Sunday, January 23, 2005
Mideast peace dependent on children, priest believes
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Education region's best hope, Palestinian-born Israeli says
By Mary Giunca
JOURNAL REPORTER
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The Rev. Elias Chacour, a Palestinian-born Israeli citizen and Catholic priest, said this week that after years of fighting in his homeland, he believes that children are the best hope for peace.
That's why Chacour recently arranged a field trip with a neighboring Jewish school in Galilee. At first people were nervous about the way that Jewish and Arab 7- and 8-year-olds would mix, he said. By evening, most of the children had exchanged e-mail addresses and telephone numbers, he said.
The real work is to reconcile adults, he said.
Chacour will give a talk called "Building Peace on the Desktops of Students" at 1 p.m. today in Wake Forest University's Wait Chapel. A book-signing will follow the free lecture. Chacour spoke by telephone this week after getting a religious-freedom award from Union Theological Seminary in Richmond.
Chacour is a priest in the Melkite Catholic Church, and is the president and founder of Mar Elias Educational Institutions, a school for young people from a variety of faiths in Ibillin, an Arab village in the Galilee region of Israel. He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times. The Melkite Catholic Church is an Eastern Byzantine Church in communion with the Roman Catholic Church.
"We have tried all kinds of power, oppression and denial and none of that worked," Chacour said of various efforts to bring peace to the region.
He said that he has come to realize that education is the best tool to introduce children to each other, and to help them discover that when they are together, they are neither Palestinian nor Jew. They are just children, he said.
Rabbi Mark Strauss-Cohn of Temple Emanuel said he is familiar with Chacour's work and philosophy.
"I think he's absolutely right," Strauss-Cohn said. "We start with the children, and if the kids can do it, then hopefully, we can as well."
Once people are brought together, they tend to make personal connections and usually find it difficult to view each other as enemies, he said.
"You start with the children, but there has to be both that personal connection that we create with our children," Strauss-Cohn said, "but the adults have to do it as well."
In his books, Blood Brothers, and We Belong to the Land, Chacour chronicled his own journey toward understanding the region's tangled history. Chacour was born in Arab Palestine in 1939. When he was 8 years old, Israeli authorities evicted his entire village. He was granted Israeli citizenship in 1948.
Chacour has often been the object of controversy. He has supported the rights of Palestinians; the Palestinian Liberation Organization kidnapped him in 1975. Nevertheless, Chacour said he does not believe in retaliation.
"We need to give something better to the world," he said, "than the insane hostility that is only producing martyrs on both sides."
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