My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight. My fear of anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also.
I went back this week to read Audre Lorde’s astounding “The Uses of Anger,” a lecture-turned-essay that has carved the shape of my own anger at injusticefor more than a decade. This time I read it to give shape to the anger of Palestinian Christians here at Christ at the Checkpoint. I am not hesitating to name anger as the primary emotion at this conference, while certainly not the exclusive response. And I recognize that anger is so often used to delegitimize, render the person expressing anger irrational, refusing to acknowledge nuance, unable to hear both sides. Palestinian pastor Fares Abufanah said it bluntly: “every time Palestinians raise their voices in anger they are discredited.” And so, I’m turning back to Lorde’s theory of anger and the way I’m watching its outpouring here in the West Bank.
One of Lorde’s most helpful insights has to do with the role of anger in clarification of the struggle:
anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies.
In his opening lecture Rev. Munther Isaac, pastor of Christmas Lutheran church and one of organizers of CATCP said much the same. “Gaza has divided the world,” he told us. “Good. We want to know where you stand. Tell us!” Isaac took aim at the various statements crafted by US churches over the past eight months, statements that range from egregious (evangelical) to morally incompetent (peace church) as they attempt to portray the genocide in Gaza as a war of equals that can be solved through peace and prayer (“Jesus never said ‘blessed are the people who pray for peace.’ He said ‘blessed are the peacemakers.’”)
I let this anger wash over me again and again. Daniel Bannoura repeated the conservative Christian politicians who called for a genocide in Palestine, including the Gospel Coalition, which compared Palestinians to Amalek (echoing Netanyahu). “We felt a prophetic rage” Bannoura told us of the need to speak truth to power. Western Christians abandoned Palestine, continuing a history of antagonistic dehumanization, following the pattern of creating a new savage. This is the line that traces through American Christianity, from enslaved people to Palestinians. It’s easy to kill a terrorist because the only purpose a terrorist serves is unqualified destruction.
American evangelicals, and a few Palestinians who were trained at conservative institutions were troubled by the more intense expressions of anger at the church from some of the speaker. More than once we were called to love Netanyahu – a grating and largely tone deaf call without lack of practical expression. Another American evangelical talked about how she would want to go to an IDF soldier and telling him he could “join the circle with the rest of creation.” There was talk of grace and forgiveness. (Also all the American evangelicals promoted their books and degrees which was a lot.)
Statements like these stood in contrast with the profound harm and trauma experienced by Palestinians. Yousef Al-Khouri opened his session by telling the story of speaking with his family, sheltering in the Church of St Porphyrius only for them to learn that a group of evangelicals had arrived at the border of Gaza to assist and support the IDF. Shireen Hillal said it plainly – “we cannot keep hiding reality.” The ability for the majority of the US church to stay silent about Gaza is unbelievable to Palestinians. “How are we still deciding if the killing of Palestinians is okay or not okay?”
Hillal share the story of her own family in Gaza. Israeli bombs, paid for by the US, killed her aunt, a school principal, as they were sheltering in the church of St Porphyrius. Her other aunt was hit with shrapnel in her hip and underwent surgery without anesthesia. A picture flashed on to the screen of her uncle, an engineering, saying goodbye to his wife. A few weeks later he died from lack of medical care from the injuries her sustained. Twenty-five people in the church died, most of them children.
The week was full of brutal, haunting stories like these. For Palestinian Christians Gaza is not only a political crisis but a theological crisis. The very credibility of the church’s witness is at stake. “Normalizing a genocide means we are not doing our job as the church,” Munther Isaac told the conference attenders.
I could tell that the people who pushed back or softened this rage were worried about anger seething into hatred. Here again Lorde is helpful. For her, hate’s object is destruction while “anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.” I didn’t hear a desire for destruction but a longing for shared anger, to invite those of us looking with neutral observation at Gaza, naming the complications of geopolitics, to step into the rage of Palestinians, to share its power and its burden.
I’m also wary of Lorde’s warning against the creeping in of guilt. Guilt will not stop US military aid to Israel. It cannot save lives. “Guilt is only another form of objectification,” Lorde reminds us.
Munther Isaac ended his talk by telling us that the thing the church lacks most at this moment is courage to tell the truth, to accurately name what is happening in Gaza, and to bear the consequences of that truth-telling. “It is time we call things by name,” he told us. “I’m done hiding behind ‘peace.’”
I want to be clear about what I heard. This is a genocide. Palestinians live under apartheid. They are experiencing a second Nakba fueled by racist Christian Zionist ideology and a willing partner in Joe Biden. The US church’s continued complicity through silence destroys any collaborative hopes with Palestinians as they turn away from the North, and more and more to the Global South for theological partnership.