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A Lutheran minister who runs a university in Bethlehem traveled to Evanston this month to give a north suburban church audience his on-the-ground view of what’s happening in the West Bank, Israel and Gaza.

Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb, a Palestinian Christian, said that during Holy Week in late April, Israeli airstrikes destroyed the Gaza branch of Dar al-Kalima University, the university he founded to promote peace through arts and culture. Only the Bethlehem location, in the West Bank, survives.

“If you go to Gaza today, people are not asking any longer, ‘God, where are you?’ they’re asking ‘God, where is humanity?’” he lamented.

Raheb was joined on the multi-faith speakers’ panel at First Presbyterian Church by Rabbi Brant Rosen, who said zionism runs counter to Jewish values and described his Chicago congregation as anti-zionist; Rami Nashashibi, founder of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network, who spoke of how Jews, Muslims and Christians in the Holy Land lived in peace and friendship and celebrated each others’ holidays prior to Israel’s 1948 founding, and Iva Carruthers, a longtime Evanstonian and activist for African American rights. >> Read More