Orphan Children of Bethany: Fifly-Seven Years of Life in the Westbank

Orphan Children of Bethany: Fifly-Seven Years of Life in the Westbank

An eye-opening memoir left by a woman who lived for nearly six decades in the Occupied Territories just outside Jerusalem. Her story is also the story of the orphaned children for whom she created a home. First arriving weeks before the Six-Day War as a French Protestant childcare worker, she soon discovered the hardships of life under Israeli occupation. Beginning with the Six-Day War in 1967, living through the First and Second Intifadas, and eventually facing the hardships of the COVID years in her community, Marylène Schulz shared the everyday life of the Palestinians of Bethany. Using her status as a foreigner to gain access to Israeli officials, she often spoke out fearlessly on behalf of Palestinians who had no voice with which to protest injustices being carried out against them. Just as strongly, she modeled ways of peace for her ‘children’ by teaching them how to speak out against injustice without resorting to violence. When the teenagers in her care wanted to take revenge for harm they suffered, she told them, “The spiral of violence has no winners. It only creates victims." Never abandoning the family, she gathered the Palestinian community in which she settled, she faced with them the growing hardships of life under Israeli oppression, always exemplifying in her own life a firm belief in solidarity and non-violence. She never gave up her tireless effort to speak out for justice and continued to create bonds of cooperation among the Muslims, Jews, and Christians with whom she worked for peace. Hers is a truly remarkable story.