How Do We Celebrate Christmas While Bombs Drop in Gaza?

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Another compelling offering from The Alternative Seminary.

How Do We Celebrate Christmas While Bombs Drop in Gaza?

Jesus was born in a context of occupation, political violence, and militant resistance. As much as we try to wrap the “Christmas story” in innocent, Hallmark-card imagery, the biblical texts describing the coming of Jesus are making powerful assertions about the politics of the Bible that speak very much to our contemporary global crises – including the current violence in Israel and Palestine.

Once again this year, the Alternative Seminary is offering their annual Advent gathering “Peace on Earth and the Politics of Christmas.” In this virtual program, we will explore the “nativity narratives” in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke to see how they express core biblical themes of justice and liberation. We will “un-domesticate” these stories and reflect on how they are truly challenging us to a revolutionary discipleship – an especially urgent need as we witness more violence in Jesus’ homeland. This program will be facilitated by Will O’Brien, coordinator of The Alternative Seminary and contributor to Radical Discipleship.

Continue reading “How Do We Celebrate Christmas While Bombs Drop in Gaza?” →

Only Two Things

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An excerpt from Mosab Abu Toha’s November 6 essay in The New Yorker. Toha is a renowned Palestinian author who was kidnapped by Israeli forces, just a few days ago, at a military checkpoint along with about 200 other Palestinian men.

My brother-in-law Ahmad suggests that we set out on our bikes to find my father. After only three hundred metres, we see him, his head tilted downward while he pedals.

My father tells me later that debris covered every inch of the street that led to our house. He did not feed his fifteen ducks, thirty hens, five rabbits, and six pigeons. “Maybe some are alive and stuck under the rubble,” he says. But, after he saw the bombed house and heard the frightening whirring of drones, he headed back to the camp.

When we get “home,” we all sit on the floor. It’s not until later that I start to realize: I lost not only my house and its rooms but also my new clothes and shoes and watches. My books, too.

Continue reading “Only Two Things” →

I Will Keep Your Memory Alive

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From Ahmed Alnaouq (above), a Palestinian journalist based in London and the co-founder of We Are Not Numbers. Originally posted to Twitter on November 17, 2023.

I will never ever forget you. I will never forgive your killers. And I will keep your memory alive.

My father, Nasri Alnaouq, age 75

My sister, Walaa Alazayizi, age 36

Her children:

-Raghd Alazayizi, age 13

-Eslam Alazayizi, age 12

-Sara Alazayizi, age 9

-Abdullah Alazayizi, age 6

My brother, Muhammad Alnaouq, age 35

His children:

-Bakr Alnaouq, age 11

-Basema Alnaouq, age 9

My sister, Alaa Salman, age 35

Her children:

-Eslam Salman, age 13

-Dima Salman, age 12

-Tala Salman, age 8

-Noor Salman, age 4

-Nasmah Salman, age 2

My sister, Aya Bashir, age 33

Her children:

-Malak Bashir, age 12

-Mohammed Bashir, age 9

-Tamim Bashir, age 6

My brother, Mahmoud Alnaouq, age 25

My Name

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By Zeina Azzam, a Palestinian American poet, writer, editor, and community activist. Thank you to Linda Sarsour for posting on social media.

Write my name on my leg, Mama
Use the black permanent marker
with the ink that doesn’t bleed
if it gets wet, the one that doesn’t melt
if it’s exposed to heat

Write my name on my leg, Mama
Make the lines thick and clear
Add your special flourishes
so I can take comfort in seeing
my mama’s handwriting when I go to sleep

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Because God is Kind of Blue

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By Johari Jabir

a little Palestinian boy, walking to school in Gaza
encountered an Israeli soldier driving a U.S. – made tank
Looking up into the soldier’s eyes, the little boy said,
“Mr. American President, when you look at me, would you say
he could have been my son,
like President Obama said of Trayvon Martin

meanwhile, a little black girl,
in a studio apartment in north St. Louis
waiting for her father to pour milk into her bowl of captain crunch cereal,
turned her gaze toward the tv,
where images of fire and smoke rained down on gaza
“daddy,” she said,
“is god blue?”

Continue reading “Because God is Kind of Blue” →

We are Here to Make Ourselves Clear

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An open letter from a coalition of anti-occupation Jewish students at Brown University. Re-posted from The Brown Daily Herald (November 7, 2023)

“Solidarity is the political version of love.” – Jewish feminist activist Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz

As of today, it has been a month since the Oct. 7 attacks that have dominated global political consciousness and discourse, not to mention our experiences as young Jewish people. Zionist institutions purport to be representative of all Jews, often using us as a rhetorical shield to support the unconscionable actions of the state of Israel. We feel a particular pain as Jews having to continuously justify our stance against genocide. We are here to make ourselves clear: We stand in solidarity with Brown Students for Justice in Palestine and the Palestine Solidarity Caucus in the pursuit of the liberation of Palestinian peoples. We know intimately that Jewish struggles are necessarily bound up in global struggles for freedom. We are a group of Jewish students who have coalesced around our shared vision of justice, anti-occupation, liberation and community. We ask you to listen to us now:

1. What do we mean when we say, “from the river to the sea”?

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is not a call for the forced removal of Jews from Palestine or, as it is commonly misconstrued, a call to “throw Jews into the sea;” instead, it is a call for the end to the oppression of all Palestinians — in Gaza, the West Bank and within the Green Line. Liberating all of Palestine requires revolutionary change: not an eradication of Jews from the land, but a total dismantlement of the apartheid regime occupying it. The assumption that this phrase is inherently genocidal falsely conflates liberation with the annihilation of each citizen of the oppressive state and ignores its liberatory intent. Within this conflation, we hear a racist assumption that Palestinians are ruthless “animals” and an intentional obscuring of the violent intent of a neo-fascist government — a characterization shared even by writers in Israel’s newspaper of record. It is not only blatantly false but obscene to frame a call for liberation and justice as genocidal while Israel is carrying out genocide in Gaza funded by billions of American tax dollars. If calling for a future in which Palestinians can live in their homeland unshackled implies an existential threat to the Zionist ideology, it is that ideology that must be called into question — not the call for liberation. 

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I Grant You Refuge

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By Hiba Abu Nada. Re-posted from Protean Magazine. This poem was written on October 10th and is among the last pieces she composed before being martyred by an Israeli airstrike on October 20th. Huda Fakhreddine translated it from the original Arabic.

1.
I grant you refuge
in invocation and prayer.
I bless the neighborhood and the minaret
to guard them
from the rocket

from the moment
it is a general’s command
until it becomes
a raid.

Continue reading “I Grant You Refuge” →

Try to Make it to the Morning

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By Hala Alyan, a poem called “The Interviewer Wants to Know About Fashion,” re-posted from Literary Hub (October 17, 2023)

 “They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”
—Ayelet Shaked

Think of all the calla lilies.
Think of all the words that rhyme with calla.
Isn’t it a miracle that they come back?
The flowers. The dead. I watch a woman
bury her child. How? I lost a fetus
and couldn’t eat breakfast for a week.
I watch a woman and the watching is a crime,
so I return my eyes. The sea foams like a dog.
What’s five thousand miles between friends?
If you listen close enough,
you can hear the earth crack like a neck.
Be lucky. Try to make it to the morning.
Try to find your heart in the newsprint.
Please. I’d rather be alive than holy.
I don’t have time to write about the soul.
There are bodies to count.
The news anchor says oopsie.
The Prime Minister says thanks.
There’s a man wearing his wedding tuxedo to sleep in case
I meet God and there’s a brick of light before each bombing.
I dream I am a snake after all.
I dream I do Jerusalem all over again. This time,
I don’t shake my hair down when the soldier tells me to.
I don’t thank them for my passport.
Later my grandfather said they couldn’t have kept it.
You know that, don’t you?
I don’t know what they couldn’t do.
I only know that enormous light.
Only that roar of nothing,
as certain and incorrect as a sermon.

Hala Alyan is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize. Her latest novel, The Arsonists’ City, was a finalist for the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, Lit Hub, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn, where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University.

A Response to Rev. Barber on Palestinian Resistance

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By Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler, re-posted from Mondoweiss, a source of news and opinion on Palestine, Israel and the US

The Bishop William Barber, II, of the Poor People’s Campaign wrote an Op-Ed that appeared in The Guardian on October 13, 2023, entitled, “We must say an emphatic ‘no’ to Hamas a thousand times“. I feel compelled to respond to that Op-Ed. I am hesitant to challenge a friend and a colleague, but on this issue, I must.

I understand Rev. Barber’s need to thread the needle, but in a time like this, we need truth-telling and not outrage when it is politically expedient to do so. As Bishop Barber decries and mourns the killings and atrocities carried out by Hamas, he makes the same error that he has made in the past, by diminishing — and at times ignoring the horrendous history of settler colonialism endured by Palestinians. I am not suggesting equivocation, where a massacre by Hamas in Israel is justified by the long history of Palestinian dispossession and oppression. But I am advocating for the consistent and equal acknowledgment of the long pain and suffering of the Palestinian people. Rev. Barber has not done that historically or even in the structure of his Op-Ed, where he mentions Palestinian suffering in a secondary position to the recent attacks upon Israel.

Rev. Barber seems to want to excuse 75 years of oppression and harm perpetuated by the Israeli regime and aided by a general silence from the world. Through the years, Israelis, Palestinians, Muslims, Christians, and Jews have worked to draw attention to the gross violence and injustices of Israeli occupation. Yet, it seemed that the world was not interested in war crimes, or the genocidal pogroms carried out against the Palestinians. In most cases, the death of a Palestinian child, or the eviction of a Palestinian family did not even amount to a footnote in the concerns of the U.S. government or many religious leaders, including Rev. Barber. Click here to read the rest on Mondoweiss.