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We pivoted also to work with Palestinians around a similar time, as I also was on a trip to Palestine in 2006. We were asked to create task forces in our conference and we created a Palestine Task Force for Cal-Nevada Conference. Our leader of our Justice Committee, Jose Arcellana, had taken a trip, and also came back with a vision to want to start a ministry with Palestinians. And he was clear about it that he was not about studying the issue as it was about being in a relationship with Palestinians. Much like when we worked with other issues in the community, it's about being in a relationship with people, developing relationships, working together and developing mutuality around our organizing. And so it took us about a year to vet it with all our committees in the church, and then by the end of 2008, we were ready to move forward with that.

We brought out our liaison to the West Bank, Janet Lahr Lewis, who was then representing the Methodist church in the West Bank. And she flew out to meet with us in the congregation, and she suggested that we partner with this little village called Wadi Fukin, which is in the West Bank, Bethlehem district of the West Bank, right on the Green Line. A very small village of about 1,300 people or so, and she said this would be a great way to start a people-to-people relationship and a partnership and begin to be on the ground with stuff that's happening. And I had actually visited there in 2006 on my own, so I knew some people there from my homestay that I did, so I was familiar with the village. But she kind of had the vision of how this could work, because she knew them very well, it was like family for her. And she said, "We're a small congregation, so this could be a good fit." So we started, we launched that in 2009, in the summer of 2009, with the Beehive Project, just to support -- it was a very modest thing -- to support the cultivation of honey for families there in the village. And the key issue that they're dealing with is the imposing presence of illegal settlement of Beitar Illit, which is one of the biggest settlements in the West Bank, which is illegal according to international law, and eating up their land and creating havoc for life under the military occupation that they're dealing with. And that settlement at that time, I think, had been about forty thousand people. They've grown now to about sixty thousand, and they have plans to go to a hundred thousand. You can imagine that with a village of about fifteen hundred people, what that looks like. And they're eating up land, always taking more land and ordering demolitions of properties, olive trees, annexing more land through land confiscation orders. And I'm still with that group, as the group has more from, participation from Buena Vista and Berkeley Methodist and Trinity Methodist to several other churches.

We have a steering commission of about twelve people now, and I co-chair that in my retirement. So I'm still very much engaged in that. But Buena Vista was the key anchor for that in the very beginnings. And as a result of that work, too, I think Buena Vista began to have, develop relationships with local Palestinians, people who are here in our community in the Bay Area, that may not be, other people may not be familiar with. And one of the odd things, it turns out, that, for example, the chair of the Arab American Cultural Center in San Francisco, Fuad Atiyeh, who became a very good friend, owned a gas station around the corner from Buena Vista. And it's because of our work with Palestinians that I got to meet him one day when folks from the Arab Community Center were at Buena Vista, and the board chair said I'm going to go visit, I mean the executive director said, "I'm going to go visit my board chair," I go, "Who's your board chair?" And she mentioned who he was around the corner, and I said, "That's where I get my gas." I said, "I didn't know a Palestinian owns that place." And so after that, I went over and paid a visit to him, and he shared this story with me about how he bought the restaurant, I mean, bought the gas station a few years prior. And because of the Anti-Arab sentiment, he doesn't show himself out in their community, out in the gas station, because he doesn't want to stir up anything, and he just stays up in his office upstairs, he says, "But I watch everything that's going on." So we became very good friends, and he began to support our partnership in Palestine with the folks from Wadi Fukin. When they came from Wadi Fukin on a speaking visit, he hosted at his family with a big dinner for them and welcomed them to the Bay Area, and he has since sold the gas station. But the funny thing about it is that you just never know who your neighbors are. And never know kind of the relationships that get developed when you're doing different types of things and different kinds of ministries.

<End Segment 27> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.