Plea for Palestine

A Brief Memoir

I was the only American on the train but I was also the only one without that great American export—the M16. It was six months before my wedding. As a kind of last bachelor voyage, so to say, I decided to spend the entire summer of 2007 in Nazareth, Israel. Not that I really knew anyone there. A friend of a friend had provided the email of another friend, Azar. We exchanged a few messages during the months preceding my departure. That was about it. What was I going to do there? Where would I stay? “We’ll make arrangements when you arrive,” was all he wrote. Since the friend of a friend had himself lived there a few summers prior, that was good enough for me. So I arrived in Tel-Aviv and then spent hours being interrogated by Israeli customs officers (not having clear arrangements didn’t exactly serve me well at this point, nor that my destination contained the second largest Arab Israeli population in the country). Naturally, I was rather late out of the airport and my ride had long since returned to Nazareth. It was a Sunday, you see, and they had a Bible study to run that evening. Somehow I managed to exchange currencies and work a public phone. But that damned phone number—who could punch all the spaces and dashes in the correct order? Finally worked. “Ah yes, just take the train to Haifa and we’ll find you in the mall there, sometime tonight.” Click. I didn’t even know what these guys looked like, nor they me. I was twenty years old.

The whole summer served as an induction into a wider, richer, more complex and far more precarious world. It yielded innumerable encounters, each keen on confronting me with some sacred truth. I took quarters in the hospitality wing of Nazareth’s French Hospital, just down the main strip from the Basilica of the Annunciation. This strip roughly divides “lower” and “upper” Nazareth. The former, the site of Jesus’ hometown, boasted an almost entirely Arab Israeli population, Christian and Muslim. The latter, then called Nazareth Illit (now Nof HaGalil), an almost entirely Jewish Israeli population. My hosts were for the most part Arab Baptists who worked with Pennsylvania-based Mennonites to run “Nazareth Village,” the site of a first-century Jewish farm outfitted with a wine press, remains of an olive press, some ancient terrace work and the like. It offers tourists an interactive experience of what it might have been like to visit first-century Nazareth, complete, colonial Jamestown-like, with local actors in era-appropriate garb.

They recruited me as one of their Anglophone tour guides, which was a critical way I supported myself during the stay. It was such a peculiar experience, one I didn’t fully appreciate until much later. As I said, most of my contacts-turned-friends were Christian Arab Israelis. But this is Israel, so any travel meant meeting and dwelling among Jewish Israelis. In fact, the only other contact I had prior to the trip was a peer from my college who spent the summer among Jewish Israelis in Tel-Aviv, mostly Messianic Jews, if memory serves. The groups I guided came from all over the world and a variety of religious, social, and political backgrounds. My tour terminated in a replica of a first-century synagogue (as best they surmised). There I’d give a brief meditation on the Nazareth events relayed in Luke 4—Jesus’ interpretation of Isaiah’s gospel as referring to his own message and ministry, the consequent attempt to cast Jesus off a nearby ridge (here I’d point to stony incline jutting from a hill opposite us), the mysterious Moses-like parting of the crowd—all of which, somehow, I related back to that very moment, that very place, a gospel yet resounding through the centuries unto that very group, a message which has gathered us from across the globe, here and now…well, you get the gist of the thing.

Once when leading a group of about twenty-five, I began to sense that some were growing uneasy as we neared the end. Group members kept glancing at this one guy who seemed to be their leader. At length I realized that this was a Mormon group and that my “teaching” was perhaps not to their liking. Another time I had a group of fifty or more, mostly American teenagers wearing the same theme shirt. I couldn’t quite make out the name of the group. I did spy a pair of eighth notes, however, so I asked one member if they were a musical group.

“Well, yes,” said one pleasant and pockmarked lad, “more like a youth group. But our church is big. We represent only a handful of the youth group.”

“So are you hear to perform?” I followed.

“Yes, the church sent us.” Piqued my interest.

“What kind of show? For whom?”

“It’s a show for the IDF. We’re here to boost their morale—God’s work!”

I did get to do a bit of traveling. I slept on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, spent a whole day with a friend at the oddly overlooked Beit She’an (Scythopolis, its Greek name), visited all parts of Jerusalem several times over, scoured Qumran. Once with some Mennonite friends I set out for Petra, Jordan. We decided to cross the border near Jerusalem. Hot, fatigued, hungry, and a little anxious after hearing a huge explosion which prompted at least fifty IDF soldiers, in near perfect unison, to emerge from their trailers with weapons drawn, I was suddenly relieved when one Jordanian soldier, who was vetting those standing in line, squinted at my US passport, glanced at me, back to the passport, back at me, and erupted into laughter. He walked away (with my passport) to the front counter. Another peal of laughter, this time from all the soldiers behind the desk. He waved me and my companions to the front. He then managed to communicate how utterly hilarious he found it that my name is Jordan. “You are Jordan. You are going to Jordan. You are crossing over the Jordan!”

Not every encounter charmed me so. In a Jerusalem shop, the owner basically accosted me in a corner. I couldn’t read his disposition—something like an indeterminate mixture of amusement and resentment.

“You are Christian, right?”

“Yea,” I nearly mumbled.

“So let me ask you a question,” he said. “Jesus was Jewish, no? His twelve disciples were Jewish, no? All his early followers—all Jewish, no?”

“Yes, definitely,” I replied.

“So why do you Christians hate us Jews? You make no sense.”

“True,” I heartily agreed, “it doesn’t make any sense at all.”

He smirked, slapped me on the shoulder, and returned to the checkout counter. I bought something.

Soon after that encounter I headed to Bethlehem. It was halfway through the summer. I’d not yet seen Gaza or the West Bank. Here, I admit, my words give way. Nothing is adequate. Upon entry I felt my gaze immediately drawn to a gaping hole in the side of one building. From there I noticed that virtually every edifice in sight wore a face as pockmarked as that young evangelical kid’s from earlier. The homes—the ruins, rather—would’ve been sufficiently harrowing on their own, if, say, they carved out the landscape of some ancient and abandoned city, like Beit She-an. But these were not the land’s darkest specter. That specter, that shadow which slinks even now in the gloam of my memory, my soul, my nightmares—that specter fell across the downcast faces of the Palestinian children whose blank eyes fixed upon us as we sauntered down the street edges (I can’t say I recall anything like a sidewalk). I overheard our guide mention something about the buildings, how they’d been in disrepair for years now. No one referenced the children. We were rushed into what seemed the only functioning shop/restaurant in town. It offered Olive Wood trinkets and crosses and the like. Crepuscular hues then haunted the ruins; we were gone before dark. I felt dizzy and paralyzed and stupid—utterly stupid—on the tour bus back to Jerusalem.

My reading that summer, particularly after Bethlehem, assumed two different orientations, not always entirely in synch. I read some classics of what has today become the “Paul within Judaism” school. E.P. Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism and Jesus and the Covenant, Daniel Boyarin’s A Radical Jew, some short works by Krister Stendahl and so on. Alongside those I was reading a bit on the history of modern Israel-Palestine, from older works on Palestine under the British Mandate to books by Benny Morris to Ilan Pappe’s then-recently released The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2007). My Arab Israeli friends were always patient with me. They listened attentively to any questions, offered fairly brief responses, and never insisted on their own viewpoint. They were content simply that I took interest enough to ask. The younger Palestinian Israelis (this is how they self-described at the time) spoke a bit more openly about things. They sardonically invoked “war season in Israel,” which, they said, came and went like any other season. They spoke about their own “identity crisis”: they were Israeli citizens but also Palestinians, and so second-class; they were Arabs but Christian, and so a minority sometimes in their own extended families; they were Christian but neither Catholic nor Eastern Orthodox, and so mostly unrecognized by Western or Eastern Christians; they were loosely “evangelical” but not Western, and so perpetually scandalized by the West’s uncritical support for Israel’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza. Often their soliloquies would trail off without countenancing any real path forward.

All the while I too was left vexed and cold. New Testament scholars were rightly reminding me that Christians had long cultivated the habit of reading a New Testament excised from its context, especially Second Temple Judaism. Not infrequently would they draw the correlation, and often enough the causation, between this hermeneutical practice of imposing a foreign context upon a Jewish one in service of some version of Christian triumphalism, and with it the frequently violent imposition of Christian prerogatives upon Jewish lands, culture, religion, families, and people. The shopkeeper in Jerusalem had aggressively reminded me of the same. Post-Shoah Christian theology and biblical scholarship, these authors rightly insisted, must face up to this dark legacy and repudiate it entirely. I agreed, and still do. At Mass this past Good Friday, we did not speak of “the perfidious Jews” who crucified Christ (the Romans did that, after all). Rather we prayed through the litany for the ongoing peace and prosperity of the Jewish people. This reflects radical changes in Church teaching regarding the status of the Jewish people, developments that I celebrate without apology, even as I know why certain Middle Eastern Christians at Vatican 2 were less enthusiastic on this front.¹ Antisemitism is damnable; its ubiquity throughout Christian history is a scandal for which the Church has rightly repented, no matter what the despicable, faddish integralist defenses of the Mortara Affair might suggest.

It’s no less true, as the other scholars were teaching me (of course Morris is a more complicated case), that the very same Christianity culpable of antisemitism also sometimes seeks to rectify its own wrongs by turning a blind eye to—and providing unilateral support for—the State of Israel’s ongoing blockade of, disproportionate retaliation against, and now near extermination of the Palestinian people, especially but not only in Gaza. Sure, there lurks a moral motive, laudable in itself, behind ignoring such atrocities, namely the fear of committing our ancient sin of antisemitism.² But this fear cannot become a blanket justification for, say, ignoring the plight of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank—of ignoring over 34,000 corpses, almost half of which are children, many of whose body parts have been boxed and labeled for want of the basic resources necessary for a dignified death, as has occurred during and after the two-week siege of Al-Shifa Hospital in Rimal.

This cannot be a zero-sum game. The price of avoiding antisemitism cannot be to ignore genocide, or, if you insist, the seven-month massacre of thousands of women and children. Likewise, the price of credibly opposing Israel’s ongoing obliteration of a 25-by-5-mile open-air prison cannot be to ignore or deny Hamas’s heinous terrorist attacks on October 7^th, 2023. But, as many Jews (Jewish Voices for Peace, Breaking the Silence—even Jon Stewart!) and non-Jewish Zionists (President Biden) alike now admit, Israel’s current strategy will only diminish its security in the Middle East. That’s a lesson nearly every major superpower in modern history should have learned from its own similar, terrorist-creating atrocities. And we’d do well to heed the old prophetic truth that the people of God must beware of becoming the very tyrants from whom they were once ransomed (Amos 5.17). None of this can justify actual antisemitism, obviously. But at this moment there is also no justification for false equivalence.

Christians, not just because of our history but also because of our faith in God’s Incarnation and identification with all who languish, ought never to justify one violence by another, one oppression by another, one victim by another. For the Christ who suffered, suffers still in all who suffer, to the exact degree of their suffering, suffering with and as them. “In the cross,” Rev. Munther Isaac preached this past Good Friday in Bethlehem, “God united with mankind in its pain, not out of love or glorification in pain, but to redeem us from pain, and to rise with Him in His resurrection.” In Jesus Christ, the first-century Palestinian Jew, God has undermined our attempt to instrumentalize even human death and suffering, because absolutely no death, however undignified, is bereft of the God-human’s own death; all die in his death, that all might be raised in his own life. God has revealed his own infinite dignity precisely by granting it to us in our undignified state, not to dignify or justify that state but to dignify and justify any in that state. And so, as Pope Francis has recently taught, “every human person possesses an infinite dignity” (1), since, “By uniting himself with every human being through his Incarnation, Jesus Christ confirmed that each person possesses an immeasurable dignity simply by belonging to the human community…this dignity can never be lost” (19).

Let us refuse the demonic zero-sum game and instead seek where and how Christ suffers today. Then the infinite dignity that he himself is may be brought forth through liberation, salvation, justice, love. Rev. Isaac again:

“Yes, Jesus on the cross today amidst the ruins of Gaza. Suffering with the despised. Jesus on the cross with the abandoned around the world, victim of racism and authoritarian regimes. Jesus is crucified today unjustly and unjustly... Amongst the rubble.”

In Bethlehem all those years ago I first noticed the rubble, then the faces. The Lord sees only the faces, and so enters the rubble where they lie, decomposing. For God’s sake, this is my plea: at the very least, let us stop supplying the means of crucifying Christ in many thousands anew!

1. John T. McGreevy, Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis (W.W. Norton & Company, 2022), 294.

2. E.g. Michael G. Azar, “‘Supersessionism’: The Political Origin of a Theological Neologism,” Studies in Jewish-Christian Relations 16.1 (2021): 1–25.