Listen to the audio:
Alice:
I didn’t tell anyone about the church. We built it in three days. We make it like puzzle. And then we prayed there. Jews, Christians, Muslims, and people, people from different backgrounds and beliefs, they were there.
Claire:
Hi, my name is Claire Porter Robbins, and I’m a freelance journalist. The voice you just heard was Alice Kisiya, a Palestinian Christian woman from Al Makhrour, a predominantly Christian area near Bethlehem in the West Bank. She’s describing how in protest of the displacement of her family from their ancestral lands, she set up a church to pray for peace with a group of people and leaders from different faiths.
She is one of approximately 50,000 Palestinian Christians left in Israel and the occupied West Bank. And since the war began on October 7th, 2023, the pressures on the Christian population, including her family, have only intensified. In my article, I focus on those pressures, whether they are quite tangible, like land displacement and settler violence — like the Kisiyas are facing — or the lack of economic opportunities that have intensified since the war, to really broader spiritual and existential challenges, like whether young people see a future for themselves, or the never-ending grief of living in a place that is so fraught with violence and uncertainty.
I spoke with people like Father Rami, who is a counselor, and has seen how the war and the pressures have impacted family life and marriage, and I talked with young Christians about how they see their future. I’ve highlighted Alice’s story because she’s really at the fore of this political issue of forced displacement, but she’s using spirituality and multifaith coexistence as a way of fighting that.
And in my personal experience, given how much grief has surrounded the past year, it’s a really beautiful way of approaching injustice.
Read more about Alice and the situation for Palestinian Christians in the West Bank in “Rooted in the Land Called Holy” in the December 2024 edition of ONE.