A meditation on hope and Palestinian liberation

Photo by Olga Marina Segura

I hope for Palestinian liberation in my lifetime. 

My best friend laughed at me when I told him I was writing an essay on hope. That’s fair. I rarely lead with flowery, hopeful language. I mean I love flowers, but otherwise, that’s just not me. Even if it was at some point, life’s wrung it out of me. Like every Millennial, I’ve spent my entire adult life lurching from one global crisis to the next. 

I’m tired. Tired and sad. Yet I remain hopeful that things could work out. They might – they might not, but they might. Things could work out, and that’s good enough reason to fight. I was going to fight anyway, but it’s nice to know that it’s not irrational to do so. I’m not irrational. I’m tired and sad and angry. I am so, so angry.

But anger and hope justify one another. It’s because I know that it doesn’t have to be this way that I’m pissed off that it is. Hope is the strong sense that it doesn’t have to be this way, that someone can and must do something about it. Hope is at once both that strong sense and the attempt. There is no hope without action. Hope is a set of unstated, thunderous assertions: about our ability to transform our situation, as well as the limitations of those who would stop us. It’s the sense that we’re not wholly impotent and our oppressors aren’t all-powerful. 

Personal Hope, Repentance, & Transformation 

On October 19, Israel’s military bombed one of the oldest churches in the land, the Church of Saint Porphyrius, killing 400. The next day, Palestinian Christian leaders published an open letter to Christian leaders and theologians in the West. In deep fear and grief, these leaders called on their Western counterparts to repent of their unconditional support of the nation of Israel, their theologies that promote colonial expropriation of lands, and valuing Israeli lives more than Palestinian lives.

They’re right. 

The summer before my senior year in college, I spent a month studying Hebrew at the University of Haifa in northwestern Israel. In truth, it had nothing to do with my budding specialization, but as a young theology student, I could justify it to my parents. It was the capital H, capital L Holy Land, after all. 

It doesn’t take long to figure out who the niggas are in Israel. That is, the oppressed and scorned, who may or may not actually be black. The East African asylum seekers and Ethiopian Jewish emigres, for instance, who are subject to routine race riots in Tel Aviv, are definitely niggas there. The indigenous Arabs of all faiths are, metaphorically, of course. The Bedouin of the Negev and Galilee that Israel labels “trespassers” even though they were there for generations prior to the nation’s 1948 establishment. Druze, Bahá’í, and other religious minorities, too.

I was 21 at the time of my first and last visit to Israel. Looking back, it is remarkable how smoothly the visiting Western Christian faithful and theologians carry on wholly unaffected against this blood-soaked backdrop. Every day, hundreds of lucky – blessed, really – white-robed pilgrims wade into the River Jordan to renew their baptismal vows in the same waters Jesus received the sacrament from John the Baptist. Archaeologists and theologians flood through security checkpoints daily, covered in clay and dust, in ambition and indifference, hoping to make a tenure- and promotion-worthy contribution to their respective fields. There is much for which we need to repent.

(I signed the letter. I encourage our readers to sign it, too, and to check out the organizations that composed it. Their work, their survival, is critical.)

The call to repentance is, I think, an act of great hope. Repentance is the lived expression of the hope that I don’t have to be this way; that we don’t have to relate to one another through veils of alienation and harm. The Western church has abandoned its most ancient counterpart in Palestine to the Israeli occupation, and the broader project of settler colonialism. It is our moral responsibility not to make fools of the people who expressed enough faith and hope in our humanity to even bother calling for us to repent. We can no longer abandon them, or anyone, to annihilation. 

On Social Hope

Hope extends beyond our internal lives and into actions out in the world, otherwise it’s just fantasy. Fantasies are important. As a capacity of the imagination, they can help furnish new worlds for us to hope for. When overindulged, however, fantasies can contribute to inertia. Hope needs grounding. It needs flesh and bone, brick and mortar.

Now more than ever it feels important to distinguish personal hope from a social hope that extends beyond me and my limitations. Social hope comes to life as concrete institutions, practices, and relationships that will birth or grow alongside the world we strive for. The letter from Christian leaders reveals to us that social hope is pinned to the possibility of solidarity. It is a hope in the capacity of the other to recognize our interconnectedness and be moved to act justly in light of it. Their social hope is an opportunity, an invitation, for us to grow in our humanity.

Two weeks into bombardment, I came across another letter, this time from the community at Dar al-Kalima University in Bethlehem. In it, they call for an immediate ceasefire, an end to the Israeli occupation and siege, and a total arms embargo from Western governments like the United States, which furnishes Israel with billions of dollars in arms each year. It’s short and worth a read. It’s also worth contacting your Congressional delegation to voice those demands.

Reading the letter during this acute crisis, I was moved to a sense of wonder by something I had taken for granted up to now: There are Palestinian universities! No one cultivates knowledge for the abyss. It is always for people. The university as a social institution projects its people into the future. Universities educating Palestinian students and other people struggling under the long process of genocide are forms of social hope. They assume that there will be a future that needs their knowledge. They fight for that future. A free Palestine will need universities.

Photo by Olga Marina Segura

On Religious Hope

The Kairos Document, composed by members of the Christian community in Palestine, is witness to the global Christian community and a call for justice. It ends with one final assertion of their hope and faith in God:

In the absence of all hope, we cry out our cry of hope. We believe in God, good and just. We believe that God’s goodness will finally triumph over the evil of hate and of death that still persist in our land. We will see here ‘a new land’ and ‘a new human being’, capable of rising up in the spirit to love each one of his or her brothers and sisters.

In the face of compounding atrocities, despite abandonment by the Western governments that could put an end to this latest episode of their long catastrophe, survivors in Palestine have not given up their humanity. They are burying their dead, consoling children for whom nothing will ever be the same, risking their lives to tend to the injured, and reporting the truth of what is happening to them. The least we in the West, especially Western Christians, can do is accept the invitation to solidarity by talking to our faith communities about the human costs of Christian Zionism, supporting Palestinian institutions working for liberation, and amplifying their demands in our protests and advocacy.

Hope takes on religious significance when believers imagine themselves to be collaborators not just with their neighbors, but with God, as well. Not waiting for some deus ex machina, for some magical divine intervention; not waiting for relief to come from the outside and solve every problem for them. That’s never coming. It doesn’t exist. Religious hope is a vision of God and neighbor right there in the muck with you.

I don’t know that every community I care for will find freedom; however, I do know with every bit of who I am that it is possible. And that’s good enough for me. It’s good enough for me to live with, and good enough reason to fight. 

In solidarity,

Dwayne