The Episcopal Peace Fellowship Palestine Israel Network (EPF PIN) mourns the continuing loss of life in Palestine and Israel. We view the deaths, injuries, and destruction set in motion by the actions of October 7, 2023, from within Gaza and organized by Hamas, as the most recent tragic evidence of the abject failure of the Zionist settler-colonialism project.
The violence did not begin on October 7. The violence began decades ago when militant, colonial forces sought to establish a Jewish immigrant state in the inhabited land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, claiming that land on the basis of religious exclusivity unrecognized by international law, and in the process displacing and dispossessing the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants through systemic and sustained violence. Palestinians who remained in the land became second class citizens of a non-democratic Jewish supremacy state. Palestinians in the West Bank became captives in the machinery of an apartheid regime. Two million persons in the Gaza Strip endure the collective punishment of de facto imprisonment without parole.
The horrific events of Oct. 7, 2023, are the result of people resisting a brutal system of discrimination and seeking an end to their oppression. It is a people's legal right to resist oppression. We do not condone violence, but we recognize a people moved to desperation whose every plea, every attempt at conciliation, every non-violent campaign has been met by obdurate racism, by the shameful silence of the international community, and worst, by complicit participation in the oppression by governments of the United States and western Europe through tacit endorsement, financial support, and diplomatic protection.
On the morning of October 8, Israeli military spokesperson Lt. Col. Richard Hecht said, “Israel is waking up this morning to a terrible morning. There are a lot of people killed ... children, grandmothers, families, bodies.” EPF PIN grieves for these lives needlessly lost with the realization that such “terrible mornings” have been the daily reality for Palestinians for days and weeks and months and years. Influenced by mainstream media reports, many Americans have been unaware of the immense scope of the settler-colonial enterprise underway in Palestine and Israel. Military occupation is only one element of it. Palestinian children are dragged from their beds in pre-dawn raids by Israeli soldiers and held without charge in Israeli military prisons. Palestinians’ homes are torched by mobs of Israeli settlers or destroyed by the Israeli army. Entire Palestinian villages are forced to flee, abandoning the homes and orchards and land that were in their family for generations. And in Gaza, as Jewish Voice for Peace has detailed in their statement, The Root Cause of Violence is Oppression, “For 16 years, the Israeli government has suffocated Palestinians in Gaza under a draconian air, sea and land military blockade, imprisoning and starving two million people and denying them medical aid. The Israeli government routinely massacres Palestinians in Gaza; ten-year-olds who live in Gaza have already been traumatized by seven major bombing campaigns in their short lives.”
The plain but difficult truth is that Israel’s policies toward Palestinians provoke violence. No people will tolerate oppression indefinitely. We pray for peace with justice, but we categorically reject a “peace process” or “negotiation” or “restored period of calm” that continues the underlying daily violence of Israel’s regime, is mediated by biased parties such as the U.S. government, does not abide by international law, and does not begin with unconditional assurance of the freedom, dignity, self-determination, and human rights of all parties. We call on the words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who said, “True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.”
