the compound for generations. Our visit was short lived: it took less than five minutes for the IDF to arrive in order to escort us away from the property, citing the area as a military zone. Prior to our removal the worker told us the compound was in the hands of a Scandinavian church; his son later named this as the Scandinavian Seamen Holy Land Church. The lawyer and spokesperson we were directed to told us it was a ‘Swedish Church’ who owned the property, and that the reports of a sale to Aryeh King were ‘not true’.

Until 2008, a Presbyterian church, The Independent Board of Presbyterian Foreign Missions, owned the compound, where it operated first as a hospital and then as a pilgrim hostel from 1995. Whenthis proved to be unsustainable, the property was sold. Pastor Keith Coleman, told us on the phone from Philadelphia that the church had sold the property to Scandinavian Seamen Holy Land Enterprises, rather than a church, which appears to have been set up as a company with the sole purpose of covertly purchasing this land. First established in 2007 and fully registered as a company in Sweden in 2008, it existed in that form until 2011, and no annual reports or information are available for it from the Swedish Company Registration Office after that year. It appears to have been dissolved in 2012 following the registration of the purchase of Beit al-Baraka with the Civil Administration in Israel.

International Support for Settlements

The ex-board members of Scandinavian Seamen Holy Land