Resurrecting Freedom for Palestine: God is in the rubble
Melanie Childers and Cath Hopkins
April 14, 2024
During and after the 2016 presidential election I was horrified and truly frightened about what was happening to our country. Other than casting my vote, and going to the Women’s March in January 2017, however, I pretty much hid my head in the sand. My partner catalogued every lie the new president was saying, renewed her passport in case of a need to escape quickly, and decried the injustices with her colleagues and on social media. Meanwhile, I resorted to eye rolls, private curses, and vague hopes that my country would come to its senses.
The CEO at the hospital where I work regularly reminds us, “Hope is not a strategy.” Sadly, hope was the only strategy I had, and it didn’t work.
Even more sadly, I have repeated that pattern since October 7, 2023, choosing to avert my gaze from the carnage being inflicted in the Middle East. Today represents my attempt to get my head out of the sand and take an honest look at what is happening and how I might do more than hope. I have had to do a lot of reading and research to catch up, as this conflict is extraordinarily complex and difficult to understand. I have a bibliography if anyone would like to know my sources, but they primarily come from Ilan Pappe, a noted scholar in the region, as well as Jewish Voice for Peace, Amnesty International, and other sources that I consider highly reputable. I am also deeply indebted to Cath Hopkins for her partnership, guidance and wisdom on this topic and this presentation.
All violence and suffering is a travesty, regardless of who is firing the weapons. I regret that people on both sides of this horrible war have been hurt, maimed, killed, or orphaned. I grieve for Jews and Palestinians who have been harmed and killed and taken hostage. AND, I believe that this war is not a fair fight. The God of the Hebrew Bible repeatedly sided with the oppressed, and Jesus expanded that theology of supporting the marginalized and despised.
On the surface, it appears that Hamas waged an unprovoked deadly surprise attack on Israel, killing 1,200 Israeli military and civilians, as well as foreign nationals, and taking 253 hostages. But this conflict did not begin on October 7, and it was far from unprovoked. It is the result of 75 years of a Zionist strategy to make Palestine an exclusively Jewish state and systematically eradicate non-Jews from the region.
During the peak colonialist period of our global development, every country in the world with a little bit of power sought to assert that power by invading some other country, claiming it as their own, taking over its governance, exploiting its resources, and expelling, killing, or enslaving the people who were already there.
In the Modern period, Britain, France, Portugal, Spain, Russia, all have been colonizers. The United States and Canada committed crimes of genocide and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people living here before us and have never adequately addressed this. Settler colonialism is one of many dark blots on what we call “civilization.” And it is not over.
Zionism is a nationalist movement that emerged in the 1800s to establish a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine. Many people may not know that Christian Zionism predated Jewish Zionism by about 50 years. As early as 1840, British diplomats began formulating a plan to colonize Palestine by encouraging European Jews to relocate there.
This plan of Zionism conveniently solved three problems for the British: 1) Because of longstanding antisemitism, the Europeans didn’t want the Jews in Europe, especially not in large numbers; 2) The British could use the Jewish people to be their colonizers in Palestine, so they wouldn’t have to do it themselves; and 3) By “giving” Palestine to the Jews, the Europeans could assuage their guilt from fomenting a Christian hate and antisemitism against the Jewish people for thousands of years. The Europeans apparently gave little care to the fact that people already lived and flourished in the land they were getting ready to give away to someone else. But the Jewish Zionists quickly began calculating a plan for forcibly removing and marginalizing all non-Jewish inhabitants from the Holy Land they planned to retake.
Many of us Christians have only the biblical narrative to explain to us how God smiled on the Hebrew people, promising a land flowing with milk and honey, and preparing them to conquer any lesser peoples who might be there already, so that God’s chosen people could take over. The Hebrew people were not the first ones to occupy that particular plot of land. But they believed it was divinely ordained that they have it. Christians in the US rarely bat an eye about this, since we are taught the same thing through the doctrine of manifest destiny—that God wanted us to have these United States, and so whatever crimes we committed against the people who were already here were somehow justified.
This begs the question of how God must have felt toward the indigenous peoples of Palestine, Australia, Africa, and the so-called United States. Was God not the God of these people too? Did God’s loving care not extend toward them? Did God’s favoritism make it OK for thousands of people to be slaughtered? And who would want to believe in a God like that?
Christians have a strange Zionist attachment to Judaism. Despite believing Jewish people are profoundly flawed for not believing in Jesus, we continue to believe that Jews are God’s chosen people, and that their inhabitation of the region of Palestine fulfills biblical prophecy. Some Christians believe that once Jews overtake Palestine, it will trigger Jesus’ return to Earth. Because of this, many (especially evangelical) Christians are heavily invested in Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
On the other hand, Christianity is simultaneously largely to blame for centuries of hatred, persecution, and genocide of the Jewish people. Ever since the Gospel accounts were interpreted to blame Jews for Jesus’ crucifixion and the Roman armies destroyed the temple in Jerusalem and displaced many Jews who scattered to other regions of the world, Christians have condemned Jews as agents of the devil, killed them in crusades, excluded them from political, economic, and cultural life, incited hatred against them, and even used pseudoscience to “prove” they were genetically inferior. Two thousand years of such antisemitism set the stage for the Holocaust of WWII, where millions of Jews were kidnapped, tortured, enslaved, and murdered.
And, it seems, history is repeating itself as the Jewish people long vilified now have a nation-state that is victimizing others.
In 1917, when through the Balfour Declaration the British government officially declared a plan for Palestine to become the national home for the Jewish people, Jews made up 5% of the population of Palestine, and Christians and Muslims made up 95% of the population. At that time in Palestine, people of various faiths lived in relative harmony together.
During the ensuing years, thousands of European Jewish people were cajoled into settling in Palestine. By 1922, Jewish people made up 11% of the population. In 1935, they were 27% of the population.
And in 1947, when the British were preparing to relinquish their control of Palestine amid huge unrest and uprisings between Jews and Palestinians, the United Nations drew up a plan to partition the land of Palestine into two areas—one for Israel and one for the Palestinians. At this time, the Jewish people made up 30% of the population, and they owned only 5% of the land. And yet the United Nations’ plan gave 55% of the land to the Jewish people, including the most fertile and usable land where Palestinians had lived for centuries.
It should be no surprise that the Jewish people accepted this proposal, while the Palestinians did not. Many skirmishes and battles ensued as the Jewish people immediately began moving beyond the UN borders, claiming more and more of the Palestinian territory for themselves. Every time the Palestinians rebelled against Jewish incursion, and put up a bit of a fight, the Jews claimed retaliation but in fact waged all-out war on the under-armed and untrained Palestinians, taking more and more of the land that had been partitioned to Palestine. Between 1947 and 1949, the Palestinians suffered mass displacement and dispossession, known as the Nakba or the catastrophe. According to Amnesty International, 800,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes through Israeli military attacks and intimidation of Palestinian civilians, and neither those 800,000 people, nor their descendants, were ever allowed to return. Many of them now live as refugees. Through a later conflict in 1967, Israel extended its control by means of military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and began building Jewish settlements in these areas while systematically restricting the rights of Palestinians.
Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has relentlessly pursued a policy of establishing and maintaining an exclusively Jewish state. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said so himself in 2019: “Israel is not a state of all its citizens, but rather the nation-state of the Jewish people and only them.”
Today, out of the original 45% of the land that was supposedly “partitioned” to Palestine, none of it freely belongs to the Palestinian people. In the end, Israel occupies almost all of Palestine, and through walls and fences and military checkpoints restricts all Palestinian movement from one area to another, and controls supplies and people who come in and out of the country.
Amnesty International states that Israel has committed the crime of Apartheid by the systematic domination and oppression of the Palestinian people through dispossession of their lands and homes, banishment from the region, creating a system of terror through indiscriminate killing, and refusing access to clean water, food, and healthcare.
Israel is maximizing its control over the land to benefit Jewish Israelis while minimizing Palestinian rights and obstructing their ability to challenge this policy. Three weeks ago, United Nations special investigator Francesca Albanese reported that Israel’s actions toward Palestinians fit the definition of genocide:
“After five months of military operations, Israel has destroyed Gaza. Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 13,000 children. Over 12,000 are presumed dead and 71,000 injured, many with life-changing mutilations. Seventy percent of residential areas have been destroyed. Eighty percent of the whole population has been forcibly displaced. Thousands of families have lost loved ones or have been wiped out. Many could not bury and mourn their relatives, forced instead to leave their bodies decomposing in homes, in the street or under the rubble. Thousands have been detained and systematically subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment. By analysing the patterns of violence and Israel’s policies in its onslaught on Gaza, this report concludes that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.”
This report and others also indicated:
The Israeli Defense Forces are targeting doctors, journalists, children, and even aid workers. They are testing powerful new weapons on the Palestinians before selling those weapons to other countries. They refuse to allow safe drinking water into Palestine, cut off communication lines, tell its military to aim for legs to permanently maim Palestinians, who then have to endure amputation of limbs without anesthetic. Entire family trees have been wiped out. They destroy high rise buildings where hundreds of Palestinians lived, to replace them with luxury homes for a few Israelis. The Israeli Defense Forces tell Palestinians to evacuate, and then bomb the evacuation routes. Israel has killed so many Palestinians in Gaza that a new acronym was coined – WCNSF – Wounded Child No Surviving Family – to cover an ever-increasing number of [surviving] children in Gaza.
As we in the US are watching the carnage unfold, we are also profiting from this war, as our country continues to sell weapons to Israel to the tune of 3.8 billion dollars a year.
I think we can agree that in general, killing another person is not OK. Especially not indiscriminate killing. Of course it was not OK for Hamas to attack Israel on October 7. But I can see now how a group of people could be driven to desperate measures, and even hate, when they have no food, no clean water to drink, no access to healthcare. When another people have killed, terrorized, and forcibly removed them from their homes and into refugee status for 70 years.
I want to be clear that anti-Zionism is not the same as antisemitism. Jewish Voice for Peace states that while Zionism “had many strains historically, the Zionism that took hold and stands today is a political ideology, not religious. This Zionism is a settler-colonial movement,” establishing an apartheid state where Jews have rights to the exclusion of Palestinians. To speak out against Zionism is to speak out against apartheid, not to be antisemitic.
And yet this situation is so complex. As a Christian, I have begun to recognize the role my people have played in this disaster. My ancestors, in the name of religion, created this hatred toward Jews, which caused 2,000 years of vilification, repeated expulsions, mass killings, and restrictions on their lives.
A relatively new field of research is the study of intergenerational trauma. Studying the children of Holocaust survivors helped determine that severe trauma on one generation can be transmitted to younger generations who themselves may not have personally experienced or even known about that trauma. This has also been shown among Indigenous Peoples and African Americans in the US. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder gets transmitted genetically, and also through learned survivor behavior, as well as through continuing oppressive systems. In Gaza’s case, there is no break in the trauma to even allow the “post” in “post traumatic stress disorder,” as ongoing survival is questionable. A Palestinian child who was 2 years old in 2008 and still alive now, has lived through five armed conflicts.
Who is to say what intergenerational trauma Christians have inflicted on the Jewish people? It’s telling to me that Israel’s army is called the Israeli Defense Forces. Might it make sense that after 2,000 years of violence toward your people, you might never feel truly safe, even as you beat relentlessly on another group of people the way your people were also treated?
Many of us have very strong feelings on many different sides of this challenge. It is hard to face our own complicity and then to feel helpless in the face of our government who seems callous to the realities of what is happening. If we take an honest and hard look at this reality, we are not alone, however. The United Nations is looking hard. Amnesty International is looking hard. South Africa has been looking hard. Jewish Voice for Peace is doing amazing work. The United Church of Christ developed a Palestine Israel Network to help educate about and address the concerns. We also have a local group—High Country Peace and Justice—who are organizing demonstrations and educational events and petitioning the town of Boone to pass a resolution for ceasefire. There is an opportunity for faith communities to sign a pledge to be “Apartheid Free.” There are boycotts that may help us live our values more fully. There are government representatives charged with considering our voices and our views. There are prayer circles and grief circles. There are more people like me waking up to the need.
Despite how differently all of us may feel about this complex topic, I would hope that we might agree that good starting places would be to advocate for a permanent ceasefire and to demand access to humanitarian aid for Palestinians.
High Country UCC has long preached a liberation theology—believing that God is on the side of the poor, the dispossessed, the marginalized. Even then, sometimes we wonder where God is, and how God has allowed us to create such a mess of our planet and its inhabitants.
In his disturbing book Night, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel recounts being forced to watch as two men and a boy were hanged in a concentration camp. As they walked by, Wiesel heard a man behind him say “For God’s sake, where is God?” and it occurred to Wiesel that God was right there, hanging from the gallows.
Munther Isaac, a Palestinian Christian pastor in Bethlehem, echoed Wiesel last October when he said: “God is under the rubble in Gaza. He is with the frightened and the refugees. He is in the operating room. This is our consolation. He walks with us through the valley of the shadow of death.”
Friends, if God is in the rubble, then that is good news for all of us. Because I believe that wherever God is, love abides, and possibility for hope and change resides. If God is in the rubble in Gaza, then God is in the rubble of all our lives, providing comfort and companionship where we struggle most. If God is in the rubble in Gaza, she may be beckoning us there too—to make what difference we can, to believe change is possible, to speak up for those whose voices have been silenced.
May we go with God, even if it is to the rubble.
