The Distance to Mid-East Peace: Going to a Daughter's Graduation, Stopping a Million-Dollar Tax Decision

Baltimore, June 9, 2003 — One way to measure the distance to peace in the Middle East is to make a mental leap from the news of summit meetings to the affairs of daily life.

While summit leaders talked at the Red Sea last week, Gaza resident Constantine Dabbagh was at work but hoping to be able to travel to his daughter's graduation at Bethlehem University. He knew that his chances of getting permission from the Israeli authorities were slim - only once in the past year (for 30 minutes while allowed out to attend a business meeting) has Dabbagh seen his two daughters who are studying just 50 miles away in Bethlehem. Dabbagh heads the Gaza program the Middle East Council of Churches, a Lutheran World Relief partner.

Accustomed to a life hobbled by crises, Dabbagh manages a program that delivers both short-term relief and longer-term remedies. During the summit week he learned that, after two months in customs, a $617,000 relief shipment from Lutheran World Relief had arrived. The four containers full of clothing, health kits, school kits, bedding and soap will go to Gazans listed as 'hardship cases' by the United Nations.

"These supplies will be of great help for widows, the elderly, and in homes where there is no breadwinner," Dabbagh notes. Households in need are common in Gaza. The unemployment rate is now 40 percentage points higher than the employment rate, according to Dabbagh, and four out of five inhabitants fall below the poverty line. He and his 1.3 million neighbors are fenced off from the outside world in some of the most crowded living conditions in the world and 6,000 Israeli settlers in guarded enclaves restrict movement within the Gaza Strip.

Yet through decades of crisis this LWR partner organization has kept its eyes on the future as well as the present - training 230 young people at a time in computers and construction trades, for example, and running three local clinics that teach family planning. Remarkably, about 65 percent of the trainees still find jobs even now, Dabbagh notes, and family size is shrinking in the neighborhoods served by the clinics.

"All we really need is liberty and freedom," Dabbagh says. "We hope the summit leaders will stand by their promises. We are aware that efforts made to help us could be directed elsewhere-to needy people in Africa, for example."

In East Jerusalem, a huge tax bill is the challenge of the week and the year for Augusta Victoria Hospital. The tax-free status of the Lutheran World Federation institution on the Mount of Olives was revoked last December in an Israeli court.

The LWF Jerusalem program provides emergency care, village health and specialized medical services not available elsewhere for Palestinians, plus a vocational school and, recently, humanitarian aid. But the tax judgment would saddle the financially strapped LWF hospital with $350,000 in annual taxes plus $1 million in back taxes. An Evangelical Lutheran Church in America delegation last month brought the concern to the attention of the Israel's President. The Geneva-based LWF, the ELCA and LWR are asking U.S. Lutherans to urge the U.S. Congress and Administration to see that the case is dropped.

At a third LWR partner organization in the Holy Land, the East Jerusalem YMCA , summit week brought the release from prison of Nabeel Hamed Hamadna. An extension worker for YMCA, Hamadna was arrested November 30, 2002, while at work. He was sentenced to six months of detention. His wife Isaf was only informed that "the current situation requires that [he] should be put in jail without explaining the reasons."

Hamadna is one of six YMCA staff and students detained in recent months. Through years of failed peace processes this LWR partner organization has helped Palestinians by providing vocational training, rehabilitation, and trauma counseling in communities and schools.