By Kathleen Kern

When I first began working in the West Bank, I understood that communicating a Palestinian perspective to our Christian Peacemaker Team constituency was part of our job.

I soon learned that the U.S. media ignored not only the Palestinian perspective. It ignored the perspective of the thousands of Israelis who for decades had worked sacrificially on behalf of peace and human rights.

Most of these activists struggled with depression, and I thought CPT could be a ministry to them, encouraging them in their efforts.

During the first months of the current Intifada, as visitors to Hebron tried to cheer up our depressed and sleep-deprived team by telling us what admirable work we were doing, I had a revelation. All the encouraging things I said to Israeli activists years ago must have been really annoying.

They saw the big picture that I did not. They knew they were plugging only a few of the holes in a very leaky dike, that their dream of two states — Israel and Palestine — living side by side in peace was becoming impossible.

As I have watched the carnage in Gaza, Israel and Lebanon in recent weeks, I have finally spoken words I had not dared to before: “I have given up hope.”

I am aware that by doing so, I have failed in a Christian obligation. Given God’s salvation history, Christians should believe that nothing is impossible, that God works through his people in desperate times to establish his kingdom. But I feel with an almost calm certainty that Palestinians will lose the 24 percent of historic Palestine left to them.

Palestinian youth, who watched older brothers, uncles and cousins die in the first Intifada, are now watching their peers, their mothers, fathers and siblings die. They will continue to join militant groups where they feel they will kill and die with “honor.”

Israel will respond to terrorist attacks with bloody and disproportionate terrorism of its own, and hundreds more Israeli and Palestinian civilians will die as a result.

The U.S. Congress will continue to grant enormous amounts of military aid to Israel, regardless of how many civilians it kills. The right wing in Israel will solidify its hold on power, because now, most Israelis believe the only way to security is to keep pounding Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world until they give up hope.

And they will not learn that hopelessness is the most dangerous of human conditions.

After I returned home from one of my last stints in Hebron, I checked a video of Braveheart out of the public library.

The movie chronicles, in a highly fictional manner, the resistance of the Scots to the nonfictional repression, occupation and theft of their lands by the British.

Like the Israelis, the English have successfully presented themselves as more civilized than the people they colonized, despite the fact they imposed a near-genocide on the Scots (and Irish) in subsequent centuries.

The Scots, like Palestinians, resisted the brutality of their occupiers — often in brutal ways — but the overwhelmingly superior military force of their occupiers won out. Outside Scotland, few people remember the horrors that England inflicted on the Scots. I believe the same will be true for the Palestinians in another century.

So here’s my candle flickering in the darkness: Today, even though most of the world does not know about the historically vicious and contemptuous way the British treated the Scots, it’s not so bad to be Scottish. My bleak hope is that in another hundred years, it won’t be so bad to be Palestinian.