Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August 2008, page 57

Waging Peace

Israel Blocks Children’s Peace March

	Last year on the Children’s Journey to Jerusalem young people visited the Mount of Olives overlooking the Haram Al-Sharif. This year Israel barred the Christian children from visiting their holy sites (Photo courtesy Ramzy Qumsich, HCEF).

THE ISRAELI government imposed a new travel restriction barring Palestinian Christian children from traveling to Jerusalem for this year’s annual “Children’s Journey to Jerusalem,” according to the Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation (HCEF)’s Bethlehem office, which sponsors the annual event. The Israeli government announced that the children, aged 13 and under, would require permits to enter the Holy City. With great effort, HCEF managed to submit applications for the permits three weeks before the event’s scheduled date of May 2, but on April 30 Israeli authorities told HCEF that there was not enough time to consider the applications.

In each of the last three Easter seasons, HCEF has sponsored trips to Jerusalem for close to 1,000 Christian schoolchildren from 35 cities and towns in the Holy Land. This program, part of HCEF’s “Jesus Loves the Children” program, has allowed children to see, and worship at, Jerusalem’s most important Christian shrines, including the Garden of Gethsemane and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

Nearly 850 children had registered for the event. For most, these trips would have been their first to Jerusalem, even though most of them live not far from that city. The children have been kept away from the Christian sites by Israeli military roadblocks and checkpoints, as well as by the inability of their parents and teachers to obtain travel documents from the Israeli authorities.

Protesting the government’s refusal to permit this year’s long-planned Children’s Journey to Jerusalem, HCEF President Rateb Rabie stressed the peaceable, spiritual nature of the event. “These trips teach a message of love and peace, and they have taken place three times without any kind of incident,” he said. “The visits of the children to the holy places have never presented any kind of threat to the security of Israel or to public order.

“These trips are important and exciting experiences for all of the children, who are otherwise virtual prisoners in their own towns,” Rabie noted. “It is unconscionable that the Israeli authorities are now preventing even young Palestinian Christian children from traveling a few kilometers within their own country to visit religious sites of paramount importance to them.”

For more information visit <www.hcef.org>.

—Karen Gainor