We have just returned from a short and unusual trip to Palestine, not leading a large group as in the past but traveling with our son and 3 grandchildren.  Our oldest grandson is now working for the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund in Ramallah, so this was opportunity to share his and our experiences of Palestine.

In our short week, we visited Jerusalem, northern and southern West Bank and Gaza.  As all readers will know, conditions have deteriorated dramatically everywhere in Palestine, most notably in Gaza.  As I write this, President Trump, having shifted terminology from “Israeli occupation” to “Israeli control” of the West Bank and Gaza, has just declared Israeli sovereignty over the Golan.  One fears Trump’s next declaration of Israel’s supremacy.

These are, indeed, precarious days for our beloved Palestinian friends and their communities, and everyone we met stressed the deterioration of the situation.  But what was most striking to us were the amazing initiatives that we saw in the face of such oppression, when it would be easy to simply give up in despair.

Gaza starkly embodies the contrast:  conditions could not be worse, with 2 million people blockaded into an area 1/12 the size of Rhode Island, lacking adequate electricity, water, food, shelter.   Unemployment is rampant, the streets teeming with the 75% of the population under 25. The casualties from Israeli snipers at the Great March of Return continue to grow, with more than 250 dead and about 29,000 wounded, most maimed for life.  And yet, life goes on.   Rebuilding from the 2014 assault continues slowly with people using home-size cement mixers to try to construct multi-floor buildings.  

We continue to be amazed and inspired by the work at Al Ahli Arab Hospital (Episcopal), where we spent 2 days.  Ahli is not a first line hospital for emergencies, but it serves as a specialty hospital caring for cases that the overwhelmed state hospitals cannot serve.  We visited the orthopedics department that provides care for the maimed, the women’s center with its extensive breast cancer program, the nutrition department that is fighting epidemic child malnutrition, the psycho-social program serving the vast number of children with PTSD.  And we happened into the opening day of a workshop in the use of laparoscopic surgery taught by doctors from Scotland and their Jerusalem counterparts.  

Given the dramatic funding cuts from UNRWA and USAID, one might think the hospital would retreat into survival mode, but each time we visit, there is a new initiative underway that serves the greater Gaza community.  Suhaila Tarazi, the Director of Ahli, summed up the philosophy of the hospital, “We don’t know the word impossible.”  

That was the theme in all our other visits:  Mazin and Jessie Qumsiyeh continue their remarkable work at the Palestinian Museum of Natural History, preserving the flora and fauna of Palestine and developing new methods of agriculture for even the smallest plots of land.  The fight to preserve the Bedouin communities from forced removal continues among the Jahalin, whom we visited at Al Khan al Amar, where the school is made of tires and mud because the Israelis prohibit permanent structures.  Sabeel has dramatically extended its local programming to empower the youth of the West Bank and Jerusalem with liberation theology.  The Episcopal Vocational and Technological Center has created a guesthouse where we stayed in Ramallah, part of an extensive computer and hospitality program that gives non-academic young people job skills.  And Palestinians continue to preserve their cultural heritage as we experienced at a sold-out dabke dance and music festival.

Each time we go to Palestine, we wonder if it would be better to contribute the money spent on travel to these and similar projects, but the warm welcome we received everywhere reminded us that there is a ministry of presence, a time to simply be with those who are suffering so deeply but are constantly working to insure there will always be a Palestine.  Our long-time friend and staff member at Ahli Hospital shared a story that sticks with us.  He has 5 children and is in debt because he has built a home and is educating his children for the future.  His oldest child has finished university and cannot find a job in Gaza; his second child, a daughter, is studying accounting, and feels the fees are too high when job prospects are low.  But our friend is emphatic that she continue her course because if there is no work now, “someday there will be.”  

It is this amazing sumud, this steadfastness in the face of such adversity that inspires us.  Surely, we cannot give way to despair when those whose lives are so deeply impacted continue not only to survive but to innovate.  They are doing their work there.  We must do our work here, telling their stories and supporting them however we can.

At really successful art openings the crush of excited people makes it hard to check out the art. Similarly, the annual “Israel Lobby and American Policy” conference in DC was so jammed with fascinating people from all over who are working to break Israel’s death grip on Palestine and on U.S. policy that it was easy to miss the actual program! Luckily, it’s easy to catch videos of the presentations on a free “playlist”. You won’t get the networking and positive energy of having been physically at the National Press Club on 22 March, but you can see and hear the powerful speakers buoyed up by a rapt audience of hundreds of activists and experts. 

Most awesome, perhaps, was the keynote address by Susan Abulhawa. A trained scientist with great literary gifts, she led us on an eye-opening tour of Israel “Beyond Apartheid,” asking us temporarily to look away from the system of Apartheid that has blighted Palestinians’ existence for the last 70 years. Instead, she tallied some of Israel’s other sinister accomplishments in the areas of ecological destruction, the development and global spread of “death, surveillance and suppression tech and tactics,” support of anti-democratic forces worldwide, and destruction of the ancient histories and cultures of Palestine and of its non-Jewish religious heritage: You’ve heard of Israel, the “environmental wonder-worker” who made the desert bloom? Well, Palestine wasn’t a desert to start with, she noted. As for making it bloom, check out the Jordan River, or what’s left of it, the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee; or the dumping of toxic waste on Palestinian villages; the destruction of olive orchards and the planting of fire-prone European trees; the draining of precious wetlands, etc.

Is Israeli innovation celebrated? It’s all about military and police weaponry and tactics to control unhappy populations. Abulhawa ran the numbers to show Israel is second only to Saudi Arabia in military spending per capita and way ahead of the world in military/police exports per capita. Their success is due to Israel’s ability to test its lethal products on live Palestinians.

Abulhawa surveyed a long list of genocidal, pariah regimes that Israel has supplied with weaponry and training, often covertly and often by breaking UN arms embargoes. Passionate support for Apartheid South Africa set the standard early on. Along with selling weapons, Israel’s alliances have given moral support and cover to thuggish–and even overtly anti-Semitic– regimes from Southeast Asia to Europe to Central and South America – and above all in Africa.

She outlined decades of destruction and vandalization of mosques, churches and cemeteries, along with the destruction of archeological sites and artifacts from non-Jewish cultures in Palestine’s uniquely significant territory.  She warned that Israel is “moving forcefully against al Aqsa, perhaps the last frontier.”

Abulhawa argued that Israel is bad news for many more people than just Palestinians, calling it “a global force for violence, suppression, plunder, paranoia, greed, war, ecological destruction, erasure of history and culture, and supremacism.” The good news, she said, is that Palestinians are “on a time-tested trajectory to liberation,” however “difficult and bloody” it may be.

Earlier, Grant Smith of the Institute for Research on Middle East Policy (IRmep), which co-sponsored the conference with the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, had focused on the many tentacles of subversion and perversion of U.S. laws and government agencies, from the White House on down, brought about by the Israel Lobby. Detailing three prolonged campaigns by IRmep to win court orders to get access to information on what our government has been doing, Smith showed how the Lobby “supplants, silences and exploits” the functions of U.S. and state governments.

Good news was shared by Martin McMahon, the attorney who is litigating a potentially game-changing lawsuit against Sheldon Adelson, Eliot Abrams and some 40 individuals, non-profit foundations and banks which have enabled the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza. He spoke in the wake of a federal appeals court’s resounding vindication of the legitimacy of the lawsuit, which invokes jurisdiction under the Alien Tort Statute and alleges the aiding and abetting of genocide against the Palestinians. Al Tamimi, et. al. v. Adelson (No. 17-5207, D.C. Cir., decision Feb. 19, 2019).

The three-judge court unanimously reversed the trial judge’s dismissal of the suit, which she had ruled presents a “political question” reserved to the Congress and the President. The appellate panel ruled that claims of genocide against violent Israeli settlers could be proved at trial, if the plaintiffs, Palestinians and Palestinian Americans, submit solid evidence.

“This ruling provides an unprecedented opportunity in the U.S. for the Palestinian victims of

Israeli aggression and ethnic cleansing to fairly prove their claims in a court of law,” McMahon said in a statement. He made clear, however, that his team is in need of a lot of aid and support from supporters of Palestinian rights as the defendants have the toughest lawyers money can buy, as well as all the other political and media assets of the Israel Lobby. 

Other fascinating and important speeches were given, including by Ali Abunimah, the founder of the Electronic Intifada, who discussed an extraordinary undercover investigative report on the Israel Lobby that Al Jazeera was afraid to air. A leaked copy of the video is available on the EI website. It details the techniques and names the organizations that are behind the smears and deceptions perpetrated by the Lobby. 

James North of Mondoweiss served up a biting analysis of the many ways “The New York Times Rigs News on Israel-Palestine” to hide the misdeeds or soften the image of Israel. 

Brad Parker of Defense for Children International-Palestine explained how best to reach members of Congress and other political figures with tightly targeted human rights issues, such as Israeli child-detention practices. 

Three local activists from Virginia described how they have created remarkably successful groups and campaigns to counter increasing efforts by the Lobby to influence state and local policies, from opposing anti-BDS legislation and policies, and pro-Israel economic “advisory” groups to fighting Lobby moves to politicize K-12 textbooks.

All of the program offerings are well worth viewing online. But when the Israel Lobby conference meets in Spring 2020 at the Press Club, dedicated activists really should try to be there.

Homily, PIN Retreat Chicago, March 17, 2019, by Kathy Christison

I must say, this really is preaching to the choir!

We’ve been hearing a lot these last few days about love, because this is what the bishops at their spring meeting emphasized.  I’d also like to talk about love—meaning God’s love for all people equally—and also about hope.

In a lot of ways, this means liberation theology.  I’ve been thinking a lot lately about liberation theology because this is what I’ve been dealing with in theology school.  And it astounds me—the notion that I could possibly be a theologian simply because I’m about to get a degree from a theology school!

But in fact it’s not really that complicated or esoteric.  I think all of us here are “liberation theologians”: liberation theologians because we’re gathered here as church people to be involved in finding a way to liberation on behalf of Palestinians—which means working to bring justice to Palestinians.  Working and praxis.  Without action and work—without praxis—liberation theology is nothing but empty words.  All theology without praxis is theorizing about God.  Liberation theology without praxis is simply talking a good game without doing anything.  But, because we’re working as church people, trying to work through our church and alongside the Palestinians, and working with God, we are all doing theology.  We’re doing the praxis that makes theology into something meaningful in practical terms.

For us, praxis first of all means listening to, hearing and understanding, what Palestinians have to say about the injustices being done to them, the outrage they feel, the freedoms they’ve been deprived of, the psychological and physical oppression being inflicted on them.  Then it means speaking out, writing, making this a political issue, lobbying, talking to congresspeople and policymakers and church leaders—and being in solidarity with Palestinians.  This solidarity is hugely important for Palestinians, psychologically if in no other way.

Liberation theology is about love and hope.  And, no matter how unctuous and gushy this might sound to our practical, realistic minds—and no matter how suspicious we all may be about the real meaning of the professions of love coming out of the just-concluded Episcopal bishop’s meeting—this is serious stuff.  Real love is about working hard, and working hard some more, and continuing to work hard, even when nothing seems to happen, even when it seems impossible.  And even when there seems little hope.

This is not happy work.

I want to tell you a story that’s been on my mind for the last several days that shows what this all means—the love and the hope, as well as the despair, which all come together.  You may all have heard of a young man from Gaza named Ahmed Abu Artema, who basically started the Great March of Return almost exactly a year ago when he posted on Facebook a suggestion that 200,000 Palestinians should walk to the border wall/fence around Gaza, non-violently, and ask to be able to return to their homes.  Something like 70 or 75 percent of Gaza’s two million people are refugees from homes and land that are now inside Israel, and from which they are barred.

Of course, the Palestinian response to Abu Artema’s post has been overwhelming; Israel’s response has been vicious and violent.  Hundreds of Palestinian civilians have been shot to death by Israeli snipers—sharpshooters who could see whom they were shooting at—including children, medical people in medical dress, journalists wearing vests marked as PRESS in large letters, the elderly.

Thousands have been wounded, including hundreds of teenage boys and young men shot in the leg or in both legs who have had to have limbs amputated.  This is deliberate, of course: essentially shooting the legs out from under Palestine’s future.

Last Tuesday evening, Ahmed Abu Artema spoke in Santa Fe, where I live.  He described the situation in Gaza—a tiny territory (1/10 the size of Rhode Island, our smallest state), with two million people blockaded in, under Israeli siege for the last 12 years, and so on, as we all know.

Abu Artema is 35 years old, but he’s never until now been outside of Gaza.  He said the first time he ever saw an airplane other than Israeli bombers and fighter jets was when he boarded a plane in Cairo to fly to the US!  But through all this, he emphasized (with no little pleasure because of his own role) that the weekly March of Return, which will reach 52 weeks on March 22, next Friday, has restored hope among Gazans, given them something to live for and look forward to.  And it has restored some cultural pride.

It gives them agency, he said—which I will tell you from a liberation theology standpoint is immensely important for any oppressed population.  He said over and over that Gazans are “screaming for life,” and that they need to be able to get out.  And, combining all those emotions I was talking about—love and hope and despair—he said the Gazans’ desire for life is stronger than their despair.  He gave me hope, along with everyone in the audience.

When I got back home that evening, I found among my voluminous emails an article, strangely enough from the Wall Street Journal, that gave a sympathetic picture of Gaza and the March.  But it also showed how hope and despair go together.  The article began with the story of a 17-year-old boy who was shot in the leg a few months ago and had to have the leg amputated.  He tries to be happy and appear brave in front of his family, but one night his father couldn’t find him and went out looking for him.  He found the boy in a cemetery where his amputated leg had been buried, sobbing.  Sobbing over his lost leg.

As I said, our work is not happy.  Gustavo Gutiérrez, the Latin American priest who’s sort of the father of liberation theology, once wrote that the challenge of this theology is how it could be possible “to tell the poor, who are forced to live in conditions that embody a denial of love, that God loves them.”  How to tell the poor, by which he means everyone who is socially or economically or politically oppressed that God loves them, when they live in horrible circumstances where God appears not to be present.

So, this is tough work.  But as liberation theologians and solidarity activists, we can be the love and the hope that Palestinians depend on: we can show the love of God, help them see, through what we do, that God does love them, no matter what things look like.  And we can help bring hope through our work.

Liberation theology is resistance to power—the oppressive, colonialist power of governments and economic systems, and of the church—and it speaks truth to that power, it calls out injustice.  Jesus was a liberation theologian, and he always spoke defiance to power.  He knew injustice when he saw it, and he defied it.  We can do no less.

EPF PIN activities coordinator Harry Gunkel writes about funding cuts to USAID programs in Palestine.

When USAID completes a construction project or funds the acquisition of new equipment, for example at a hospital, it places a plaque stating that the work is “a gift of the American people”. During the past year, by actions of the current American government, this phrase has become a cruel joke for the Palestinian people.

The US has now completely shut down all projects of USAID (US Agency for International Development) in the West Bank and Gaza, about $200 million worth. The agency had been the primary supporter of food aid in the Palestinian territories, as well as an important supporter of infrastructure development in the water and sanitation, health, and education sectors. Additionally, US AID projects in the West Bank and Gaza primarily employed Palestinians, jobs sorely needed in a place where jobs are life-threateningly scarce. 

And within a week of first announcing the USAID cuts, the Trump administration also slashed its support to UNRWA by about half. UNRWA is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in the Middle East, established in 1947 when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians became refugees as they were displaced from their homes to make way for the new state of Israel. Today, about 40% of Palestinians in the West Bank and two-thirds of Gazans are refugees who depend on UNRWA for housing, education and health care. 

US officials made no secret of the reason for their actions – to try to force the Palestinian Authority to accept its new, still secret “peace plan” for Israel and Palestine. Although the plan itself, long in coming, has not been presented yet, early indications are that it will continue to enforce Israeli hegemony over the region, ensuring that Palestinians remain unfree and stateless. In yet another display of willful ignorance, the administration’s plan will throw money at Palestinians to try to purchase their silence and acquiescence. It won’t work as anyone who has spent any time at all with Palestinian people will know. 

But however ill-conceived, these moves will result in millions of Palestinians, already suffering grotesque injustice and deprivation at the hands of the government of Israel, suffering more. Less food, poorer housing, fewer opportunities, and poorer health. All at the hands of the American government and the people it represents. You and me. No longer gifts from the American people, now we will deliver lashes of the whip. Now in Palestine we will make ourselves known by our malice and cruelty. Indeed, as Adam Serwer writes in The Atlantic, “cruelty is the point” of much of this administration’s actions.

This is no paean to USAID, which is hardly a paragon of altruism. As an agency of the US State Department, the strings attached to projects are strong and stretch straight back to Washington, DC. I worked for a USAID healthcare project in the West Bank that was terminated two years into its five-year plan because a member of Congress got miffed at the Palestinian Authority. That pettiness was repeated on a Gaza project soon after, but this bad behavior does not negate the good that was done during the lives of the projects. The chimerical character of US AID is not the point; harming and abusing helpless people in need is.  

Some will argue that these moves represent realpolitik, playing necessary hardball to achieve our international objectives, but in fact, this is nothing less than collective punishment. It’s not the first time Israel or the US has practiced collective punishment against the Palestinian nation; indeed, it’s a favorite in our bulging arsenal of weapons. Article 32 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits exactly this kind of action against civilian populations, so these actions are not only immoral, they are illegal. They are also as good an example as you might find of racism on grand scale. How else explain causing such injury to entire populations unless the people being injured are objectified into other than or less than? Think slavery. Think brown children in cages at the US-Mexico border. 

Some actions of government can be overlooked or shrugged off as unfortunate consequences of our bureaucratic morass. But others, like this, cross the line. This may be the way of governments and empires, but since Calvary it has not been the way of those who claim to follow Jesus. We must say No, not in my name. We must stand against international objectives that include hurting children and the ill.  

Mind you, Palestinians will not keen and wring their hands over these assaults from the American people. They will set to do what’s needed. They will continue to stand steadfast and rise in resistance. We must rise with them.  

Last week we lifted up the Ecumenical Statement  on policy toward Israel and Palestine that was sent to members of Congress and the White House and we encouraged readers to take their own actions by also sending the statement to their representatives.

Today, we call readers’ attention to the unfortunate absence of the Episcopal Church from signatories of the statement. EPF PIN regrets the missed opportunity to add our collective voice to the call for justice. We concur with Michelle Alexander in her recent NY Times editorial that it is “Time to Break the Silence on Palestine”. Our own statement follows and we urge readers to share their concerns with church leaders as well as within their own congregations.

Having just passed another season to mark the nativity of our Lord, the members and supporters of the Palestine Israel Network of the Episcopal Peace Fellowship (EPF PIN) are especially mindful of our Church’s important actions recently at General Convention regarding Palestine/Israel, the land of Jesus’ life and ministry.

So it was with surprise and distress the EPF PIN noted the absence of the Episcopal Church from the signatories to the November 14 “Ecumenical Statement on Current U.S. Policy and Israel/Palestine”. Considering the concern shown by bishops and deputies in passing six resolutions at the Convention, as well as the mounting tragedies for the Palestinian people and the ever-deteriorating prospects for a just peace in the region, we would have expected our Church to join our many ecumenical partners in supporting this important message.

The Episcopal Church is on record in support of the issues raised in the Statement: the status of Jerusalem, the continuing displacement of refugees, and the problematic presence and growth of Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank, so we are confused about our Church’s absence of support. The Statement also addressed US de-funding of humanitarian assistance programs for Palestinians. This withdrawal of financial support, which was addressed in one of the six resolutions passed at Convention, will further endanger millions of Palestinians.

As leaders of PIN, we are concerned about the Church’s failure to sign and support this important Statement, and we welcome the opportunity to better understand the decision. We have spent years of time cumulatively in the West Bank and Gaza. Some of us have lived there, most have visited many times over the course of decades, and we all have long standing personal relationships with both Palestinians and Israeli Jews. As a result, we are not naive about the situation; indeed, we believe our long engagement in and understanding of its many complexities is uniquely sophisticated.

Finally, we cannot fail to note with sadness and dismay the recent efforts to portray advocacy for Palestinian human rights as antisemitic, an egregious and cynical misrepresentation callously deployed in order to stifle honest debate. We hope that members of our Church, especially deputies and bishops, will not be misled by such specious rhetoric. We are reminded of the 1991 General Convention resolution D122 which notes “a distinction exists between the propriety of legitimate criticism of Israeli government policy and the impropriety of Anti-Jewish prejudice.”

Kairos Palestine recently held a 9th anniversary celebration and gathering in Bethlehem. Read the statement coming out of the gathering here.  We celebrate it with this essay by EPF PIN member Kathy Christison:

The weekly London Economist recently ran an article more or less pronouncing the death of Liberation Theology in Latin America and, by implication, everywhere else as well.  But, from the perspective of those millions around the world who live in injustice and oppression—including Palestinians and the theologians and spiritual leaders who minister to them—this misguided death knell for a theology that gives them spiritual succor and hope in their misery comes as an insensitive assertion that God has abandoned them.  In fact, however, the Economist fails to understand the true nature of liberation theology and the provenance under which it exists and is called forth.

Taking off from the Vatican’s canonization in October of Archbishop Óscar Romero, the El Salvadoran Catholic prelate assassinated on the altar by rightwing militiamen in 1980, the article (signed only by “B.C.”) vaguely hints that Romero’s entry into sainthood marks the capstone of the vast liberation theology movement that arose throughout Latin America in the 1960s and ‘70s.  But it is not clear whether the author believes liberation theology ultimately succeeded or failed.  Observing rather too sweepingly that “the liberationists’ critique of inequality has now passed into the standard thinking of the Vatican,” B.C. suggests that liberation theology might now take its success and pass peacefully from the political scene, like other past transitory social movements.  But at the same time, B.C. says, the Catholic Church is losing numbers precipitately in South America—from 90 percent of that population in 1970 to a predicted 50 percent by the end of the next decade—and so the Catholic Church is losing its grip on theology for the oppressed.

These assertions are mostly non sequiturs, telling us nothing about the spiritual essence of any of the several liberation theologies; nothing about the beauty of the path these theologies offer the oppressed and marginalized in their various contexts, whether their suffering is political, social, economic, or some combination of these; nothing about liberation theology’s connection with God, which comes in diverse ways according to each suffering community’s needs.

Most essentially, liberation theology is not what the Economist describes.  It is not a proprietary office of the Catholic Church or of any particular “theology central,” and it has never been a theology only for Latin America.  The Vatican and the Latin American bishops did in the 1960s enunciate a seminal doctrine asserting that God has a “preferential option for the poor” but, like everything else about liberation theology, this thinking originates in the gospel, not from the Church.  It comes not from the Church preaching the gospel to the poor and marginalized, but from the oppressed themselves speaking out through the gospel about their own concerns, against the collective power of secular governments and coopted churches.

As it began in Latin America and wherever it is enunciated today, liberation theology is a grassroots, bottom-up rather than top-down theology, and a form of resistance by the oppressed to the Euro-centric, colonialist structures that have dominated church and state for so many centuries.  It is the oppressed who preach the gospel of justice to church hierarchies, not the reverse.  Kairos Palestine, issued by local Christian leaders in Jerusalem in 2009 to bring the plight of Palestinians to wider church attention, is a prime example of this grassroots testimony.  The South Africa Kairos Document issued by anti-apartheid theologians in 1985 was the same.

Liberation theology is a set of diverse contextual theologies formulated more or less spontaneously in response to particular forms of oppression in particular geographical areas and speaking out in the particular vernacular of the oppressed.  The late Black Protestant theologian James Cone, for instance, enunciated a liberation theology for Blacks almost simultaneously with Gustavo Gutiérrez’s classic 1970 explication of Latin American liberation theology, A Theology of Liberation, and without knowing anything about the Latin American version.  Feminist and womanist theologies have also developed without particular reference to Catholicism or to Latin America.

Palestinian liberation theology—formulated most notably by Palestinian Episcopal priest Naim Ateek beginning in the 1980s and ‘90s in several books and through the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem, which he co-founded in 1990—is unique among liberation theologies because, by politically challenging Israeli domination and the secular and religious powers that support that system of domination, it is standing up to an oppressive system of nationalism—exclusive Jewish nationalism—that by its very nature denies any notion of non-Jewish equality.  This Palestinian theology, uniquely, rests its call for justice, equality, and an end to oppression on precisely the same scriptural foundations that Israel and Zionism employ to justify Jewish supremacy.  

Liberation theology in all its variations is ecumenical and, although based in Christianity, speaks not for, but on behalf of people of any faith, or of none, who suffer secular or religious injustice.  It is shaped by each community’s view of how God relates to them as communities with distinct needs but universally deserving of justice and equality in their separate contexts.  In calling for liberation from Israel’s oppression, Palestinian liberation theology speaks on behalf not only of Palestinian Christians, but also of their many Muslim compatriots.

God’s relationship with humanity and especially with oppressed humanity is the point at which liberation theology’s universality enters in: this point is God’s love for all humankind equally and concern that all of humankind live in justice.  This point of universality is God’s effort, through God’s own preferential option for the disadvantaged, to raise all people to an equal level of justice and love.  This theology is the cri de cœur of the oppressed seeking God’s help and solidarity as they struggle against the powers, secular and religious, that created oppression in the first place, and it is God’s promise, in response, to be with all those who suffer.

D038 Civil Rights and Equality for All in Israel [The House of Bishops declined to concur on this resolution]

My name is Marcelle and I am from Bethlehem in Palestine.  As a Palestinian Christian, I often feel forgotten by my international Christian family.  Please visit our beautiful historic and ancient stones and visit us, the living stones.

One caution – if you come to see us, you may feel overwhelmed and hopeless, but you will also see and know that despite all the challenges, hardships, and animosity, we continue to survive and live in our ancestral land. We are a people of great resilience.

I almost didn’t make it into this world.  On Good Friday in 1991, as my mother and grandmother were walking back from Church service, Israeli soldiers shot teargas at my pregnant mother.  Luckily, we both survived. This is significant because a few years earlier, episodes of tear gas fired by Israeli soldiers caused by aunt to lose three pregnancies.  No pregnant woman should have to live in constant fear of losing their unborn baby to tear gas.  This is not an ethnical nor a normal way of life.

Palestinians in Israel live under constant challenges and restrictions imposed by the Israeli military and government.  These range from restrictions on travel, marriage, water availability, land ownership, and even educational opportunities.

In 2003, Israel passed a law banning family reunification for Israeli citizens who are Palestinians. This means that a Palestinian Israeli citizen cannot live with their Palestinian spouse from the West Bank or Gaza. I have a family member who has Israeli citizenship and lives in Haifa. He fell in love with a Palestinian from Bethlehem. According to Israel’s discriminatory law (which was renewed in 2016), they are unable to live in the same house in Israel. They have now emigrated to Canada. Having to choose between the person you love and having the opportunity to live in your homeland is a terrible choice.  I have several Palestinian Christian friends who are currently fighting in the Israeli court for the right to live with their spouse. What kind of world is this, where you need to censor who you fall in love with and marry? What if this was your son or daughter? Do you have the heart to tell them that because their spouse doesn’t have the same driver’s license as they do, they cannot, by law, be together?

As a Palestinian Christian from Bethlehem, I am not allowed to marry a Palestinian Christian Israeli citizen from Nazareth. If this was in Jesus’ time, what would Mary and Joseph do?

Please support Palestinian Israeli citizens to marry whomever they want and to have equality. Please support D038 civil rights and equality for all in Israel.

D028 Freedom of Speech and the Right to Boycott [the House of Deputies rejected this resolution.]

Good morning, my name is Alex Kirreh and I’m a Palestinian Christian. My roots with the Episcopalian church run very deep, my parents were actually married in St George’s church in Jerusalem by reverend Naim Ateek.   For decades, the Episcopalian Church has given my family both literal and figurative refuge. Literally, when my grandparents’ home was bombed and they were forced to flee along with 750,000 other Palestinians in what is now known as the Nakba, the Episcopalian church gave them food and shelter. Figuratively speaking, the Episcopalian church gave my family refuge from the mental and emotional anguish that is innate to living under a brutal military occupation. I’m also very proud to be speaking here because this church has stood in solidarity with human rights movements for years. In the 1960’s, the Episcopalian church honored and mourned martyrs of the civil rights movement. In the 1970’s, the church supported homosexuality when it was not only taboo to talk about, but criminalized to engage in. Now, in 2018, we have a new human rights movement; that is, the suppression of Palestinian voices and those who support our plight at a local, state, and federal level through anti-BDS legislation. This issue is especially pertinent to me, seeing as though I just graduated high school & fear that because of this legislation, my university will eliminate organizations that aim to give Palestinians such as myself a platform to be openly and unapologetically Palestinian. In conclusion, I implore the Episcopal Church to support resolution D028 not only to show solidarity with the Palestinian people, but to uphold the integrity and history of the church in its support for human rights and freedom. Thank you.

B019 Impact Investing for Palestine [No further action taken on the committee’s recommendation]

My name is Anna Baltzer and I am a Jewish American speaking against B019, not because I oppose investment, but because B019 positions investment in Palestinian infrastructure as a substitute for divesting from the violence of Israel’s occupation.

Palestinian Christians have spoken clearly asking for a basic moral obligation to do no harm — to stop investing in and profiting from their misery.

Charity has an important place, but the Church sending money to rebuild Palestinian homes while the Church continues to invest in their destruction is neither effective nor moral.

I’d like to read a quote from Alex Awad, a teacher at Bethlehem Bible College:

“We are not asking for charity. We are asking for freedom. We are smart, educated, God-loving people. We are perfectly capable of building up our own economy, but it is impossible as long as the occupation destroys everything we build. Investing without divesting is like trying to improve our prison. We are asking you, as Christians, to help liberate us from our prison.”

This resolution’s explanation ends with a quotation from Palestinian businessman Zahi Khouri. Yet Khouri himself is a critic of investment without divestment. In his own words, simple investment “gives the appearance of positive movement while distracting from the real issues…. [It] offers economic crumbs in an effort to normalize and better manage the occupation.”

I know divestment is controversial — like all justice issues once were. It is easy to say today that we are against Jim Crow and slavery. What about when they were divisive? Would we have stood up when it counted most? Prophetic faith always requires courage.

Do not be intimidated. There is nothing Jewish about military occupation; and there is nothing anti-Jewish about ending your church’s involvement in it. Jewish opinions are changing quickly. You have to follow your own conscience.

Let us not say that on the day when Palestinian Christians cried out for justice from the Episcopal Church, they were given money instead. If you truly want to help the Palestinian people, I urge you to listen to what they are asking for.

Thanks to EPF PIN member Steve France for attending and reporting on this program.

It seemed maybe it was a dark joke when Yousef Bashir, a young Gazan, said Israel’s leaders sometimes bomb Gaza out of “boredom.” He was talking to an audience at the Foundation for Middle East Peace about the trauma of growing up in Gaza. When question time came he was challenged by a man who said Israel fights in Gaza to protect itself from Hamas, not out of boredom. But Yousef told what he would see the IDF soldiers do who occupied parts of his family’s home for almost five years during the Second Intifada (the home was right next to a militant Jewish settlement): He would watch the snipers sitting around getting bored. Then one of them would shoot a dog or a goat, just wounding it, and another would do the same and a third would fire the kill shot. This was how they entertained themselves, Yousef explained. The leaders are no different, he added, saying they shoot and bomb to entertain Israeli voters.

He might have pointed to something more personal: the day in 2004 that a UN group got a permit to visit Yousef’s home and a soldier randomly shot 15-year-old Yousef in the spine as he was waving good-bye to them. He had already told the audience about this, but had emphasized his good fortune in having the UN group drive him directly to a local hospital. Soon, he found himself in a Tel Aviv hospital for a long stay. The point, he told the audience, was how shocked he was to see Israelis doing good. They saved his life. The bullet is still in his back, but 16 months of rehab gave him back the ability to walk. What sort of irritation or boredom motivated the man who shot him he did not say.

The other young Gazan speaking at the “Gaza’s Next Generation” program Aug. 16 was Mohammed Eid. He told of working as an UNRWA first responder during the 51-day attack on Gaza in 2014 known as “Operation Protective Edge.” That was when he was rushed to a scene of carnage only to see his family’s home had just been blown up. “I purposely avoided being the first one to go in. I didn’t want to be the one to have to identify my family members,” he told the audience. Thankfully, they had gotten out in time and were not injured. But it was the second family home he had seen destroyed, the first one having been suddenly bulldozed a few years earlier to create a larger buffer zone around Gaza. Not being from Gaza, the family had of course already lost their home in Northern Palestine in the Nakba.

Maybe the most amazing part of hearing the two young men tell their stories and discuss the issues was seeing that they had survived the unrelenting hardship, humiliation and terror of life in Gaza not only intact but possessed of such inner peace. They were remarkably poised, modest, highly educated, highly articulate and deeply committed to nonviolence. Yousef, who now works with the PLO Delegation in DC, has a master’s from Brandeis; Mohammed is getting a master’s from Duke and spent the summer volunteering with UNRWA. Their families have been rock solid – Yousef’s father, a farmer and literature teacher, inculcated an uncompromising ideology of peace and is the star of Yousef’s forthcoming book, “The Words of My Father.” His son said that he considers any show of anger to be a “defeat.” Mohammed’s family lost everything three times but had each other and always rebuilt their lives. Leaving Gaza to study in the U.S he had everything taken away from him but enjoyed the generosity of his American hosts. Their commitment to their people and to peace and justice seemed serenely unshakable.