"Palestine

Palestine has always been a dear land because there lived our Lord Jesus Christ and rendered it a land of salvation. Palestine is therefore the land of the holy light out of which we stem. Our attachment to this land grows even more today particularly because it suffers. He who experiences death becomes a partner in Christ’s Passion. We are now fasting but the Palestinians are starving and are wrongfully murdered in an atmosphere of incomparable destruction, expulsion, occupation and extermination. We, in the church of Christ, stand against bloodshed, starvation and thirst whoever the perpetrator may be. We stand side by side with the Palestinians who are being slaughtered today because we feel for every massacred people.

In addition, the sanctity of the churches has been violated and innocents have been killed inside them. It is obvious that the people who committed these crimes do not differentiate between the religions. What hurts is this global incursion that aims at exterminating a whole nation, including the peaceful women, the elderly and the children, who are the beloved and kin of God. What is really pitiful is that humanity seems, until now, incapable of helping them or it refuses to make use of pressure and lift the oppression that tortures the suffering people in the Holy Land, in spite of the international community’s acknowledgement of the Palestinians’ right to have a state. Possessing a state is their legitimate right; the state makes them sense their free existence and offers them the path to prosperity. They want the occupation to end. As we have rejoiced when the occupation of South Lebanon ended, we should wish for the liberty and dignity of the Palestinians, knowing that humiliation is the source of despair and utter sorrow. Independence is every people’s path to resurrection. Like we have wished for peace to ourselves, we wish for the birth of peace in Palestine. Peace is a whole entity, and the war that is currently taking place in the Holy Land presages great danger for us and for the whole region of the East, so much beloved by Jesus-Christ.

What is happening in Palestine is beyond the suffering population’s capacity of toleration. God wants His creatures to live; He created them for life not to endure an existence that is threatened by the fear of death. He created us to rejoyce in Him and in our brothers around us. He did not create us to live in tension and despair. The Savior said: "I have come that men may have life". Besides, death in the Holy Bible is called "enemy" because God prepared us to be eternal. The commandment "Thou shall not kill2 applies to the individual as well as the state that orders its soldiers to slaughter the children and the adults

We salute the people of Palestine from the bottom of our hearts. We, the believers in Jesus-Christ, support the oppressed not the oppressor. We pray the Lord to grant the killers repentence. We want the Jews to live; we do not wish them any humiliation nor do we accept that they be killed. However, we want the Lord to fill their hearts with peace-loving so that they treat the Palestinians like they treat themselves. Like the Jews possess a land to live in, we wish that they realize and try to see that the Arabs also should have, in the Holy Land, a territory to live in. It is written in the Holy Bible: "So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them". We, who have experienced the bitterness of displacement, do not want anyone to suffer the same. Palestine belongs to the Palestinians and we are looking forward the day when they shall return there. As much as we refuse to be expelled from Lebanon, we refuse that they be expelled from their country. Being scattered around the world is an enormous distress and an incentive for crime perpetration. No people would accept an alternative country. We have refused the resettlement of the Palestinians in Lebanon because we want them to regain the land they love and enjoy.

Therefore, I ask you - while the Palestinians endure these troubled times - to pray for each one of them. I also ask the priests to remember the people of Palestine in the divine liturgy either through a special litany or during the Great Entrance, in the hope that the Lord answers our prayers before we identify, together with our fellow countrymen, an authentic way to lift the unjustice off their shoulders and support their rights and their recovery."

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