News and Views

By Virginia (Ginny) Lapham 
Member of Dumbarton UMC and a devoted advocate for the rights of Palestinians.
Her connection to this part of the world began in 1956.

My first glimpse of Jerusalem 70 years ago (January 1956) was from a small plane circling a makeshift airport just outside the Holy City, where the runway was a local road being shut down for the plane to land. With its rocky terrain, houses hewn of stone, ancient olive and fig trees, and showy winter flowers, Jerusalem looked a lot like the Biblical pictures I remembered from Sunday School. I was excited and a little scared of being in a place so scarred by the Arab/Israeli war that was often the headline news back home. My husband Bob Lapham and I were there with the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) assigned to work with Palestinian Refugees. We were peace-seeking Methodists prepared to learn from our 22 new MCC colleagues what being peacemakers with refugees was like.

Our ten-day orientation introduced us to the MCC's work with Palestinian refugees who had lost their homes, land, and means of livelihood in the 1948 war with Israel, ending in the division of Palestine. Half of the million Palestinian refugees were living in tents and mud huts, divided into refugee camps across the West Bank and Jordan. Our first visit to a refugee camp was to Aroub, a camp between Bethlehem and Hebron that still exists today. There we sat on the tent floor, wet from recent rains, and were served Arabic coffee and sweets as we listened to stories of the Palestinians being driven from their homes and lands by armed Israeli militia. The Palestinians were left with 22% of their land and an occupation none of them understood. 

After the orientation, the MCC Director drove us three hours north to the town of Irbid, Jordan, for our first assignment. Irbid was a town of 30,000 in the rolling wheat fields of north-western Jordan near the Syrian border. From our apartment windows, we could see snow-capped Mount Herman in the distance as well as a refugee camp nearby where 7,500 refugees lived in miserable one-room mud huts and tents. We busied ourselves for the first two months distributing clothing to all the refugees in the area. This was a big job – checking lists provided by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), making bundles of clothing for each family, and distributing the bundles to the camp where the refugees lived.  

Irbid was the first of three places we were assigned during the seven years we worked with MCC and Church World Service (1956-1963). After Irbid, we were assigned to Amman, the capital of Jordan, where we were again charged with distributing clothing to 125,000 refugees in East Jordan, clothing that came mostly from churches and other organizations in the United States. We were able to change the system from making bundles of clothing in a central location and taking them to camps and villages where refugees lived, to setting up warehouses in locations near the camps. We displayed the clothing on shelves and pipe racks and let refugees come at scheduled times to select their clothing. The new system treated people with more respect and dignity. 

Hebron, the town of Abraham and Sarah, is where we spent the next five years working with border refugees. The “border” was formed by order of the United Nations and drawn on a map in New York. In many cases, the line drawn cut people’s houses off from their lands, schools, livestock, and relatives. As long as they had a home, they got no assistance from the United Nations, and in many cases were poorer than the refugees. In a letter home, Bob described seeing a child in one of the village Feeding Centers who was so cold that he couldn’t hold his dish because his whole body was shaking. A thin dress-like garment and a completely worn-out rag of a jacket kept a little of the rain and wind off his body, but his feet, like most other children coming for lunch, were bare.  

Bob and I stayed in Palestine working with refugees for seven years – four of our five children were born there. When the children got to be school age, we felt it was time to go back to the US. It was hard to leave the people we had come to love and admire, always hoping life would get better for them and a just political settlement would be found. We could never have imagined how much worse things would get for the Palestinians as the US and other Western countries failed to understand the situation and sided with the Israelis, who ignore the UN border and occupy, murder, falsely imprison, and try to drive the Palestinians out so that Israelis can take the land. 

Back in the USA, Bob and I spoke of our Middle East experiences at many UMC and other churches, schools, and gatherings in Michigan, New York, and the D.C. area, hoping for a better understanding of the larger Palestinian/Israeli situation. I returned to Palestine/Israel several times to renew ties, and after Bob’s passing in 1988, I continued my advocacy for justice in Palestine.  

In 2012, a new phase of my Palestinian connection started after a member of Dumbarton UMC (my home church) was looking for host families for Palestinian students coming to this country on 4-year scholarships. The hosting was for two weeks during their orientation but for me it became much more. I volunteered and a few weeks later picked up two Palestinian students from Lebanon at Dulles Airport. The students and I connected in many ways, and over the past 13 years, I have hosted more than 50 Palestinian students during holidays, summers, and post-grad internships. Some of the students from the West Bank are children and grandchildren of our friends from the early days. Other students I hosted came from Lebanon, Syria and a dozen or more from Gaza, an area I visited on two trips to the Middle East.

It was thanks to the Gazan students that I met Ghada Rabah, an educator in Gaza and, for many years, the liaison with the Gaza students I hosted. We met at Peet’s Coffee Shop when she was in the D.C. area and we remained friends on social media. Ghada was one of those unusual educators who put her whole self into helping the students in her charge. She was proud of their work and their successes. The Gaza genocide became more personal when I got word that Ghada and her brother were buried in the rubble of their home as they were trying to get their elderly mother and special-needs sister out to safety. For two days, Ghada used her cell phone to call for help. I asked friends from my church group to pray for Ghada’s safety. Around 3 p.m. on September 24, I received word that a second Israeli drone had dropped explosives on her apartment complex, and Ghada and her brother were killed. Ghada becomes one more of the 70,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza in the past two years.

As we prepare to welcome the Christ Child into our homes and hearts in this season, let us remember that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, a city in Palestine. Just as Herod ordered the slaughter of every infant in an attempt to kill the newborn king, thousands of innocent children are counted among the 70,000 dead. In this holy season of Advent, as we await the coming Light who enters a world so desperate for peace, may we hold the people of Palestine, and all who suffer under violence and oppression, in persistent prayer, asking God to kindle justice, mercy, and hope anew.