Mennonite Weekly Review

While any armed conflict is a tragedy, few compare to the one in Israel and Palestine in its ability to cause anger and despair.

It is difficult to find signs of hope in the brokering of the current peace process, yet hope is exactly what’s needed for all the people living in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.

“Many Israelis and Palestinians now doubt that a two-state peace is possible,” wrote Philip C. Wilcox Jr., president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace and former U.S. consul general to Jerusalem, in a July 28 Christian Century article.

Violence from both sides, as well as the “40-year national project of Jewish settlement that has dramatically transformed the West Bank and East Jerusalem into Israeli colonies,” have caused many to abandon hope, Wilcox wrote.

Some of the Jewish West Bank settlements have tens of thousands of people and a high level of infrastructure. They also receive more government funds than municipalities in Israel, according to a study by the Macro Center of the Israeli European Policy Network, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported July 21.

Yet, amid the conflict, positive developments at the government and grassroots levels are drawing international attention.

Israel is reportedly considering plans to evacuate 23 illegal settler outposts in the West Bank constructed by Israelis.

In the face of settlement growth, some Palestinian villagers, supported by Israeli and international peacemakers, are practicing a form of nonviolent resistance called sumoud (steadfastness or perseverance).

Philip Rizk, a German-Egyptian Christian journalist, documents the lives of those villagers in his film This Palestinian Life. Their steadfastness includes shepherding their flocks, rebuilding homes, replanting olive and lemon trees after they are bulldozed, and remaining on the land where their families have lived for generations.

“It is a very religious approach to the conflict,” Rizk told an audience by Internet phone after a Chicago screening of the film June 23. “It is a grassroots reaction to everyday injustice.”