Episcopal Press and News

Church of Wales Delegation Expresses Shock After Visit to Middle East

Episcopal News Service. October 3, 2000 [2000-145]

(ENS) A delegation of 80 members of the Church of Wales returned from a 10-day visit to the Middle East, expressing "genuine moral shock" at what they saw and heard, according to Archbishop Rowan Williams, primate of the church.

After visiting projects that the church supports, including refugee settlements and clinics for children and the disabled, Williams said in a speech to his church's governing body, "It is impossible to come away from such places without a sense of anger and heartbreak about the Palestinian situation -- and a sense of impotence, since there seems no possible peace plan that will give them the assurance of ordinary care, stability and justice."

Williams also addressed charges that support for Christians in the Holy Land "was being represented in some quarters as anti-Semitic. We were accused of accepting without question one side of a complex story, even of undermining the Israeli Government's efforts towards peace." A visit to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, a grisly reminder of what happened to Jews during the Holocaust, "was an almost unbearable reminder of just why Israel exists, and just why any suggestion that the Israeli state lacks moral or political legitimacy creates such anger," he said.

It is not easy to identify the real victims in the area, Williams said. "The Palestinians suffer outrageous privations in the shape of restrictions on their movements, their access to fresh water, and their rights to social and medical welfare," he added. "There can be no dispute that they are the victims of day-by-day Israeli policy."

That situation must be balanced by persecution of Jews who "have been outsiders and victims for centuries of bloodshed and torment." Because they have been "victims for too long, now they must learn to be agents of their own destiny."

Williams said that he is convinced that the two communities "can have no security that is not a shared security. A strong Israel, free from the constant, high-pitched anxiety that it will be pushed into the sea by its neighbors, needs a secure Palestinian population not seething with bitterness, an easy target for the wildest propaganda of Islamic militants."

As believers we have "the unenviable job of trying to hear and interpret the wounds of everyone involved and to ask not simply for justice, in the sense of reparation or retribution, but for the justice of the Bible, a situation in which each acts for the good of the other. And this, believe it or not, is what the church is supposed to be and show -- a place of justice," Williams said.