Jerusalem: Christians struggle under Israeli crackdown
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Rev Don Binder, writes from St George's Anglican Cathedral in Jerusalem
This morning, one of the new police commanders in Jerusalem escorted our Protestant group through the Stations of the Cross, helpfully making sure that none of the Haredi spat on us as we bore our cross on the Via Dolorosa.
We are therefore hopeful that tomorrow's Holy Fire Ceremony will be free from the kind of police violence that the above (linked below) article references (and that I have documented in these pages over the past three years).
We also hope that the police will allow the numbers of Christians into the Old City to be at parity with the tens of thousands of Jewish pilgrims permitted entry this past week for the Kohanim blessings at the Western Wall during Pesach.
But here's the thing. The police are not responsible for the shockingly low number of Christians being allowed into Jerusalem from the West Bank for Holy Week and Easter.
That falls under the authority of the Ministry of Defence.
When we wrote them kindly last week asking for more permits, they ignored our request and instead bombed our hospital on Palm Sunday!
What more can we do? For eighteen months, we've pleaded with the world's leaders and our fellow Christians to put an end to this madness, with the killings, starvation tactics, land-theft, home demolitions, and movement restrictions only getting worse. Indeed, these are all now essentially normalized behaviours. Nobody even bats an eye anymore!
Fifty years from now, students will be studying this situation as a textbook example of the world's catastrophic moral failure, with our generation standing judged as culpable or complicit in massive crimes as they were livestreamed to the world in real-time.
And so there is much to repent from in churches around the world this Good Friday as we gaze upon our crosses and behold the naked suffering we've inflicted upon our Lord as he bore the crushing weight of our sins upon his shoulders.
May God have mercy upon our generation-but, given the gravity of our failures, I wouldn't count on it!
Rev Binder also shared a link to this Guardian report on Good Friday:
'They are Trying to Make it Unbearable': Jerusalem Christians Face Easter Under Israeli Crackdown'
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