Dear friends of Indiana Center for Middle East Peace,
One of the blessings in these last few weeks is getting to know Wendell Griffen, pastor, retired judge, and Co-Chair of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference. The Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, founded in 2003 by Dr. Iva E. Carruthers, Dr. Frederick D. Haynes III, and Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. is a national network that serves thousands of pastors, lay leaders and the next generation of those working for social justice.
In his missive below, Wendell refers to our upcoming “The Stones Cry Out Delegation” to Palestine and Washington DC, February 27-March 6; also Israel’s genocide against Gaza and US government complicity and responsibility.
Thank you, Wendell, for your bold, courageous, and prophetic words. Michael
WENDELL: I’ve been thinking about an important issue we’ve been discussing in our meetings, namely repentance concerning Gaza. Don (Wagner) mentioned lament. I mentioned reparations. Mark (Braverman) mentioned an end to displacement of Palestinians.
Despite my inability to be in Washington on March 5 and 6, I implore us to make a strong prophetic statement that connects the present plight of the people of Gaza with how Israel, the United States, the UK, Germany, and their allies have been treating Palestinians since 1948. I have been unable to think of a more relevant Biblical analogy than the familiar narrative of Naboth in 1 Kings 21 and the unflinching indictment uttered by Elijah to King Ahab after Naboth (and presumably his descendants) was executed (murdered) by the Jezreel community following a sham religious/judicial inquiry orchestrated by Queen Jezebel aimed at wiping out Naboth’s claim to a vineyard inherited from his paternal ancestors.
Gaza is Naboth. Every death is Naboth. Every disfigured man, woman, and child is Naboth. Every murdered journalist is Naboth. Every bombed dwelling, school, church, mosque, synagogue, hospital, road, village, food, sanitation, and utility infrastructure is Naboth.
Israel is Ahab. Benjamin Netanyahu is Ahab. The United States is Ahab. Joe Biden is Ahab. The US ambassador to the United Nations is Ahab. The US Secretary of Defense is Ahab. The US Congress, which has consistently enacted appropriation measures that fund Israel’s defense, intelligence, and security network, is Ahab. And, the US religious community has been an integral constituency in the Ahab entourage of pro-Zionist sycophants before 1948, and openly so since then.
It now is our responsibility to declare a prophetic threat (and I use that term deliberately) against the Ahab-like collective that has produced and is committing genocide in Gaza. Martin Luther King Jr. did so in his Beyond Vietnam speech at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, in these words:
On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will only be an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
I am trying to urge us to say that Gaza, like every genocide, is a manufactured reality. As prophetic people, we should lead the world in saying so. As Allan Boesak has written, something is wrong, and the time has come for us to not be afraid to say it. I now quote Boesak’s words.
I am not talking about simply mentioning, enumerating, or bemoaning the wrongs we see. To not be afraid to say it has everything to do with how we say it. Do we say it with truth, with courage, with compassion, and with faithfulness to those who suffer? The wrongs we see are not just happening; they are caused to happen, and they are happening to the vast majority of God’s children who are vulnerable, targeted, and excluded from human consideration. They are not happening randomly, they are deeply systemic, deliberately built into systems of oppression, domination, and dehumanization. And we must not be afraid to say it. [Allan Aubrey Boesak, Parables on Both Sides of the Blood-Red Waters, (Cascade Books, 2017), page 81]
Beloved, we stand in the shoes of Elijah as the people of Gaza are, like Naboth, threatened with extermination by the powerful ruthless Israeli-US military alliance. In God’s name and for the peace of Gaza, we must not be silent.
In God’s name, and for the “vulnerable, targeted, and excluded from human consideration” people of Gaza, let us denounce and condemn what is being carried out by the Israeli-US alliance against Gaza as mass murder, genocide, and a white supremacist lynching of an entire population.
In God’s name, and for the people of Gaza, let us remind the Israeli-US alliance against Gaza that God is not mocked. There will be a reckoning for mass murder. There will be a divine judgment on two nations that murdered defenseless men, women, and children out of vengeful bloodlust.
In God’s name, and for the people in Gaza, let us speak as plainly to Israel and the United States now as Elijah spoke to Ahab after Naboth was stoned to death. We must not shy away from our prophetic duty to declare a prophetic threat to Israel, the United States, and all who have been part of the political, military, economic, cultural, and religious conspiracy to kill, displace, and defame Palestinians and seize their land.
Walter Brueggemann seems to always understand and explain these things with matchless clarity. To wit, consider what he writes in Theology of the Old Testament.
“[T]here are no escape hatches or exceptional treatments for the wise, the rich, the powerful, or the well-connected. Their destiny is linked to the destiny of the whole community… There can be no viable future of well-being for the Jerusalem establishment, except on the condition of the well-being of the entire community [including those who are most vulnerable and powerless and marginalized]. When the strong and powerful mobilize their resources and energy for the weak and vulnerable, peace and prosperity are generated for all. The prophets state these matters with Yahwistic specificity. The argument being made, however, is that this future, conditioned by justice, is not an arbitrary imposition of an angry God, but is a conditionality found in the very fabric of justice. It is indeed how life works; no matter how much the strong and the powerful engage in the illusin of their own exceptionality.” (p. 645)
Hence, our prophetic message for repentance should include a warning about the certain threat that the whole community, meaning the world, must suffer because of what Israel and the US are doing in Gaza, and to Palestinians generally. It should, with equal fervor, speak the truth that human violations of the divine imperatives of love, justice, generosity, and peace do not defeat God’s resolve, capacity, and promise to “do a new thing,” based as Brueggemann puts it, “not rooted in or derived from the data or circumstance at hand, but rooted in Yahweh’s circumstance-defying capacity to work newness” (p. 646).
Indulge me in a final exhortation. In every instance, we must demand an immediate ceasefire. We must demand that the US stop funding the Israeli program of settler colonialism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, depopulation, and genocide. We must name, denounce, condemn, and reject violence by Hamas, Israeli security forces, Israeli settlers, and by the U.S. and its European partners. Land stolen from Palestinians must be returned and restored. The Israeli occupation must cease. Refugees and exiled persons must be allowed to return home.
At the same time, we must clearly say that none of these things will happen if we leave things to the mindset of people who have championed, manufactured, financed, and weaponized the Israeli-Palestinian situation for the past more than 75 years. It is absurd to expect the blind to lead us out of the ditch they created, drove the world into, and are furiously plowing. Rational people do not continue trusting people who produce wrecks to direct traffic, let alone regulate transportation.
Prophetic people must lead the discourse and the process for repentance and restoration, not “seasoned” Israeli, U.S. and western European diplomats of imperialism and colonization. The world needs prophetic people leading the work of mediating this longstanding situation, not accomplished representatives of murder merchants, land thieves, and xenophobic bigotry. We should say so. And we should nominate prophetic mediators who will, in turn, ensure that Palestinians speak for themselves, not through Qatari or other agents, and speak while being supported by prophetic people.