This is a cross post from The Jerusalem Post by Fran Waddams

The Jewish Leadership Council of the UK recently led a group of leaders from  several Christian organizations to Israel and the Palestinian  territories.

This group had the opportunity to meet with and question  Israeli officials, citizens and clergy.

Fran Waddams of Anglican Friends  of Israel, one of the organizations represented on the trip, responds to a  report by the archbishop of Canterbury on his visit  to the Holy Land which took place a few days later.

Dear Archbishop  Justin,

I toured the Holy Land, together with Christian leaders of other  organizations, on a visit organized by the UK Jewish Leadership Council just a  few days before you last month, and read your reflections on your own visit to  the region wondering whether you would be as attentive and impartial as you were  at a meeting a few years ago at which I spoke and you were chair.

It’s  heartening that you support the rights of all people in the region “to peace,  security, and justice.”

The issues you touch on also arose on our three  days of visits and meetings with Israelis, both Jewish and Arab, and  Palestinians, and some questions sprang to mind as I read your piece.

You  were shocked at the contrast between west Jerusalem and Ramallah.

Next  time you visit, would you ask Palestinian leaders why there is such a contrast?  The Palestinian Authority has received billions of dollars in aid. Where,  exactly, has this money gone? It doesn’t appear to have gone into  infrastructure, public buildings and utilities, nor created Palestinian jobs nor  gone onto Palestinian tables. It might really help our understanding if we knew  the answers to this question.

Palestinians may find passing through IDF  checkpoints inconvenient, or even humiliating.

But air travelers of every  nationality accept the indignity of intrusive security searches, understanding  that there are those who would blow airliners out of the sky if measures were  not taken to stop them.

Israel’s security fence and checkpoints exist for  the same reason. They were put into place only after dozens of murders and  hundreds of mutilations caused by Palestinian suicide bombers who drove  unhindered into Israel to carry out their missions. Several people loaded with  explosives have been stopped at checkpoints over the years. Every week the  Israel Defense Forces intercepts weapons and explosives and prevents  indiscriminate death and mutilation of Palestinians and Israelis alike. Israel’s  security measures save lives.

One young Palestinian woman has written  that “most Palestinian Christians and peace loving Muslims acknowledge  (privately) that the wall was built as a direct response to suicide bombers from  within the Palestinian community.”

However unwilling the Ecumenical  Accompaniers Programme for Palestine and Israel (EAPPI) is to believe it, it is  a fact that the number of terror attacks, which reached epidemic proportions by  2003, has dwindled to almost nothing.

Like us, you were alarmed by the  danger with which the citizens of Sderot live daily. It’s one thing to read  dispassionately the few reports that appear in the UK media, quite another to be  on the spot, wondering whether the nearest bomb shelter (at every bus stop)  could be reached within the 15 seconds between the Red Alert and the missile  exploding. The morning after our visit, terrorists were lobbing missiles toward  Israel.

They missed this time. But missing was not the intention, and it  didn’t stop Sderot’s parents having to make agonizing decisions on whether they  had time to get all their children to shelter in time.

Then we met young  IDF soldiers, amazed that British Christians wanted to show appreciation for  their dangerous work. Most Christians they encounter are scrutinizing their  behavior for faults as they work at checkpoints or try to prevent violence at  demonstrations.
These Christians seem indifferent to the dangers they  face as they try to distinguish between peaceful Palestinians and those  smuggling explosives or weapons.

Finally we had the privilege of visiting  Baptist Pastor Naim Khoury in Bethlehem. Brought up to believe that the Jewish  Scriptures were irrelevant, he began to read them for himself as a 17 year old.  He has discovered that the whole Bible is God’s Word, not just the New Testament  and as a result insists that Palestinian Christians are obliged to love all  their neighbors, Muslim and Jew.

He also learned that God has given the  Jewish people a right to live in the Holy Land. Pastor Khoury does not endorse  all that the Israeli government does. Nevertheless, he insists that Jews’ right  to live unhindered on the land promised to them by the God is clearly set out in  the Bible.

As a result of his courage, Pastor Khoury is shunned by fellow  Christians, his church has had its right to conduct official marriages and  baptisms withdrawn by the Palestinian Authority, his church has been bombed 14  times, and he was once shot. Nevertheless, his Arab congregation numbers in the  hundreds, the largest in the Territories. What an irony.

The conflict  between Israel and the Palestinians is complex.

It is about land and it  is about justice. And your question is excellent – what constitutes a “just  solution.” There are many voices that you won’t hear by sticking to “official”  channels. The truths told by the “other voices” are out there, but so often  those voices have to be sought out.

They’re worth listening  to.

They really are.