Last week, Palestinian Christians gathered in Beit Sahour, a community adjacent to Bethlehem, to pay tribute to Nobel Peace Prize winner Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu who died in December last year. The prayer service was held at Our Lady of Fatima Catholic Church, where Tutu prayed when he visited the town in 1989.
Tutu had come to Beit Sahour during the first Palestinian Intifada. He spoke at Shepherds’ Fields in Beit Sahour, where he was welcomed by thousands of Palestinians, both Christian and Muslim. That visit wasn’t his first. As a young priest, Tutu had come to Jerusalem in 1966 to study Arabic and Greek. It’s not surprising, then, that three decades before the recent reports of B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, Tutu had identified the situation in Palestine/Israel as apartheid.
Last week’s memorial service was organized by Kairos Palestine, the Palestinian Christian ecumenical nonviolent movement based on the Kairos Palestine document: A Moment of Truth. The service included readings from A Moment of Truth, the writing of which was inspired by the 1985 South African Kairos document that challenged the global church to recognize and resist South African apartheid.
Many comparisons were made between the two situations—in former apartheid South Africa and now in Palestine. The service included prayers for South Africa. Attendees shared a prayer by Tutu familiar to many, Disturb Us, O Lord.
Tutu’s renowned sense of humor was also recalled. In his sermon during the service, Munther Isaac, pastor of Bethlehem’s Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church, shared from a January article in This Week in Palestine written by Dar al-Kalima University’s President Mitri Raheb. Raheb described the 1989 gathering at Shepherds’ Fields. Tutu, he said, pointed to many parallels between South Africa and Israel. Each time he would pause and, with a characteristic twinkle in his eye, say, “I’m not talking about Israel. I’m talking about South Africa”—to which the crowd responded with knowing laughter.
Following the prayer service, a ceremony was hosted by Beit Sahour’s Mayor Jihad Khair and Mrs. Khomotso Maake, a representative of the Consulate of South Africa in Palestine. Both recognized the importance of Tutu’s 1989 visit. Maake read from the address that South African President Nelson Mandela delivered to the U.N. in 1990. “The histories of our two people, Palestinian and South African,” Mandela said, “correspond in such a painful and pregnant way, and we all know that our freedom isn’t complete without the freedom of everyone in Palestine.”
In its December tribute to Tutu, Kairos Palestine wrote, “We will continue to turn our eye to Tutu’s life-long aspiration for a better world where everyone enjoys liberty, equality and equity and we will remember him as we march on in our path for self-determination and independence. May his soul rest in peace as his legacy lives on forever.”
Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Archbishop Desmond Tutu (who certainly knows apartheid when he sees it) in a recent letter to student leaders at the University of California regarding the occupied West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem: “I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid. I have witnessed the humiliation of Palestinian men, women, and children made to wait hours at Israeli military checkpoints routinely when trying to make the most basic of trips to visit relatives or attend school or college, and this humiliation is familiar to me and the many black South Africans who were corralled and regularly insulted by the security forces of the Apartheid government.”
Archbishop Desmond Tutu: “I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about.” (The Guardian, 29 April 2002 – http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/apr/29/comment)