Communities of faith have a duty to fight for Palestinian freedom

On a rainy night in early March, Palestinian American Representative Rashida Tlaib walked to the lectern at the historic Calvary Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. and did something extraordinary. Tlaib was there to address church leaders who had just returned from a week in the West Bank. They had traveled there to meet with leaders of Palestinian civil society — women and men from the churches, universities, NGOs, and organizations devoted to preserving Palestinian life in the face of Israel’s ongoing program to erase it. Named the “Stones Cry Out” delegation, the 23 were joined in Washington by colleagues from the U.S. church movement for Palestine and their Jewish and Muslim allies from across the country. We had spent two days meeting with members of Congress and their staff to bring these messages from Palestine: Stop the genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza. Stop the strangulation of the West Bank. Stop funding Israel’s 76-year-long project of dispossession and colonization.

“When I speak in Congress or in public,” Tlaib began, “I bring stories from my district — about people’s struggles with poverty, housing, income inequality.” These are issues that have driven her mission as a public servant. Tonight, Tlaib continued, she would say the names of the children of Gaza. She proceeded to tell one impossible, shattering story after another of children who have died, been injured and mutilated, lost their families, and been driven from their homes. One story after another, until we felt that it would never stop — as indeed it has not. There was no relief from the horror and the heartbreak — even as it seemed that Tlaib’s tears might make it impossible for her to continue. 

In this act, Tlaib unlocked the meaning of the Stones Cry Out delegation. We had heard the cry of the Palestinians to stop the killing and the savage destruction of all that makes life possible in that crowded strip of land. We let flow our outrage not only at the genocide in Gaza, but also at what one Christian leader in Jerusalem described as Israel’s “slow-moving death machine” bearing down on the cities, villages, grazing fields, and olive groves of the West Bank. We appealed to members of Congress to use the leverage of our country’s financial and diplomatic support for Israel to press for an immediate ceasefire and for humanitarian relief. This is what the staffers had expected to hear from us. What they did not expect, what was the bigger reach, even for the most progressive among them, was our message that the U.S. was responsible for the conditions that led up to the October 7 attack: the 17-year-long blockade and slow starvation of Gaza and the systematic colonization and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, all made possible by our money, arms, and diplomatic protection. 

The delegates were on fire. They argued, they appealed, they bore witness. They countered the false facts and twisted history, the inexcusably hollow excuses for standing aside as the carnage continued and as the supply of weapons of destruction and killing flowed. As we sat in these meetings it dawned on us that we were fighting not only for the oppressed Palestinians but for the integrity of our country and for the survival of our democracy. 

I could not help but feel compassion for those staffers. They were — you could read it in their eyes and see it in their body language —  in the impossible position of having to defend the indefensible positions of their bosses. Confronting the lumbering, faltering, blind machinery of our democracy, we were asking for a display of the political courage that has produced the rare moments in our nation’s history when we’ve done the right thing. Like Tlaib and the handful of her colleagues in Congress who have spoken up for the Palestinians, we were defending not only the Palestinians but the ideals of equality and compassion we claim to uphold. We were asking the question: can we overcome our settler colonial DNA?

With only two exceptions, Senators and members of the House did not meet with us themselves — they assigned their staffers to hear our reports and receive our requests. Rashida Tlaib went one better — she came to us, accepting the invitation to join in our service of testimony and prayer. 

She came to the church that night because she had to be there. 

It was an extraordinary evening. Tlaib was preceded by readings and reflections from the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions. In the Christian reading from the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus put it clearly to his followers: when you feed the hungry, when you heal their wounds and release them from the prison of their oppression, you are coworkers with me in bringing the Kingdom of God here on earth. In his reflections, Rev Graylan Hagler, an African American pastor well known to the Washington DC social justice community, spoke of the faith and persistence of Palestinian resistance, and he lifted up the Black liberation struggle in America. The Palestinian struggle has brought home once again the challenge, in every historical era, to be faithful to the core of the gospel, to know, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., that we are part of “the inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”

Palestinian American Imam Tarif Shraim, the Muslim chaplain at the University of Maryland, spoke about his pain at the loss of family and friends in the ongoing slaughter. He reached for solace and hope in the vision of the Prophet Muhammad for a world reflecting the will of the Creator:  “O mankind, indeed We have created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another. Indeed, the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous of you.”

Lamentation

The text from the Jewish tradition, read by Rabbi Lizz Goldstein, was “Lamentation for Gaza,” a rendering of the Book of Lamentations written by Rabbi Brant Rosen of Congregation Tzedek Chicago. Commemorating the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by Rome in 70CE, Lamentations is a cry of pain from the heart of a genocide. It is a harrowing description of a people fallen and traumatized. 

Panic and pitfall are our lot,
Death and destruction.
My eyes shed streams of water
Over the brokenness of my people.

(Lam. 1:8, 4:46–48; author’s translation) 

Marking the end of Jewish autonomy and rule in Palestine (until today, of course), the destruction of the Temple has served as the prototype for Jewish suffering. Running through the litany of desolation and ruin is grief and humiliation over the loss of status and pride: “How the city sits alone and isolated, she who was great among nations!” There is also mourning for the loss of safety and security: “He has withdrawn His right hand that shielded Israel from the enemy, laid waste her citadels, destroyed her fortress walls.”

Lamentations concludes with this entreaty: “Restore us to You, O Lord! Renew our days as of old!” With the destroyed Temple as the symbol, this yearning for safety and control has resonated throughout Jewish history, culminating in the catastrophic turn to the ethnic nationalism of Zionism in modern times. Stifled under Roman oppression, Jesus’ disciples expressed the same yearning when they asked him, “Lord, is now the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” It was King, Temple, armies and fortress walls they were envisioning. They had had Jesus’ answer, only a week earlier, standing with him in the Temple courtyard on Palm Sunday: “Destroy this Temple!” he cried. Reject, he was telling them, unconditionally and radically, this embodiment of greed and naked power that has poisoned our community and our faith. Jesus wept for the calamity that was still 40 years away but that had already happened:  “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those sent to her! The things that make for peace are hidden from your eyes.”  

Hearing again the words of Lamentations that evening in Washington, like that Jew of 2000 years ago, I shed tears, but this time for the Palestinian people, and yes, for the brokenness of my own people. And so I began my reflections with the question: “What do we do with our suffering?”

Here is what you don’t do. You don’t cling to your insularity, to your identity as a victim that gives you the right to do anything to protect yourself against an “eternal, implacable enemy.”

Here is what you don’t do. You don’t cling to a worldview of “us and them.” You don’t enclose yourself within fortress walls, station soldiers along it and say to your people, “Trust no one, we will protect you.”

Instead, you ask the right question: walking along the road, privileged, powerful and free, seeing the naked, beaten person lying by the side of the road, you ask, “Who is my neighbor?”

You follow the instructions of Aaron Bushnell, who, before he set himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy, bid us to ask ourselves, “What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?”

You do what Rabbi Brant Rosen did in his Lamentation for Gaza, renouncing entitlement and exceptionalism, rejecting the idolatry of power:

This fatal attachment to our own might
has become our downfall.
This idolatrous veneration of the land
has sent us wandering into
a wilderness of our own making,
imprisoned inside behind walls we have built
with our own fear and dread. 

The gift of hope

This is not only a Jewish story. We returned from Palestine with this message to our nation — this is about us, our own falling into the pit of fear, of greed and grasping. We came to call not only on our elected representatives, but on our churches, by and large silent as this horror has unfolded. We came in recognition of the shameful history of the church’s embrace of colonialism, of America’s original sin of land theft and genocide.

Another astonishing thing happened that evening in Washington. As Tlaib stepped down from the lectern, Graylan Hagler approached, motioning for her come to him. He put his arm around her shoulder and asked us all to stand and stretch out our arms to her in the manner of the Black churches as he blessed her. I don’t remember the blessing, perhaps he spoke it only to her, but it was a healing for all of us, an affirmation of the power of the spirit: of the Palestinians who refuse to give up, of our faith traditions that sustain the spirit of prophecy in the face of the institutions, religious and governmental, that subvert foundational values of compassion and equality. All those Temples: Zionism, Hindutva, ethnic nationalisms of all kinds, the terrifying rise of Christian nationalism. This is the fight of our lives. Not only for Palestine, not only for our country, but for humankind.

As I left the church, I passed Rashida Tlaib and Graylan Hagler standing outside the entrance, deep in conversation. I wanted to go up to them and thank them for the extraordinary gift they had given us. But it felt right to leave them be and simply receive the gift, to take it with me as I walked out of the church and into the night. It was the gift of hope.