The bible says that Jesus was born in a small Palestinian town called Bethlehem. His Jewish parents were surviving imperial occupation. They were forced to travel back to their ancestral region to register for Caesar’s census. There was no room in the inn. So Mary gave birth to baby Jesus in a stable. This year, it’s even worse. The inn and the stable have been bombed by Caesar – along with the refugee camps, the schools, the mosques, the churches and the hospitals. Baby Jesus is lying in a manger – in the rubble. This year, we will be attending a live-streamed church service from Bethlehem, along with a multitude of others who are anchored in the agape love of Christ – or who are, at the very least, Jesus adjacent. Will you consider joining us in this time of worship, solidarity, mourning and mobilization?
Check the RadicalDiscipleship.Net Facebook page or NewVision Media Center’s YouTube channel for the livestream on Sat, December 23 at 11amEST.
An excerpt from a message from Mark Braverman, executive director of Kairos USA. Download the Kairos Palestine Christmas Alert pdf here. If you are looking for a compelling alternative to Christian Zionism, this is definitely one of them.
WE TEACH LIFE TO THE REST OF THE WORLD
This is what meets your eyes as you enter the Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem, in place of the traditional Christmas tree. No explanation is needed, beyond what is articulated by the church’s pastor Rev. Munther Isaac in this year’s Kairos Palestine Christmas Alert:
“Christmas celebrations are cancelled this year in Bethlehem.There will be no tree lighting, no street parades, and no festivals.
“We watch in horror and agony as one child after another is pulled out of the rubble in the genocide in Gaza, reminding us of the ruthless massacre of the children of Bethlehem at the hand of the Empire—yet another reminder of the relevancy of the Christmas narrative. We will not celebrate. It is hard to rejoice. We are afraid. We are broken. We are shaken.
This is the Introduction of a position paper in solidarity with Palestinian liberation written by NDN Collective and the LANDBACK Team. The full paper is posted here.
When questioning the problems around our communities, Indigenous youth are often told, “it’s a complicated issue”. We see our grandparents’ houses with no electricity or running water while transmission lines run overhead and water lines supply nearby resource extraction projects. Coincidentally, when asking about what is happening in Palestine (named in Arabic, Falasteen), the dominant response is the same. However, neither the questions nor the answers are truly complicated. The current conditions we face as People stem from the root causes of settler colonialism, genocide, and apartheid. Under settler colonialism, settlers do not care about the People or the land. Their relationships are based on extraction and exploitation. Indigenous Peoples protect and defend our land and our communities. The land convenes us and helps to define who we are and what our purpose is. This is our shared relationship and understanding to Indigenous Peoples globally. That is why, we look to our Palestinian Relatives who, like us, continue to demonstrate the power of resistance against colonialism and occupation. This position paper, provides information on the historical relationship between Palestinians and Native Peoples, an overview of the devastating impacts of zionism, and reasons why NDN Collective and the LANDBACK Team stand in full solidarity and commitment to the Right of Return of our Palestinian siblings and full liberation of their homeland. Just as we fight and organize to reclaim land here on Turtle Island, our Palestinian relatives fight and organize to return to the land and for the land to return to the people. It is through our relationships and shared history of resistance against colonialism that we present the position paper: The Right of Return is LANDBACK.
From Dana Mills, Resource Development Manager, +972 Magazine, sent to subscribers of The Landline, their weekly newsletter on Friday, December 8, 2023
It has been 63 days since the atrocities carried out by Hamas in southern Israel, and since Israel began its nightmarish assault on the Gaza Strip. October 7, the first day of the war, was also the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, which occurs on the last day of the holiday of Sukkot. Now, two months later, we find ourselves beginning the next Jewish holiday: Hanukkah. But this Hanukkah feels more complicated than any I can remember.
A week before the start of Hanukkah, Israeli soldiers brought a huge hanukkiah — a nine-branched candelabrum lit by Jews around the world during the eight-day festival — into Gaza. The soldier holding the camera proudly smiles and announces that it is “the first hanukkiah in Gaza,” while the other soldiers around him cheer, the rubble of Palestinian homes and buildings visible in the background. A headline about the hanukkiah in the right-wing Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom proudly stated: “We will drive out the darkness with light.” But looking at soldiers assembling a hanukkiah on top of the ruins of Gaza, where the army has killed more than 17,000 Palestinians in the past two months, was a moment of deep darkness for me.
This image brought to mind a Hanukkah photo from a very different place and time: one in which a hanukkiah sits on a windowsill while, in the background, a swastika flag hangs from a building. The photo, taken in 1931 in Kiel, Germany, strikingly captures the eve of Nazism’s ascension. That hanukkiah was lit by Rabbi Dr. Akiva Posner and his wife, Rachel — my great-uncle and great-aunt.
The fact that this photo is part of my own family archive has always made me proud. Like any photo, it can be read in different ways. For me, it represents a legacy of defiance, the importance of celebrating one’s Jewishness as a subversive act, and the significance of holding on to ritual even in the face of grave danger. It symbolizes the power of resistance and moral courage, which are core to the kind of Jewishness I seek to embody.
The hanukkiah lit in Kiel against the backdrop of a swastika feels like the polar opposite of the hanukkiah standing on the ruins of Gaza. While the Kiel hanukkiah celebrates defiance in the face of oppression and the sanctity of ritual, the Gaza hanukkiah glorifies death and destruction.
This death and destruction is not an accident or an unintended consequence of Israel’s military operation in Gaza: Israeli officials have called for a permanent forcible transfer of Palestinians in Gaza, and, as our recent investigation demonstrated, the army is fully aware of civilian casualties when choosing its targets. Among the Israeli public, too, there is increasing legitimacy for calls to “flatten Gaza” and decreasing concern for the collective punishment being carried out against civilians.
In less than a century, we have moved from lighting candles against a backdrop of the genocide of Jews to a world in which there are Jews lighting candles to affirm, legitimize, and celebrate a genocide that they themselves are involved in committing.
Reflecting on the brave acts of Jewish resistance and defiance throughout history, including my own family lighting that hanukkiah against the backdrop of the swastika, ought to push us in the Jewish community to consider more seriously how we can use our faith, tradition, and culture to bring about a more just world. Jewish history is rich with examples of how we have opposed fascism and resisted racism throughout history. Turning to those examples at this difficult time can help us in fighting the widespread hatred, fear, and vengeance that are currently so prevalent in Israeli society.
Looking to our history for inspiration does not mean romanticizing those moments in which Jews were under horrific attacks and dealt with grave danger, bolstering an image of the Jew as constantly suffering and a pariah by disposition and destiny. But the violence and racism inflicted upon us as Jews should be a constant reminder to cherish humanity above all and resist racism enacted in our name.
As I prepare to light my own hanukkiah, it feels unbelievable that the war is still raging, that the Israeli army is continuing its unchecked attacks on Gaza, and that Israeli hostages are still being held captive. This Hanukkah, may the Kiel hanukkiah serve as a call to celebrate and treasure life.
Inspired by the defiance embodied in my family’s hannukiah, we must call to prioritize bringing home all of the hostages, to stop the immense death and suffering being inflicted on Palestinians, and to achieve a political resolution that ensures all human lives between the river and the sea are protected. We must demand that genocides are a thing of the past and work to bring light into our midst through resistance to racism and fascism — including when it comes from those who claim to speak in our name.
There is always another way to read history and to brush against its grain in support of the crucial value of humanism. In this horrific moment in Israel-Palestine, my great-aunt and great-uncle’s hanukkiah teaches us to not be afraid to dissent, and to fight to drive out the darkness and bring in the light.
Happy Hanukkah, Dana Mills Resource Development Manager, +972 Magazine
The American democratic experiment is unique in human history not because we are God’s chosen people to lead the world, nor because we are always a force for good in the world, but because of our refusal to acknowledge the deeply racist and imperial roots of our democratic project. We are exceptional because of our denial of the antidemocratic foundation stones of American democracy. No other democratic nation revels so blatantly in such self-deceptive innocence, such self-paralyzing reluctance to confront the night-side of its own history. This sentimental flight from history – or adolescent escape from painful truths about ourselves – means that even as we grow old, grow big, and grow powerful, we have yet to grow up.
An excerpt from Ismat Mangla’s AnalystNews interview with Zachary Foster, a historian and Rutgers University senior fellow. The full interview is well worth reading multiple times. You can follow Foster on Twitter here. In this excerpt, Mangla asks Foster about what made him move away from the Zionist beliefs.
I grew up in a very “exotic” suburb of Detroit, went to Jewish schools, Jewish summer camps, Jewish youth groups — all of which were Zionist. I went to Israel as a study abroad student in undergrad. That was the beginning of my transition from Zionist to non-Zionist to anti-Zionist, getting exposed to what day-to-day life was like for Palestinians in Jerusalem.
You don’t go from a Zionist household to speaking out publicly, frequently advocating for Palestinian human rights, overnight. It’s a process.
When I discovered that Palestinian Americans — who identify strongly with Palestine, whose parents and grandparents are from Palestine — are not allowed to go move to or visit Palestine, while I — an American Jew who may speak zero Arabic or Hebrew, who may have zero family in the country, who may literally not be able to identify it on a map or even ever heard of it — have a right to claim citizenship because I’m Jewish? Does that make any sense to you? That’s insane. That was a real lightbulb moment for me, meeting Palestinians and understanding the trauma of ’48 — and understanding that while I have rights there, they don’t.
The more you study Palestinian history and Israeli history, the more pro-Palestinian you become. You can’t study the history of Zionism and not be horrified. It’s as simple as that.
Radical Discipleship 