Musalaha Newsletter
December 2007

Director’s word

The summer months at Musalaha are always busy as we arrange our two largest gatherings of the year: a summer camp for 9-12 year-old Israelis and Palestinians in Baptist Village, and another for 7-12 year-old Christian and Muslim Palestinians in the West Bank. The former summer camp has been going strong for five years. The latter is in its second year, but we are particularly proud of it as a project that was initiated not by Musalaha staff, but by a group of Palestinian women participants in Musalaha programs.
All summer camps, properly conducted, have the ability to mold children’s minds in a way that school does not. Children tend to resist the didactic influences of school, but they look forward all year long to summer camp. A summer camp is, then, a unique opportunity to “sneak in” a little learning and character development in ways that the kids will actually enjoy.
It is because summer camps can have such a profound impact on children and youth that Musalaha invests so much energy in organizing them. From 9 to 12 especially, children are more open socially than they’ll ever be in their lives. In this age range, they have still not entered into the agonizing teenage search for identity and belonging, have not yet locked themselves into cliques or other conformity-demanding social groups. Pre-teens will still play with anyone who’s nice to them, and so it is critical that we keep kids of this age playing with children from “the other side”. Especially here, where schools (and other summer camps) are more or less segregated along religious and racial lines, our summer camps are a unique and extremely important meeting ground.
How do we know that our camps are really having an impact? Well, there’s the “sticking-with-it” indication: After five consecutive years of summer camps, we’re beginning to see counselors who, five years ago, were themselves Musalaha campers! Then there’s the “light to the world” indication: One regular Musalaha camper, while attending a non-Musalaha summer camp, heard another child make a racist comment. Rather than sit quiet, the Musalaha camper boldly pointed his finger and said in a loud voice, “That’s wrong!” When we see ten-year-olds courageously taking a stand against racism, we tend to think this whole summer camp thing really is working.
In this newsletter, we’ll review some of the programs that have taken place since our last report in June.
~ Salim J. Munayer, PhD, Director

General BV Information
In July, Musalaha held its fifth Summer Camp for Israeli and Palestinian children, aged 9 to 12. Thank God, the number of children registering has risen every year. This year, we had 50, some of whom had been to the camp before, others of whom were new. The fact that children return is a sign to us that we must be doing something right.
One of the favorite games this summer was memorizing Bible verses. Each morning, the kids were given three verses, each in Arabic, Hebrew, and English. This exercise forced the Israeli children to ask the Palestinian children how to read the Arabic, and the Palestinian children had to ask Israeli children’s help reading the Hebrew. The more languages the kids memorized the verse in, the more stars their team got hung on the wall. The kids frantically memorized as much as possible and, by the end of camp, the wall was full of stars.
Each day, we also taught the children a little bit about the what, how, when, who, and where of prayer, and introduced to them ways they can continue to learn about prayer on their own. To get them started praying, we put up a Prayer Box where they could put prayer requests and, every morning, we brought these issues before the Lord together. For the adults, it was so exciting to open the box and find it full every morning!
At our last Bible study, one of the counselors said to the children: “This is our last day together, and I would like to encourage you to start praying for each other. We come from different places and we are not supposed to be friends. When we pray ‘Our Father in Heaven’, this means we have the same Father, and that makes us brothers and sisters. What greater thing can you do for your brothers and sisters than pray for them? You can praise God for their existence. You can pray that they’ll find hope when things are hard for them. You can pray that they will always depend on God. You can thank God that He forgives them as He forgives you. You can pray for God’s goodness in their lives. I suggest that, before you go home, you write down the names of the other campers in your cabin, put the paper in your Bible, and continue to pray for them even after camp has ended.”
I am thankful for everyone that came to camp this year, especially for our staff and volunteers. It takes a lot of work to make this camp a success. And I am sure it was a success because, by the last day, we were all exhausted!

…Wisdom to Know the Difference
Usually, the point of summer camp is just great fun and fellowship. But at Musalaha, we have an ulterior motive: to introduce the process of reconciliation to as many kids as possible. And this year, we had an incident that reminded us why that’s so important.

When engaged in prolonged conflict, the minority (or weaker) party often worries that it will suffer discrimination. This is not just paranoia. Obviously, if it never happened, it would be unreasonable to expect it. Sometimes, however, when you expect to be discriminated against, you see discrimination even when it isn’t happening.

As time flew by at camp, it was difficult not to get wrapped up in all the activities. But my job is to keep an eye out for signs of conflict, so I was especially alert to the campers’ and counselors’ interactions. One day, from a distance, I saw something between the counselors of two specific cabins. I went to see what was going on.

The counselors told me that one of their campers, a Palestinian girl named Reem, had told some of her friends that she thought an Israeli boy, Dan, was cute. That information found its way to Dan, whose buddies teased him until he agreed to do something about it. Eventually, he gave in to peer pressure and, together with his friends, approached Reem’s counselor, Samar. “Is Reem pretty?” he asked, “Cuz I heard she’s ugly.” Dan’s friends got a great kick out of this. But Samar, a Palestinian counselor, hardly found it funny. Deeply offended, she replied: “Are you saying Reem is ugly because she’s Arab?”

Things only spiralled downward from there. Dan soon found himself accused of racism by not just one, but two Palestinian counselors. This is where I entered the scene, calmed down both counselors, and explained to them that this is precisely why we are here. It’s not our job to make sure these kinds of things don’t happen. On the contrary, we should expect them to happen. But it’s the way we deal with them that makes all the difference. Children mimic what society teaches them. We must not blame them, but show them that God’s love offers an alternative approach.

While I was explaining to the counselors how to deal with racist outbursts from children, something didn’t make sense to be me about the whole ordeal. Dan was not willing to apologize, and his friends—the ones who told him that Reem was ugly—were Palestinian. In fact, the only other kids that Dan had made friends with at the camp were Palestinians. I called Dan over for a private talk.

The moment I had him alone, he burst out crying. I told him not to be afraid. “I just want to find out from you what really happened,” I assured him. Sure enough, after hearing his side of the story, it was clear that he had been falsely accused. He most certainly did not think that all Arabs are ugly. I explained to him that he was still wrong to call Reem ugly, because it hurt her feelings. Now Dan was willing to apologize to Reem, and the counselors apologized to him for jumping to conclusions. An hour later, everyone was busy working and playing together again.

On Friday, after camp’s end, as I was walking home with two other counselors who live in my neighborhood, we saw three Israeli girls, probably about 14 or 15 years old, pass an Arab young man in front of us. They cast sideward glances at him and giggled. When he turned around to see what they were laughing about, they took off running. The man just turned back around, gave a heavy sigh, and continued on his way. Further up the road, now a safe distance from the man, the girls turned back and yelled in unison, “Dirty Arab!”

The latter incident is a case of racism—what happened at camp is not. In fact, if there was any racism at camp, it was against the Israeli boy. Sometimes, both of us, Palestinians and Israelis, raise the discrimination card too fast and too high. The Bible teaches us not to accuse people falsely, and so we must learn to overcome our personal sensitivities to be able to distinguish between real wrongs and imagined ones. But then, how should we respond when we really are being discriminated against? We should still not attack and accuse, but neither should we suffer silently and thereby allow the injustice to continue. “Correct, rebuke, and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction.” (2 Timothy 4:2)
~Shadia Qubti, Project Coordinator

Voices of Change
The following testimonies were given by women at the Women’s Identity Follow-Ups which took place the 25th and 26th of April, and 22nd and 23rd of June at Talitha Koumi.

My father rejected me when he heard that I am involved in Musalaha. I haven’t seen him for several months now. But it’s not because I’m meeting Israeli women that he has shunned me. He himself has very good relations with Israelis; he even believes in reconciliation. What he can’t accept is that I meet with Palestinian women from other churches. We all call ourselves Christians but, according to him, they’re not. So he sees me as a traitor to the true faith.

Well, as all of you know, I grew up attending Israeli schools, speaking Hebrew, hanging out with Jewish girls, and otherwise living a “normal” Israeli life. But I’ll never forget that, my first day at school, when the teacher asked my name and I told her Abeer [a very common Arabic name], she said, “Well, we’ll just call you Sarah.” Over the years, with everybody at school calling me Sarah, I became Sarah. I completely took on this Israeli identity. So, when I went to take my high school exit exams, I of course wrote “Sarah” on the exam. The Ministry of Education wanted to reject my exam and force me to take it over because, they said, my name wasn’t really Sarah. Technically, they were right, but it was a total shock to me. It was like I was no longer allowed to be myself, and it threw me into an identity crisis. Of course, that wasn’t who I really was—I realize that now. I had accepted the name just to fit in with Israeli society.

When I immigrated from America with my husband (who is Jewish), I came as a Christian. But a few years ago, I found out that I actually have Jewish ancestors and, according to Israeli law, am myself Jewish. I received this news with joy, thinking that, now, Israelis would accept me as “one of them”. But no matter how much I demonstrated my newfound Jewishness, they still related to me as a Christian and a foreigner. I began to feel as though they were right. Maybe I had been trying to be someone I am not. This rejection kept me from appreciating my heritage. However, I have come to realize that God is calling me to embrace my Jewish roots, but also to be comfortable with who I am no matter how others may relate to me or identify me. This is only possible through God’s love.

At a conference, when we all took turns introducing ourselves, I stood up and said my name and described myself as an Ethiopian believer. Afterwards, one of my friends—I won’t say which one—came to me and told me I shouldn’t think of myself this way. “You’re an Israeli, like me. We’re the same.” But I told him no, I’m an Ethiopian. He answered, “ But we shouldn’t talk about our differences.” “But I’m black and you’re white,” I said. “Yes, but we should focus on our similarities. We are both Israelis.” I know very well who I am, though, and I just said, “I am and always will be an Ethiopian Israeli.” And we left it at that.

Abud Summer Camp

Last year, Musalaha held its first Palestinian summer camp in Zababdeh, a village in the northern West Bank. Zababdeh is a village of about 2,000, about half of whom are Christians, located in an area that is otherwise overwhelmingly Muslim. About 130 Christian children from the village attended the summer camp. Overall, the camp went very well, and the villagers were happy to have had it there.
This year, we held our second summer camp in the south West Bank, in a village called Abud. Here, about 60% of the population of 1,200 is Christian. For the second year, not only Christian children came: about 20 of the 100 in attendance were Muslim! There was much less planning to do this year, since we already had the plan from last year, but the Musalaha office team put a lot of effort into recruiting women and youth from the village to serve as counselors. This is really not an easy thing to do in our culture, where the idea of a woman leaving her family for a week is practically inconceivable. Nevertheless, we had 11 women and 7 young adults, some of whom were veteran counselors from the Zababdeh camp.
The West Bank summer camp is a unique Musalaha program in that it was not the brainchild of Musalaha staff, but of Musalaha participants. Palestinian women participating in our women’s groups recognized that the children of Israeli women have many more extracurricular opportunities, particularly when it comes to summer camps. It is difficult to reconcile when one side is considerably more disadvantaged than the other, and so these women took upon themselves to do what they could for the next generation. Since they were inspired by Musalaha, they decided to utilize what they had learned about reconciliation to make their camps unique. And they are unique: they are the only summer camps in the PA that bring Christians from different churches together—not to mention Christians and Muslims. While the focus in the Middle East is often on conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, that is not the only conflict in the region. Palestinian society, like Israeli society, is very divided along racial and religious lines, and these communities often experience strained relations. This, then, is a mission as necessary to the ultimate attainment of peace in the Middle East as Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation is.
~Shireen Awwad-Hilal, Project Coordinator
Munayer Family Update
Since the last Munayer Family Update in March, JACK (17 ¾) has finished the first half of his high school exit exams—and done very well, thank God!—and DANIEL (15 ½) has been to Iceland, where he made Jerusalem very proud at the international swimming competition. At the national swim competitions in August, Daniel improved his time. All summer long, JOHN (13 ½) went through a series of “try-outs” for the Jerusalem Beitar Junior football team and—to our utter shock—got in. (It’s very hard to get accepted: boys dream of it and try for years and years, and John is no exception.) He now has to train fives times a week! Both Jack and John volunteered as summer camp counselors all summer, and SAM (9 ½) attended two summer camps. He also moved up to a swim group more suitable to his ability (although not to his age). Of course, with all these sports practices and try-outs and competitions, I, Kay, have been frantically busy driving boys all over the city (and beyond). And when we’re not going to sports or school, we’re on our way to youth group, or extra math lessons, piano lessons, social events, extracurricular school activities, family gatherings… AHHH!
Salim lectured at Oxford’s Wycliffe Hall summer school in July, and we’ve all just returned from a trip to the UK. For the first ten days, Jack and Daniel were in Holland participating in a Musalaha Overseas Outing for Israeli, Palestinian, and Dutch youth. The rest of us hung out in Bolton until they came. And now that we’re all back home, we’re getting ready for the new school year.

Upcoming events
October 5-6, Women’s follow up.
October 27- November 2, Muslim-Christian  Encounter.
November 22-24, Women’s Follow up.
December 7-8, Local Women’s Meeting, Bethlehem.
December 7-8, Third Side Meeting, Tantur
December, Holland Youth Follow up.