Peacemakers gather in S.L.

In his hometown of Jerusalem, his message is a hard sell. That message — that suicide bombing and Israel's occupation of Palestinian land are equally wrong — meets with resistance from both Jews and Muslims.

But the Rev. Canon Naim Ateek says he has hope. Ateek, an Anglican priest and director of the Sabeel Ecumenical Center for Liberation Theology in Jerusalem, believes "God will ultimately not allow injustice to continue." Not that he thinks the world should just sit around and wait for God to broker a peace deal, though.

The Rev. Ateek continues to speak out and to travel to places like Utah, trying to convince people to become advocates of peace. Today the Rev. Ateek is in Salt Lake City as part of a conference called "Working for a Just Peace in Palestine and Israel."

Like other liberation theologies, the Rev. Ateek's Sabeel movement is based on the belief that Christian churches should fight against poverty and oppression. Coined in the 1970s, the term was first used in a Latin American context but has spread since to other countries and cultures considered to be oppressed.

"We're trying to make the gospel relevant for people living under occupation," the Rev. Ateek said last week in a phone interview from his home in Jerusalem. "Jesus himself lived under occupation and remained faithful to God."

Suicide bombings won't stop in Israel, the Rev. Ateek believes, until "the deep misery and torment" of many Palestinians is addressed. And that means, he says, that Israel must first end its "illegal occupation" of the Palestinian territories.

"It has not been a benign occupation as Israeli propagandists claim," writes the Rev. Ateek. "It has been an oppressive military domination" that includes curfews, checkpoints, humiliation, home demolitions and now a 450-mile wall. Many young Palestinian men can't find work. Many families have lost loved ones to violence. Young men, detained for indefinite periods of time in Israeli prisons, are pressured into becoming spies — and then live "in constant self-contempt and scorn for having betrayed their own people. . . ."

"To sum up," writes the Rev. Ateek, "these young people's daily life has become an experience of death."

This, he says, is the logic behind suicide bombing, a logic that also includes a Muslim belief in martyrdom — fighting for the cause of God and "friendship with God in heaven."

And what's so different, the Rev. Ateek asks, between a Palestinian suicide bomber and, say, the Hebrew hero Samson? "Obviously from the perspective of the Israelites he was regarded as a hero and a freedom fighter while from the perspective of the people of power, namely the Philistines, he was, in today's language, a terrorist."