MCC Partner Profile - Lajee Children's Center

Lajee Children's Center is one of MCC's partners here in Israel/Palestine. They run after school programs for children, and work mainly with children from Aida refugee camp. Here, Palestinians are considered refugees if any of their ancestors left their homes during the war of 1948. Generally, those who fled their homes were not allowed to return. It's not uncommon to meet a child who will tell you he's from Jaffa or Lod, even though he himself may have never even seen the city.

Lajee provides under-privileged children with a small library, a place to learn about and use computers, and a summer camp which provides them with new experiences and gets them out of the crowded conditions of the refugee camp. As part of their summer camps, Lajee brings international volunteers to work with the children. One such volunteer, a young Jewish woman from America, was the first Jewish person that many of the children have encountered that wasn't wearing a uniform of the Israeli military. The story is related in the video. It's encounters such as this, building bridges and breaking down walls among those that are different, that encourage MCC's work with partners such as Lajee.

East Jerusalem: Urban Planning or Ethnic Cleansing?

As a part of urban planning and land use development in communities around the world, building permits are required to ensure public safety, health, and welfare as they are affected by building construction. In East Jerusalem, however, building permits appear to have a different purpose.

A complicated and lengthy application process along with fees as high as $25,000 make obtaining a building permit almost out of reach for many Palestinians and very few permits are actually issued. In addition, Palestinians are only permitted to build one- or two-storey buildings, while adjacent Israeli housing units may have up to eight floors. With a housing density double that of Israeli’s, 11.9 square meters per person in Palestinian neighborhoods compared to 23.8 in Israeli neighborhoods, Palestinians are often forced to build “illegally” without permits. The Jerusalem Municipality enforces the building laws by issuing demolition orders for all houses built without a permit. In recent months we have seen a significant increase in home demolitions among Palestinians in East Jerusalem for this reason.

Just two months ago, a nearby house owned by the Ibrahim Ghazlan Al Abbasi family was demolished because they did not have a permit. One month following the demolition Al Abbasi died of a heart attack and shortly thereafter the family decided to come together to rebuild the home. We watched the four walls of the new structure go up over the past month, but this past week the backhoes returned and the new structure was again demolished. Also within the last week, a five-story building in the nearby neighborhood of Beit Hanina was demolished leaving 70 Palestinians homeless. It is important to underscore the fact that these are not isolated incidents. Nearly 80 businesses and homes have been demolished since the beginning of this year and earlier this summer the municipality announced plans to demolish 47 of the 88 homes in the neighborhood of Silwan.

At the same time, illegal Israeli settlements continue to be built and expanded in East Jerusalem. In January 2008, just two months after Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations in Annapolis, the Israeli government announced plans to build 300 new apartments at the Har Homa settlement in occupied East Jerusalem. Settlement expansion is also being encouraged in the Palestinian neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah where a court order threatens the evacuation of 27 homes.

Yet Palestinians and internationals are not the only critics of the municipality’s ethnic cleansing program. In protest of the destruction of property and confiscation of homes, Rabbi Meir Hirsh, a leading rabbinical figure, issued the following statement: “Torah Jewry condemns the illegitimate occupation of Palestinian land and the subjugation of Palestinians throughout the Holy Land…What a very different world it would be if all Jews would seek to emulate the traits of Abraham our forefather. Then respect would begat respect and love would yield love and peoples would once again live as true neighbors as we did in the decades before Zionism sought the dispossession of people…We all hope and pray for the day to come, that we all may yet live in peace in the land of our mutual forefather Abraham, under the moral laws of the Almighty.”

As Christians, as messengers of life, healing, and peace between peoples, we must oppose violence in all forms, whether suicide bombings or ethnic cleansing which destroys homes, tears away the hope of a people, and hinders peace. As Americans whose tax dollars support Israel, it is our duty to call upon our government to hold the nation of Israel accountable for actions that contradict the democratic principles we value.

"I'll choose to live every time..."

As soon as you get off the plane, literally, stepping off of the plane onto the little foot bridge that lets you get from the plane to the terminal, it starts. There's a family, Muslim judging by the young woman's head covering, standing off to the side. Airport security wants to speak to them and has asked them to wait.

I get to the end of the bridge and turn to start walking toward passport control. A woman steps forward, "Hello, sir. Airport security. Can I see your passport please?" Jessie, my wife, has already stepped onto the escalator, "Sure. She has it." She's on her way up. The woman gives me a look and tells me I can go.

We're waiting in line at passport control. They've already told two different families to step aside, both of which look very Arab to me. The girl in front of us looks Arab as well. "Wait over there," she's told. "Where?" "Over there. Someone will come to you in a minute." Security wants to talk to her more before they allow her into the country.

Waiting for our bags to come around on the carousel, a Palestinian man passes. He has a luggage trolley with his bags on it. Two security guards are escorting him out of the airport, one on either side. They walk him around the corner all the way out to the taxi stand. I wonder if they wait for a taxi with him?

Driving home we pass a bus. It's blue and white, a typical Palestinian bus. Two Israeli soldiers have asked everyone to step off and are writing down the names and ID numbers of people on board. It's 5:00 on Saturday afternoon.

All of these things happened within 2 hours of us touching down in Israel as we returned back to work. Small things, seemingly insignificant things. "There are terrorists around. We do these things for the security of the country. You don't know what it's like to have someone want to kill you." These are common explanations for what we see, and are all true statements. But I can't help but wonder how many normal people are inconvenienced by "security measures." I don't know what happens every single day, but I imagine that the day we got off the plane was pretty typical. Here's a family stopped getting off the plane; I'm asked for my passport before I even get close to passport control (and I don't think she was trying to help speed up my entry into the country); families that look Arab are asked to wait to the side; buses are stopped and people are asked to get off. These are all security measures taken by Israel. They're little, daily inconveniences.

An Israeli friend recently told me, "If it's a choice between inconveniencing them, and me living, I'll choose to live every time." I wonder if I would choose the same thing if I were in his position? Is there any number of people I'd consider too many to stop at checkpoints or pull out of line before I thought it wasn't worth the chance? If 100 people wait at a checkpoint so that a terrorist is caught, that seems fair to me. What about 500? 1,000? 10,000? More? When does the law of 'diminishing returns' kick in, and the anger and frustration that are caused not make up for the number of terrorists that are actually caught this way? I can't honestly answer these questions; sure, I live here now, but I don't have to think about raising a family long-term in this environment. If things get too hot, we can always leave. Would I choose to support a society that said that no matter how many normal people are 'inconvenienced', we're going to keep dealing with this certain problem in this certain way?