Check out this Sojourners Magazine conversation between Josiah R. Daniels and Azmera Hammouri-Davis.

Honestly, I never thought much about Israel before college. Then, during my sophomore year, a prominent New Testament studies scholar had been invited to speak on campus; after it came to light that they were openly critical of the state of Israel, they were summarily disinvited. A few other students and I were still able to meet with the scholar, and we were shocked by the language they were using to describe the conditions in Israel for the Palestinians: “Second-class citizens,” “genocide,” and “apartheid” were the terms that struck me most.

“It can’t be as bad as what Black people have faced in the United States or what they faced in South Africa,” I remember saying to the scholar. “Go and see,” they admonished. And so, one year later, that’s exactly what I did.

In 2012, three other students and I had been invited to attend a conference at Bethlehem Bible College called Christ at the Checkpoint. The mission of this conference, which will be convening for the seventh time in May 2024, was to invite evangelicals to think about Israel and Palestine in ways that prioritized “peace, justice, and reconciliation,” while also explicitly giving voice to Palestinian Christians. And while I’m grateful that I was introduced to authors, theologians, and activists like Munther Isaac, Jonathan Kuttab, and Salim Munayer, nothing was quite as transformational as experiencing a checkpoint for myself.

I’d been stopped at police checkpoints in the United States multiple times — either alone or with friends or my dad. During those stops, humiliation, pain, or death always seemed to be a likely outcome. So when I was preparing to pass through one of the checkpoints at Israel’s apartheid wall, I imagined the Israel Defense Forces soldiers would hassle me the same as the Chicago police. But there was no hassling. I handed them my blue U.S. passport and waltzed through the checkpoint. “I feel like the scholar exaggerated a bit,” I thought to myself. But as soon as that thought crossed my mind, I turned around to see a long line of Palestinians, each of them being hassled by an IDF soldier. When I looked into the eyes of those Palestinians, I saw that they, too, felt humiliation, pain, or death was a likely outcome.

To read the interview go to Sojourners Magazine here.