The Places We Stop Seeing

On June 8, First Congregational Church UCC will host Reverend Dr. Alex Awad, a Palestinian Christian raised in Jerusalem who served 26 years as a United Methodist missionary and spent 21 of those years pastoring the East Jerusalem International Church. Rev. Dr. Elmarie Parker, former PCUSA Regional Liaison for Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, will interview him. Many of you heard Elmarie preach here in April. This talk is a long-planned event that supports both our national UCC commitment to Peace and Justice and our own commitment to being a Just Peace Congregation.  

Last July I wrote about General Synod 35, where the UCC passed its Declaration for an End to Genocide in Palestine, and noted that the blog was "not the place for a full exploration of Zionism, U.S. complicity, or the apartheid realities of Israeli policy." This post is a fuller exploration, offered as preparation for June 8.

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There is a particular cruelty in the news cycle: a place becomes visible when the violence is spectacular enough, then invisible again when something more convenient demands our outrage. Gaza has been both. But the people there did not stop suffering when we stopped watching.

The peer-reviewed record is clear. A Gaza Mortality Survey published in The Lancet Global Health estimated 75,200 violent deaths between October 7, 2023, and January 5, 2025 (roughly 3.4% of Gaza's pre-conflict population), with women, children, and elderly comprising 56.2% of those killed. The Max Planck Institute subsequently estimated the toll likely surpassed 100,000 by October 2025. A ceasefire was declared that month; killings have continued since.

This is not background. This is the ground on which we stand when we ask: what does it mean to be a Christian who cares about the Holy Land?

What Is the Holy Land, and Why Do We Call It That?

The term is primarily Christian and Jewish in origin. Christians call this land holy because it is where Jesus was born, taught, died, and rose. For Jews, it is Eretz Yisrael, the land of the covenant, the geography of the Torah. For Muslims, Jerusalem (Al-Quds, "the Holy") contains the Haram al-Sharif, Islam's third holiest site.

The phrase carries an embedded claim worth examining: it implies that land itself can be sacred, that geography participates in covenant. That is a powerful idea with powerful political consequences. When we say "Holy Land" without examination, we are already inside a narrative. Palestinians have continuously inhabited this land across millennia of shifting empires: Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Ottoman, British. The notion that the land was "empty" before Jewish immigration in the late 19th century is not a matter of historical debate. It is a documented falsehood.

The Stories We Are Told

Several narratives compete for this region's meaning. American Christians have largely been given two of them.

The biblical narrative of return (promised land, Exodus, Kingdom, Exile, homecoming) is real, ancient, and spiritually weighty. But it is selectively applied. The same Hebrew scriptures that speak of promised land speak with prophetic fury about what it means to dwell there: the demands of justice, care of the stranger, warnings to kings who oppress.

The Zionist founding narrative describes a persecuted people, facing centuries of antisemitism culminating in the Holocaust, exercising the right to self-determination. This is also real. European Jewish suffering is not in question. What is in question is whether the political program that emerged from it justified what was done to the people already living in that land.

The Palestinian narrative tells of a people dispossessed through war, expulsion, and policy, now living under occupation or as refugees. This is the narrative most American Christians have been told is either nonexistent or antisemitic to acknowledge. The Nakba, the displacement of approximately 750,000 Palestinians in 1948, is documented history, not contested propaganda. Israeli historians including Benny Morris and Avi Shlaim have established this from Israeli archival sources. Dr. Awad grew up inside that history. He will speak from it on June 8.

The Weaponization of Antisemitism

Real antisemitism exists, is dangerous, and demands unambiguous opposition. Jews have been murdered in synagogues and targeted by white nationalist movements. None of that is in dispute.

What is in dispute is whether criticism of Israeli state policy constitutes antisemitism. A significant number of Jewish scholars, rabbis, and organizations say plainly that it does not. The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, developed in 2021 by scholars specializing in Holocaust studies and Jewish history, explicitly states that criticizing or opposing Zionism as a form of nationalism does not constitute antisemitism. The conflation of the two has been used to silence Palestinian voices, discipline scholars, and make solidarity with Palestinian suffering professionally and politically costly. In many mainline churches it has worked. Christians who want to engage honestly must be able to distinguish between hatred of a people and opposition to the policies of a government, a distinction we apply without hesitation everywhere else in the world.

A Friend in Palestine

I have a friend in the West Bank doing the hard work this moment demands. Mai Shaheen co-leads Satyam Homeland, a Palestinian women-led center that opened in March 2024 and is one of the only spaces in the occupied West Bank that brings Palestinians, Israelis, and internationals together. It is the continuation of a community called EcoMe, which ran from 2010 to 2018, hosting nonviolent communication trainings and dialogue across the lines the conflict draws. Current campaigns include Their Hunger is Ours, a nonviolent hunger strike in solidarity with Gaza, and Mondays4Gaza. That this work exists at all, in Area C under full Israeli military control, is worth paying attention to. I encourage you to learn more and support them at satyamhomeland.org.

June 8 is not a meme. It is not something we can swipe past in search of easier content. It is an invitation to do something our culture has made increasingly rare: sit with complexity, listen to a witness whose life experience most of us will never share, and let that encounter ask something of us. The UCC's declaration at General Synod and our own congregation's commitment to justice did not produce a slogan. They produced a responsibility. This evening is part of how we meet it.

The prophetic tradition that both Judaism and Christianity inherit does not leave us without guidance for our times. Micah's call to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly comes after a long indictment of those who dispossess the poor of their land. Isaiah's true fast is "to loose the chains of injustice, to set the oppressed free." Jesus, in Luke 4, names this as his mission. When 100,000 people have been killed, most of them civilians and many of them children, silence in the name of balance is not neutrality. It is a choice.

Come on June 8 ready to listen, ready to be uncomfortable, and ready to ask what our shared story asks of us now.

Sources:

• Kairos Palestine Document (2009): kairospalestine.ps

• Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 (Cambridge, 1987)

• The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021): jerusalemdeclaration.org

• The Lancet Global Health, Gaza Mortality Survey (2025)

• Satyam Homeland: satyamhomeland.org

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