PALESTINE
Cape Town -To stand where Jesus had stood while under Roman occupation. This is the mission of a group of South African church leaders and a wider international Christian delegation that arrived safely in the Holy Land in the Middle East to, “grieve, mourn, and express solidarity with fellow Christians” during the Christmas period amid unrelenting Israeli attacks on Gaza and the West Bank.
A group of about 20 Christian leaders arrived in Occupied Palestine for the solidarity Christmas pilgrimage organised by Kairos Southern Africa and Kairos Palestine. The delegation departed on Tuesday via Amman, Jordan, and arrived on Wednesday. They will be hosted by Kairos Palestine and Sabeel in Jerusalem and Bethlehem.
St George’s Cathedral Dean, Father Michael Weeder, is part of the delegation and undertaking the pilgrimage while fasting in solidarity with the people of Palestine, who have been at the receiving end of Israeli bombardment in retaliation for the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel.
Speaking to the Argus from Jerusalem, Weeder said the group met a wide variety of people from mainly the Christian religious leadership such as the Latin Patriarchate, the Orthodox, and the Armenian sector of the Christian faith community
Weeder, who has called for a permanent ceasefire in Palestine, spoke of a 27-year-old Palestinian political prisoner who was arrested when he was just 17, saying, “the punitive nature of that is there’s administrative detention so they don’t have to prove a case against you, and can imprison you indefinitely. And if they decide to release you, you still have to pay a fee for the costs of your incarceration and if you get support, say, from the Palestinian authority then you are further punished.
“It’s so diabolical, the fact that you have this relative freedom to be released into an occupied territory, then you are still in debt to the very people who imprisoned you because you haven’t paid the penalty for being imprisoned. So there’s a gross denial of your human rights and they said from October 7, the quality of their life was further detrimental”.
Weeder will be leaving for Cape Town on December 26 while the rest of the group will move on to Cairo, Egypt, where they hope to go to the Rafah Border Crossing. Reverend Dr Allan Boesak is expected to join the delegation for the latter part of the journey.
During a media briefing ahead of the pilgrimage, Reverend Edwin Arrison said the group would be meeting with various church leaders, human rights organisations, families of those who were held hostage by Hamas, and with Palestinian families of those detained and held hostage by Israel.