Pastoral Care visit to Friends in the Middle East
FWCC Europe & Middle East Section & Friends United Meeting pastoral visit to the Middle East – 6-17 April 2025
I had the privilege of travelling to the Middle East to visit Friends and the Friends’ schools in Palestine and Lebanon in April this year. The visit was organised by Friends United Meeting who are the main supporter of Ramallah Friends School. EMES Clerk, Ethel Livermore, and I joined the visit. We spent 8 days in Ramallah and 2 days in Brummana. The schools are amazing, thriving in places where there is so much uncertainty in daily life and often a lot of violence, even if it’s not always seen. We went to listen; to be alongside people there and to get to know them and hear their stories. We wanted to learn about their lives in Palestine. Not everyone wanted to talk to us, some of them didn’t trust us at first or know whether they could trust us; but many did talk to us, especially the longer we were there.
I want to share a few reflections of being in Ramallah. I first went there over 30 years ago on a Young Friends workcamp – we spent a month living in the school and working on the school and the meeting house. Half our group was Palestinian, the other half was British & American. At the weekends we went on excursions to places such as Bethlehem, Nazareth, the Mediterranean, the Gaza Strip. In those days it was possible for Palestians from the West Bank to visit all those places. Now they can only dream of going to such places – the occupation makes it all but impossible. Even to visit Bethlehem or Jerusalem – just a few miles from Ramallah – requires a long drive to avoid closed roads and the humiliation of going through checkpoints with the risk of being refused the right to pass if they don’t have the correct permit. I have been back several times in the past 30 years. The situation there is worse than ever before – there are more road closures, the West Bank wall has encircled most Palestinian towns.
We heard a lot of stories during our visit. In Ramallah the teachers often have difficulty getting to work – the Israeli occupation of the West Bank has got worse, there are more checkpoints and closures of roads than before the current war in Gaza. A journey from a village outside Ramallah that used to take 20 minutes can now take 2-3 hours. Some teachers are even having to move to Ramallah, leaving their family homes – running the risk of having their land stolen by Israeli settlers. These settlers act with the support of the Israeli army, so Palestinians have no authority to turn to for help. On a couple of occasions we had lunch with the teaching staff – I remember one lunch where they were talking about the war in Gaza and we heard that one teacher has lost 19 relatives and another has 4 of their children in Gaza (3 grown ups but one is 10 years old) – I can’t imagine how awful this must be. People told us that life in Ramallah is getting harder; we heard phrases like unprecedented, that things are different now, since the 7th October 2023. But at the same time we heard guilt about how good their quality of life is compared to Gaza. And that’s with electricity cuts, water rationing and all the travel difficulties I have already mentioned. They feel the pain of Gaza. One day on a visit to the hills south of Bethlehem we had a beautiful view down towards the Mediterranean – and then realised that we were probably looking over to the Gaza Strip. It is so close; everyone we met said they had friends or relatives there.
Despite all of this, the teachers do all they can to create a safe and ‘normal’ environment for the children to learn in. Our team spent a week in Ramallah, visiting the school most days – we introduced ourselves in ‘chapel’ one morning and visited lessons. Another morning I remember visiting an ethics lesson where the children were learning about the Quaker values, in particular simplicity on this occasion. As I watched the non-Quaker teacher (I don’t know if she was a Muslim or Christian) teaching the lesson it felt like she was doing Quakerism justice!
There is a lot of despair but we also heard stories of hope, amazingly many people maintain the hope that things will get better – they have to! We met a Palestinian American family that had moved from the States to Palestine in order to help support the development the country and its culture. On our last full day in Ramallah we attended an exhibition of year 10 projects. There were some incredible ideas; growing mushrooms, a scale model of the school, making furniture out of Gaza rubble, debunking the theory about left and right brain sides, making an electric car and much more.
We had a number of speakers during the visit. Two stand out for me. The first is Pastor Munther Isaac who is the pastor at the Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem, where there is a nativity scene on display all year round called ‘Christ in the rubble’. He challenged us to speak the truth to the world about the situation in Palestine and to use words like genocide and apartheid to describe what we had seen. We also met with the head of the Dar al Kalima vocational university in Bethlehem. He talked to us about education in Palestine – before the current war Palestine had one of the highest ratios of universities to population in the world. Since October 2023 all eleven universities in Gaza have been destroyed. Some of them continue to operate by teaching in the open air on the rubble.
The active Quaker community in Ramallah is sadly only two people at the moment, other Friends in the meeting are unwell or abroad. We were able to attend meeting for worship on our first day in Ramallah and there were about 20 people there, including several other visitors, one of whom was an ecumenical accompanier from Britain. We took time to listen to Friends in the meeting and have found some practical ways to help support them and their meeting.
In Brummana we found a larger Quaker community, of perhaps 10 active Friends. Life in Lebanon is also hard, they also live under the threat of Israeli attacks. The Friends School in Brummana is also an amazing place, built on a steep hillside overlooking Beirut and the Mediterranean Sea. Like the school in Ramallah, Friends School Brummana is something to be proud of; it can give us and the people of the region hope.
On our final day we attended a meeting for worship with Brummana Friends; we were accompanied on our visit by Rania Maayeh the headteacher of Ramallah Friends School and to best of our knowledge this was the first time that any Lebanese and Palestinian Friends had worshipped together in the same room since the 1990s! It was a special moment for everyone.
Michael Eccles, Executive Secretary, FWCC Europe & Middle East Section, May 2025
A version of this article was published in The Friend 20 May 2025 edition
