I just returned from Palestine and Israel, leading my 18th “solidarity tour” in 23 years, 18 of us in all – mostly Christian, a few clergy, a few secular folks, and a Jewish member of Jewish Voice for Peace (the 40th time I’ve traveled to Palestine and Israel since 1998). We meet with Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious, political, and NGO leaders committed to justice, human rights, non-violence, and the liberation of Palestine.
We met with Fadwa Barghouti, activist and wife of the “Palestinian Nelson Mandela,” Marwan Barghouti, himself imprisoned for 23 years, and with award-winning Ha’aretz columnist, Gideon Levy. We walked through Silwan with Sabeel’s Omar Haramy, and talked with Fakhri Diab whose house was destroyed there. We met with a former member of Israel’s IDF from Breaking the Silence as well as an Israeli conscientious objector. We met with Jewish, Christian, and Muslim activists and voices of conscience, political, religious, and NGO leaders; we met with the three Nobel Peace Prize nominees from Palestine and Israel – Mazin Qumsiyeh (Bethlehem’s Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability; Jeff Halper (ICAHD and a Jewish leader of the One Democratic State Campaign; and Issa Amro (Youth Against Settlements and Friends of Hebron) – transparency, I’m a member of Jeff’s (ICAHD) and Issa’s (Friends of Hebron) boards. 19 meetings, 13 days.
Some observations:
1. We stayed in Bethlehem and Jerusalem’s Old City. Very few tourists. Hotels closed, Manger Square souvenir shops shuttered. Virtually no one in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity nor in Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre (and we were there on a Sunday morning). And while there a couple other solidarity tour groups like ours (Friends of Sabeel and Friends of Tent of Nations), the human rights activists and organizations with whom we met reported our groups were few and far between.
One example, we met with Sahar Francis of the Addameer Prisoner Support Organization in Ramallah. The Trump administration has recently imposed sanctions on Addameeer for alleged links to Palestinian political factions designated by Israel and the U.S. as “terrorist groups” – it was designated a terrorist group by Israel in 2021. She said we were the fifth group to meet her in the last 20 months (normally, 2-3/week), and mine were two of them (February at height of the war). This was a common refrain.
2. Palestinians feel betrayed by the US government – they see no difference between Biden and Trump when it comes to them; the US government is their enemy. Sam Bahour says it outright: “This is a US war!” The new pastor of Bethlehem’s Christmas Lutheran Church, Ashraf Tannous, introduced himself to us this way, “I am a human being made in the image of God. I start my talks this way with American groups; it’s an important reminder because the US government, your government, says I’m worthy of being killed because I’m an animal.”
We heard repeatedly that over 150 Christian families have left Bethlehem since October 7, 2023. A crippling loss since the Bethlehem region is the center of the Christian population in the West Bank. The Christians who remain are worried that within a generation there won’t be a Christian presence left in the land of Jesus’ birth.
3. Israel, like the present US administration, plays a despicable but somewhat successful game of sleight of hand. Our eyes are on Gaza all the while it “Judaizes Jerusalem” (Israel’s term) and ethnically cleanses the West Bank, Israel calls it, “Gazafication.” Now it launches an attack on Iran, which takes our eyes off the West Bank.
We wanted to go to Jenin – that was out, the Israeli military has turned it into a war zone. We planned to go to Nablus, where we have one of our mission partners. They advised us – along with some other friends who have been there in 2025 – not to come. More severe checkpoints, military incursions – even if we were able to get in, we might not be able to get out. But also in the south, daily, sometimes multiple times daily, incursions into Bethlehem, for example. And Hebron is being partitioned even further.
Israel and the US administration both believe they can act with impunity because they ARE acting with impunity; in other words, they don’t give a damn what people think. And the sad thing is, they’re right: Lots of outrage, lots of well-meaning platitudes, “thoughts and prayers,” but no effective, coordinated, strategic, impactful action. Our friends in Palestine feel isolated and alone. Where is the West? Where are the churches?
4. This is not random; neither is it associated with one person, on leader, one party. We need to be clear about this: this is the end-product of the Zionist project, it is built into the very definition of Zionism; and in the US, it is the end-product of American exceptionalism, built into the very definition of American exceptionalism. More directly, Christian nationalism in the US, and Jewish and Christian Zionism in Israel, both intertwined and interrelated, two forms of a larger ethno-nationalism around the world – racist, exclusivist, expansionist, colonial to their very core. White Chirstian nationalism and white Jewish and Christian Zionism, like manifest destiny, the Doctrine of Discovery, like all ethno-nationalisms and exceptionalisms are death cults – we see in our day what their agenda has been, what their heart has been from their very beginnings.
We met with award-winning journalist, Gideon Levy, who writes for the left-leading daily newspaper, Ha’aretz. This is how he describes the situation in Israel today:
“Most of Israeli society believes Israel can do whatever it wants; they believe there are no innocent people in Gaza. Even babies are considered simply ‘future terrorists.’ We hear more Nazi-like language here. Israel murders 100 innocent Palestinians a day with impunity and the world does nothing to stop it. The key to what is happening here is in your country, in your churches, in Washington DC.”
5. I am increasingly disgusted by the mainstream news media – print, tv, cable, even many on-line. Complicit is the kindest word I can find to describe them – “negligent,” “unethical,” “criminal,” “bought-and-paid-for” are other words that come to mind. The use of language (Israeli “hostages,” Palestinian “prisoners”), the skewing of the news (names of individual Israelis killed but anonymous numbers applied to hundreds, thousands, tens of thousnds of Palestinians killed); the use of the passive voice when applied to Palestinians (“37 Palestinians killed when seeking humanitarian aid”), and more. At best a shirking of their journalistic responsibility, at worst, an egregious and intentional compolicity in genocide. Not just the three commercial broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) but also, CNN and, especially disappointing, MSNBC (with the exception of Ayman Mohyeldin and Ali Velshi).
One example: we saw CNN’s Van Jones eating dinner with friends at the Notre Dame Guesthouse Restaurant in Jerusalem. A few of us separately engaged him in conversations. When I asked him about his trip, if he was meeting with any Palestinians, he said he was there as a “Christian pilgrim.” He also added that he doesn’t like to use the word “genocide.”
Mehdi Hasan’s “Zeteo,” Democracy Now, Mondoweiss, Electronic Intifada, Al-Jazeera, a few others – these are trustworthy news sources.
6. Jeff Halper, one of the Nobel Peace Prize nominees this year (with Palestinian activist, Issa Amro), names Israel’s genocidal strategy as “normalization,” what he calls “the greatest threat to the Palestinian people since the Nakba.” He’s concerned that Trump’s “Vision for Peace” will buy off the Saudis so then he can declare a “two-state solution,” in essence, a two-state apartheid, and claim victory. Normalization, Jeff says, would “complete the Nakba.” Jeff suggests that even those European governments that will soon recognize a Palestinian state (eg. as France says it wants to do) will simply normalize the two-state status quo,
Add to that, now US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, is upping the US ante in support of Israel’s genocidal endgame. “No room for a Palestinian state in our lifetime in historic Israel,” he says. “And why does it have to be in Judea and Samaria, anyway; why can’t it be in another Muslim country?” Not even giving lip-service anymore to a political solution that acknowledges Palestinian self-determination. All out in the open for all the world to see.
7. “Existential threat” is a ubiquitous term these days, used about so many policies in our country. But it’s true about two of our closest friends in Palestine: Daoud Nassar and Issa Amro.
Daoud, Daher, and Amal Nassar have the written deed to their 100-acre farm south of Bethlehem. It has been in their family for almost 110 years. Surrounded by five settlements and a radical settler yeshiva, Israel desperately wants this last remaining hilltop in the area. The Nassar family has been threatened with their lives several times; two years ago, Daoud and his brother, Daher, were attacked by masked men on the farm.
I’ve been to the farm a dozen times in the last decade but nothing prepared me for what is happening now. Israeli military outposts are being set up right outside the farm, settlers with machine guns boldly walk through the farm telling the family that the land belongs to them, threatening them with more violence, electricity is run between the various outposts (even though the farm is not allowed to have electricity), access to the farm is now limited to one road through Nahalin village in the valley below, but even now, Israel can close it at any time. And you can see bulldozers just outside the farm already creating a settler road planned to run directly through the farm so that the Nassar family would lose more than 50% of their land.
Daoud, Daher, and Amal say that all that protects their farm and their own personal safety is the steady stream of international volunteers who come for a couple of weeks or more to work on the farm – planting, watering, harvesting, and more. Yet, prominently displayed on a stone, in Arabic, English and German, based on their Christian values and commitment to non-violence, the farm’s motto: “We Refuse to be Enemies.”
The New York Times Magazine called Issa Amro, “the Palestinian Gandhi,” but he shrugs that off and says the children who brave Israeli soldiers to walk to school, the women who are harassed as they go to market, the men who endure epithets and threats as they go to prayer – they are the “Palestinian Gandhis.” When my group met with Issa in March 2024, Israeli snipers on rooftops followed us around as he led us through Hebron. This time, we walked through shuttered Shuhadah Street, then up the winding hill to Issa’s house in Tel Rumeida, where we met with him in his courtyard. Watching us intently were Israeli soldier-settlers from a military outpost directly abutting Issa’s yard.
Issa has been arrested, jailed, beaten, tortured many times in the last two decades. Most recently, after October 7, 2023, he was beaten and sexually assaulted by Israeli soldiers while imprisoned. A few days before and a few days after our group met with him at his house on a Hebron hilltop, settlers vandalizing it and threatening him. He says the camera is the resisters’ best friend, documenting injustice and oppression.
Two days after we returned, I received a text from our Friends of Hebron board chair saying that because Issa has been featured in the recent 2025 documentary, “The Settlers” (Issa guided the film director, Louis Theroux around Hebron and environs), he was under imminent danger, and the threats have become more targeted and frequent. I fear for our friend, Issa’s, life.
8. After every presentation, at every meeting, in every supportive organization, church, community group, you hear the question, “What can we do?” When I first met our friend, Zoughbi Zoughbi, he told me, “You cannot make our problem your problem; you’re not here and it will consume you. But you have a problem, and your problem is impacting our problem. So you need to fix your problem.” What does hope look like when things look hopeless? Zoughbi named this paradox when he told us, “We can’t afford to hope; so we do the work in spite of it being hopeless. Hope is what you do.” We heard repeatedly that hope is not a feeling but an activity.
Mazin Qumsiyeh, one of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize nominees: “If you’re a writer, write. If you’re in business, serve the community. If you’re a poet, poet. If you’re an artist, draw, paint, dance, make music. If you’re a gardener, garden. Whatever fits your gifts, do” he said. “Create beauty, then share it.” When there is no hope and we create beauty, that very act of creating beauty creates the hope that’s missing. This is what it means to “hope beyond hope.”
Abdelfattah Abusrour described how he returned from France with a PhD in Engineering to the camp where he grew up, volunteering with young people there, asking them what they wanted to do with their lives. More than one, he said, told him, “I want to die.” So he began Arrowwad, it means “pioneer,” which emphasizes the arts; the arts give them hope, they begin to dream a better world, become pioneers of a new society. Their theme: “Beautiful Resistance.” Create something beautiful and share it; Beauty creates hope and overcomes the ugly.
Sabeel’s Omar Haramy walked us through Silwan and introduced us to powerful young women, leaders of I Witness Silwan. They use the power of art, painting scores of sets of eyes on buildings in Silwan and other East Jerusalem neighborhoods “in support of their longstanding fight against dispossession…. The staring eyes say to people that we see them and they should see us too…we want to say that we are here — we love our land and our home.” Included in the eyes they’ve painted are local and international leaders, activists, workers, and others, including Che Guevera, George Floyd, and more.
9. Our friends continue to ask, “Why is the world silent, indifferent to our genocide?” And our Palestinian Christian friends ask, “Where is the Church?” They get churches on the Religious Right and their Christian Zionism, but what about the subtle and silent Zionism of progressive churches. I’m getting increasingly frustrated and angry at progressive churches, even supportive ones, who at most might offer sympathetic feelings and prayers – and maybe a resolution or two without any consequence – but when the cost gets too high, they’re nowhere to be found. I drive around my community and see a variety of signs and steeples and, I offer this as my confession, my first thought is that this place is part of the problem. I do not think of them as an ally or even as a friend.
Knowledge is not the problem; the will to act is the problem. Munther Isaac reminds us of Bonhoeffer’s challenge, the need for “costly solidarity” alot. We love the prophets as long as we aren’t asked to be one. We love the prophets as long as they’re not pointing their fingers at us. We love the prophets as long as they’re not goring out sacred oxes, exposing our privilege, baring our blind spots. There’s an unspoken liberal code of niceness we don’t’ dare violate. Our comfort takes precedence over our solidarity. Prayers are fine, of course, Zoom is fine, donations are fine, too, but our Palestinian friends are urging us to come and stand with them. There’s nothing, they tell us, like our presence – for support, protection, that they’re not alone. They did find hope with students on college campuses and people like us who come to stand with them. Hope is not what you feel; hope is what you do. Costly solidarity!
10. We need to keep our focus on the big picture, the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza, yes, but also throughout all of Palestine – the erasure of Palestinian traditions and culture, the erasure of Palestine itself from human memory. We must be intentional, strategic, un-silo ourselves and build broad coalitions between people of faith and people of good will. We must disrupt the status quo – here in our country because, as Zoughbi said, their problem is impacted by our problem. We must disrupt their impunity. And, as a number of the speakers said, “make the occupation costly, their ignoring of international law costly, and now the unprovoked bombing of Iran, with tacit US approval costly both to Israel, costly to the US.
11. You remember in the front of Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem, how they went viral two Christmases ago when they created the Christ Under the Rubble manger scene. This Easter the olive wood baby Jesus is no longer under the rubble but sits atop the rubble, with a sprig of green and an unopened lily at his feet. Ashraf Tannous, their pastor, reminded the Christians in the group that in this Pentecost season, “Good Friday wasn’t the last word. Even Easter isn’t the final word. We have the final word.”
12. Finally, one of our travelers, Ana Diaz Loucks, the co-leader of Michiana Voices for Middle East Peace, asked if we could sing to the people we met the blessing they sing for their guests as they host them in Goshen, Indiana. So we sang it to Jewish, Christian, Muslim activists, teachers, lawyers, Nobel Peace Prize nominees, a farmer, a pastor, an Israeli military veteran, an Israeli conscientious objector. It might have seemed to an outsider like more “thoughts and prayers,” but it was heartfelt, and they knew we had come during a war. Some said they’d never been sung to before; each one thanked us. This is what we sang:
“You … do … not … carry this alone. No, you … do … not … carry this alone.
This is way too BIG … for you to carry this on your own. O, you … do … not … carry this alone.”