This event took place October 18, 2023. Religion and Public Life hosted a dialogue between three scholar-practitioners who drew inspiration from their respective faiths in order to advocate for a just peace. This talk provided an opportunity for a deep discussion of faith-based activism, liberatory readings of theological texts, and the complex and, at times, controversial role of multi-faith and international solidarity in the Palestinian liberation movement during times of crisis.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Faith in action. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim solidarity for just peace in times of conflict. October 18, 2023.
DIANE MOORE: And welcome. These are extremely heartbreaking, challenging, brutal times. We're feeling it as we read news or hear news from loved ones who are many of them affected in the region. We are experiencing the trauma and challenge of these days here in our own community.
This event, we are very happy to offer as an opportunity to come together to address these challenges in a way that does not reproduce the binaries that are so profoundly being replicated in national conversation about these times and to bring complexity, and to bring heart, and to bring soul to what it means for us to come together as a human community to think together about how do we respond to this terrible moment and how do we move forward in ways that don't replicate the violence but actually do our large and small parts to mitigate it.
I'm Diane Moore. I am the Associate—I never remember this title. Forgive me. I am the Associate Dean of Religion and Public Life here at Harvard Divinity School. And I want to thank Hilary Rantisi, and Reem Atassi, and our colleagues in RPL for helping to organize this event.
I also want to say that as a Religion and Public Life event, this is a little bit out of our normal lane, if you will. This is an event that asks us to think about what does it mean for those of us here on this panel to be scholars of religion, which all of us are, as well as we are all people of faith.
And we don't often sponsor events at RPL where we speak out of experiences of faith. But we felt like this time and this time in our community and also this time in the world is an opportunity for us to bring what we call a religiously literate lens to think about questions of faith.
And part of what that means is to challenge simple stories about faith that unify whole groups of people into one banner. Faith is never that. The power of faith is that it is internally diverse. It changes and evolves. Faith and practice emerge out of context and never are static.
And our faith stances impact what we otherwise think of as, quote unquote, "secular" parts of our lives. So we at RPL are always wanting to bring that lens of understanding of religious literacy to the work we do. We often enter from a different place. Now we're entering through faith. But that lens is as relevant to faith as anything else.
I also want to start to say that this is a time where these binaries are also being played out as zero-sum equations. Our words—I'm not speaking of RPL. I'm thinking all of our words. When we speak about our grief for the loss of Israelis is interpreted by some as not grief for the loss of Palestinians.
We are often interpreted to say our grief for the loss of Palestinian lives is somehow interpreted as not grief for the loss of Israeli lives. These are exactly the binaries and binaries kill. Binaries kill. This is a time where antisemitism is profoundly on the rise.
And that has to be challenged. It has to be challenged. It has to be named. We have to think about in ourselves are we the perpetrators of those sentiments as well as when we see it we need to challenge it.
Anti-Muslim sentiment is profoundly on the rise. And these divisions, these challenges are being utilized by nefarious actors to inflame, further inflame. And they're being very successful. Anti-Palestinian violence is very much on the rise. And anti-Israeli violence is very much on the rise.
So what does it mean for any of us in this room? And I'm going to make an assumption about people in this room to say that we will stand against any form of violence that dehumanizes others, and not to give in to single-story narratives, and to investigate what are the building blocks that allow for single-story narratives to continue to be reproduced.
That is what we have to do in an educational institution. That is our work as scholars, as scholars of religion, is to challenge the structures that give rise to and allow for the reproduction of any single story, especially those that create a zero-sum equation. So thank you for being here. Thank you for listening.
We look forward to—this is a very short session, so we will be able to hear from my wonderful colleagues here to my left. We're going to have a discussion among ourselves for about 40 minutes. And then we want to leave room and time for questions at the end. And what we hope you'll leave with-- you will not leave this room with any answers.
I'll tell you right now. I hope you leave this room with deeper and different kinds of questions and curiosity about things that you thought you might have known but now maybe wonder about how much you know. That's what I hope for this session that's what we all hope for this session.
So I'm going to do—I am going to be like—I'm going to slaughter the introductions to these people because we would be here for another two hours for me to give full introduction to these remarkable colleagues. So I'm going to literally give you names and affiliations because we have conversations to have, and we have work to do.
So to my left is my new friend and colleague who I just now don't have your introduction, which I put somewhere else. This is the day. Rev. Dr. Mae—your middle name?
MAE ELISE CANNON: Elise.
DIANE MOORE: Elise.
MAE ELISE CANNON: Cannon.
DIANE MOORE: Cannon. Thank you. I knew the last name and the first name. I did not know the middle name. Who is a formal—tell me. You have to say who you are because I know what you do, but I don't want to—make sure that the wording of the work you do.
MAE ELISE CANNON: Yes. I'm the Executive Director of Churches for Middle East Peace. And I'm ordained in the Evangelical Covenant Church.
DIANE MOORE: Thank you. That's what I was going to say, though you said it better. Thank you very much. To Mae's left is my dear friend and colleague Dr. Hussein Rashid who is the Assistant Dean of Religion and Public Life here at Harvard Divinity School.
And to his left is another dear friend and colleague Dr. Atalia Omer who is a Professor of Religion and Peace at the Kroc Institute in Notre Dame, and also our Dunphy visiting scholar in Religion, Conflict, and Peace, and one of the architects and central figures in our Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative.
So I'm going to open and ask you all to please just respond to as both scholars of religion and people of faith, what are you bringing to this moment, to this conversation, as we see the news unfold by the second of horrors in the region? How are you showing up in this moment with your hat as scholars but also as people of faith?
MAE ELISE CANNON: I lead an organization that is broadly ecumenical, so it has more than 30 denominations—Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant. I'm ordained as an evangelical, one of the few evangelical denominations that ordains women. We have peace churches.
Our membership coalition includes the Unitarian Universalists. And needless to say, these 33 denominations don't agree on anything theology, Christology, any ology, you name it. But they have come together under commitments around Middle East peace.
My vocational calling is first as a pastor. I'm also an academic. And in terms of this moment, I don't have any answers. And my heart is utterly broken. And I believe as a person of faith that part of what God calls us to is to allow our hearts to be broken.
And that's an invitation into a transformational journey because sometimes our hearts want to be broken for some and not to be broken for others. And so what does it mean to allow our hearts to be broken, and to grieve, and to lament? The Christian faith tradition and my faith tradition, in the Hebrew scriptures or the Old Testament, we have a whole book on lamentations.
And one of the great challenges of this moment is that I believe many—and it would be very appropriate for us to just stay in that moment of lament and in that moment of grief and acknowledging that the realities that are happening right in this moment are a tragedy—a tragedy for the people of Israel, and a tragedy for people in Gaza, and a tragedy for the Palestinian people. And yet I don't think we have the luxury of just resting in grief and lament.
And so the tension—I preached this past Sunday at a local church. And the pastor there, I was telling him about my wrestling. And I was sharing with him about how the sermon that I prepared for Sunday was the hardest sermon I've ever had to preach. And he said, well, you're wrestling between being pastoral and being prophetic.
And what does it mean to be pastoral and to care for people who are suffering in this moment and yet also to not ignore that we are at war and people are dying? And so calling attention to the realities, not only of the Israelis who have been killed at the horrific attacks of Hamas on October 7 and thereafter, those who are being held hostage in this very moment, but last night I was up much of the night.
We had a hospital that is a hospital that is a part of our membership. It is an Anglican hospital that was attacked yesterday. And hundreds and hundreds of people were killed. And I was texting last night with the Catholic leader of a development office in Gaza. And he said, if the war does not stop soon, we will not have enough body bags for all of the people in Gaza. You will need 2.2 million of them.
And he said, I hope we die soon because it is too hard to live in the tragedy of not having water and food and with the continual bombs. And so one of the challenges as people of faith is how do we allow our hearts to be broken and yet speak into moments of injustice and violence when lives are at risk and lives are at stake? And so that's what I'm wrestling with at this very moment.
HUSSEIN RASHID: Bismillahir rahmanir rahim salam alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh. In the name of God, the most compassionate, the most merciful, may God's peace, blessings, and mercy be with you today. I want to start by stating explicitly I am not Palestinian. We had hoped to get a Palestinian Muslim on this panel today.
And when we called around, we couldn't find one who would agree to be on here. We spoke to a half a dozen people. And the same thing—we kept hearing the same thing over and over again. I don't know what it means for my ability to go back and visit my family. I don't know what it means for the safety of my family back in Palestine.
I was in New York last weekend. I grew up in New York. I still call New York home. And I was visiting with friends of mine. And we have this word now. I've said this before. Some of my students know this. We have this word interfaith now. But I grew up in a New York where it was just growing up and hanging out. And I visited with a few of friends of mine.
Two of them have—keep it to the present tense—they have family members who have been taken hostage by Hamas. And I sat with them because they were my friends. They are my friends. And we sat together. And I'm not going to mention their names because we don't know what that means for their family who are hostages now.
And I sat with my Palestinian friends who were in fear for their families. And this idea of fear kept coming up over and over and over again. And we are looking at horrific, unbelievable direct violence that is being visited upon peoples throughout the Middle East, but specifically in Israel and Palestine right now.
And we are ignoring the many invisible acts of violence that are keeping people living in fear, that are keeping them from being able to speak out to their truths, that are keeping them from investing in solidarity together, which is what we were invited here to speak about. Because when you live in fear, how do you act in solidarity? How do you come together? How do you create?
And the Quran tells me, there's a verse of the Quran, like any text—at least for me in the Muslim tradition—is a living text. And the texts come to you as you need them is the way I interact with the text. The text that's been coming to me is I'll paraphrase here is, stand for justice.
Be a witness for justice. Be a witness for justice, even if it's against the strong, even if it's against your parents, even if it's against yourself, right? That justice has to be an overriding concern. Because without justice, there is no peace. The last part is my paraphrase, not the Quranic text. I realize as I say that.
And so what is doing justice mean? Because justice is a verb. It's not a noun. Justice is a verb. What does it mean to do justice? And jumping to another part of the Quran but this is a refrain. It is striving to outdo each other in good works. And can I look at the world today and say that we are striving to outdo each other in good works?
And I don't even know if there's another answer besides, no, that's even possible. And that reminds me that God gives us the tool to turn the impossible to possible. And so what is our realm of possibility? If what we're seeing is not striving with each other in good works and outdoing each other in good works, if that feels impossible now, how do we make that possible?
And I want to come back to my friends, both of whom actually happen to be rabbis. And as I was sitting with them, they were asking me how I was doing. And I want to come back. I said I'm not Palestinian. They asked me how I was doing because they saw. They know that in moments like this Islamophobia, anti-Muslim bias are not far behind. They asked how I was doing. And I said, look, don't worry about me. I can take care of myself. I've been at this for a minute. I'm a New Yorker. I'm good.
But that was their act of solidarity, right? In their moment of grief, in their moment of hurt, they're coming to me and checking in on me on how they can support me because we have these relationships from before that mean that we know that when there is Islamophobia, there is antisemitism. When there is antisemitism, there is Islamophobia. There is racism. These are not separate and distinct. It is the same actors. It is the same interests. It is the same forces.
And that we cannot let potential fear impact our ability to create friendships and communities. I'm not even saying acts of solidarity. This is something much more profound. You all the Robert Frost poem, Good fences make good neighbors, right? That's actually an indictment of fences. Actually, it wasn't an encouragement. It's like, you don't need neighbors. You need community. You need family.
How do you show up in the moments where you're not needed that make it easy to have these moments now when you are needed? And you can have those disagreements. And as a last act of solidarity, another friend of mine who's the head of a large congregation, Jewish congregation in New York—again, for security reasons, I'm not going to mention—but he's invited me to the bimah I think three times at this point for services.
Sorry. I should say to join on Friday services and speak to the congregation, to speak to the community. And the community knows me. And he invites me not because we agree, but because we disagree. And he said, this is where we build our community is we disagree when it's OK to, not when we can't have the space to. And so he's invited me, he said, come and be a greeter.
And for those of you who are not from New York, although I don't think this will come as a surprise to anybody who's ever been to a synagogue or shul before, there is security. There is lots of security, particularly on Shabbat. They have greeters who double as security. But he asked me to come as a greeter. He said, this community knows you. They need to know they're not alone.
I'll be there. I'll be there for the next few Fridays just so the committee knows they're not alone. But that's how you show up. And they know we're probably not going to agree on everything. But that's what I'm called to do is be a witness for justice.
ATALIA OMER: Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I just wanted before I move to my story as it relates to the panel today, I very relatedly wanted to articulate how I'm feeling completely overwhelmed with pain, mourning, grief, fear for what is unfolding and what seems to continue to become worse.
And I come to this as a Jewish person from Israel. I'm Israeli. I'm Jewish. But also as someone with deep friendships with Palestinians and someone who has come to recognition that Jewish safety, Jewish liberation is interlinked to Palestinian liberation and Palestinian freedom.
And this is kind of what continues to motivate me personally, intellectually. And I think at this moment, since I am in academic spaces, I feel most called into my role as a teacher. And so I appreciate that we have this conversation.
And yeah, I usually don't—in my work, while I've been grappling all my life with the question of my positionality as Jewish and Israeli and as it connects to questions of justice, I don't usually talk about—I don't bring my—I don't become too personal in my public articulations.
But I think the moment does call for something like that. And by an advice of a friend, I decided to start by talking about what I did last Shabbat on Saturday. It was my daughter's bat mitzvah. And we are a part of a community in Chicago called Tzedek Chicago. Tzedek meaning justice.
I became a part of this community because of my research. A few years back I wrote a book called Days of Awe-- Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians.
And the main question that motivated the book initially was recognition, descriptive recognition through ethnography and other kind of research methodologies that many American Jews are shifting their understanding, their understanding of Israel, Israeli policies, and perhaps most pivotally, how Israel and Zionism connects to their understanding of Jewish identity, of what does it mean to be Jewish.
And so as part of this broader movement of American Jewish critics, of Israeli policies, there also emerged a community called Tzedek Chicago that started with the recognition—well, OK, occupation is not my Judaism. This is what young people would wear T-shirts saying, occupation is not my Judaism.
But then the follow up question, well, what is my Judaism? And that requires work, that requires hermeneutics, interpretation, engaging with the tradition, and also engaging with the tradition. Not in some abstract way, a historical searching for something authentic that exists somewhere and somehow was perverted, but actual work that is historical that is accountable to historical injustices.
It's about reimagining in historically in embedded and embodied ways, which is very much connected to the framing of the Religion and Public Life, and broadly what does it mean to be religiously literate? It doesn't mean accessing something that is authentic and historical that is an essence that is transported transhistorically through time. But it's something that we always have to work on contextually and perhaps generate new meaning.
And so this is part of what Tzedek Chicago has been about. It's been about OK, well, what does it mean for us to be Jewish? And also be in solidarity with Palestinians but also with Black and Brown and other marginalized communities in Chicago, going back to the principle of doikayt, of hereness, of being in solidarity with other people.
So I found myself really following this community as it was consolidating, and emerging, and forming, and becoming a part of it because as a family because I wanted my children to have that sense of tradition and especially since I'm raising them in a very, very, very Catholic context, I'm based at the University of Notre Dame.
I wanted them to have a sense of, well, what does it mean to be Jewish? And so going back to Shabbat, to the bat mitzvah, it was absolutely overwhelming.
The whole week I was constantly in tears and grieving, and hurting, and fearful for my Palestinian friends in Gaza and elsewhere and also very attuned to the pain that many of my Jewish Israeli friends are feeling and also so acutely aware of the polarization of the discourse. Like Hussein was talking about, how being there when you are not needed can then be, in a sense, retrieved in moments of need.
But the other side is also true. There has been already such an infrastructure of polarization, of litigating critique that was also activated and made real conversation really so impossible to have even in spaces that where you're supposed to have that meaningful debate. And so I felt very overwhelmed.
And also overwhelmed by the sense of privilege of marking my daughter's special day and time of so much blood and suffering, and lack of compassion and recognition of people's humanity, and time of selective outrage, and so forth.
But the leader of the—the rabbi leading the community, Rabbi Brant Rosen, told me people continue to marry, and have children, and have all those—marked all those important moments in life cycle, even in the worst of times. And we are going to make it meaningful and acknowledge.
And it was really incredible moment because the community gathered together and a very, very diverse community. People from my life, from different times in my life were there.
And we talked, as the parents, we talked during the bat mitzvah about my daughter's name. We named her Peniel which means the face of God. But it connects to the story of in Genesis, in Bereshit, where Jacob is wrestling with the angel. And at that critical moment of wrestling, his name was—well, Peniel means face of God.
That was a moment of grappling and wrestling with God. And that was a turning point that his name was changed to Israel. But for me, that the wrestling is what it means to be Jewish. And this is why we named our Peniel. She does not want to go by this name. She is going by her middle name, which is not Hebrew. But that's her choice for now.
But this really—when we reflected to her about her name in that moment of when the parents talk to the bat mitzvah girl, that really very deeply connected to my trajectory, my personal, my autobiographical but
also the intellectual. They are really interlinked because I grew up in Israel, Jewish in Israel, but in a very secular sector milieu of Jerusalem.
But I was told, well you are a part of a Jewish state. And I kept asking, well, what does it mean? What does it mean? Tell me, what does it mean? And as I continued to learn and really truly unlearn many of the things that I was taught in school, and beyond that, I realized that I really needed—I truly needed to wrestle with that. And that it's not one thing and with the reductionism that it entails.
And with what Diane said, that zero-sum understanding of history, and memory, and Jewish history, and Jewish memory—and that to go back to where I started, I've reached a place where I understood very deeply that to live meaningfully Jewish would mean that I have to interlinked my understanding of freedom with Palestinian understanding of freedom. So I'll end with this. Thank you.
DIANE MOORE: Thank you. Thank you all. I'm struck hearing you. And one of the great challenges we're facing relevant to the question of what's religion's role in this, which is a common question. And I think it's actually an appropriate question, but it's often answered in terms that I think end up reproducing the violences instead of helping to mitigate them.
And so we have very powerful single stories of the Christian role in this, or the particularly Christian evangelical role, of the Muslim role in this. Note I am using the singular intentionally because I'm reproducing saying exactly this is the problem—and the Jewish role.
So I'm going to ask you all to maybe reflect on what does it mean to—in your own lives, how do you both know that those single stories are framing the questions that often come to you about your own faith or about faith?
How do you respond to that to help advance a more complicated and a more generative understanding of the power of religion in these times? And maybe let's just mix it up a little. Hussein, why don't you go ahead and start?
HUSSEIN RASHID: OK, thanks, Diane. I think you're right. I think the two hats, wearing the two hats as both a scholar of religion and as a religious community leader, religion and faith is a good way to approach this, I mean, and so far as one can neatly distinguish them.
But thinking about these single narratives as a type of violence that is imposed on us, Muslims are asked categorically. Muslims and Jews hate each other. Muslims are bad Christians, which I'm actually OK with that one because I'm not a Christian, so I guess I'm a bad Christian.
But you know—but I think that the single narratives, our impositions about trying to—somebody else's attempt to make sense of the world. And we have to understand that when we accept those narratives, what we're doing is not only violence to others but to ourselves, right?
Even if we come out as you are the, quote unquote, "good ones," that means you are the good ones, right? One of the other identities for those of you who can't tell is I'm Asian-American. The model minority is a really pernicious—you're really good at math. No, no. So I'm in religion.
But there is an expectation right like you are the good one. And you are the—and you're good at this. And that is a pernicious and evil single story as well, right? The myth of being good. And understanding that as a type of violence that's visited on our communities and that we buy into or that religious communities buy into, how do you complicate those stories?
And I think it's trying to push into questions—not this kumbaya, we're all the same, and can't we all just get along, but think very deeply and realistically about what does that mean. What does justice mean for us to come together around? Can I as an individual start with understanding that human dignity is not conditional on whether I like you or not? But it is an absolute way of being and seeing the world.
Because if you cannot take human dignity seriously, you are undignified. And you will be treated as such. This is the thing I've been seeing so much is that people who are like, yes, there's only one story. And we're going to stand with this. And we don't recognize anybody else's humanity or human dignity in this. They're the ones who are being treated the worst in all of this, right?
And I think that this is something that keeps coming up is, what are you doing? And why are you doing it? So that is sort of the social, religious, cultural critique. But again it's a soft line between what is my faith perspective on this? Where does my faith lead me to?
Is thinking about how do I tell those complicated stories where there only is a push for only one way to be Muslim and only one way to think about this and the violence that is again inflicted within our community because we've bought into these single stories, and thinking about how do you make that space so that how you choose to define your Islam is irrelevant as long as we can agree to compete in doing good works, coming back to the earlier point I made.
So I think there is conflict and there is real division. And there are ways we can address real division without resorting to violence as a first, second, third, or last resort. And I think that's the thing we keep getting tripped on is we keep making these metaphysical wars so that there is no option but to fight them, and there is no option to ever end them. And I think we have to start thinking beyond that model.
ATALIA OMER: I mean, I can go next. Yeah, I mean, so one of the issues that I've traced in my—as I did ethnography and work with American Jewish critics and Palestine solidarity activists and just people who are kind of rethinking precisely the homogenization of Jewish history that is entailed by kind of the ethos of Zionism.
That there is only—yeah, that it is a single narrative that reads the millennia, years, millennia of Jewish, Jews inhabiting what according to those categories is the diaspora including in Arab and Islamic countries as somehow out of history.
Somehow this is when the Jewish people was floating outside of time. And it's only the, quote unquote, "return" to the land, to Zion that rehabilitate and redeem. And that's the telos of Jewish history.
This is exactly an—this is exemplifies a single narrative that is a modernizing, that is teleological, that also entails all kind of erasures, specifically of Jews living in very integrated ways, for instance, in Iraq or in Palestine itself in the Ottoman Empire during the Ottoman time.
And so part of what I've been kind of tracing in my scholarship is spaces where people reclaim other kinds of narratives engage in a practice of counter—kind of counter archival practice as a way of reimagining or reclaiming something else that again it's not about a retrieval of something authentic that is out there.
It's not about romanticizing another story. But it's about being confronted by other kinds of questions and narratives and other people's narratives resisting the zero-sum kind of assumption. So it's absolutely a critical ethical practice of resisting a single narrative and also single narratives about one's redemption and safety.
And so this is where it is important to grapple with multiple stories because people don't live in abstraction. We are not living in some sort of abstract spaces. We live in communities with other people unless there are designs in people's minds to live just amongst people just like them. And this is obviously ethically very, very problematic.
So this is exactly in my own, my scholarship, and my personal trajectory, I've been curious about those kind of processes of resistance to a single narrative. And it's resistance that is propelled by a recognition
that the one narrative did not come out of nowhere but in fact has a particular history and particular forces.
That in the case of Zionism, those forces and particular history is very much connected in Europe. Europe not only as a geography, but Europe as a project, as a political project, as an intellectual project, as a settler colonial project, as an antisemitic project, as a genocidal project. And also very much linked to modernity.
So I think that this is absolutely critical and to resist the single—again, just to underscore, to resist the single story, it's not to say that somehow the tradition was corrupt or perverted by all those other forces. But recognition of-- well, first of all, traditions are internally contested, historical, embodied, embedded, et cetera.
And we need to face, let's say, the problematic motifs within the traditions. For instance, for most of Jewish history, Jews were a minority, oppressed minority, in different contexts. And they had all kind of fantasies about revenge that they shared among themselves and in their texts.
But what happens when all of a sudden Jewish people are a majority in particular context. And again, becoming a majority is not something that descended from the sky. It was an outcome of policies and various forces that enabled—becoming majority meant the displacement of Palestinians.
And so what do you do with all those verses that maybe made sense at a particular moment when you had somebody else's boot on your neck? But if you're in a context where your boot is on somebody else's neck, how those same resources play out in a different context.
This is just to highlight the need to think of tradition as changing, as elastic, as dynamic. It's open to interpretation and reinterpretation and reimagine that is in conversation with others. This is kind of the source of the ethical work, I think.
MAE ELISE CANNON: A lot of my academic work focuses on the history of American Protestant engagement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And the title of my doctoral dissertation was Mischief Making in Palestine. I'm afraid that Christian engagement often in the conflict today has not shifted in terms of its constructiveness. It is not monolithic. I would argue though it continues to be in many ways quite problematic.
I think most people don't know historically in the United States that the American Christians who were the most in favor of the establishment of the State of Israel were not conservatives, or evangelicals, or fundamentalists. It was actually Protestant liberals. So prior to 1948, it was Protestant liberals who were supporting in large part Jewish refugees coming out of the Holocaust who were advocating for the establishment of the Jewish state.
And in fact, in 1948, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Mennonites and to the Quakers for their work with Jewish refugees which then after the establishment of the State of Israel and what the Palestinians call the Nakba, the Palestinian refugee problem, where nearly a million Palestinian refugees were created after the Arab—
ATALIA OMER: War.
MAE ELISE CANNON:—Israeli war. Yes, the War of 1948. The refugee crisis became so significant that Protestant liberals began to respond to the needs of Palestinian refugees which then began an allegiance between American Christians who were Protestant liberals who were advocating for justice and care for refugees. The support of American conservative Christians, and evangelicals, and those allegiances didn't come until 1967 until the Six-Day War.
And for American conservative Christians, many of them saw the '60s and the civil rights movement—excuse the expression—as the world was going to hell in a handbasket. Is that the expression? And so they were very concerned. And so they thought, of course, the world is going up in flames, so Christ must be coming again. And then Israel won this war in six days. And that meant that of course Jesus would be coming soon. And God must be on the side of Israel. And then we see these allegiances between the far right conservatives and evangelicals.
And many people don't know that history and don't know where that comes from. So when you speak—and I do. I speak in churches, conservative churches and liberal churches. I speak in mosques. I speak anywhere anyone will let me about what's happening on the ground right now in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.
And often, what's taught in American conservative or evangelical churches is that this war and this conflict has been going on for thousands of years and it's intractable. It is a war that was ordained by God because Isaac and Ishmael were the sons of Abraham, and they were having conflict. And there's a lack of understanding even of the historical text that Isaac and Ishmael actually buried their father together.
And that even when you look at the historical text, when you see Ishmael in the wilderness with Hagar, Hagar cries out to God. And God does not turn his back on her, but he reveals himself to her. It's the very first revelation of God that we see in the Holy scriptures.
And so so much of what we see, at least in Christian tradition in the United States, is actually this integration of politics and the story of Israel without a deeper look at the contemporary geopolitics. There's a lack of understanding that the conflict is a contemporary conflict and not a historical one.
Even so much so—and I would encourage you—this is really a question, look at the rhetoric that is being used today. Even by our president just this morning in response to the attack on the Al-Ahli hospital, he said in a conversation he was having with Israeli officials—and I don't know if he said it specifically to Netanyahu or to someone else. He said, I heard that wasn't done by our team.
This rhetoric of good and evil, this rhetoric of Israel as being seen as being on God's side and the Arabs as being seen as Brown and evil. Vice President Pence was the very first vice president in the US history ever to speak at the Knesset. And if you look at his speech, you see these themes that are inherent in Christian conservativism as of good and evil and of God on being on the side of one and not on the side of other.
And I think this has to be deconstructed. And we have to understand where it comes from. And we have to understand that if there's ever going to be peace coming from our own traditions, these inherently false assumptions, they will destroy us, let alone the world.
And there will never be peace in Gaza. There will never be security in Israel. There will never be an end to the occupation. These issues will never be resolved when we're constantly imposing these views of good and evil. We are good and the other is evil. And I'm afraid and I can say this confessionally, I'm afraid a lot of that comes from Christian presuppositions that are just wrong.
I know I'm supposed to come with questions and not answers. And I'm saying that very authoritatively but—and so I do think on the other hand, Christianity is not monolithic. And we have this beautiful example and the person of Christ, who is pastoral and prophetic. Who came and said don't only love your neighbor but love your enemy. And who came and I believe died on the cross as an example of the greatest sacrifice.
And so what a beautiful thing as I see Israeli peace activists who are human rights activists who are literally risking their life in this very moment when they speak up fo
beautiful thing that is. And the same when you have Palestinians who are courageous who are saying what Hamas did was horrific, and it should be condemned. They are often viewed as traitors in their own society.
And so the encouragement would be could we go through a transformational experience as individuals to be willing to step outside of our own context, to love people who are other than us, to be able to pursue peace even when our natural response would be anger or even violence.
I heard the most beautiful piece, and I'll end with this. A Palestinian peace activist wrote a letter and we posted it on our website at Churches for Middle East Peace. And he was talking about right now so many Israeli peace activists are literally going to serve in the Israeli army. They're giving up. They're done.
And he begged them. And he said, please, please, please if there is any moment when standing for peace matters, if there's any moment when putting our money where our mouth is like where the cost is worth it, it's in this very moment where—he said, please. He said, I love you no matter what. But I'm reaching out my hand in hope that we can pursue peace together for a future for both of our peoples.
And I hope that we in the United States, like we're no better, right? We make it worse because we use words of violence that then create space for physical violence. Our words here are horrific. I'm brokenhearted by what's happening there on the ground in death. But when we talk here, we use words of hatred and dehumanization. And it's abhorrent. We should be ashamed of the way that we talk about things here in this space.
And I don't care what your religion is or if you're atheist or not. And so I implore us. May we not do violence with our words. But may we create space to reach across divides and to seek to understand people who have a different history and a different understanding. And so to try to meet them in their grief, to bring comfort in brokenness, and then also to say killing and violence is not the answer.
DIANE MOORE: As we feared, we are close to the end of the hour. I want to say a couple other words and then have an invitation maybe for the audience. First, I want to say part of the power of single stories, particularly when they are married with religion, which is perceived by many faith practitioners and people outside of religion as the ultimate calling on ultimacy, the ultimate truth, the ultimate power.
So a single story about religion is a very dangerous thing because then you are talking about a single story of ultimacy that is often weaponized by practitioners themselves as well as others. I want to say partly also when we have single stories, we erase whole swaths of people and invisiblized them.
And even very much so, very few people today actually even realize—and sadly today with the bombing of the hospital in Gaza, this may tweak a challenge to assumption. There are many, many Palestinian Christians who are often left out of these stories. So again, dangers of the single story.
And finally, I want to say when we think about the internal diversity of religious traditions, it's a phrase we can just kind of rolls off our tongue. We think internal diversity of religious traditions. There are very few people who would actually challenge the truth of that statement. But the actual way that plays out is we rarely actually really recognize the internal diversity of religious traditions.
We have fights internally about what's true Christianity and what's fake Christianity. I'm a Christian. I'll speak from that perspective. This is real Christianity, and that's not real Christianity. I think what this moment calls for and what many of my wonderful friends and colleagues have spoken about here is what does it mean to challenge single stories in our own faith traditions if we have one?
To actually deal with intrafaith conversation and not necessarily interfaith conversation, although that's often important too—but what does it mean for me as a progressive Christian growing up in a community
where justice and religion were united in my own upbringing? And then to leave that community and realize that that actually was its own particular interpretation of Christianity.
And when I encountered what for me were then conservative Christians who were promoting nationalisms, I felt like I had to leave the church because I thought that's not that's not my church. And it wasn't until relatively recently—I'm very old, so recent is relative. So I would say 20 years ago that I realized I can't not be a Christian. I am a Christian. You can't just say, I'm not going to be a Christian.
And then it required me to say what does it mean for me to engage with Christians who are representing a Christianity that troubles me deeply? But these are people in my tradition that I have access to. It is my work to do that work of intrafaith conversation. We need that. How do we move away from fear?
Your comment that started us off, Hussein, I think is so key. When we are in fear, we are only, we can only be in a single-story narrative. We have to acknowledge fear and find communities that we can move beyond it. I will close with a invitation. And I will—I'm using my moderator status here and I apologize.
What brought me back to my tradition and a challenge in my tradition is a passage that has always meant a lot to me. It's Micah 6:6 and the question is, what does God require of us but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.
We are in sore need of justice. We are in sore need of kindness. And we are in sore need of humility. May we be inspired by each other, by courage to step out of our places of comfort into discomfort, and seize this horrific moment to do the work of just peace building. This is the time.
Thank you for being with us. And thank you for joining us today. Can we give round of applause to our speakers?
[APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER 2: Sponsor, Religion and Public Life.
SPEAKER 1: Copyright, 2023. President and Fellows of Harvard College.