Donnach Fahy recorded a conversation with George Akroush. George Akroush, project coordinator for the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, speaks candidly about his witness account of the situation in the Holy Land. The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem covers the territories of Palestine, Israel, Jordan and Cyprus. For a variety of reasons, it is a very complex reality, with growing and diverse communities in Israel, but rapidly diminishing communities in Palestine and Jordan.

Transcript (Generated automatically):
So of the 66 parishes, the custody have 11 of them? Exactly, and we have still parishes under the Maronite Catholic Church, and also, but the majority are under the Latin Patriarchate mandate, 55 parishes out of 66. So this means that we are almost responsible for over 300,000 Christians, still we are a minority, I mean if you take Palestine we are less than 1%, if you take Israel we are 1.8% from the total population, but all in all we are 1.5%, but we deliver our services, still the best schools, the best hospitals, the best centres for people with disabilities are under the mandate or under the management of the Catholic Church in the Holy Land. So we are responsible for different marginalised communities, whether in southern Jordan or northern Jordan or Palestine, so it is really not attractive for so many donors, except for the Knights and Dames of the Holy Land, to support because they are remote, they are poor, and there are so many challenges facing these communities, but we accepted this challenge and we are doing our best, especially after the outbreak of this war, to deliver to our people.

Now, what is unique about the Christian community is that it is true that we are 1% of the population, but we used to operate 92% of the tourism sector. That’s why this war was a big hit on the Christian community, because now the unemployment rates among Christians in the Holy Land are the highest of all time. We never reached 65% or 72%.

These are our estimations based on scientific reports that are being prepared by different professional bodies like the United Nations, the WHO, or even the Palestinian Chamber of Commerce in Bethlehem and Ramallah. So we estimate that the Christians are unemployed now because over 70% of them depend on the hospitality sector in the region. And also I can tell you another challenge that we are facing at the moment is that Christians are becoming traumatized from the tourism sector.

Every two years we have something here. A war, or a confrontation, or a new government, or certain challenges of the Palestinian government as well. So we are getting used to have a kind of chronic socio-economic and political challenges.

And that’s why the Church has a big responsibility to cater for the people and to be responsible maybe like a kind of incubator for the people to support them in these harsh times. His Beatitude keeps focusing on the real role of the Church being responsible for the pastoral services. But in addition to the pastoral services, now we became the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Social Affairs, the Ministry of Tourism even.

And so we are really responsible for so many things that is not supposed to be the role of the Church. But thanks to your support, thanks to the people who are really dedicated to the mission of the Holy Land and also to preserving what can be preserved from the Christian community, to support our presence here, because definitely this is the right time to invest in the Mother Church of Jerusalem, as we like to call it here locally. It is the Mother Church where everything started from here.

The Land of Incarnation, the Land of Salvation. And we are really proud to be part of this, despite all the suffering and the challenges that we face every day. So this is in general our mandate.

The mandate of this department is four functions, as I said, studying the needs. Number two, designing interventions, projects, whether humanitarian or developmental interventions. So we are responsible for communicating with the donors, the Knights and Dames and others, because we have now more people joining the mandate of the Latin Patriarchate, or supporting the mandate of the Latin Patriarchate, mainly from Europe.

We have now, supporting us with substantial grants, like the, it is called, it has a branch in Ireland, Aid to the Church in Need. Aid to the Church in Need. We received also, when Sister Sinead was there, she received another grant from the offices there.

And also we have several Catholic institutions supporting us, like Missio in Germany, Kinder Missions in Germany. So we have so many partners. We also received a good grant for remedial education for Gaza from a Catholic foundation in Milano.

And also the solidarity of the Universal Catholic Church was shown to us clearly through the support of so many parishes and dioceses in this period. So we feel now responsible also to keep this trust, maintain this partnership, and at the same time provide as much as possible help for our people. Of course the Church cannot be responsible for employing 300,000 people.

It is a big challenge for the Church, and the Church, to be perfectly honest with you, we were never prepared to deal with such a big volume of challenges, economic, political. His Beatitude keeps differentiating between hope and being optimistic. Of course we should be hopeful as Christians.

It is part of our faith. Make-up. But of course we are not that optimistic that a long-lasting political solution will happen here.

So we keep just fixing bad and quick fixes, but the real root of the conflict is not addressed yet by the international community. Still Israel is above the international law. The international law doesn’t apply to them.

Maybe this is not politically correct to say that, but this is what is happening. The Irish people know about it very well. You are in a much advanced awareness compared to Europe and the West in general, America and Canada, you know the story, you know the roots, you know our suffering.

But yes, we are getting used to this and we have to be responsible also to keep the hope alive in the hearts of our people. This is our mandate now. And the fourth function that is also under my responsibility is reporting also, preparing reports for our donors to inform them about the progress of certain projects, whether developmental, humanitarian, anything that, or even pastoral, because also we established the spiritual formation center at the Latin Seminary in Beir Jala.

If you visited the place, I advise you to see also Rector Father Bernard Poggi. He is the rector of the Latin Seminary and he was entrusted by His Beatitude to open the Latin Seminary for the first time in history to lay people. So the Latin Seminary was the only center for formation for clergy, Arabic-speaking clergy.

So all these parishes are being served by clergy who are graduates from the Latin Seminary in Jordan, Palestine, Israel. And now coming soon to Cyprus, because Cyprus has also been receiving so many Arabic-speaking refugees from Lebanon, unfortunately, and Syria. So we have now, according to our estimations, 40,000, similar to the number of the Christians, Palestinians here, 40,000 Syrians and Lebanese who are flooding to Cyprus to seek a kind of normal life.

It is close to them and at the same time Cyprus is part of Europe. And it is part of our mandate as well. We are particularly responsible for the Paphos congregations.

And in addition to all this, His Beatitude also, because he wanted to make our life more complicated. This is off the record. No, no, he knows my opinion.

He added two challenging tasks to the Latin Patriarchate. He added the Vicariate for Migrants and Asylum Seekers. St. James.

St. James and St. Rachel, which is the Hebrew-speaking congregation. Sorry, St. James is the Hebrew-speaking congregation and St. Rachel is the Vicariate for Migrants and Asylum Seekers. And we are talking about 85,000 Christians here who are coming to Israel as tourists and then they get rid of their visa and passport and they want to find a job here because they come from very, very poor countries like the Philippines, India, Nigeria, Africa.

So they come here and Israel has been turning a blind eye to this congregation because they want those people to work in the, sorry to say, dirty, difficult jobs. Caretakers or elderly, difficult nursing tasks. And at the same time, the Israeli Jews are not interested in such careers.

And the Palestinians are good in agriculture and construction. So they used to count on 180,000 Palestinian workers who commute on a daily basis inside the Green Line to work in the Israeli settlements. Coming in from the West Bank.

Coming from the West Bank, exactly. So immediately after the outbreak of this war, the 180,000 permits were revoked by the State of Israel and now they are passing new laws in the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, to bring or to replace Palestinian workers with Indian workers. They already brought 40,000 Indians and Romanians.

But I’m not telling you this because I’m a Palestinian, but in terms of quality of work, maybe you need three to four Romanians to make a job of one Palestinian. In construction, we are the best. It’s a long experience.

It’s in your genes. Yeah, I mean construction and this kind of… All the buildings here were built by you over thousands of years. Yes, exactly, thousands of years in history.

So what we are doing at the moment, maybe I don’t know if you had the chance to see Dima, the head of the social department. Are you staying till next week? Till Monday. Till Monday, you’re leaving on Monday, okay.

I will do my best to introduce you to my colleague if you have time. Dima is responsible for the social department. Okay.

So we have been also helping her by raising funds to her social department. The social department is doing so many things, more than 10 different interventions. Most importantly is the coverage of medical operations.

Now, in Jerusalem, we are different than the people in the West Bank. Unfortunately, the West Bank, there is no such thing as health insurance. So it is the responsibility of the church or humanitarian organizations to cover the cost of treatment, especially the tertiary intervention.

Primary, secondary are taken care of by the government, very low quality, Palestinian government, low quality but it’s functioning. The tertiary intervention has to be covered by private insurance company, very expensive. The vast majority of the Palestinian Christians and Muslims cannot afford it.

So they turn to the humanitarian organizations to cover these costs. So also we have hundreds of Christians who have chronic diseases, kidney dialysis, heart problems, cardiovascular problems, and they are also on our program for providing them with their monthly allowances of medications. Very expensive also.

You’re talking about certain cases like cost of $200 a month, which is a big number in the West Bank, especially with these skyrocketing unemployment rates. We do like also a kind of bills support. We cover the electricity cost for elderly people who have zero income.

We cover even the rent cost for poor families who lost their income after the war. We’re talking about couples who also lost their income. Both of them used to work in the tourism sector now.

No hotels, no souvenir shops, no restaurants, everything is closed. So as I told you, the church has a great responsibility now, and it is the first refuge to the people to help, and that’s why we have to live up to the expectations of the local people. We are all physically tired.

I mean, me, my team, His Beatitude the Patriarch is the most hardworking person, Sammy, our CEO. So everybody is physically tired, to be perfectly honest. We are small teams doing so many things.

Great work. Yeah, thank you. But at the same time, when we compare our life, our daily life with Gaza, for instance, we are not doing anything.

They are the true heroes who are maintaining their faith under fire. And we are just, our responsibility, our goal in life is to support this and to keep the Holy Land Church alive instead of transforming it into a museum. This is very important because we care for the living stones, not the stones of the Holy Land.

So, I mean, if you look at the trends, this challenge might happen. God forbids one time that the Holy Land, the Land of Jesus, will not have any Christians. And it is, in my opinion, it is a miracle to still have people who want to stay.

I mean, I did a study in 2021, and I discovered that 92% of the Palestinian Christians or even the Holy Land Christians are so proud to be part of this land, because everything started here. And at the same time, they want to stay, while they have 78% of their first-degree relatives outside the Holy Land. I mean, I have my cousins from my mother’s and father’s side in America, in Canada, in France.

I can, you know, select a city and go. And also we, because of our education, of our faith, also as Christians, we can be easily integrated into European cultures. We share the same values.

But still we say, okay, if we can secure a decent home with an average income, salary, or a job, we will stay here, because God wanted us to stay here and to be witnessed for his salvation for the whole universe. So this is like a call, this is a responsibility to be born as a Holy Land Christian. And this is, we are receiving this call from our Lord with joy and strength.