How Jewish lawyer Justus Weiner began to protect Palestinian Christians
Justus Weiner, a legal scholar in Jerusalem who has built a career on helping Christians flee persecution in the Palestinian Territories, traces the roots of his activism to a chat with a pastor at a cocktail party long ago, sometime between his graduation from Berkeley law school and the violence of the Second Intifada."Justus, you're a human rights lawyer, what are you doing to save the Palestinian Christians," the pastor asked, to which the baffled young lawyer replied, "I didn't know the Palestinian Christians had any problems."
It was a forgivable ignorance, one that is common even today, with the Christian populations of the West Bank and Gaza in decline, a dynamic that is often hastened by outright persecution, sometimes official, often freelance.
In Canada this week to testify before the Parliamentary Subcommittee on International Human Rights, which is studying the effects of the Arab Spring on Middle Eastern Christians, Prof. Weiner recalled in an interview the cleric rolled his eyes in exasperation and started sending him visitors.
"They began showing up with regularity in my office, and they were full of stories, mostly very sad stories, of what had happened to them in the West Bank or especially in Gaza," said Prof. Weiner, a scholar with the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs who lectures at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
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