From February 27 until March 3, a delegation including Pax Christi USA Ambassador of Peace Scott Wright and representatives from Friends of Sabeel North America, the Palestinian Christian Alliance for Peace, Kairos USA, the Indiana Center for Middle East Peace and other groups, visited Palestinian religious, political, and NGO leaders in the West Bank. They returned to Washington, DC on March 4 and have visited Congressional offices on March 5-6.
Use this link to read a reflection by Michael Spath with the Indiana Center for Middle East Peace, given at the Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem on March 3.
Participants in the delegation will speak at a public demonstration and vigil to be held at the White House at noon on March 6, followed by a prayer service at Calvary Baptist Church in DC at 7 pm.
The report from their visit — here in PDF format — follows:
“Nothing has changed, and everything has changed.”
These are the words of Sam Bahour, Palestinian-American businessman and activist who spoke to our delegation.
Nothing has changed because the deadly oppression of the Palestinian people has been ongoing for 76 years. Everything has changed since October 7, the day Hamas fighters pierced the walls of the concentration camp called Gaza. As followers of Jesus, we embrace nonviolence and so grieve for all who have died, including the victims of the Hamas attack. Nevertheless, as our Palestinian friends reminded us, the violence did not begin on October 7; it must be understood in the broader context of at least 17 years of Israel’s inhuman strangulation of Gaza by land, air, and sea, 76 years of a continuing Nakba (since 1948), and over a century since the rise of Zionism.
In the past 150 days, Gaza has become a killing field. Israel’s response against the Palestinian people is disproportionate by orders of magnitude. The atrocities perpetrated by the IDF on Gaza by land, sea, and air are broadcast before our eyes, on our phones, in real time. We watch in horror. Entire families die in their beds under Israel’s bombs. Apartment blocks, schools, hospitals, churches and mosques, markets are leveled. Relief and food convoys are denied entry at the Egypt border.
Mass starvation is rampant. On February 29, Gazans in the north rushed to grab bags of flour from rare relief. Israeli soldiers responded with a massacre of starving civilians seeking food; at least 100 died. Lethal infections and diarrhea, lack of clean water and medicines will kill thousands more in the coming weeks and months. The UN representatives on the ground, no strangers to tragedy, call this “the worst humanitarian crisis that they have ever seen.” We conclude it is nothing less than an attempt to wipe Palestinian history, tradition, and culture from human memory, the very definition of genocide.
We are a delegation of 23 American Christians, pastors and lay people, activists all, some who have been to Palestine and Israel often, a few who have lived and worked in the region, and a few who are visiting for the first time. We have been urgently called by our Palestinian sisters and brothers to bear witness to this abomination and return to the US with their message. To put our visit into context, the “Flour Massacre,” as it is now called, was taking place in Gaza less than 50 miles from where we sat listening to Sam Bahour.
Let us be clear: it is our faith, our shared faith, our shared humanity, that compelled us to be here, in the land where our faith was born. But it is also as US citizens that we’ve come, knowing that US tax dollars, our tax dollars, are funding this crisis. Our government, the administration and Congress, bipartisan, supports these war crimes.
We met with Palestinian leaders – clergy, laypeople, civil rights lawyers, NGO leaders, and the director of UNRWA. We asked each one to share what they would say to policy makers in Washington DC, to our churches, to our communities in the US.
- The Palestinians with whom we spoke fervently believe in nonviolent resistance. They say, “Hear our voices.”
- They feel abandoned, forsaken by the world, to face the genocide of their people alone. Our visit and solidarity comfort them and gives them courage to carry on.
- The genocide in Gaza is now in its fifth month, and the world has done nothing to stop it. Palestinians are incredulous. There is palpable anger, righteous anger, even from clergy, from activists devoted to nonviolence. They want no more high and mighty lectures from the West about values, democracy, equality, and human rights. The sheer tonnage of US hypocrisy is epic in its scale in the bombs paid for by the US that Israel drops on Gaza.
- We call for a ceasefire now, including hostages held by Hamas and political prisoners held by Israel. No mincing words. No equivocation. NOW!
- We heard again and again that while our eyes are fixed on Gaza – and rightly so – there is a “slow massacre,” a “slow genocide” taking place in the West Bank. While there is genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing is exponentially increasing in the West Bank “under the radar.”
- End the occupation of Palestine by Israel. Stop illegal settlements.The West Bank is not Samaria and Judea. It is Palestinian territory and Palestinians cannot continue to exist as stateless people without human rights.
- Children as young as five years old are arrested, abused, tortured, and held in prisons without trial for months or years. Night raids into Palestinian homes occur every night. They are tried in military, not civil, courts. Confessions are extracted by torture.
- There are 700+ checkpoints in the West Bank, an area roughly the size of Delaware, Joe Biden’s home state. Restricting freedom of movement is a tool of torment to make daily life unbearable for Palestinians. IDF teenagers with machine guns man these checkpoints and kill Palestinians with impunity.
- Home demolitions have increased. We visited a man whose home was demolished two weeks earlier. His crime: he was a spokesman for Palestinians in Silwan, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem. We sat under a tarp in his yard amidst the rubble. Israel is ethnically cleansing, stealing, and Judaizing his neighborhood, Silwan, on the hills below Jerusalem. The large Silwan neighborhood has been zoned for demolition by the Israeli government to expand an archaeological site and create a theme park. The home demolitions would displace hundreds of people from their homes. Israel uses home demolitions as a potent weapon used for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. We call for an end to Israel’s policy of house demolitions of Palestinian homes.
- The knee-jerk reaction by the Biden administration to cut off funding for UNRWA (based on unfounded Israeli allegations against a few employees out of thousands) was unjustified. We call for the full restoration – and increase – of UNRWA funding immediately. UNRWA is the only organization that can deliver mass human services to Gaza. The UNRWA West Bank Director told us the agency cannot continue unless donations are restored. To withhold food and relief from starving people is a war crime. It comes as no surprise that the accusations against UNWRA employees were levied just two days after the International Court of Justice announced its findings that Israel is credibly guilty of genocide, the crime of all crimes.
- This is a US war; the weapons are US made. The money is US money. The shameful United Nations veto against a cease fire is US policy. We say it again loudly and clearly: This is a US war!
- The US selectively applies international law. Compare the US response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the US response to Israel’s open genocide in Gaza and its takeover and oppression in the West Bank. The world is watching. We continually heard the words applied to the United States – “hypocrisy,” “double standard.”
- The nations supporting a ceasefire, who continue their support of Palestine, the South Africa ICJ case – the Global South understands and is making their voices heard. The people of the Global South see the hypocrisy.
- The West’s response is profoundly racist. Again, compare the response to Ukraine, a predominantly white Christian country, to the response to Palestine, a predominantly Arab Muslim country. The world is watching. The people of the Global South see the injustice.
- They – and we – say to our churches: Both those who unconditionally support Israel as well as those who are silent, not wanting to offend, “You are complicit in Israel’s genocide!” Following Jesus, listening to Jesus’ Gospel message, loving your neighbor, even your enemy – that is our call. It is morally derelict that some Christians insist on undying loyalty to Israel. Scripture is not to be manipulated to crush one of God’s peoples for the gain of another. We heard from many about the scourge of Christian Zionism. It is equally sickening to be silent in the face of evil.
- Nonviolent resistance can only succeed if people of good conscience take bold and decisive action in support of the cause. The Palestinian people cry out, “Hear our call. Take up our cross with us.”
How many Palestinians beyond the 30,000 must be murdered, plus 8,000 estimated dead under the rubble, for Israel to be satiated? For the US to decry the killings? For the world to intervene and say, “No”?
We say it again: This is a US war. We are party to genocide. We give Israel a free pass. Israel continues to violate international law with impunity. The slaughter could not happen without the backing of the US government. Our tax dollars provide billions in aid to Israel, weapons, and full cover for Israel’s crimes. The fighter jets, bombs, tanks, chemical weapons are US made. The US vetoes UN cease fire resolutions.
The US believes it is in its geopolitical interest to protect Israel, believing Israel is key to the strategic military, economic, and political interests of the US. On the contrary, as Israel’s genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing inside Palestine continue, Israel and the US are less safe, they are pariahs on the world stage, with other countries looking to China and Russia for support. The US is a shield and bank for Israel to commit war crimes. Our adversaries are watching and exploiting our moral failing to perpetuate their own.
We heard various political solutions offered, but all agree that Zionism – and support by the US government and Christian Zionists in the West – is the problem. The racist, settler colonial project that is Zionism must be rejected out of hand and a system of government based on equity, human dignity, and full civil, political, and human rights. Zionism makes Jews around the world less safe and contributes to antisemitism. If the US wants to be Israel’s friend, it must realize that this genocidal action fosters even more acts of antisemitism and disgust for the US. It is in no one’s interest, no one’s.
We call on the United States to follow international law, including support for the recent ICJ ruling declaring a “plausible case” for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Palestinians no longer want to hear Western and US platitudes about democratic values and equal rights. The words are a lie. The US needs to apply the values that it espouses equally – democracy, human rights, equality, and equity. Put up or shut up.
Each of the speakers with whom we met were activist leaders committed to nonviolence. Each refuses to hate; they acknowledge that Palestinians over the years have compromised for peace. The response has been more illegal settlements (major towns, illegal outposts with populations in the tens of thousands) in the West Bank, more checkpoints, more restrictions of movement, more killings, more children imprisoned.
No form of resistance is allowed, none. Violent resistance leaves no one safe and leads to more violence. Israel and US decry violence but at the same time actively suppress nonviolent resistance and muzzle nonviolent activists. One nonviolent speaker told us that he was arrested on October 7 and tortured. When released, the IDF ordered him to leave his home for his own security. When he refused, the IDF forcibly removed him. They wanted him to leave to steal his property for a military outpost.
The world condemns Hamas. But years of nonviolent resistance, including BDS, is – and has been – rejected out of hand. Hypocrisy. Double standards. That same activist said, “Violence is condemned. Nonviolent resistance, BDS, and others are rejected. This shows what they really want. They want us gone.”
In conclusion:
Zionism is a force of destruction. Vicious and hateful “settlers” do the dirty work for the state, with impunity and protection of the IDF, the police, and the courts. The settlers are armed with automatic weapons and present bold menace in the streets. Their assaults on Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank go unpunished. We encountered a party of settlers, parading through the streets of Hebron while the IDF protected them, their machine guns cocked and pointed at us, a group of Americans as they hustled us out of the way. Many of these violent, extremist, fascist settlers are now leaders in the Israeli cabinet.
Last week a US Air Force serviceman immolated himself in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington DC. His act of self-sacrifice reverberated across the globe. Every day Palestinians mentioned him, they said they will remember him long after he has become just the answer to a trivia question in the west.
His name. Aaron Bushnell. We conclude with his words: “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, You are doing it now. Right now.
“I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people are experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal. Free Palestine.”
And we, too, say “Free Palestine!”
Use this link to download the report as a PDF.
Remarks at Christmas Lutheran Church
March 3, 2024
L. Michael Spath, DMin, PhD
with the Stones Cry Out delegation
Dear Brother Munther, Brother Mitri, dear friends here at Christmas Lutheran Church, thank you for your hospitality throughout this week – we stayed at the Guesthouse – and your warm hospitality this morning.
In this season of Lent as Jesus walks toward his cross, as the people of Gaza and you here, too, bear your heavy crosses, we members of the Stones Cry Out Delegation want you to know that we are here to walk with you in these dire and difficult days, to pledge our support for you, to stand in solidarity with you.
We are 23 church leaders and activists from all around the US representing a dozen different denominations. Many of us have been here often, some of us have lived here, worked here; some are here for the first time. All of us are here today humbly, in a spirit of repentance, knowing that our tax dollars, our UN vetoes, our country’s weapons have contributed to your suffering.
We’ve come to listen and learn so that when we return – we leave here directly for Washington DC for meetings with congressional leaders and others there – when we return to our churches, we can bear witness to what you are asking us to tell them. So we have come humbly to listen.
We also understand that the church has too often been complicit. Tragically, from many churches on the Left, masters of the art of peace-talking, a lukewarm, impotent silence, not wanting to offend; and on the Right, the cross, wrapped in two flags, ours and Israel’s, enforced by a gun. We want you to know that we are here not to offer a surface solidarity of private no-risk-prayers behind church doors; rather a solidarity that thrusts us into public spaces that impacts decision makers and policy makers. We are here not to be peace talkers but peacemakers … peace with justice.
So we also come boldly in a spirit of solidarity because your resilience and resistance, your steadfastness and courage embolden us in our own. “Costly discipleship,” Bonhoeffer said.
Gaza, Palestine is the moral fulcrum of our time that calls upon our hearts, that calls upon the church’s heart. Our humanity is being tested. Our morality is being tested. Our faith is being tested.
So we pledge to you that we will remain strong in our support of the people of Gaza … and of you.
We pledge to you that we will remain strong against the genocidal assault on Palestinian culture and tradition, on Palestinian memory and Palestine’s future, the very idea of Palestine itself.
We pledge to you that we will remain strong in the face of empire’s war against Palestinian liberation, self-determination, and human dignity.
As you and your pastor so powerfully reminded the world this past Christmas, if Immanuel, “God with us,” means anything at all during these catastrophic days, it’s that Christ is dodging bombs, Christ is in every suffering child, Christ is on every operating table, Christ is “under the rubble.”
It is your faith and courage, even more, it is this same “Christ under the rubble” with all who are suffering … who inspires, compels, indeed, thrusts us into acts of solidarity with you and resistance in our own country.
It is our shared hope against all hope that the cross of this same Christ will peak its head over the horizon, the dawning of a new day, where it will rise up and claim its hard-won victory over the powers of empire, evil, and death.
We know that checkpoints are not the last word, humiliations aren’t the last word, settlers aren’t the last word, apartheid is not the last word, the Nakba will not be the last word for Palestine, because our God has the last word, a new creation of self-determination and freedom emerging “out of the rubble.”
So on this Lenten Sunday, as your sisters and brothers in Christ, in this place of his birth, let there be no doubt – for you and for us, your friends – no doubt …
We hear you! We hear the cries of Gaza’s children. We hear the cries of your children! They are our children, because all children are our children.
And we are with you. We are together with you in an unshakeable bond of sumud.
That is our shared faith. That is what animates us. That is our work together. And that is why we are here.
Thank you.