The blind man said, "My Teacher, let me see again.." (Mark 10:51)
I wonder now if solidarity is not as simple as aligning with a cause, though the cause be righteous and urgent; if it's not as simple as choosing a side. Perhaps solidarity aims not so much to enlist as to convert, not so much to justify as to transfigure. So I pay close attention in these streets to my friends Tarek and Zoughbi Zoughbi, as each bears witness to life in Bethlehem, the suffering in their city, the dissolution of a rich and ancient culture, the emigration of so many, many friends. Like the great teachers and gurus of old, they ask for something like companionship, something like accompaniment: "Come, follow me."
1. The physical 'architecture' of this occupation includes hundreds of demeaning checkpoints, preventing freedom of movement and association; apartheid itself, a system of separation and diminishment; collective punishment inscribed upon every part of their lives; the cruel splitting of Jerusalem from Bethlehem, with its economic, social and spiritual consequences.
4. And this, then, creates a reality which any family, any individual with resources, yearns to escape. Emigration is no doubt part of the occupier's plan. Essential to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Tarek notes that almost 100% of young people are aching to get out, to emigrate: they're much less interested than ever before in civic life, community engagement, the kinds of activities that build resistant spirit and relational power. I wonder aloud if every one of those 1000 families who've left (for Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, the US, Canada) is a nakba in and unto themselves, a catastrophe felt in the hearts and economies and churches and mosques here. "Yes," Zoughbi says quickly. "That is it." Zoughbi does everything he can to urge friends, colleagues, artists, young students to stay and work for their freedom and futures here. It's a tough sell.
The murder of two Israeli embassy aides in DC this week understandably shakes our hearts, and shatters that illusion we cherish (between sudden or mass killings) that our American streets are deservedly safe and free from violence. But vengeance is epidemic among us, grievance is weaponized, and notions of retributive violence rule the halls of congress, the psyche of social media, and the nightmares of so many American men. This week, that evil struck two young Israelis in Washington. And this is reason enough for grief, and a deep searching of our shared spirit, our American soul. As we might have done after Charleston and Charlottesville, after Pittsburgh and Orlando, after Las Vegas and Sandy Hook.
In "The World after Gaza," Pankaj Mishra argues against notions of history and justice that posit pure evil and unblemished victims: not because there aren't hideously cruel despots among us, and not because victims are somehow complicit in their suffering. Retributive justice requires unquestionably good guys and disgustingly bad guys, righteous causes and terrorists, and then promises moral satisfaction when punishment is meted out. Restorative justice (on the other hand) looks to a landscape populated by complex human communities and imagines wholeness and sustainability: every community and every member created for beauty and wonder, every community and every member made "in the image of the divine," every community and every member complicated by fear and doubt and desires for self-protection. "Is it possible," Mishra asks, "to rescue visions of justice and solidarity from zero-sum contests for recognition and identity, and the strange quests for guiltlessness?" Isn't our work about a future of shared responsibility, security grounded in deepening respect, and multicultural projects generously informed by our varied, often painful experiences of injustice and survival?
And this is where--rather than blaming my colleagues with Jewish Voice for Peace or the Center for Jewish Nonviolence for what happened in DC--I hope we'll continue to insist on brave and heartbreaking conversations, daring and big-hearted coalitions, and extended tables where traumas are shared, survivors of the Shoah breaking bread with Palestinians in the West Bank, South African practitioners of liberation with Jewish civil rights pioneers, indigenous defenders of sacred rivers and lakes with refugees of ecocide wherever they may be. For it is at these "intersections," and in the work and imagination that arises there, that our true human hope may well be found...
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| Tarek Zoughbi, the West Bank |
Solidarity involves me, then, in a kind of moral and spiritual hospitality: inviting the other into the living room of my conscience, my prayer life, my heart. In that space, I listen carefully, actively, to their pain and their analysis, to their experience of diminishment and their defiant courage. I don't pretend to share these things, or know them; but I do endeavor to grasp their significance and the desires of dear and godly human beings. Their suffering is like a sacred text before me, which now implicates me in a community of care, resistance and (yes) solidarity...
This is just some of what these two men, father and son, are teaching me this month. To love my neighbors now means something more than conformity, some more than performative indigation. Love implicates me in their pain, and then, their hope.
Apartheid only begins to describe the "matrix of control" (Zoughbi's phrase) they experience every day, the steady erosion not only of human rights, but of culture and community, patterns of celebration and friendship, trust among neighbors and shared commitment to futures and progress. Today, in conversation with an delegation of church leaders from London, the two offered another master class in this particular "matrix" and how it works:
From nakba to occupation, from apartheid to ethnic cleansing:
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| Skunk Water Pump |
Among other things, this system of separation prevents many couples from living together, from enjoying and building family life together--and this indeed is Zoughbi's reality. His dear wife Elaine is rarely able to be with him here, and then only for brief (approved) periods of time. She lives instead in Michigan.
The wall towering above Wi'am features a pump that occasionally fires "skunk water" at children playing on swingsets and staff members feeding chickens. Imagine that: an occupying force so intent on driving a people away that they use stinky, sour, miserable "skunk water" to terrorize its children...
2. This has, over many decades now, strangled the economies of Bethlehem and the West Bank: unemployment here (since 2023) is 75%, poverty is at 35%, opportunities for young people are nonexistent, families are separated, despair is everywhere felt. In the end game of Israel's obliteration of Gaza, observes describe "slow" starvation as a strategy--by which the obliterating power aims to so demoralize and weaken the obliterated that the latter welcomes its own displacement and exile. But that's not just the Gazan strategy. The settlement enterprise and occupation here works for the same goals in the West Bank: to so demoralize and weaken Palestinian communities that they scatter across the globe and accept a crippled long term plan for those who remain. It's sounds grim. And it is grim. Buttressed by US diplomatic cover and aid over many, many decades; and especially now.
And all of this, all of it, affects everday life...within families, among neighbors, at school...tension, conflict, physical and mental health...While illegal settlements have running water in abundance, and green lawns, and more than a few swimming pools and recreational centers, Bethlehemites pay exorbitant costs for the water they must beg for, and running water is limited to once or twice a month. They rely instead on rain water collected in tanks on their many roofs. It's collective punishment, obviously, but systemic racism, oppression enforced with international support.
3. To all this the Israeli occupation adds a culture of intimidation, fear and betrayal: by design. Thousands are imprisoned (often uncharged and in undisclosed locations), under harsh conditions in military confinement; and they're often offered special favors (early release, or a better accomodation, or a break for a loved one) in return for information, names, any names at all; and this cycle then turns and turns, as more are imprisoned, forced to name others, and the result is distrust, fear of friendship, even anger. Zoughbi tells us that several times in recent months Israeli military vehicles have gone neighborhood to neighborhood in Bethlehem, warning that any act of resistance (a rock thrown by a child, a misplaced gesture at a checkpoint) may result in a Gaza-like event in Bethlehem. "Imagine that," he says. "Parents send their kids out every day with the fear that a simple mistake may bring genocide from Gaza's razed plain to their door." What if it's your child who brings this on all the rest? All of this is designed to demoralize a people, to rip their culture to pieces.
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| Community of Resistance and Love: Wi'am Staff |
For the Zoughbis, this is felt in particularly painful ways among the dwindling Christian community of Palestine...just 45,000 remaining in the West Bank itself. Is a lovely, gifted community being systematically expelled? Through the architecture of apartheid, the crippling of economies, the culture of distrust and fear, the crisis of emigration--this "matrix of control"? He quickly adds--and does so often--that Muslims and Christians have no trouble collaborating, celebrating, imagining futures together. But they are so much richer for the collaboration, for the gifts discovered in one another; when the Christian community is no more, something of the spirit of the land, the vibrancy of the people is lost forever. We are made, my friend Ghassan Manasra reminds me, quoting the Qur'an, to be curious around our many difference, to learn to cherish the unique traditions and prayers of the other.
Sadly, but clearly, the occupation is determined and quite satisfied to see Christian life, Christian community disappear here. It serves their narrative, paving the way for continued aggression, and enabling Western stereotypes (regrading Arabs, Muslims) to run rampant.
5. And this then, in the West Bank, is a daily experience--and can be, I think, identified as "erasure," "eradication," and "ethnic cleansing." Zoughbi notes that Israel's rumored to have a plan for the West Bank: smaller and smaller 'walled-off' enclaves in Bethlehem and Ramallah, and every last village beyond those enclaves erased and populated by Israeli settlements. It's already happening. The plan is well underway. What does any proud and loving people do--in such circumstances? How do they continue to persist in hope?
And Gaza crumbles now, undefended by any of the world's democracies or powers, as a warning of what may yet be coming. Is this not the basest kind of human cruelty? Does anything, anything at all, justify such madness and meanness?
Say NO to peace
if what they mean by peace
is the quiet misery of hunger,
the frozen stillness of fear,
the silence of broken spirits,
the unborn hopes of the oppressed.
Tell them that PEACE
is the shouting of children at play,
the babble of tongues set free,
the thunder of dancing feet,
and a father's voice singing.
The Zoughbis' Kitchen, Bethlehem
My challenge--spiritually, politically, personally--is to take all this in, to account for it in my heart, to pay attention to the human costs among people I've come to love and respect so much. While the temptation to despair, or even rage in response, is great, my calling is now to act in accordance with the love, the knowledge in my heart: to be a committed and dependable friend and ally. This means brave work around boycotts, political protest and accompaniment. Mere cynicism doesn't cut it. It means resisting hatred and violence in all forms; because these things consume energy rather than renew it for resistance. It means recognizing the spirit of oppression that moves in and among us all; and it means taking up the cross, the way of the cross, the practices of consquential care and companionship that really matter to the beleagured and hungry of our world. It means showing up. And stepping up. And accepting the costs.
And this, all of this, somehow--is solidarity. What my faith requires of me now.
Saturday Evening
Is it possible to rescue visions of justice and solidarity from zero-sum contests for recognition and identity, and the strange quests for guiltlessness? In the face of Gaza, we ought to do more than register anger, grief, disgust or guilt; neither veneration of the victims nor loathing of the perpetrators will help us see a way out of global impasse. Is it possible to imagine moral and political action in the present that is liberated from Manichaean historical narratives?
Pankaj Misra
"The World After Gaza"
Inevitably though, in the eyes of the AIPAC and certain U.S. senators, this week's killings rise above these others and represent a unique and uniquely important threat; antisemitism. Movements aimed at ending genocide, or indeed criticism of Israel at all, are blamed for the madness that drove a young man to kill two young staffers. And therefore, that criticism itself is not just dangerous, but lethal, and representative of a kind of hatred that threatens Jews not just in DC, but in every American city, town and hamlet.
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| Partners in Solidarity, Sabeel Delegation |
It strikes me that the conversation that 'sanctifies' antisemitism as a kind of "zero-sum contest" risks blinding us to all kinds of injustice and apartheid in the present...even as it renders us all less capable of truly and bravely and humbly identifying and countering antisemitism for the destructive, vindictive bigotry that it is. Antisemitism is not a "zero-sum contest." No pain cancels out other pain. No injustice diminishes another's suffering. It's not as easy as saying: I'm for Israel rain or shine; therefore I'm free of antisemitism.
Mishra notes that the urgent work of understanding and then disabling antisemitism can and must happen in conversation (and solidarity) with other grieving communitiies: Palestinians exiled from their lands and now starved in Gaza as they bury their young; African-Americans in the US and peoples of color the world around, subject to colonialism and apartheid; indigenous peoples likewise uprooted and rendered invisible in white supremacist societies; and the list goes on. And in his complicated and amazing essay, Mishra reminds us of histories and artists who bring Jewish trauma "into a conversation" with other long and noble "struggles for decolonization and civil rights." It's here, at these intersections, that "moral and political action" may at last be "liberated from Manichaean historical narratives."
And when it is, when we've buried the guns at last and grounded the drones forever, I trust we'll take all the time we need to recite the names of all those who've lost their lives as we've struggled to figure it out...every last child in Gaza, every last beloved soul in Gaza, every activist, every victim of violence on October 7 and after, every old woman who died of a broken heart, every leader who took a risk for peace and died for it, and Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim too. Say their names. As a promise to never turn back. To never turn back.
