Charmaine Hedding is doing all she can for the thousands who fled across the Egyptian border.
By LARRY DERFNERcharmaine hedding 224.88(photo credit: Esteban Alterman)
At last week's inaugural meeting of the council of South Sudanese refugees in Israel, Charmaine Hedding, who organized the group, sticks out - as usual. Tall, fair-skinned and platinum blonde, she sits surrounded by seven Sudanese men who also tend to be tall, but whose skin is the color of mahogany.
The meeting takes place in the old German Colony mansion that houses the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, where Hedding is in charge of special projects, mainly the annual Feast of the Tabernacles, which is expected to draw some 8,000 Christians to Israel this week. (Her father, Rev. Malcolm Hedding, heads the embassy, which is co-publisher of The Jerusalem Post Christian Edition.)
But in the last year and a half, Charmaine, 35, has become one of the leading activists on behalf of the thousands of African refugees who've crossed the Egyptian border into Israel. Devoting three days a week to their cause, she's put the well-funded, well-connected embassy, the pioneer among contemporary Christian Zionist organizations in Israel, at the refugees' service. With the government generally treating them as an unwanted burden, Hedding at times works with, but at other times around, Israel's powers-that-be, usually in concert with left-leaning Israeli human rights organizations.
She grew up in South Africa identifying with the anti-apartheid struggle, a predominantly left-wing movement that, to outsiders, would seem foreign to Christian Zionism. Yet she is no left-winger on the Israeli-Arab conflict - but then she is no apologist for Israeli abuses of innocent Palestinians, either. In several ways, Hedding breaks the stereotype about Christian lovers of Israel. She sticks out from the evangelical mainstream almost as starkly as she does at a table with seven men from Sudan.
The council, which was elected by the (mainly Christian) South Sudanese refugees around the country, is meant to be a voice for the community to the government. The main thing the community wants, say the men, is education for their children. In Eilat, where the refugees work at the hotels, a lot of Sudanese teenagers are roaming around and getting into trouble because there's no school for them and they're too young to work. The children spent so many years in refugee camps and on the run that they are way behind in their education, and the parents want them to have a future - ultimately, back in Southern Sudan.
Hedding speaks English to them in her soft South African accent while the men speak a jumble of English and Sudanese dialects, which they translate for her. Toward the end of the meeting, one says: "You know, Charmaine, we are Africans, we come from different communities, there are a lot of disagreements, a lot of confusion, and you don't have to help us, you're doing it because you want to, which we really thank you for so much. But it's going to be a long time, a lot of work, until we can go back home. Are you really going to be with us until then?"
Hedding has a very quiet, gentle manner, but her composure and purposefulness, together with her tall, blonde good looks and classy clothing, give her an authoritative presence. Folding her hands and leaning slightly forward, she tells the inquirer: "One of the first words I learned when I came to this country was savlanut [patience]." It is the only Hebrew word spoken at the meeting, and the refugees laugh and nod in recognition. An understanding has been reached.
THE MEETING with the Sudanese is a rare break for Hedding from the project that's completely dominated her time lately, the Feast of the Tabernacles. In the embassy's computer room upstairs, she gives instructions to 10 women volunteers preparing for registration day, goes around to guide them on how to use the software, meanwhile making calls to try to smooth the arrival of foreign VIPs and delegations.
A smartly dressed, widely grinning woman comes into the room. "Charmaine? Hi! Carrie Burns from Champaign, Illinois." Hedding was a guest on Burns's Christian radio show some months ago, and Burns is here studying Hebrew, training at Yad Vashem to teach the Holocaust at American churches, and to volunteer for the Feast. Hedding gets up and gives her a hug.
Recalling the interview, Burns says to her, "You did such a good job. What you said just really engages believers. It shows that with all the bad news from Israel, there's good news too."
Later, I ask Burns what Hedding told her audience. "She talked about the refugees who came from Sudan through Egypt to Israel, and how the embassy is helping these Christian Sudanese, how it's helping the government of Israel care for them."
I ask what impression Hedding gave of the government's treatment of the Africans. "Positive," replies Burns. In this mission of mercy, she says, the Christian Embassy and the Israeli government are "a partnership made in heaven."
In truth, the only government bodies in Israel that have taken a positive attitude toward the refugees are the Tel Aviv and Beersheba municipalities; otherwise, it is Israeli civil rights organizations, synagogues, churches, charities, a few medical institutions and random volunteers who have kept the refugees afloat.
In view of her radio interview with Burns, I ask Hedding whether this is a sticky dilemma for her - whether her Christian Zionism, the embassy's role as an advocate for Israel, and the demands of the evangelical community compel her to sugar-coat the government's handling of African refugees.
She maintains there's no dilemma. "I do criticize the government, and pretty candidly. If people ask me, I will talk about it," Hedding says. "When Israel was starting the policy of 'hot return' [forcing apprehended refugees right back across the border to Egypt], I did a news conference with [activist] Eitan Schwartz and I spoke about the dangers in no uncertain terms. When people come to your country to ask for asylum, and you deny them entry without knowing whether they're at risk, you're placing human lives in danger." She noted that she began the day with a 7:30 a.m. meeting with civil rights attorneys attending the Supreme Court challenge of the "hot return" policy.
However, while Hedding has her criticisms of Israel's refugee policy, she empathizes with the government and gives it more credit for effort than most of her allies in the human rights NGOs do. "I know for a fact that Israel is training people to interview the refugees when they first arrive, to see if they have a legitimate claim to asylum. It isn't easy - Israel used to get, what, 50 refugees a year coming over the border, and now suddenly there are 12,000."
Recently she went to Southern Sudan and Kenya to see the problem at its source, and she plans another trip to Africa next month. Beyond the issue of how to help the few thousand Southern Sudanese in Israel, she is preoccupied with the fate of the nation as a whole, which lost two million people in its struggle for independence, and which remains under threat from the genocidal Sudanese government in Khartoum.
"The world says 'never again,' but are we going to let genocide happen again?" she says plaintively. "We have to keep the pressure on Khartoum, because if the peace agreement [in effect in Sudan since 2005] breaks down, then genocide will happen again."
FOR HEDDING, there is a moral link between the cause of Southern Sudan and that of Israel. There is also a moral link between those two causes and the one that shaped her childhood - the fight against apartheid.
Her father was part of it. As the anti-apartheid movement's confrontation with the South African government escalated in the 1980s, Malcolm Hedding was an Assemblies of God minister preaching against apartheid to a large congregation in Durban. "I told them the Bible upholds the dignity of all people, and that as white people in South Africa they have to realize that the system of apartheid is bankrupt and cannot be sustained," he says.
Some unfamiliar faces began showing up in the church and Rev. Hedding realized they were government spies. But one day in 1986, a long-time parishioner whom he didn't suspect came to his office "with a file a couple of inches thick," Hedding recalls. "He told me, 'I'm not who you think I am.' He was from the Bureau of State Security - BOSS - and he told me, 'We've got our eye on you.' He told me they were planning to detain me without charges, which they would do to people they didn't like for 90 days, and on the last day they'd release you and arrest you again as soon as you walked out the prison door, and they'd hold you for another 90 days. This could go on for years."
The government spy told Hedding all this because he'd developed a guilty conscience. "He told me to get out of South Africa as soon as possible," says the minister.
For over a decade, Rev. Hedding had been involved in Christian Action for Israel, so he was able to arrange a job at the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, and he, his wife and three children boarded the first plane available.
"We each had one suitcase," recalls Charmaine, who was 12 at the time. "These are the kinds of memories I have from childhood." Given her upbringing, she was appalled and ashamed by apartheid. "I thought, 'Oh my goodness, this is my country that's doing this.'"
As the Christian Embassy tends toward the Right on the Israeli-Arab conflict, the Heddings obviously don't agree with the notion that Israel is an apartheid state, or that Israeli rule in the West Bank amounts to apartheid. (The embassy, however, is not as right-wing about the conflict as it once was, nor as right-wing as pro-Israel evangelicals in the US; see box.) Rev. Hedding didn't have to be asked about this issue - he raised it in our interview.
"You can't equate this situation [in the West Bank] with what happened in South Africa," he says. "That was a political issue. The big mistake here is that everyone tries to hide the fact that behind the Palestinian fight is a strong Islamic theological idea - that this entire land is part of Dar al-Islam" - the realm of Islam.
While stressing that the embassy will support any decision taken by an Israeli government regarding the borders of the country, Hedding says that privately he opposed the Oslo accord and the disengagement from Gaza, and opposes any concessions in the West Bank now - but not on territorial grounds so much as for reasons of security. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah - they're all terrorist, anti-Israeli movements, he says.
Yet he does not whitewash the instances of abuse by Israeli soldiers and settlers against innocent Palestinians, citing the recent filmed incident in which a soldier shot a blindfolded, bound Palestinian in the foot from point-blank range. "That was a display of bravado, a reckless act. This type of injustice clearly is an issue that has to be addressed in this country," noting that one of the key measures of a democracy is "how it treats its minorities." But this, he stresses, is the "micro" story of the conflict; the more important "macro" story is the terrorist "jihad" being waged against Israel, and since the world seems interested only in the micro, Hedding and the embassy do all they can to remind it about the macro.
Only if the Palestinians were to come to terms with Israel's existence as a Jewish state and offer genuine peace in return for land - something he doesn't see anywhere on the horizon - might Hedding see the merits of rolling back Israeli control over the West Bank. "The Palestinians have to find their own Nelson Mandela, their own F.W. De Klerk," he says.
His daughter Charmaine is not deeply involved in the hasbara end of the embassy's work, and she isn't as steeped in Israeli-Arab politics as her father. When I asked how she viewed Israeli rule over West Bank Palestinians in comparison to white rule over blacks in South Africa, she leaned toward her father's opinion. She pointed out that Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups were worlds apart from the African National Congress, adding that the Palestinian Christian minority was often preyed upon by Muslim militants.
So she doesn't liken Israel's West Bank presence to apartheid. But when I asked if she saw no similarities whatsoever, Charmaine paused, then said that many Israelis, like most white South Africans during the time of apartheid, are liable to become "desensitized" to the abuses of innocent Palestinians that occur in the West Bank.
LATER, IN the embassy's computer room, one of the volunteers pipes up with exaggerated glee, "It's the candy lady!" as a woman comes through with a bag of sweets. Another volunteer shows up at the entrance and calls out in a Southern accent, "What are you doing here, girlfriend?" The girlfriend looks up and says in a New Jersey accent, "Oh my gosh!" then goes to give her Southern friend a hug.
"We're working at Mach 10 speed for the Feast," says Charmaine, who'd been there until midnight the night before. She's on the phone with someone from the Ministry of Tourism. "Did you speak to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs about getting visas for our two groups coming from Congo and Gabon? Otherwise they have to cancel their flights.... They should call the local Israeli consulate?... Okay, but if you could see whether the Foreign Ministry knows about their visas, because it's very important and time is running out," she says, always in that quiet, composed, civilized South African voice.
This time, though, it does no good. Soon she hears that the visas for the Gabon and Congo groups, each with about 10 pilgrims, won't be forthcoming. "We've been on this for weeks, it's not like we haven't tried, but we've hit a brick wall," she tells a volunteer who, because she speaks French, will be relaying the bad news to the Gabon and Congo contingents. However, Charmaine has managed to straighten out visas for a large mission of pilgrims from Nigeria. "One out of three," she figures.
Her father describes her as "a brilliant marketer. She can open any door, she's highly efficient, and since she's tall, pretty and blonde, she's a bit disarming to Israelis."
After returning to South Africa with her family in 1989, by which time De Klerk was in power and apartheid was starting to wind down, Hedding studied financial management and marketing in college, then got a job training store managers at a large retail chain.
"When I went into a store, I was usually the only white employee there," she recalls. She found that there would be black, "colored" and Indian clerks who'd been with the company for decades, yet had never been given the opportunity for a promotion to manager. Thus, they had no loyalty to the company, and when they came under threat from criminal gangs to cooperate in thefts, they cooperated.
"I trained them to be managers, which gave them incentive, and the stores where they worked became profitable," Hedding recalls. "That's when I realized that my concepts of how to do things were different from the norm."
With violent crime skyrocketing in South Africa, Hedding, who had access to a lot of money when going from store to store, traveled with two armed security guards and a panic button around her neck. I ask if she was ever mugged. "Once. But I fought them off. With a purple Parker pen," she replies, laughing through her embarrassment. "Two guys came up to me in Pietermaritzburg, and one of them grabbed me from behind, but I pulled out a purple Parker pen and I sort of... stabbed him in the arm, and they ran away."
By 2004 she'd married, left the company to follow her husband to England, given birth to a son, Ethan, and gotten divorced when she received two job offers: to accept a higher position with the South African retail company, or move back to Jerusalem, where her parents and younger sister were again living, and organize the Christian Embassy's annual Feast of the Tabernacles. She left Africa for God, family and Jerusalem- but Africa followed her here.
Last year she organized a conference in Jerusalem for Christian and Jewish women about issues that religious communities ordinarily do not discuss - domestic violence, incest, trafficking in women. Some 700 women came from all over the world, and what Hedding remembers most vividly are the tales of violence and victimization told by two Southern Sudanese women. "They were crying, but they went on anyway. There was a hush in the auditorium."
By then, the flow of African refugees across the Egyptian border had stepped up dramatically. In the government's absence, the NGOs and volunteers were left to deal with the humanitarian challenge. Hedding knew where she was needed.
Her new mission began at the beginning of that summer when some 10 families of refugees apprehended at the border were bused to Beersheba and let off on the street with no place to go. Sigal Rozen, head of the Hotline for Migrant Workers, the lead civil rights NGO aiding the refugees, recalls Hedding's response. "Without thinking about where the money was coming from, she right away put them on buses to Jerusalem and rented them hotel rooms in the Old City. For the next month, she made all the arrangements for them - getting them food and clothing, health care, registering them with the UN, finding them work. When I see those families today, they still talk about her."
Since then, Hedding has been spending three days a week going around to the different refugee communities in Eilat, Beersheba, Arad, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and elsewhere, finding out what they need, then going about getting it. She used her connections at Jerusalem's Crowne Plaza Hotel, the embassy's headquarters for the Feast, to get five African refugees hired on as cleaners. "They worked out so well that the manpower company they went through asked me, 'Do you have any more?' I said, 'I sure do.' Now there are refugees working in hotels all over the city."
Hedding says she's "gotten lost on every street in South Tel Aviv," the nerve center of the refugee community. She's lost count of how many hundreds of Africans she's helped, or how many hundreds of thousands of dollars the embassy has spent on them.
"There were eight families in Ketziot prison who needed places to live in order to be released, and with landlords asking two months' rent plus a security deposit, we needed about $20,000 to get them out of prison and into their own apartments," Hedding recalls. "So I put out the word to our embassies around the world, including poor countries like Papua New Guinea and India. I'd get $10 donations from a poor Christian family in India who wanted to help the refugees here. Within a couple of days, I had the $20,000."
She also gets help for the refugees from a long list of Israelis and Israeli institutions - including synagogues, Hadassah Hospital and the Terem clinics. "Last Christmas there was a strike by the refugees in Ketziot because they weren't being provided socks and underwear. I rented a truck and filled it with more socks and underwear than I've ever seen and drove down to Ketziot with an embassy volunteer. There were 93 children among the strikers, so we also brought 93 book bags filled with goodies that were donated by families in North Tel Aviv."
Most of the refugees who've come Hedding's way happen to be Christians, but "she makes no distinction about religion, she helps Muslim refugees just like she does Christians," Rozen points out.
Hedding recalls making arrangements with Hadassah for the birth of the first baby born in Israel to a Darfurian refugee family, then arranging for the father, a construction worker, to get work on the restoration of Christ Church in the Old City. "Here was a Muslim woman giving birth in a Jewish hospital, which was providing all her pre-natal care for free, and then the Muslim father is able to start earning a living by helping rebuild Christ Church," she says. "I mean, this is what it's all about."
Her ecumenical approach used to surprise a lot of left-leaning Israeli activists for the refugees, given the right-wing, anti-Arab reputation of Christian Zionists. "But it's gotten to the point with the Israelis I work with that we can enjoy our differences," she says. "Once I was in a meeting with a lot of Israelis, and one of them said to me, 'An evangelical Christian working with all us secular, leftist Israeli Jews - you could almost think the messiah had come.' Then both of us said, at exactly the same time, how this depended on whether we were talking about the messiah's first or second coming. Everybody in the room just broke up laughing."
And how do the black African refugees react to the presence of a white South African? "They all know South Africa's story - we are the 'rainbow nation.' They know I wouldn't be working with them if I was a racist. I'm an African, and that's how they treat me - as one of their own."
It is the cause of the African refugees that keeps her in Israel, she says. Hedding has had offers to work in the US, both in the business sector and with the International Christian Embassy.
"But I'm staying in Israel," she says. "I have unfinished business here."
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