only thing that brought a smile to our faces was when the mamoul was brought in still warm from the kitchen" she continues with a chuckle as we both look forward to these little beauties we are decorating coming out of the oven.

My mother continues to tell me about taking part in the Palm Sunday procession through Jerusalem carrying me as a baby the whole way while my two older brothers toddled alongside her holding onto her skirt while her mother tried to stop them whacking each other with the palms. I listen eagerly and greedily, trying to imagine a life that was once mine but to which I now hold no rights. I am a member of the unwilling Palestinian diaspora, no rights to the land in which I was born, no papers to say that I belong to this place, this people, this culture. My Palestinian heritage is lived now through memories, food and holidays and it just doesn't seem enough.

This year marks 70 years since the Nakba ('Catastrophe') when Zionist forces swept through the lands of Palestine killing thousands and creating millions of refugees who were forced to desert their villages or face death. This was also the start of the Palestinian story of displacement, brutal dispossession, a system of separation and subordination, unprecedented violence, occupation and siege. The year of the Nakba also saw the creation of the state of Israel, a Jewish state. But this is not merely history. Still today Palestinians are being displaced, their rights as refugees refused, their land confiscated as Israel continues to 'cleanse' Israel and Palestine of its non-Jewish populations. The Knesset has just approved a bill that firms up the Jewishness of the state at the expense of the other indigenous religions, and Israeli government policy, in its actions, supports the annexation of the West Bank all while the Jerusalem Authorities table motions to tax churches and appropriate church lands. If the Nakba is not just a history and it is happening now, why is it not being challenged?

Now at Easter time, the most significant feast in the Christian Calendar, when we spend Holy Week in mourning and anticipation of the Risen Christ, recreating events that took place in the Holy Land, watching scenes from Jerusalem, watching films on the TV about Christ's final days and eating chocolate, are enough of us thinking about what life has become for Palestinians? Are we thinking about our Christian family bearing witness in the Holy Land against an unbearable pressure to stop existing and under extreme violence, and denial of rights?

Every Palestinian has a different story of how the Nakba and the sad chain of events that it inevitably made way for has affected their lives. For me, it means that I listen to stories about my mother, grandmother and great-grandmother all born in Jerusalem before the Nakba and one day my children will hear those stories from me. My son is the first generation in my family line not to be born in Palestine and that hurts my heart. Are we to always live our lives and celebrate Easter through memories, stories and making mamoul? Or will we one day be able to return to our 'real lives' and if we do, will it even be our home by then?

This Easter, I ask you to pray for Palestinians and their journey to justice; I ask you to challenge your churches to say more and do more to help Palestinians and I ask you to join our campaign on Morally Responsible Investment.

From all of us at Sabeel-Kairos and from me and my family in our kitchen making Palestinian sweets, we wish you a blessed Easter.

Download the Easter Alert here: www.kairospalestine.ps/images/Kairos-Easter-Alert-2018.pdf