When Budour Hassan is asked to describe what she hears from Gazans in the weeks since the collapse of the recent ceasefire, she leans forward and breathes deeply. She does her work from home, by phone, making calls into the catastrophe that is the Gazan genocide. "I talk to parents who are standing over the rubble, and sifting through to find the remains of their loved ones." She takes another breath. "I talk to young mothers, who should be breastfeeding but can't; because starvation denies their bodies the ability to produce milk." And these are the survivors. So far.Though that ceasefire was tenuous and brief, it allowed the women and men she interviewed to "plan for something other than their own deaths." Just a little. Some version of a future. "Something other than their own deaths." And that phrase hits me hard. I see those around me wince too. That planning for their own destruction has been, and is again, a way of life for Gaza's people. Made in the image of God--but reduced to roaming bombed out streets anticipating their own demise. And of course, in the violent weeks since the collapse of that ceasefire, this is the daily round for so many, the strange way forward that is no way at all.
Budour joins us this morning in East Jerusalem, reflecting on this terrible moment and her work with Amnesty International, documenting that genocide, listening carefully to its victims and survivors, marking (in real time) to collapse of systems and institutions once trusted: international law, organized religion, even nonviolence to some degree. "My people are steadfast in our commitment to nonviolence," she says, "but we are justified in asking, 'Has it worked?'" Trained in international law herself, she lives and works out of Ramallah for Amnesty, rising every day to listen to the unimaginable, to chronicle the obscene. Though she is blind herself, it's clear to us all that she has seen more than we ever will, and understands realities most of us would rather not. When asked, late in the hour, what she does with the pain she is witnessing day after day, she replies simply, but sadly: "I will never recover from this."
Thursday Afternoon
If we are capable of compassion and at the same time are powerless, then we live in a state of desperate exasperation.
Czeslaw Miloscz, 1960s
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Bishop Younan |
Today's itinerary included that visit with Budour and others with Father David Neuheus, SJ; and Munib Younan, a Palestinian and Bishop Emeritus of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land (ELCJHL). Each was sober, generous beyond reason and clearly enraged: by all that's happening in Gaza and West Bank, by the global community's inaction, and by the church's skittishness. "We Palestinians," said Bishop Younan (while still settling into his seat), "feel that we are alone." He lamented Israel's deliberate bombing, raiding and depopulating of Palestinian refugee camps--in Gaza and the West Bank. Refugees, he insisted, remind Israel and the world of 1948, forced displacement, the nakba then, apartheid since. It's Israel's intention to rid these lands of refugees permanently--so as to erase that narrative from global consciousness and moral urgency once and for all. His pace picked up, and there was a touch of fire in his eye as he said: "Don't just come and visit. Go and act! The time for action is not tomorrow; it's today!"I'd heard words very much like these on previous trips, with other delegations. "We cherish your visits; but go back and do something about the politics at home. See our suffering. Beat your own damn swords into plowshares. We're counting on American leadership." I'm humbled to realize it's been, maybe, 15 years since I heard them first.
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On my long sabbatical flight from New York to Amman, Jordan, I picked up Pankaj Mishra's The World After Gaza, a thoughtful and even piercing reflection on the events of October 7, 2023 and the genocidal war following. An Indian writing from his own context of rising Hindu nationalism, dangerous and near, Mishra begins with his own concern for nationalist rhetoric, racial hierarchies and the "moral perversion" that follows. Germany, our United States, this Israel.
As Indian voters succumbed to Hindu supremacists, I found myself turning to Indian critics of the nation state, such as Rabindranath Tagore, who denounced nationalist Asians as 'callow schoolboys of the East': they, he argued, had fallen for a Western idea with 'high-sounding distinction' but which was actually 'one of the most powerful anaesthetics that man has invented', under whose influence people can carry out a 'systematic porgramme of the most virulent self-seeking without being in the least aware of its moral perversion -- in fact feeling dangerously resentful if it is pointed out'.
I found Tagore's critique--that 'the people accept this all-pervading mental slavery with cheerfulness and pride because of their nervous desire to turn themselves into a machine of power, called the Nation, and emulate other machines in their collective worldliness'--echoed in the writings of Ahad Ha'am, the pioneering Hebrew writer and opponent of Herzl who likewise deplored the nationalist 'tendency to find the path of glory in the attainment of material power and political dominion.'
Mishra, The World After Gaza
Much like Mishra, each of today's speakers insisted that what is happening here is similar to what's happened in these other places: the dream of a inpenetrable nation state ("a machine of power"), willing and able to brutalize another people for security's sake, thereby justifying its own excesses and cruelty. And everytime...racial hatred stirs and rages at the heart of the project. What's especially clear here--but should be in other settings--is that the "machine" is destroying lives, families and whole communities. And faith requires our response: our love, yes; but our loving, active, resisting response. "If I fail to do whatever I can to prevent [these crimes]," said Jaspers in 1945, "I too am guilty."
I'll need more time to reflect on these last two paragraphs (Mishra's and my own)--so stunningly do they implicate my own country's "nervous desire to turn [itself] into a machine of power" (MAGA again) in 2025.
Thursday Evening
In our conversation this morning, Budour Hassan noted that her own academic background includes studies in the history of the Shoah, the 20th century genocide in Europe. And she said that it is particularly painful, especially difficult to see that genocide "weaponized" (her word) to justify and perpetuate this one in Gaza. How is it, she asks, that the oppressed become oppressors, again and again through human history? And yet, to suggest that this too--all that's happening in Gaza now--is genocidal is to face a vicious backlash and accusations of antisemitism. It strikes her as cruel and inhumane. There's no doubt, she added this morning, that Israel is imposing conditions on Gaza that are "calculated" (her word) to bring about a whole people's destruction and erasure.
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Fr. David Neuhaus |
All three of today's speakers have spoken powerfully to the Palestinian yearning for justice, peace and equality. Father David (a Jewish Israeli citizen, and a Jesuit priest!) urged us to insist on equality as a key piece: that all the peoples of these lands, whatever the political arrangement of states, must experience fullness of life and the protection afforded by basic human rights. The same human rights for all. Peace comes only when we can agree on this, he insisted. Then he noted the "venomous binding of Shoah and the nation state"--and how that coupling is destroying not only Palestinian life and culture, but Jewish practice and culture too. He quickly added that many in his own family had been slaughtered by Nazis in Europe. But radical nationalism in Europe and radical nationalism in Israel are equally pernicious, and deadly. Like Father David, Pankaj Mishra worries that the violence of the past hundred years is not only catching up with us, but compromising our capacity for human "being" and human collaboration in a world frought with animosity and distrust.
These events (the Shoah, Vietnam, Iraq) which took place in living memory undermined the basic assumption of both religious traditions and the secular enlightenment: that human beings have a fundamentally 'moral' nature.
The corrosive suspicion that they don't is now widespread. Many more poeple have closely witnessed death and mutilation, under regimes of callousness, timidity and censorship; they recognize with a shock that everything is possible, remembering past atrocities is no guarantee against repeating them in the present, and the foundations of international law and morality are not secure at all.
Mishra, The World After Gaza
"Remembering past atrocities is no guarantee against repeating them in the present." In fact--reducing one people's wellness to a pattern of victimhood rehearsed and vulnerability defended only betrays democratic possibilities. Institutions for mutual support and community life cannot withstand the fear, the scapegoating, the rage passed on from generation to generation.
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St. George's in East Jerusalem |
There was something urgent but almost subtle in the way Budour Hassan revealed her pain to us this morning. This afternoon, Munib Younan was more explicit. For the sake of the world--for the sake of those who've died in genocides past--the church cannot be silent and cannot risk inaction. He described with gratitude our United Church of Christ's willingness to risk truthful witness to apartheid, genocide and (beyond these terrors) a world of reconciliation and restorative justice for all peoples of this land. But he noted that other denominational leaders have been here, left here and done nothing at all. Said nothing at all. Lives are at stake now, he said: Jewish lives and Palestinian lives, Israeli lives and American lives, and our moral capacity to do good by one another. And the church that follows the Lord of Love can only respond. In love. In courage. In respect for the sanctity of all life. All lives. "Go and act."