THERE is a pressing need to pursue interfaith projects in the Holy Land in the aftermath of the recent violence between Israelis and Palestinians (News, 4 June), the Dean of St George’s College, Jerusalem, Canon Richard Sewell, has said. Both sides in the conflict feel traumatised and fearful.
“I think this is the very best time to try to bring people together to listen to one another,” he said on Monday. “I think our interfaith course that we run at the college every year will be even more vital and important than it has been in the past. There’s such uncertainty about one another, and such fear and distrust among groups.”
St George’s College closed in March 2020, when the lockdown in Israel began. Canon Sewell is hoping that it will reopen for pilgrims in a limited way in July. “So far, our groups that are booked in for September, October, and November have not cancelled,” he continued. “But I think obviously everybody is watching very closely. I think if people don’t feel reassured in themselves, they should simply cancel and book for another stage.”
Canon Sewell acknowledged that “different people have different levels of risk they’re prepared to take. But we don’t want anybody coming who doesn’t feel comfortable making their travel because you need to be in the right spirit for a pilgrimage.”
The college is situated close to one of the main flashpoints in the current crisis in Jerusalem: the neighbourhood of Shaikh Jarrah, where settler groups are trying to evict Palestinian families. “That’s what has been rather different from previous periods of unrest when there were troubles around Jerusalem,” the Dean said.
“The college and the cathedral close have always been something of a safe haven and an oasis. We could get people out on buses away from the trouble. But unrest has been so much a part of our life for the past weeks that you wouldn’t really want visitors in the college with that situation continuing.”
Canon Sewell has been Dean of St George’s College since 2018. He says that the atmosphere in Jerusalem has changed radically since the recent violence. But the unrest did not “come out of nowhere. It’s the result of years and years of a slow suffocation” of the Palestinian people. It just took a couple of incidents to set off the violence.
“The mood in Jerusalem right now is really very different,” he said. “The people are very wary of going into areas of the other communities. So Jerusalem is a divided city again, whereas, previously, people would have moved freely between east and west.”
Looking at the Holy Land’s future, Canon Sewell says that “these are incredibly challenging times for Palestinians of all communities, but especially for Christians, being such a smaller number. I’m concerned — I would be dishonest to say that I am not — for the future of all Palestinians.
“For us, as Christians, we are duty-bound to build on hope and to live our lives out of that hope, and to ensure that our actions are an embodiment of Christian hope that defies the odds, the apparent reality on the ground.”