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How a Jewish lawyer came to devote his career to protecting Christians in the Palestinian Territories
by Joseph Brean ("The National Post," June 8, 2013)
Justus Weiner, a legal scholar in Jerusalem who has built a career on helping Christians flee persecution in the Palestinian Territories, traces the roots of his activism to a chat with a pastor at a cocktail party long ago, sometime between his graduation from Berkeley law school and the violence of the Second Intifada.”Justus, you’re a human rights lawyer, what are you doing to save the Palestinian Christians,” the pastor asked, to which the baffled young lawyer replied, “I didn’t know the Palestinian Christians had any problems.”
It was a forgivable ignorance, one that is common even today, with the Christian populations of the West Bank and Gaza in decline, a dynamic that is often hastened by outright persecution, sometimes official, often freelance.
In Canada this week to testify before the Parliamentary Subcommittee on International Human Rights, which is studying the effects of the Arab Spring on Middle Eastern Christians, Prof. Weiner recalled in an interview the cleric rolled his eyes in exasperation and started sending him visitors.
“They began showing up with regularity in my office, and they were full of stories, mostly very sad stories, of what had happened to them in the West Bank or especially in Gaza,” said Prof. Weiner, a scholar with the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs who lectures at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
They had endured theft of their land, extortion, pressure to wear Muslim clothing, forced marriage or conversion to Islam, and the vandalism or destruction of holy sites, he said.
He described one incident in 2002, during the Israeli military incursion into the West Bank in response to the Second Intifada, in which Christian pastors were taken hostage as thieves looted donation boxes, stole chandeliers and icons, and “just cleaned the place out,” Prof. Weiner said. Some hostages were even made to walk with rifles in view of distant Israeli soldiers, hoping to provoke a sniper, and thus an international incident.
“There’s no legitimate way in which I or anybody else can quantify [this persecution],” he said. “Even the mediocre efforts at doing a census, I wouldn’t put much trust in them.”
Converts to Christianity are the most vulnerable, especially when coupled with suspicions of collaboration with Israeli security forces. He called conversion in these conditions “a lonely decision.”
These Christian visitors, some of whom he has helped flee to countries such as Chile, Germany or the United States, put him in mind of the olive trees at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, some of which are dedicated to Polish Christians who sheltered Jews during the Holocaust, at great peril, often at the cost of their lives.
“I’m an ordinary Jew who goes to synagogue about four times a year,” said Prof. Weiner, who was hosted in Toronto by the Centre for Israel & Jewish Affairs. “I drew the connection between A and B and said, you know, this is something I should get into.”
He described his role not as protecting Christianity, the religion, but rather Christians, the adherents, and in particular those Christians who come into conflict with their Islamic society. This puts him at conceptual odds with the frequent efforts by Islamic states to seek legal protection for Islam, the religion, usually with blasphemy laws, rather than individual Muslims.
“It’s a sad joke,” he said of the United Nations’ dialogue on religious persecution, for which he has provided evidence, and discovered “a cheapening of human rights rhetoric.”
“This is about as clear an issue as you can find unless you actually believe Christians should be killed for converting,” he said.
Palestinian Christians — a small minority of perhaps a few thousand amid a broader conflict — tap the same cultural vein as Toronto’s own Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, in that both groups serve as token victims in a proxy war, Prof. Weiner said.
“People are often times enticed to go for a quick proxy. They want quick speed over the expense of careful, slow methodical, ideological analysis. It’s not an easy subject. I’ve seen people killed over this.”
Palestinian Christians mostly belong to the Eastern Orthodox Church, but there are also Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Baptists and various evangelicals.
‘This is about as clear an issue as you can find unless you actually believe Christians should be killed for converting'
A decade ago, about 1,000 Christians fled each year. That has slowed, but there are only about 25,000 in the West Bank, fewer in Gaza, where the situation is worse.
“Nobody will give you actual census figures, because then they’d have a lot of explaining to do,” he said.
“The percentages are what’s important. The percentage, if you went back to 1948, maybe 80% of the population of Bethlehem was Christian, more or less. It declined precipitously during the Jordanian 20 years [1949-67] and that puts the lie to the implication that it’s all Israel’s fault.
“Israel wasn’t there, but the economics of a declining community were there, and even in the post-’67 era, the Christian population has continued to decline at a varied pace.”
“It’s not an open society. Someone knocks on your door, he’s wearing a kaffiyeh, he says I’m doing a census, who would you vote for?” he added.
“You judge, well, is he wearing a red kaffiyeh or a black kaffiyeh? Does he look to come from Bethlehem or Ramallah? People are justifiably concerned as to who may accept and who may reject them.”
For the Canadian government, which recently opened an Office of Religious Freedom in the Department of Foreign Affairs & International Trade, with Andrew Bennett as its first ambassador, this is an issue on which it wants to be seen to be taking action.
It is a prominent part of the Conservative brand to stand up for persecuted religious minorities, for example Ahmadiyya Muslims, or Tibetan Buddhists, or Coptic Christians. But Middle Eastern diplomacy is especially perilous, and more complicated than opening a few more refugee spots.
“It’s not for me to advise Canada,” Prof. Weiner said. “You’re playing with people’s lives.”
He cautioned against letting sympathy outweigh security.
“People will present Canada with supporting materials, much of which is forged, witnesses who are unreliable, and it’s like playing God. People dream of coming to Canada,” he said.
“Canada might consider balancing its desire to do well by the would-be immigrants with its desire to preserve in perpetuity the open and safe style of living. If you get into this in a big way, you may find out that your new friends aren’t really your friends, and in fact they had planned even a while ago that Canada’s a perfect target.
“Once they’re here, as England has found out, once they’re in the country, getting rid of them is a big, big headache. At least what you can say about the [asylum-seeking] Africans is that they’re unlikely to be terrorists.”
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