Palestinian Christians challenge the World Council of Churches on Gaza

The Palestinian Christians are losing patience. In June, the Executive Committee of the World Council of Churches (WCC) meeting in Bogota, Colombia published a “Statement on the Escalating Crisis in Gaza.” In response, the Board of Kairos Palestine, a Christian Palestinian movement, released an “Open Letter to the World Council of Church’s Executive Committee.”  It begins respectfully: “We trust that the statement was issued with great concern and with the urgent need to terminate the atrocious crimes in Gaza.” And on the surface, the WCC statement appears to take full account of the horrific suffering of Gaza and Israel’s responsibility for its egregiously disproportionate response to the October 7 attack. It appeals to international law and stresses the urgency to put an end to the carnage. 

But the Palestinians see what is missing. They feel what is missing. “As Palestinians, as Christians and as your partners,” the Open Letter continues, “we would like to bring to your attention the following points.” They do not mince words, getting to the heart of the matter in their first point:  

We believe that the title “Escalating Crisis in Gaza” is neither accurate, nor adequate. The protracted “crisis” is a result of 8 months of Israel’s incessant large-scale military aggression which amounts to acts of genocide, prior to which Gaza has been strangled by a 17-year blockade that forced 2.3 million people to become aid-dependent and extremely vulnerable to famine and starvation…Not only is the term genocide absent from the title, it is marginalized in the body of the statement instead of being the essence of what the statement is condemning. It cannot be acceptable that crimes of such scale, committed deliberately over 8 months, be narrowed down to a “crisis.” 

The Palestinians then proceed directly to place the October 7 Hamas attack in context, shifting the framework from “humanitarian crisis” and “human rights” to Israel’s longstanding, systemic denial of Palestinian peoplehood.

We deplore that the Statement fails to mention Israel’s 7-decades settler colonial regime, apartheid and prolonged occupation with total impunity as the root cause and the context that laid the grounds for the events of 7 October and the ensuing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza and the grave escalation of Israel’s atrocities in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

It is shocking that it was necessary to call the WCC to account for this failure. The world church body has decades of direct involvement with Palestine to its credit, with missions and programs on the ground addressing the consequences of Israel’s ongoing project of dispossession and ethnic cleansing. Is it possible that the members of the WCC Executive Committee do not see the root cause of Palestinian resistance, especially in the case of the almost two-decades-long siege of Gaza? It is equally hard to comprehend why it should be necessary for the Palestinians to point out that “the Statement seems to reserve the use of strong, direct language to acts committed by Hamas, describing them as ‘the most extreme and inhumane forms of killing, torture and other horrors, including sexual violence.’ No such language is used to describe Israel’s atrocious acts in Gaza.” Indeed, the letter continues, “[t]he statement continued to both-side the ‘violence’ and the call for accountability, despite the stark differences in power dynamics.” 

“Both-siding” indeed. Even the New York Times and Washington Post have all but abandoned the longstanding practice of “balanced” reporting, impossible even for the mainstream press to maintain in the face of the news coming out of Gaza. And yet the letter goes on to call out the WCC for having “put on equal footing the 37,000 Palestinians killed during Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and the 1200 Israelis killed on October 7^th. ^.” It is stunning that, even today, they have had to patiently explain how “the statement reflexively obscures the massive asymmetry of powers at play on the one hand, and the 7 decades long colonization of the Palestinian land and oppression of its people.”

The church challenged

What is going on? In recent history world church world bodies have shown capable of prophetic action when the times required. Where is the WCC that in response to James Baldwin’s challenge to the World Council’s Fourth Assembly in Uppsala, Sweden in June 1968 established the Programme to Combat Racism (PCR)?  Baldwin’s words to the Assembly speak as loudly as they did almost 60 years ago:  “Christianity still has the power to move the world if it will. It still has the power to change the structure of South Africa, to prevent the assassination of another Martin Luther King, to force my country to stop dropping bombs on southeast Asia.” Launched in 1969, the PCR played a highly visible role in opposing white minority rule in Southern Africa, supporting resistance among churches there and providing direct financial support to armed national liberation movements throughout the African continent. Through the PCR, the WCC was a proponent of the international campaigns of economic sanctions that ultimately brought down the apartheid regime. These actions left the WCC open to accusations by member churches of supporting “terrorism” and violence. But it did not flinch. Contrast this with the WCC that in its 2022 General Assembly in Karlsruhe Germany stated in its declaration on “Seeking Justice and Peace for All in the Middle East” that on the question of Israel as an apartheid regime, “We are not of one mind on the matter.”

Where today is the World Communion of Reformed Churches, the body that in 1982 (then World Alliance of Reformed Churches) meeting in Ottawa Canada named apartheid a heresy and declared itself in status confessionis, suspending the membership of the white Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa? These actions were responsible for bringing world churches into the struggle, overcoming the resistance of Western governments to the sanctions, and setting into motion the global actions that within a decade would bring the apartheid government to the negotiating table. This is the same World Communion of Reformed Churches that in 2017 passed a resolution in its General Assembly in Leipzig Germany determining that, in the matter of Palestine “the integrity of Christian faith and praxis is at stake” and resolving to bring awareness of the Palestinian liberation struggle to its 230 member denominations in 108 countries. Seven years later, it has yet to act on this commitment.

It is time for the churches of the world — in every region, denomination and nation and from every pulpit — to be of one mind on this matter and to hold their leaders and their institutions to account. It is time for the churches to move from words to action. The Open Letter from Kairos Palestine puts the challenge to the church unambiguously:

We believe that the Christian community of believers has a special contribution to make. The call for an immediate ceasefire must be merely a first step to end this harrowing genocide, but not the ultimate objective…ending the decades-long colonization of the Palestinian lands and the oppression against the Palestinian people. 

The ultimate objective. Christianity originated as a grassroots movement of resistance to Empire. It betrayed that legacy in the church’s overt complicity with Empire and for furnishing the theological justification for colonialism throughout history. Today the church is called to speak loudly and without reservation in condemnation of Israel’s settler colonial project and, by extension, all ideologies of domination. As argued convincingly in the Palestinian letter, it must move the discourse on Palestine from humanitarian assistance and defense of human rights to a confrontation with the structure of racialized dominance that is the cause of Palestinian suffering and of Israel’s descent into fascism and barbarism. 

“The church should not wait for the international community to officially describe and condemn Israel’s apartheid” reads the Open Letter. “No, a prophetic church should shape and lead the international community.” (emphasis in original) This is the church’s special contribution of which the Palestinians speak. It is its mandate, its proper role. “There was a time when the church was very powerful” wrote Martin Luther King Jr. in Letter from Birmingham Jail. “It was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was the thermostat that transformed the mores of society.” 

The Palestinian letter closes with these words from the 2009 Kairos Palestine document, reminding the church to be faithful to its mission. In so doing, as they have done repeatedly over the decades, the Palestinians call once again not only to the churches, but to the conscience of the world.

“The mission of the Church is prophetic, to speak the Word of God courageously, honestly and lovingly in the local context and in the midst of daily events. If she does take sides, it is with the oppressed, to stand alongside them, just as Christ our Lord stood by the side of each poor person and each sinner, calling them to repentance, life, and the restoration of the dignity bestowed on them by God and that no one has the right to strip away.”

Read the Palestinian letter here.