Kayla Robbins, 4 April 2024: A week before Holy Week, a few friends and I traveled to Washington DC and went on hunger strike for a mere five days in solidarity with the people of Palestine, joining over 150 clergy and practitioners of a multiplicity of faith traditions around the country. We fasted and protested on Capitol Hill, at the White House, outside the Holocaust Memorial Museum, at the Israeli Embassy, and at the National Cathedral. We spoke and prayed with the Episcopal Bishop of Washington and the chief military advisor of Sen. Jon Tester, the Chairman of the Defense Appropriations Committee in the Senate. Holy Eucharist was celebrated on Wednesday in front of the Israeli Embassy, a site of much horror and, quite recently, an act of singularly beautiful and devastating courage carried out by Airman Aaron Bushnell. Finally, we broke our fast on Friday night with a new Muslim friend at a Palestinian restaurant in Falls Church, VA with much gratitude, joy, and renewed courage.
All week, we abstained from food, wrote, advocated, and prayed for the absolute and unequivocal liberation of the Palestinian people, as well as for the absolute and unequivocal freedom of the whole cosmos from the moral ugliness of empire, domination, and theft of land and life that curse our shared being together. Of course, I experienced hunger and (especially) cold during those five days of my fast, but it is truly nothing compared to the forced starvation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian men, women, and children on the other side of the globe. In my oscillating periods of extreme fatigue and exceptional mental clarity, I had much time to think long and hard about what we were doing and what love demands of us still. I reflected largely on violence: colonial, Israeli, American, mine, and yours.
As Eastertide is upon us, I continue to reflect upon a terrible mystery under which I have found myself grappling since Advent; namely, the brutality of violence that corrupts and destroys both its perpetrators and recipients alike. It’s the force with which men terrify women, with which adults bend low children, and with which the very rich exploit and crush the very poor. Jewish philosopher and mystic Simone Weil wrote of force as the mechanism by which a person is turned into a thing. Most literally, it is force that converts a living, breathing being (subject) into a corpse (object), but force is also at play every time a person is treated as a means to an end - the victim’s desires, wellbeing, or humanity disregarded for the sake of another’s gain, pleasure, or mere convenience. The use of force is everywhere, all the time. It is on full display in all of its hideous monstrosity and murderous rage in Palestine now.
There is a kind of conservative “logic” that demands we not only accept but even enthusiastically embrace this brutal state as the way things inevitably are. As we protest, pray, and watch countless videos of bulldozed corpses, fathers screaming and carrying the remains of their children in plastic bags, and mainstream news media covering it all up here at home, it is easy to sink into a nihilistic disposition that concedes to force as the law of the cosmos. There is even a twisted sort of internal effort involved - “guts” if you will - in the capitulation to this worldview, hence its allegedly moral appeal. To this kind of “realist” it is, in fact, a Hobbesian universe in which the game is every man for himself, and the rules are endless brutality. Such a nihilist is the kind of person who insists upon the inherent moral virtue of taking cold showers in the morning simply because they are cold.
The left too has its own version of such remorseless, Puritan ideology which invokes “the way things really are” as justification for its claims. Beauty and pleasure from this perspective are but bourgeois preoccupations that numb us from the horrors of the world. To such a person, the way that things really are is also rather nasty, brutish, and short. This perspective, popularized by the second generation of neo-Marxists who survived the fascist gulags and concentration camps of the Second World War only to be confronted with the fascism of the free market of the latter twentieth century, equally affirms that the world is ontologically a violent place. It insinuates that to refuse to accept this perspective not only reveals a lack of intellectual and moral courage, but also perpetuates injustice (as if all we have to offer to the oppressed is our own severity, misery, and co-suffering). Yet, when our sin-sick and suffering world is viewed through radical “Easter Eyes”, such an essentialisation of force as fundamental to our human nature becomes not only morally untenable, but also incoherent and profoundly unreasonable.
The Holy Scriptures shout the goodness of all creation. We worship a creator who is Himself the Source of all Goodness. Therefore, if what He made was not good, it simply would not be. The connection between Goodness and Reality could not be plainer when one is attentive to the most basic creeds and doctrines of the Christian faith. It is precisely because humankind is so very good and, by virtue of its existence, infinitely lovable, that the veritable realities of force, violence, and injustice are in a sense, much less real than the originary goodness for which we were made. As Roman Catholic theologian James Allison writes, “The violence that was chronologically original (and seemed to us to be simply natural) is discovered to be logically secondary to an anterior self-giving and creative order.”
Perhaps it takes “guts” to look the horrible realities of human cruelty, indifference, and violence in Palestine and capitulate to our inability to stop it. But it takes faith and authentic, human courage to trust that the ground of capital R Reality pulses ever presently underneath it all; transforming, healing, and binding up that which has been rent apart by violence. If force is that which turns a subject into an object, a living person into a corpse, it is the Prince of Peace himself, through his own incarnation and resurrection that revives a sin-ridden corpse back to life by infusing it with his own flesh and blood. This is the meaning of Easter, of Christmas, and every day of the liturgical year from the beginning of time itself. Thus, to accept lower case realities of human depravity and suffering as the final word can be viewed as naught but despairing nihilism.
This brings us back to the Israeli State, which has egregiously violated all human dignity after nearly seven decades of theft of Palestinian land and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people. This Easter, I am compelled by the teachings of the Church and by my own conscience to believe that this genocidal regime will fall. I will not cease to pray, advocate, and hope in the waiting. Change is long, and hearts immobilized by the bitter ice of apathy and helplessness melt slow. Such hearts often must break. When a heart is bound to capital, to racism, to colonial propaganda, hopelessness, and broken agency, it freezes. It loses the capacity to move the person to love justice, proclaim the truth with courage, and gaze upon the other with mercy. Yet what a mystery and a gift it is that our Savior is one who loves our hearts, melting them in the purgatorial fire of enduring and eternal Love. Hearts around the country are breaking for Palestine by the grace of God; day by day, resentment by resentment, and prejudice by prejudice. I myself will break my own heart every day until I die if that is the cost of binding it with the cords of faith to the Truth who is Christ Jesus. The people of Palestine are being wiped off the face of the earth by a murderous and genocidal regime. That is truth. The American government has remorselessly and pathologically abetted such murderous hatred. That is truth.
All empires will fade, and Christ is Lord. That is truth. May we never cease to proclaim this, body and soul, as long as we have breath in our lungs.
