“Al Nakba”
“Like a shepherd you feed your flock, gathering the lambs and holding them close, and leading mother ewes with gentleness.”
-Isaiah 40:11
As we come up on the second Sunday of the season of Advent, a Sunday frequently associated with “peace,” I have felt the need to speak to the horrors we are bearing witness to for the past 60 days in the Holy Lands of Israel and Palestine as a Christian pastor.
Since October 7, 2023, the world has been bearing witness to non-stop news coverage of the astonishing tragedy still unfolding in the Middle East. After a heinous terrorist act of violence by a militant group in power known as Hamas, war has broken out between Israel and Hamas and thousands of non-combatant Palestinian people in Gaza have been killed as a result. Hospitals and refugee camps have been bombed. An unceasing campaign of vengeance has only had one pause: a week of a cease-fire which made it possible to exchange hostages.
A primary moment in history that Palestinians continue to remember and commemorate that has led to this point, involved the creation of the state of Isreal in 1947 and is called “Al Nakba,” the catastrophe.
I can’t find a better way to describe the ongoing devastation we are bearing witness to each day.
Thousands of people have died. Hospitals and refugee camps have been bombed in Gaza. And across the world, both islamophobia and anti-semitism are on the rise. These past two months have been a “Nakba.” A catastrophe.
It can be very difficult to even find out where to start when it comes to figuring out how to feel or even what to say about such an overwhelmingly complex conflict. These acts of violence certainly didn’t happen in a vacuum. We so desperately want to find someone to blame and to punish. Some want to punish Palestinians in Gaza for the fact that Hamas is in power at all. Others want to blame Israel for the decades of encroachment on Palestinian land, the 1947 “Nakba,” and the ongoing seige of Gaza since 2007.
So what can our response be as Christians?
I hope our first response is prayer—praying lament, praying for the intercession of the divine, praying for peace, praying with hope. And I hope our second response will be to slow down and recognize the vast humanity of this Nakba.
And, in recognizing this humanity, perhaps we can also turn toward our nation and raise a voice of criticism for the billions of dollars our nation has invested into the military power of a country that is now relentlessly bombing and has killed over 16,000 people, committing war crimes and genocide. (Here are some additional genocide arguments.) Perhaps we can examine and question why those in power in our nation have stubbornly refrained from voicing any meaningful concerns about the widespread devastation being enacted with bombs our country has paid for.
Perhaps we can ask if over 16,000 Palestinian lives has been enough payment for the loss of 1,400 Israeli lives.
I found myself thinking of Psalm 137 recently, a Psalm that was very clearly linked to a massive tragedy that the Israelite people faced thousands of years ago when the Babylonian empire conquered Jerusalem and exiled its people after destroying the Temple in Jerusalem: “By the rivers of Babylon, we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.”
I can’t help but compare the tragedy of the Babylonian exile to the tragedy of the Nakba, and the ongoing exile of Palestinian people into the “open-air prison” that is Gaza, or the shrinking region of land due to illegal settlements supported by the Israeli government that is the West Bank. The irony is not lost on me, either.
I also think the spirit of vengeance uttered in the latter part (the often unread part) of Psalm 137: “Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is the one who repays you according to what you have done to us. Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.” I wonder about how that spirit of vengeance that is willing even to indiscriminately destroy the lives of children is being unleashed now.
I think of Jesus who wept over Jerusalem and cried out, “If you (Jerusalem), even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes” in Luke 19.
And I think of a different image of God than one of wrath and retribution, the God I wish we looked toward more often rather than the human created God who promotes a myth of redemptive violence. The God whom Isaiah wrote about in Isaiah 40 when he said, “Like a shepherd you feed your flock, gathering the lambs and holding them close, and leading mother ewes with gentleness.”
May we, in these days, never turn away from the pain and suffering of this moment in Gaza.
May we, in these days, not refrain from raising our voices on behalf of those relentlessly victimized.
May we, in these days, not raise our voices in hatred against a group of people based on religion or ethnicity out of our desire to find someone to blame.
I hope you will join me in my unceasing prayer for peace—the peace that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. prayed for—a peace that is not the “absence of tension, but the presence of justice.”
Pray for the victims of this violence.
Pray for the people of Palestine who are hemmed in on all sides and unable to flee violence, unable to receive health care, and who have experienced 60 days of non-stop trauma.
Pray for those families in Israel who are still waiting for word on the health and well-being of those who were taken hostage.
Pray for all who are mourning.
And may we not refrain, as we pray, from the courage expected of us so that we will raise our own voices of protest against the forces of wickedness at work in this Nakba.
