Progressive Christians Must Support Palestine

This isn't a nuanced issue.

Image by hosny salah from Pixabay

The Dirtbag Christian isn’t really a media or current events blog. It’s kind of for talking about issues that affect me directly, or for me to offer commentary on things that I feel like aren’t being represented elsewhere. It’s very personal, like a blog. Myriad other news sources out there are able to more accurately talk about current events in a newsier context, or with more in-depth, journalistic, less blog-like analysis. When I do touch on recent events, it’s on a subject that I know intimately — such as the Duggars, who I’ve written about before. I am often uncomfortable speaking on larger issues in which I have no personal experience or understanding.

For instance, I am not Middle Eastern, nor Jewish, nor Muslim, in any capacity. I’m a white American Christian. My ancestors were the same; it’s been several generations on both sides since someone immigrated from somewhere European.

I can’t speak to the nuances of issues arising in the Middle East. I’ve never been there. I’m not informed on the precise history of the occupation of Palestine by Israel. I know what I was taught — Pentecostals are VERY pro-Israel for political reasons, even more than the average evangelical, despite thinking sincerely that Jews will go to hell — and I know more history from Judaism than Islam as it relates to my own religion, despite all three deriving scripture from the same sources, with a lot of overlap.

I find a lot of “progressive” Christians dancing around the issue of Palestine versus Israel. To be fair, I have before too, in the past. It’s not out of malice. It’s because I’m sure we feel pretty uneducated on this topic, and don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. If we speak out in defense of Palestine, will we hurt our Jewish friends’ feelings? Most of us come from positions where we don’t speak on such issues with our friends, as we feel we have no authority coming from a place of privileged and dominant culture. It’s absolutely a sensitive subject to broach.

I believe, however, we need to broach the subject. And we need to support Palestine, who is being subjected to a genocidal regime that has encroached on their land and their lives. It isn’t anti-Semitic to be against an oppressive and murderous government whether it’s China with Uighurs, Israel with Palestine, or the United States with… a lot of people worldwide. The conflict isn’t a two-sided one:

The history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is pretty concise and accurate in its Wikipedia article with a fairly neutral perspective. But to begin with, when the state of Israel was established, over 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their land — similar to what happened to Native Americans in the United States. In fact, there are a LOT of similarities here, because, essentially, that’s exactly what is happening. A colonist state is overtaking land where people already live, and forcing them out of their homes and off their lands so that other people can live there instead. This is what my ancestors did, making me a colonizer as well.

Palestine was one of the /first/ progressive issues I addressed in my personal life as someone who identified as conservative at the time. outside of political support of LGBTQ people, and the reason why was simple: I met a girl at my Christian college from Palestine. And she was a Christian, too. She spoke out on Palestinian rights and shared stories of her personal life and the horrors she’d witnessed while there — she and her entire family. I was horrified, and it opened my eyes. All my life, I’d been told that Israel vs. Palestine was just Jews vs. Muslims — but the ethnicities and issues are far, far more nuanced than that. There are Israeli Muslims and Christians, as are there Palestinian Jews and Christians. (And even if Palestinians were nothing /but/ Muslim, they still don’t deserved to be colonized and taken from their homes and lands and murdered.)

People in the United States, myself included but especially white conservatives, are wildly uninformed on the breakdown of ethnicity and religious demographics within the Middle East as a whole, if only because we are subjected to anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Middle Eastern propaganda throughout the entirety of our lives and especially in a post-9/11 world.

If you’re a progressive Christian who is fairly uneducated on Palestine, the first thing I’d ask you to do is to stop getting your research from conservative media outlets or people who explicitly call themselves Zionists or pro-Zionism. There are three pro-Palestinian groups you can support that I love: Kairos Palestine (a Christian Palestinian organization fighting against military occupation of Palestinian land), Jewish Voice for Peace which does great advocacy discussing the truth of Israel’s occupation, and Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, doing hands-on work in Palestine to provide humanitarian care for children in Gaza.

It goes without saying, of course, that avoiding anti-Semitism in leftist spaces is still paramount. Many Israelis and Jewish people do /not/ support the Israeli military occupation of Palestinian land. And while anti-Semitism doesn’t seem as if it’s “real” in the United States, it still is very much so on a global scale, including Europe. But again I say: supporting Palestine and Palestinians ISN’T ANTI-SEMITIC. People are allowed to defend their own land and their families and themselves. Currently, they aren’t able to defend themselves very well against a massive military force. So we’ve got to do what we can to help them — especially if we call ourselves Christians.