PARTNERPLAN Páraic Réamonn - March 2015

c/o St Andrew’s Scottish Guest House PO Box 8619 1 David Remez Street 91086 Israel

Dear Friends

States of Páraic Réamonn

I got off the plane in Ben Gurion last September to begin a new life as minister of St Andrew's Scots Memorial Church, Jerusalem. With characteristic Irish insouciance, I planned to spend the first month settling in before getting on with the job. Now I realise I'll still be settling in when I catch the plane home. The "situation" here is in one sense straightforward but in another endlessly complicated.

Three decades ago, Conor Cruise O'Brien published The Siege: The Saga of Israel and . It's written with characteristic energy and wit, but it's not very good - because the saga of Palestine after the British mandate is not just the story of the Zionists and the state they created, sustained and extended by force, but the story also of those they continue to displace and dispossess.

States of Ireland, which he wrote twelve years earlier, is a better entry point to where I now serve. Let me quote two paragraphs:

"I live in Ireland by choice, after experience of living in many other places, and I am happy here. Our neighbours are friendly, our view is beautiful, my political friends are fine upstanding people, my political enemies fascinating in their own way. I don't mind the gossip any more than the rain. … We are not as bad as we are painted, especially by ourselves. In fact I love Ireland, as most Irish people do, with only an occasional fit of the shudders."

All of that is true for me here - even, this winter, the rain. I have met the most fascinating range of people, Arab, Jewish and expatriate, and have yet to meet anyone I disliked.

My landlord Yossi, who used to work at the King David Hotel (yes, the one blew up in 1946) won my heart by plying me with single malt. He comes round with his son every time there's a problem with the apartment. Michal, a cheerful Jerusalemite woman, runs Scottish country dancing classes on Tuesday evenings in our guesthouse. In March, I sang Handel's Messiah twice in Hebrew (!) with a choir of expat evangelicals and local Messianic Jews - Jews who believe Jesus is the Messiah but, for understandable historical reasons, don't like to call themselves Christian - once near Caesarea, then in St Andrew's. I've now sung more Hebrew than I've spoken (not that this would be hard).

Three times I've fallen among expat military types, including a three-star Irish general who

121 George Street, Edinburgh, EH2 4YN T: +44 (0)131 225 5722 F: +44 (0)131 226 6121 E: [email protected] Scottish Charity Number: SCO11353 PARTNERPLAN oversees the UN presence on the Golan heights. I worry how well I get on with them, but not too much. Talking to the British military attaché, I said, "In the Church of Scotland, we're not keen on war." He replied, "Neither are we."

The Palestinians are the easiest, because they have first call on my sympathy. We are on the same page. Jack Sara, president of Bethlehem Bible College, married his brother-in-law in St Andrew's last year and offered me a walk-on part: one prayer in English in a sea of Arabic. Less happily, this spring we lost the head of reception in our guesthouse. Ibrahim, like most of our staff, is Latin Catholic (that's Roman Catholic, to you, by distinction from "eastern-rite" Armenian, Chaldean, Coptic, Maronite, Melkite, and Syrian Catholics). He left to join his wife and family in Ireland; if he can make a living there, he won't come back. "I can make it here," he said, "but I worry about my children. I don't see a future for them."

Together with waves of expulsion from 1947 on, individual choices of this kind - hard for an outsider to argue with - explain why a majority of Palestinian Christians now live in exile. But this brings me to the second of Conor Cruise O'Brien's paragraphs.

Unfortunately, when one has to write about the relations between Catholics and Protestants, he says, "one has to take leave of almost everything that is lovable in Ireland… Instead we must discuss the conditions of a multiple frontier: not just the territorial border, but a very old psychological frontier area, full of suspicion, reserve, fear, boasting, resentment, Messianic illusions, bad history, rancorous commemorations, and - today more than ever - murderous violence."

Substitute Jews and Arabs for Catholics and Protestants, and what was true of Ireland in 1974 is still true of this land today. Three times in six years, the state of Israel has hurled its military might against the long-suffering people of Gaza. Thousands have died; nothing has been solved; and today the only question on everyone's lips is, "How long until they 'mow the lawn' again?"

A recent report to the EU on Jerusalem in 2014 from European heads of mission here painted a picture of a city more divided than at any time since 1967, when Israeli forces first occupied East Jerusalem.

On St Patrick's Day, Israeli Jews and Arabs went to the polls. The result seems set to be a government under Binyamin Netanyahu more ultra-nationalist than any we have yet seen. Commentators here console themselves that this will at least be clarifying.

In 2008, tired of reporting on the conflict, the veteran NBC correspondent Martin Fletcher set out to walk the coastline of Israel. Ironically, Walking Israel, the book he wrote about his trip, never really gets away from it. Even more ironically, it provides the best one-sentence definition of the conflict I've seen: "Building a country on land inhabited by another people was never going to be less than excruciating."

Excruciating, most obviously, for the Arabs of Palestine; but bad, in the end, for everyone. This will never be a land of promise until Israeli Jews learn how to share it with their neighbours.

Like us on FaceBook: facebook.com/standrewsjerusalem St Andrew's Scots Memorial Church: standrewsjerusalem.org/english St Andrew's Scottish Guesthouse: scotsguesthouse.com/English Páraic Réamonn blogs at churchofscotland.org.uk/blogs/witness-in-jerusalem

Páraic

121 George Street, Edinburgh, EH2 4YN T: +44 (0)131 225 5722 F: +44 (0)131 226 6121 E: [email protected] Scottish Charity Number: SCO11353