Novak’s columns are syndicated and will be published
in newspapers around the country. Send a letter to the editor of your
area newspaper, if the article is published in it (most newspapers accept
letters to the editor via email or directly through their website).
Suggested Points for your Letter:
Thank you for publishing Robert Novak’s column about
the situation of Palestinian Christians in the Holy Land, [insert title
here as it appears in your newspaper and date of publication].
As an American Christian, I appreciate Congressman
Henry Hyde’s report to the White House, outlining the problems the
Palestinian Christians are facing, including the impact of Israeli
settlement expansion and the route of the separation barrier, especially
in Bethlehem.
I appreciate the column’s mention of Congressman
Hyde’s concern about Israeli settler actions in Jerusalem and agree that
they are undermining the city’s future as a “shared capital of Israel and
Palestine.”
My church [could insert CMEP national member church
here, e.g. ELCA] cares deeply about Israeli-Palestinian peace and the
reconciliation of the children of Abraham – Jews, Christians and Muslims –
and supports the sharing of Jerusalem as vital to a negotiated agreement
to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with a secure Israel and a viable
Palestinian state living side-by-side in peace.
By Robert D.
Novak
The
Washington Post
May 25, 2006
Rep. Henry Hyde, showing the courage that has
typified a political career now in its final months, is pleading the case
of endangered Palestinian Christians to President Bush. A faithful
supported of Israel over many years, Hyde said in a letter sent Friday to
the White House: “I cannot be blind when Israeli actions seem to go beyond
the realm of legitimate security concerns and have negative consequences
on communities and lands under their occupation.” He urged the president
to take up this issue with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert during his
visit to Washington this week.
Hyde, chairman of the House International Relations
Committee, sent along with his letter a five-page, single-spaced report
prepared by his staff based on visits to Israel and Palestine over the
past two years. It contends that “the Christians community is being
crushed in the mill of the bitter Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” The
Israeli security wall and expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank,
the report continues, “are irreversibly damaging the dwindling Christian
community.”
This issue was not on the agenda of the Bush-Olmert
talks. There is no sign that Bush studied the House report or even that
it made its way through an unsympathetic National Security Council staff
into his hands. But Hyde’s concern is shared by important members of the
Roman Catholic hierarchy. Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the new papal nuncio
in Washington, represented the Vatican in Jerusalem for the past eight
years and realizes the plight of the Christians there. So does Cardinal
Theodore McCarrick, the retiring archbishop of Washington, who recently
went to the Holy Land to experience conditions there firsthand.
Hyde has been trying to get the attention of the Bush
administration – and the world – since 2004, when he wrote Secretary of
State Colin Powell expressing concern about Israeli policy. In 2005 Hyde
took up the issue personally with Israeli Vice Premier Shimon Peres. At
age 82, in his 32nd and last year in Congress, he is making
what may be his final effort to get the president interested in what
happens to less than 2 percent of Israel’s population.
Since his letter to Powell two years ago, Hyde wrote
to Bush, “the situation has significantly worsened.” While backing
Israel’s “need to defend itself,” he called it “important that United
States support for Israel not be perceived as involving the affirmation of
injustice.”
Hyde’s committee report employs stronger language
than the congressman has used previously. It calls for insistence that
Israel “honor its pledge to stop settlement expansion” and suggests that
the security barrier is “a pretext for annexing territory.”
The report rejects the widespread impression that the
Olmert regime really is abandoning the West Bank and disbanding the
settlements. The report says that “the Bethlehem area is home to over 20
Israeli settlements and there are plans to build more. The settlements
and the barrier completely encircle the Christian triangle of Bethlehem,
Beit Jala and Beit Sahour (Shepherd’s Field).” In addition to causing
housing and land shortages, “this construction physically obstructs the
Bethlehem community from its spiritual, cultural and economic lifeline in
Jerusalem.”
Furthermore, the report contends that
“fundamentalist” settlers in East Jerusalem “intend to establish their own
brand of Jewish exclusivity” and have “Messianic aspirations on the Temple
Mount.” That “undermines” the stability of Jerusalem as a future shared
capital of Israel and Palestine, which is described as “vital” to U.S.
interests in a two-state solution.
Even as the new Israeli prime minister arrived in
Washington, his government was taking unilateral steps affecting
Palestine. On Sunday it was announced in Israel that the Defense Ministry
has approved the expansion of four settlements in the West Bank. On
Tuesday the Israeli Supreme Court approved a security wall route running
between Beit Arieh, Ofarim and the village of Aboud, an early center of
Christianity.
“It would be helpful,” the Hyde report says, “if the
United States Government committed itself to working with the Israeli
government to end support for and prevent the establishment of new
realities on the ground, which complicate a negotiated solution over
Jerusalem, destroy its multicultural identity and constitute an increase
in the political volatility of the city.” But will George W. Bush be that
helpful?
