Planting Seeds of Solidatiry in Palestine
I was very proud to represent the Community Church of New York in Palestine this January as part of a Witness and Solidarity Delegation organized by UUs for Justice in the Middle East (UUJME) with Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center as our incredible hosts and organizing partners. It was a real privilege to take place in this first official Unitarian Universalist delegation, and it felt like a natural continuation of so much Community Church has stood for and worked on over the course of our history.
The directive of our trip was “come and see, go and tell.” In this limited space, I won’t be able to convey every story that I heard or recite every painful statistic that was recounted to our group by our generous and dedicated hosts. The program that Sabeel put together for us was incredibly thorough. Over ten days, we took in more than might be packed into a college course, and the information we received was incredibly impactful.
Just as impactful were the individuals we encountered along the way and the layered stories of displacement, isolation, disenfranchisement, and violence that have marked their lives as Palestinians, whether they lived in the West Bank, Jerusalem, or inside the borders of Israel. We met grandparents who have been fighting in court to stay in their East Jerusalem home for decades, and who know they face the possibility of forcible eviction at any moment, just because the state has decided that land would be better occupied by Jewish settlers. And, we met grandparents a few neighborhoods over who already went through the horror of watching their home reduced to rubble in front of their eyes – then receiving a bill for the demolition. A gentle man in a Bedouin village outside of Hebron who watched two of his family members – his father and brother – killed in broad daylight by Israeli settlers who want to cleanse the village of its Palestinian inhabitants. Neither of them ever got justice, even though his brother’s murder was caught on video from several angles and the perpetrator well-known. A woman who was raised inside Israel without any sense of her own history and identity, who has made it her mission as an adult to educate young people in her segregated city.
I will carry these stories and many more with me forever – not merely in the form of grief over the massive injustices visited upon the Palestinian people for nearly a century, although that is there, too, but as sources of persistence and commitment to this struggle in which we are all implicated. Because I know, and this is certainly due in large part to my Unitarian Universalist upbringing, that our liberation is inherently intertwined. Our trip to Palestine was bookended by two widely-publicized killings of American citizen protestors by ICE, whose tactical and technological relationships to the Israeli military have been well-publicized; it couldn’t be more clear that whatever we enable in Palestine will be visited upon our own communities, and it already is. Educating ourselves and each other about forms of resistance to authoritarianism, and using the resources we have to advocate on behalf of oppressed people both here and around the world, is a way to practice our faith and put our values into action – I hope you will join me.
If you are interested in hearing more about this trip and our advocacy around Palestine, I hope you will attend either our March 1 worship service, entitled Holes in the Earth, Holes in the Wall, where I will co-preside with fellow delegates Karishma Gottfried and Conor Foley, or the follow-up panel discussion planned for March 8 with the same speakers plus India Wood, seminarian at Union Theological and member of First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn. Both of these events will be recorded and the videos made available online if you are reading this at a later date.
