Three weeks ago today, twelve of us began our two week “Solidarity Tour” in Palestine. While we were there, businesses and homes in the Christian village of Taybeh were burned by settlers, Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque and Greek Orthodox property in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan, both of which we visited, were seized by the Israeli military, and three weeks ago tomorrow, at breakfast at our Bethlehem Manger Square guesthouse, we heard an explosion, looked out the window, and saw smoke in the sky about 40 miles away where Israel intercepted a missile. Except for locals and a few others, we were the only foreigners in Bethlehem. Virtually all of the shops were closed, 90% of the hotels closed (our hotels in Bethlehem and Jerusalem both opened specially for us, we were the only ones there), no tour groups had come for weeks and the next ones weren’t scheduled until the fall. In a town that lives on tourism, 70% unemployment. And this coming Friday, June 3, will be a thousand days of genocide since October 7, 2023. We were told again and again how important, how much it meant to the people there that we had come at such a time as this. So today, Palestine Stories.
ONE. We saw firsthand the impact of the politics of water. On June 13, Zoughbi’s nephew, Usama Zoughbi, posted this on Facebook: “Before my kids even said, ‘Good morning’ today, their first question was: ‘Did the water come back? Did the rooftop tanks fill up?’ Today is the third consecutive day without a single drop of water in our house.” Illegal Israeli settlements built on top of stolen West Bank aquifers, Palestinians must buy their own water back from Israel at marked-up prices, shut off at whim by Israel to punish or just to show they can. The Sea of Galilee flows into the Jordan River feeding the Dead Sea, but water is siphoned from the Jordan for Israeli kibbutzim, the Dead Sea drying up, receding a meter a year, vertically, not horizontally. We saw a marker in Jordan, “This was the Dead Sea in 2012.” From there, you had to walk down over 60 steps to get to the water. 2012. And in Gaza, Israel restricts water trucks from entering; they’ve destroyed desalination plants, sewage now mixed with water; virtually no potable water so tens of thousands are infected with jaundice, Hepatitis A, and other infectious diseases.
TWO. Our friends, George and Najwah Sa’adeh, a Christian couple from the Bereaved Families Circle, spoke to us here ten years ago this fall; their 12-year-old daughter Christine shot to death in their car as they drove to the grocery (both parents, another daughter, Marianne, shot, too) by an Israeli military death squad that misidentified their car; George, a school principal, former Bethlehem vice-mayor, Najwah wears a gold necklace with Christine’s picture. She told me they’re scared the Israeli military will storm into Bethlehem one day and evict them from their home, so they’ve begun conversations about emigrating to California where George received his engineering degree and where they have family. But emigrating would mean leaving Christine behind. Thirty Christian families from Bethlehem have emigrated to Spain in the last three months.
THREE. Israeli conscientious objector Sahar Vardi, who spoke here a few months ago: “The more an empire feels like it’s crumbling, the more militarized it becomes. So we know Israel is crumbling; what does this say about the American Empire?” And then: “Unresolved trauma causes strong feelings of victimhood which leads to strong feelings of superiority which results in a strong feeling of impunity. Israel believes it has the moral right to do whatever it wants.” And Palestinian Christian activist Sami Awad, who’ll be here next year, shared when he visited Auschwitz, he saw Israeli youth on a field trip led by Israeli soldiers, how they were told not only about what Germany did to their grandparents, but this is what Palestinians would do to them today if given a chance. “This,” he said, “is how trauma is passed from one generation to another in Israel today. Absolute fear plus absolute power equals absolute disaster.”
In our country, we know about gaslighting and lies that pass for truth. The same is true in Israel; let’s be clear, this is not a “conflict” between two equal sides, it’s “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.” Growing up, our textbooks revered “settlers” as heroes, now we know about their slaughter of indigenous peoples; in Israel (here, too), better to call them what they really are, “colonizers, “invaders.” And notice how the media talks about Israeli “hostages,” yet they call Palestinians “prisoners.” The words we use, the stories we tell are the food we feed our children. If fear and trauma can get passed down from one generation to the next, so, too, can inclusion, compassion, courage, faith. The stories we tell, the words we use matter.
FOUR. We heard from Omar Haramy, Director of the Sabeel Palestinian Liberation Theology Center, that it’s not only our bodies, our politics that need to be liberated, the Bible needs to be liberated. Sabeel began by asking Palestinian Christians what the Bible meant to them in the face of house demolitions, land confiscations, child kidnappings, killings, more. They told Sabeel, you read some Scripture and say, “Thanks be to God that this is the Word of God,” and others you say, “Thanks be to God this is not the Word of God.” The Bible needs to be liberated. And our theology needs to be liberated from its use as a weapon to hate; and Jesus needs to be liberated from his macho, muscular, militarized image (no thank you, Mr. Hegseth); and the church needs to be liberated from its emphasis on a life after this one and a baptism of the flag and the status quo.
Our minds need to be liberated, too; we’re being normalized into thinking the problem’s too big, the powers too strong, there’s nothing we can do, that we can’t win. Zoughbi Zoughbi told us, “You are not Christ, but as Christians, you must carry a cross, the cross of hope against all hope. We are at the last station of the cross. Walk with us.” And Pastor Munther Isaac, who we hosted last September, added: “Now is not a time for peace-talkers, or peace-believers, or peace-hopers, but peace-makers.” So we have to make, create, craft peace; what would it look like to construct, to build peace here?
But peace, too, can be a trap. You can have peace and still have injustice. Peace is the language of the oppressor, justice is the language of the oppressed. Politicians love to talk about peace as the ultimate goal, they only talk about justice as punishment, rarely justice as human rights. I don’t ask oppressed Palestinians, or any other oppressed peoples with boots on their necks to be peacemakers. A gussied-up prison is still a prison, pretty chains are still chains. We demand justice, we demand liberation, and so we resist. A peace without justice is no peace. Sometimes peacemakers must disturb the peace.
FIVE. But we did meet real “makers of peace” who quietly yet courageously practice sumud, a fearless perseverance, every day. Ahmad Muna, one of the owners of East Jerusalem’s Educational Bookshop, a gathering place for leftists and activists, book-by-book restocked their shelves after Israeli soldiers vandalized their store twice last year. Marianne Sa’adeh, George and Najwah’s surviving daughter, just became a medical doctor specializing in mental health, and Bereaved Families Circle Jewish Israeli parent Rami Elhanan, who also spoke here ten years ago, whose daughter, Smadar, 14, was killed by a suicide bomber: “We use the power of our pain to bang our hearts against the high wall of hatred and fear to put cracks of hope in that wall and make them listen.” Abed Abusrour, Aida Refugee Camp’s Al-Rowwad Cultural Arts Center, who spoke to us at Swiss Village a few years ago, described their programs in art, photography, music, drama, and in their new Center with animation, media, journalism, even robotics clubs, and had his six-to-ten-year-olds dance for us. Al-Rowwad means “pioneers,” pioneers of a free Palestine. Its motto: “Beautiful Resistance.”
Muna Khader at the Bethlehem Icon Centre offers classes in Orthodox iconography with Palestinian themes. And the Nassar Family (Daoud, Daher, Amal) their Tent of Nations farm, surrounded by six illegal settlements, where Pam Etheridge worked for two weeks in April, where two of our group, Heath Hurst and Anglican priest, Fiona Haworth, volunteered before and after our trip. The farm lives by four principles: (1) We refuse to be victims; (2) We refuse to hate; no one can force us to hate; (3) We act differently out of our Christian values; and (4) We refuse to be enemies. And Munther confessed to us: “Every time I go to a checkpoint, I know there’s a real possibility I’m going to die, and yet I go, I have to go, I have to speak, I must tell the truth.” And others, too, we met with every single day.
We have the attention span of a gnat. While the media is obsessed with the World Cup and Taylor Swift’s wedding, and we relish memes about the President’s botching of the Reflecting Pool, people in the West Bank and Gaza are being displaced, killed every day. Just to remain is a brave act. We go to stand in solidarity with them, yet under impossible circumstances, with destruction, death all around them, when it would be easy to give up, they remain steadfast and true, models of courage, resilience, faith, and a freedom of spirit no wall can contain, no death can defeat, that inspires us in our struggle here.
James Baldwin put it like this: “Love has never been popular. Of course you can despair. But the world is held together – it really is,” he said – “it’s held together by the love and passion of a very few people.” I want to be one of those people. Let’s be some of those people here. Love in the best of times is hard. We’re called to a tough and tireless, fearless, no-matter-what kind of love that doesn’t give up, that stands the test, that stands with those who need us because we need them, too, if Love will win the day. The vine doesn’t grow up the trellis because it’s strong; whether strong or weak, it grows because it reaches for the Light.
You know … our friends in Palestine, in Gaza, who are under siege, those here in this country, in our community under attack. When I give presentations or preach like this about Palestine, people always ask me, “Mike, where do you find hope?” And I always answer the same way, “I don’t have hope. YOU are the hope.” Hope isn’t something you have, hope is something you do. “WE are the hope.” So there’s just one question that haunts me, “How will I be their hope?” “How will we be their hope?”