Peace Not Walls

Israeli policies on Palestinian residency have arbitrarily denied thousands of Palestinians the ability to live in, and travel to and from, the West Bank and Gaza, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Israel should immediately stop denying...

I encourage you to read this report from a recent meeting in Washington, DC, hosted by the World Evangelical Alliance. Two of the quoted speakers, Dr. Atef Gendy and Dr. Andrea Zaki, are close companions of the ELCA in Egypt.

While the peace process remains stymied, and all focus is on whether parties will return to talks or not, suffering does not stand still in the Holy Land, especially for those in the occupied Palestinian territories dealing with discrimination and inequities....

The suffering in Syria has become horrifying and there is worse to come. It nevertheless remains quite difficult to determine the causes of the present situation and more difficult still to determine how other governments within the international community ought...

“Death to the Arabs,” “Death to the Christians,” and “Kahane was right” (a right-wing rabbi whose organization was labeled as a terrorist group by the US) were scrawled in Hebrew on a monastery in Jerusalem and an Arab-Jewish school operated by the...

The people of Syria are in our thoughts and prayers as the violence intensifies following lack of action by the UN Security Council.  China and Russia vetoed a Western-Arab U.N. Security Council resolution backing an Arab League plan for Syrian...

In letters to Christian church leaders in Syria, the Rev. Mark S. Hanson, presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), offered his support of the churches’ collective call for an end to violence and his prayers for...

The rate of growth for illegal settlers in the West Bank is growing at a faster pace than growth within Israel itself, according to a January, 2012, report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs for the occupied Palestinian Territory...

While the world focuses on whether Palestinians and Israelis are or are not talking at the peace table, the realties on the ground continue unabated.  Illegal settlements keep growing, while Palestinian homes continue to be demolished and populations endangered and forced off...

The World Council of Churches (WCC) general secretary Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit reaffirmed churches’ commitment to justice and peace in the Middle East, while stressing the importance of a common vision for living together by Christians and Muslims in...