city on the hill.

of course, upon hearing the name of the neighborhood sheikh jarrah in the news, i looked at a map. and realized that when steph and i were visiting a good friend in jerusalem after departing from rwanda we stayed in that very neighborhood. in news recently i have seen familiar street scenes.

sometime after that trip, back in the states, we attended a church where the pastor gushed about his own recent trip to israel, how exciting it all was seeing the ancient holy sites. but we felt that if a trip to israel doesn’t acknowledge the surrounding oppression of palestinians, then it is problematic. we saw those holy sites, too, but we could not gush about the excitement of those places only. because we learned that palestinian homes were demolished to make way for the pavilion before the western wall. because we visited a refugee camp in the west bank. we saw the stark, imposed difference in the standard of living between arab east jerusalem and the jewish west. we saw regular israeli citizens with assault rifles slung ominously across their backs in casual settings. we saw soldiers stroll down a crowded street, grab a palestinian man, and take him away while friends and family yelled after them. we walked through the humiliating checkpoint between jerusalem and bethlehem, a checkpoint thousands are forced to pass through every day. and on the palestinian side of that great wall there were written the words, ‘we are not allowed to live and so we wait to die.’ there are some who think the palestinians are not oppressed, that they do not lack essential freedoms, but i don’t believe words like that are written without oppression.

since that trip, over five years ago now, i have been reading regularly about the history of the region and the palestinian experience.

it is a layered and complicated history, certainly. and yet recently that complexity was narrowed down to specific actions. and bombing children and cutting off humanitarian aid is hardly complicated in a good/bad sense. it is bad. defense rhetoric does not justify war crimes.

now before i continue, let us keep in mind that critiques against the israeli government are not examples of anti-semitism. followers of Christ need to be very aware of the history of our religious roots in judaism and the growth of christian anti-semitism (a history well described in Christ actually by james carroll). and a government oppressing people it doesn’t want can hardly be said to be the whole truth of an entire religion and people. nor do these actions mean that all jews are bad. that’s terrible logic.

i support the existence of israel inasmuch as i support a safe place to live for every human. but i believe very strongly that such a safe place should not be brought about by violence, theft, and decades of oppression. one’s safety should not be brought about by removing safety for others. after describing the pain we saw in israel/palestine upon our return to the states, someone, a strong christian, said, with a shrug of their shoulders, ‘well, God wills it….’ i couldn’t believe what i was hearing, and yet i knew that that mentality was widespread in american christian society.

the Jesus i see in the gospels, however, our example of a life to lead (philippians 2), is someone who welcomes those whom mainstream society has deemed undesirable, unwanted (john 4, luke 19, john 8, matthew 8, matthew 25, mark 3, etc.); someone who expected better behavior from us toward our enemies than we expect from them (matthew 5); someone who demands righteousness on a level we cannot understand if we are only thinking within worldly systems (matthew 5, luke 10, matthew 25); someone who seeks to do what is right over what is societally accepted (mark 3, 4); someone who shows with every act in His life – and especially His death – that our God is not a God of the powerful and mighty and violent (Luke 2).

one of the guiding thoughts in my mind as i have done ministry work over these many years is the verse from the christmas carol ‘o holy night’: ‘truly He taught us to love one another/His law is love and His gospel is peace./Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother/and in His name all oppression shall cease.’

and in His name all oppression shall cease. i hold these words very closely with what they seem to stem from, Jesus’ reading from isaiah (Luke 4), proclaiming the nature of His ministry to be freedom on many levels. i cannot set these very strong themes aside when some people argue that israel has a right to do whatever it wants.

thus i cannot support the actions of israel, nor it’s power structures, nor its ideologies (nor the violence done against israelis). our support should be for people, not nations. nations are often built on ideologies that allow people to dehumanize others, to oppress others, to murder other humans, other souls bearing the image of God. this is not the way of Jesus. furthermore, to dehumanize others is to dehumanize oneself. to make others into monsters one must become a different kind of monster.

all this to say, i doubt very much that the God who commands us repeatedly throughout scripture to care for widows and orphans and the oppressed would like us to support the making of widows and orphans and oppression.

and so, for your own continued examinations, some book recommendations. if your reading time is limited, i suggest taking a look at the first three. for an accessible introduction into the pertinent themes, i suggest the graphic novels.

• faith in the face of empire by mitri raheb
• palestine speaks: narratives of life under occupation
• an army like no other: how the israel defense forces made a nation by haim bresheeth-zabner (free ebook here…at the time of writing)
• on palestine by noam chomsky and ilan pappé
• the iron cage: the story of the palestinian struggle for statehood by rashid khalidi
• the question of palestine by edward said
• we belong to the land: the story of a palestinian israeli who lives for peace and reconciliation by elias chacour and mary e. jensen
• jerusalem by guy delisle (graphic novel)
• palestine by joe sacco (graphic novel)
• the stories of ghassan kanafani
• the poems of mahmoud darwish
• nisanit by fadia faqir