About This Video
Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb describes himself as a Palestinian, an Arab, a Christian and a Lutheran pastor. Confusing? He doesn’t think so.
What he finds confusing is the situation in the Middle East. “Some say that Jews and Palestinians are very smart people. After decades of war, I can say that we are stupid!”
In this interview, Mitri Raheb tells Global X what happened to the Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem in 2002: “What I built over five years was destroyed in 11 hours by the Israeli Army.”
Mitri Raheb went through the 1967 war, the 1973 war and the first Gulf War, when Scud missiles were sent by Iraq over Israel and he didn’t have a mask to protect his two-months-old daughter. Then the 2002 siege of the Church of the Nativity. “That’s 40 years of ongoing conflict. Will my grand-child have to live through another war???”
Mitri Raheb is not optimistic for his daughter. He thinks that 10 years from now, “Palestine will look like a piece of Swiss cheese. Israel gets the cheese and Palestinians get the holes… An apartheid system with two different legal systems.”
But there is hope. “Hope is what we do!”