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Children in refugee camps in Shatilla, in southern Lebanon, top, and near Bethlehem, center, greet the visitors with smiles and peace signs.The destruction of homes is evident in Shatilla, in southern Lebanon, bottom.

Photos courtesy of the REV. WINNIE VARGHESE

"Samson was the first suicide-bomber.”

Remember the story of Samson? A warrior of the Hebrew people whose power was visible in his vows as a Nazarene to never cut his hair. After his defeat and humiliation at the hands of Delilah and the Philistines, after his eyes had been gouged out and he was reduced to turning a millstone like an ox, his hair grew and in his final vindication of the power of his God, he leaned on the pillars that hold up the temple and marketplace and reduce it to rubble.

The liberation theology movement asks us as communities to find our stories in the Bible. In this season of war, many Christians identify with Isaiah and the prophets who cry out for peace. Several Palestinians we met said, “Samson was the first suicide bomber,” referring to the Bible for their actions too.

From January 24 to February 8, I traveled with a Fellowship of Reconciliation delegation on a tour of Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the Occupied Territories to meet with Palestinians and Israelis working towards peace in the region. Our delegation was ecumenical and interfaith and included an Episcopal Peace Fellowship contingent. As American citizens, we took this trip aware of the fact that our government and U.S.-based charities donate billions of dollars each year to the Israeli government.

Every Israeli and Palestinian we met said the current situation is the worst in his or her memory. Israelis live in fear of suicide bombers and other kinds of terrorist attacks. Palestinians live under a complete occupation by Israel with Israeli settlements in their neighborhoods and on their lands, limited access to building materials, medical and school supplies, humiliating searches when crossing checkpoints, invasions of their homes, regular jailing and torture of men, curfew, home demolitions and direct gunfire from the Israeli Army into their homes.

An Israeli father whose teenage daughter was killed by a suicide bomber told our group that no one on either side should have to live with this kind of violence. He has started an organization to end the occupation. When we spoke to both sides separately, we heard Jewish-Israeli and Muslim-Palestinian leaders outline almost identical strategies for a two-state solution. Both sides believed the other was not really interested in such a plan. We met peace activists on both sides who did not even believe they had a partner for dialogue on the other side.

We also met Israelis who believed that all Arabs are the same and that there is no such thing as Palestinians, and they should and could be absorbed by other Muslim states. We met Palestinians who know Israelis only as soldiers who patrol the streets of their neighborhoods ready to shoot their children.

The Israeli government is building a wall eight meters high and one to two meters thick in some places around the camps, potentially walling them off on all sides to further prevent the free movement of Palestinians throughout their own lands, which are not contiguous. We met a lot of gracious Israelis, good people, some of whom didn’t know there were still camps or displaced people. They just want to live peacefully. They were themselves Holocaust survivors or descendants of survivors.

But the violence of one generation does not excuse or allow violence into another one, as many Israeli activists we met continuously reminded us. Even if we could ethically argue it and even as we collectively look away because it seems too complicated, another generation of young people is being raised waiting for fathers to come home from jail, watching their mothers abused and humiliated by the army in their homes and fearing the inevitable torture and imprisonment in their future.
Samson was the first suicide bomber. I don’t think the mothers and students who reminded us of this fact were excusing suicide bombing. They were telling us that this response to their situation is not monstrous.
The Rev. Naim Ateek, Anglican priest and Director of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, met with us the morning before we left. Our interfaith delegation sat in stunned silence as he told the story of his family’s displacement and the deeply spiritual and practical nature of his liberation theology. “It is a story of land,” he reminded us, no matter if it is the Palestinian Liberation Organization buildings being destroyed along with any semblance of Palestinian infrastructure, or if it is the netting hung above the streets of Hebron to prevent Israeli settlers from throwing stones down on Palestinian shopkeepers and pedestrians walking the streets. It is a story of the right to land. Who has a right to work the land? To own it? To travel it safely? Or better yet, who does not? Ateek writes, “The land belongs to God, we must share it.”