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Note: As a former African refugee to Israel herself, the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem's Charmaine Hedding is doing all she can for the thousands who have fled across the Egyptian border. Box at end of text.
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...