In my many years of public service, I have heard more stories of strife and woe than I can remember, most of them based on grievances that are, to one degree or another, legitimate. As I listened, I always waited for the therefore. Therefore our side is 100 percent right and our enemies are 100 percent wrong. Therefore we are justified in resorting to violence and in killing our enemies. Therefore you must help us. To the fiercest partisans, all questions are answered in cold absolutes. There can be no forbearance, no balancing of costs and benefits, no tolerance, no respect for the other side, no mercy.
Embedded in Father Elias Chacour’s stories in Blood Brothers are personal grievances and the political grievances of his people, the Palestinians. I have no personal knowledge of the specific historical facts cited in this book. I will leave it to the scholars to weave the details of Father Chacour’s memories into the full history of his times.
But on a personal level, his stories remind us how the great gears of history sometimes grind up the lives of innocent people. He tells about his Palestinian family, dispossessed after living for centuries on the same soil where Jesus walked, and about the Melkite Catholic order to which his family belonged, which traces its history to the very founding of Christianity, and which he serves as a priest and which he now leads as archbishop. But when he reaches the end, his therefore is of a fundamentally different nature. Therefore we must remember the gospel of Jesus Christ. Therefore we must love and forgive our enemies. Therefore we must reconcile ourselves with them and live together in peace. These ideas are breathtaking in their audacity and as radical today as they were when Jesus taught them two millennia ago.
But Father Chacour is more than a theologian or theoretician. He has tried, often against considerable odds, to demonstrate the power of these principles in his life. My wife, Susan, and I witnessed his good works a few years ago when he invited us to his home in Ibillin, near Nazareth. We saw what he had built for the people of his region—schools, libraries, community centers and more. Most impressive was the university he founded, Mar Elias Educational Institutions, named after the biblical prophet Elijah. Here, despite centuries of discord among their faiths, Christians, Jews, Muslims and Druze study side by side, a small orchard blooming in the rocky soil of the Middle East.
Father Chacour seeks peace and reconciliation from the bottom up, by softening one heart at a time and changing the lives of individuals. It was my calling to seek Mideast peace in another way, through traditional statecraft, diplomacy, realpolitik. For me, the happiest day in that campaign came on the morning of October 30, 1991, at the Madrid Conference, when Israel and all of her Arab state neighbors, including representatives of the Palestinian people, came together for the first time to negotiate peace. That conference started a round of negotiations that ultimately led to the Oslo Accords between Israel and Palestinian representatives, to a peace treaty between Jordan and Israel, and to extended talks between Israel and Syria that did not result in a treaty but did for a time defuse tensions.
From my admittedly worldly perspective as a diplomat, I still believe the political peace process of negotiation and confidence-building offers the best hope for the region. But as I write in the summer of 2002, it seems that peace has more enemies than friends. Day by day, violence generates new and ever more painful grievances. Day by day, dialogue is replaced by propaganda, by the imperious therefore, justifying yet more violence and yet more death. And too many—specifically including too many Christians—respond with uncritical and hot-blooded support for one combatant or the other, as if to say that Jesus Himself might bless the tanks (as some seem to believe) or the suicide bombings (as others suggest by their reluctance to condemn these acts).
From my perspective as a believer and a diplomat, I take hope and comfort in knowing that amid all the hatred, destruction and death, Father Chacour continues his patient work, softening one heart at a time. He demonstrates how, through humility before the Word of God and the never-ending struggle to reconcile faith with the unhappy realities of this world, one courageous man has illuminated the truth he learned (and that we could all bear to learn) from another Man of Galilee: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.”
Blessed, indeed, is the peacemaker.
James A. Baker III, U.S. Secretary of State, 1989–1992