The Rev. David Grishaw-Jones is pastor of the Community Church of Durham, a congregation of the United Church of Christ, and he serves on the steering committee of the United Church of Christ’s Palestine Israel Network (www.uccpin.org).
Around the world and across the political spectrum, decent people are vigorously debating who’s to blame for the horrific violence visited this month upon Palestinians in Gaza, and whether that violence is in any way justified by the equally horrific murder and kidnapping of Israelis on October 7.
While Hamas bears obvious responsibility for the terror that day, and while the Israeli government bears its own responsibility for collectively punishing all of Gaza in the days since, I want to suggest that it is the inaction of American politicians, and the indifference of the American public, that allowed this grim cycle of violence and oppression to advance so sadly to this point.
To be clear, we have known, for decades, that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, and its systemic project of planting illegal settlements in the West Bank, and its collective punishment of and siege on Gaza — all of this amounts to a brazen violation of international law and human rights standards. On this, there has been international consensus (bolstered by a series of United Nations resolutions) for 50-plus years.
More recently, but not surprisingly, human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and B’Tselem (the latter of which is the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) have all produced detailed analyses in which Israel’s occupation clearly meets international criteria as a system of apartheid. To be clear, apartheid is defined internationally as a crime against humanity that meets three conditions: 1) a system of separation or segregation for domination (based on race, creed, or ethnicity) that is 2) legally enforced and 3) entails the commission of human rights violations, or inhumane acts. That’s what we’re talking about. And that’s what this so-called war is seeking to make permanent and legitimate.
Though all of this is well-documented, and though Palestinian and Israeli advocates have urged American leaders and institutions to choose justice, to prioritize peace, and to divest from Israel’s systematic project of dispossession and apartheid, we have done little to nothing. Administration after administration pledges more and more money to Israel’s military, which in turn uses more and more sophisticated means to enforce segregation and despair upon indigenous peoples in Palestine, which inevitably moves angry, enraged and hopeless warriors (like Hamas) to pursue the logic of violence to its bloody extreme. This campaign of terror is indeed hideous, but despair and genocide push human beings to an unimaginable edge.
And still, we have remained silent. I mean “we” the churches and synagogues of America. I mean “we” the peoples of faith who claim conscience and love of neighbor as our chosen path. I mean “we” the heirs of civil rights movements and human rights campaigns, who have been too afraid to speak up for a people who have been largely invisible to us, and for the most part forgotten by our political and ecclesiastical leaders. Whether we’ve feared being labeled ‘antisemitic,’ or whether we’ve simply chosen not to watch, it is our inaction (and the four billion, with a ‘b’, dollars of annual military aid we send to Israel) that has sustained this occupation politically and materially. This present conflict is on us.
I will finish by noting that, at present, we are watching Jewish communities lead the way with courage and prophetic clarity: organizing large protests in Washington, New York and Boston, and calling on the administration and its congressional supporters to withdraw military support and insist on a ceasefire (first) and an end to the occupation (necessarily, and next). Groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, and the Boston Workers Circle are putting their bodies and souls on the line in solidarity with nonviolent and determined Palestinian friends and activists.
Their persistence, even as they too are accused of ‘antisemitism’ and ‘self-hate’, is the most profound sign of hope among us in these dark days of autumn. And from their courage, the rest of us might just take the chutzpah we all need to wake up, stand up, step in and insist on an end to this madness. We must and we can.