Just Faith Delegation

You can stop the people's imaginations, their voices crying for justice, no matter how hard you try, you cannot hide the truth from the sun / You cannot steal the love from the heart that will be pierced for the freedom of Falastin, today, tomorrow, and the next day, / when the people of the land and the land of the people here in God's sight will forever remain.

At Al-Fara'a prison, a child was forced to paint a mural for the enjoyment of his captors, his torturers. This beautiful talent he had was co-opted and used as an instrument of his torture alongside humiliation, sleep deprivation, confinement, and much worse. So he painted his village as he remembered it, as he imagined it, on a wall in the dining hall where the Israeli officers who held him and other captive children ate their meals in between torturing the children in this prison.

Dear all my relatives, friends and barely acquainted friends who support the Zionist project of Israel,Please sit with me for a while, I have too many stories that scream to be told.  
A twelve year old boy picks up a stone and throws it at a fully geared soldier. The boy is sent to a prison for 20 years. Maybe bargained down to 18. His family will not be able to visit because they will not get permits to travel. 

Returning home from Palestine this week has been illuminating and challenging to see the interconnectedness between my state and the homeland of Palestinians, a place equal in size and 5,860 miles away. I have noticed striking similarities in the way that farmers here take pride in being from Maryland, raising their children and tending to crops in the same place for generations, similar to the way that Palestinian farmers claim nine centuries of heritage in one place. I feel despairing to imagine if all the farmers in my county were forcibly displaced at the rate Palestinians have been, over 95% of the indigenous population. I have also seen that Maryland has largely erased its genocide against the Native American peoples, the Iroquois-speaking tribes of my county, while Israel denies the on-going ethnic cleansing of Palestine. 

“This is what we want as a Palestinian people, is to feel and have dignity. We are human beings. We are no less than any other people. We have a right to self-determination... I can assure you, we are strong. We are the stones of the valley. We have been here forever, and will continue to be here forever.” -Raji Sourani

How are they getting away with this? This rhetorical question dogged me for days as I learned about the intricacies of Israel's occupation of Palestine: Concrete slabs 26 feet high tearing through Palestinian neighborhoods and farmlands. More than 100 permits required for ordinary tasks like building a room in your house. Palestinian children being sentenced to five to 20 years in prison for throwing stones, a common form of protest.

I think that the occupation exists in part because of the Jewish community’s historically-justified fear of annihilation. That fear has led the Jewish community to align itself with empire, militarism, and white supremacy. Those tendencies and ideologies have never been safe havens for Jews. We need a movement that will allow Jews to feel safe, that will recognize their fears, and that will show them how much we have to gain by realigning ourselves with our values and with oppressed communities around the world, starting with our Palestinian brothers and sisters. 

It felt like something out of a bad cliche spy movie.  I walk up to the passport control window super nervous on the inside but trying to hold it together on the outside when the passport control lady barely looks at my passport before she asked me if I was with the group. I answered yes and was swiftly taken to a holding room where most of the members of my group were being detained.

Some impressions of a tour that tore my heart, of a talk that was fierce, of a leader that asked us to build bridges and another look at the WALL.

Today we visited the Palestinian village of #Lifta which was attacked by Zionist militias and destroyed during the #nakba in the lead up to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

As we got of the bus we could here sound bombs and rubber bullets being fired just down the street from us. I started crying in grief, despair, anger. Why are they doing this? Why is nothing sacred in the Holy land?

This list is an interpretation of the daily tasks and hopes of those on the front lines of the resistance to injustice, working to end the occupation.

Last Friday, I woke up and decided to go to Friday prayers it sounds simple enough, but in occupied Jerusalem where nothing is ever that simple or easy. In order to just get off the street I was on I had to go through an Israeli military checkpoint then another and another. If that wasn't enough I spent most of my time at the mosque feeling afraid that at any minute something could go wrong and we would all be in danger.

Israeli occupying forces in Hebron forcibly segregated our #JustFaith17 delegation according to religion.

We are returning to Jerusalem and we hear the unmistakable clatter of low flying military helicopters. Two of them headed back towards Hebron. We are frightened for what our friends might be experiencing.

I saw among the best minds of Judaism some destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked, dragging themselves through Jerusalem's streets looking for a homeland, a refuge, a release from shamefearagonytrauma through an angry fix, angelheaded chosen ones burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo by way of the machine-gunnery of night [...]

When in Palestine, the kindom* of God is like this

like the woman who brings her bucket of water to pour on the children in the noon hour when the electricity is robbed for days on end 

Israel stops 5 leaders on interfaith delegation from boarding a plane to Israel includes Jewish Voice for Peace, American Muslims for Palestine and Presbyterian Peace Fellowship.

Five of our members were torn from us by the Israeli state. Our team members were denied access to our flights beginning in Dulles, singled out for being activists in support of boycotts, divestment and sanctions. Among them were Rick Ufford-Chase, former moderator of the PC(USA) and Rabbi Alissa Wise.

What about me threatens you most? My Muslimness? My womanness? My Palestinianness?

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says, "I tell you, if you keep quiet, the stones will cry out." In this desert land, where every edifice and road filled is intentionally designed by rock from the stone dirt landscape, it is clear. The stones have been crying out so long their hoarseness can only be translated from silence. 

The words that are currently coming to me fall far short of the outrage and grief I feel. There is so much to say, but the event that is fresh in my mind - and in my ears - is yesterday’s attack on Muslim worshipers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque by the Israeli government. The very least I can do is to bear witness to their resistance. 

The doors of Al Aqsa were opened, but men under the age of 50 were not allowed in, and were forced to pray Friday prayer in the streets outside of the mosque's gates - including members of our delegation. This is just part of a global system that criminalizes young Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian men and paints them as inherently violent.