Fr. Raymond Helmick is a copious correspondent. For the past three years, the Jesuit priest has written nearly 20 letters to Khalid Mishal, founder and political leader of the Palestinian movement Hamas, urging him to abandon militancy, unify with Fatah, Hamas’ political rival, and organize the Palestinians in a disciplined campaign of nonviolent resistance to the Israeli occupation.

“Your military weapons are too puny to stand against Israeli weapons, but that mobilized power of a people denying, without violence, any cooperation with its occupiers is something Israel could not withstand,” wrote Helmick in a Feb 2006 letter sent weeks after Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections.

The missives to Mishal are the latest chapter in Helmick’s extraordinary engagement with the major power brokers in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, an engagement conducted primarily through letters and, on rare occasions, meetings. Over the past two and a half decades, the priest has written to Palestinian political leaders and state officials from a series of U.S. and Israeli administrations, including the late president Yasir Arafat, U.S. presidents Clinton and both Bushes, secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, and Israeli prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon.

The letters and reports, which fill three volumes, provide one of the texts for a course on the Middle East that Helmick, a theology professor, teaches at Boston College.

“Conflict resolution is a process of interpretation,” Helmick said. “I’m always very anxious to analyze, interpret, and see what options people have and to talk to them about it. … Once there is an alternative to violence, violence is no longer a legitimate course. Arafat understood that. The Israelis understand that. Hamas understands that. Of course, they have to believe that other options are real, and that can take a lot of exploration.”

The 77-year-old priest has a long history of unofficially monitoring and mediating conflicts. He worked with warring factions in Northern Ireland, Lebanon and Yugoslavia. In Washington, he helped establish the U.S. Institute of Peace and later served as senior associate for the Program in Preventive Diplomacy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Both assignments gained him access to American foreign policy makers. With the Rev. Jesse Jackson, he helped facilitate the release of three American prisoners held in Belgrade during the 1999 conflict in Kosovo.

But it is the Israeli/Palestinian conflict that has consumed much of Helmick’s attention. He became involved with the conflict through his Jewish friend Richard Hauser, a sociologist, and Hauser’s wife, Hephzibah Menuhin, concert pianist and sister of famed violinist Yehudi Menuhin. The priest and couple founded London’s Center for Human Rights and Responsibilities, which in 1973 hosted a Palestinian delegation sent by Arafat to make contact with European Jews.