December 9 2002

ARTICLE TOOLS

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Jonathan Miles had been up since dawn. He had driven to the Gaza Strip and back in order to deliver a sack full of vital medicines to Palestinian children with metabolic disorders. The medicines were prescribed by an Israeli doctor and hand-mixed by an ultra-Orthodox Jewish pharmacy.

The mission was typical of the sort of relief work that Miles, an evangelical Christian from America, has been performing in the past decade. The work has matched needy Palestinian Arabs with Israeli Jewish doctors and hospitals. During the last five years, according to The Christian Science Monitor, he has helped 200 Palestinian children from the West Bank and Gaza Strip receive medical treatment in Israeli hospitals.

Along with the respect his work has in Palestinian society, Miles has received praise from Israel's Ministry of International Cooperation and various Israeli parliamentarians.

But this was not sufficient to head off an Israeli Interior Ministry order to deport Miles, his wife, Michelle, and their six children last June. The ministry denied his application for temporary residency, which it rarely grants to non-Jews.

The family quickly relocated to nearby Amman, Jordan. And Miles, 41, has since been permitted to return to Israel for three to five days at a time to oversee the work.

A former television journalist, Miles first came to Israel as a tourist in 1990. Miles returned to Israel later that year with his pregnant wife, their three young children, and a story contract from Reader's Digest. After several years, Miles formed Light to the Nations, a nonprofit organization that provided humanitarian aid to sick and needy Russian Jewish immigrants. The organization gradually expanded its outreach to include non-Jews who had come to Israel ...