Lessons In Peace

By William Raspberry
Monday, December 22, 2003

Given his long years as a priest, it's not surprising that the Rev. Elias Chacour's conversation tends toward small homilies on brotherhood and reconciliation. What may surprise is the degree to which he both embodies and lives his sermons.
The 64-year-old Israeli-born cleric is an Israeli citizen, a Palestinian and a Melkite Catholic. He is also founder and president of Israel's first Christian-Arab-Israeli university, the fledgling Mar Elias University, which just opened as a branch of the University of Indianapolis.

Naturally, he expects to equip his graduates to earn a good living -- the first three majors are environmental science, computer science and media and communications -- but his real hope is that the university can help demonstrate that people can live together in peace in the Middle East.

"I mean real community, not mere tolerance," he said in a recent interview in Washington. "I hate being tolerated. We need to see our differences not as something we tolerate but as something that enriches us. What we are doing here could be a model not just for the region but for all human society."

So far Mar Elias has slightly fewer than 100 students, but Chacour says he expects that number to reach 3,000 within five years, drawing from the West Bank, Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere in the region. A quarter of the faculty is Jewish. Classes are conducted in English. The students are Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Druze -- and most are women.

"The role of women at our university is very important," says Chacour. "Many girls in Muslim society tend to disregard education on the rationale that they are going to marry, so why go to school? For 20 years it's been clear to me that if you educate the girl, you educate her family, because she comes to see the value of education."

The new university -- whose accreditation terms require that students complete their degree work in Indianapolis -- is an outgrowth of a high school Chacour started in 1982. That school, like Mar Elias, is in Ibillin, in the Galilee region -- near Nazareth, but not in the occupied territories -- and now enrolls about 4,500 students from kindergarten through high school. Like Mar Elias, its students are Christians, Muslims and Jews; it is the biggest school in the country with that mix, says Chacour.

Interestingly, given the flap French President Jacques Chirac set off last week with his call for a law banning the wearing of Muslim head scarves, Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses in France's public schools, such religious insignia seem not to be a problem at Mar Elias.

A few of the female Muslim students wear the scarves, but most choose not to -- a fact that for Chacour symbolizes the recognition that they are in an environment where no one religion is more honored than another. Moreover, he believes that the "peace and reconciliation" ethos of Mar Elias is best affirmed when students don't wear the insignia.

And make no mistake, peace and reconciliation are always at the front of Chacour's thinking.

"If I wanted to be bitter, I could be," he said. "I was deported from my village of Biram [in 1947], though I remained inside the territory. I'm still not allowed to live in my village. I can attend church there, and, oh, yes, I can be buried there.

"My family was fooled by the Israeli military into going away 'for two weeks' because of some things they had to do. And we've never been able to go back. So I could be bitter if I wanted to.

"But my parents, simple peasants, never believed in hatred and violence. They always taught us that the only way to dispose of an enemy is to turn him into a friend."

Not a bad sermon at that