This week, on the land of the Nacotchtank, Piscataway and Pamunkey (Wash DC).
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Lindsay and I flew to Washington DC on the Fourth of July. We touched down at about the same time that a racist, antisemitic pack of fully masked white boys called Patriot Front marched on the National Mall waving Confederate Flags.
A hot, humid wind blasted us as we rode the escalator out of the Capitol South Metro stop. It felt like the breath of Satan. After we walked a block, we looked to the right and saw these big bold words on top of a building about a quarter mile down the avenue: The Museum of the Bible.
After a pizza dinner, I walked down to the National Mall to see the MAGA circus for myself. Lindsay decided to stay in the AC and watch the World Cup. It was such a wise move.
As dark clouds rolled in, the sky trembled with wave after wave of flyovers. F-22 and F-35 fighter jets thundered out of nowhere, flying low and parallel to the Mall, from the Washington Monument past the Capitol Rotunda and back again.
The fighter jets roared right over the congressional office buildings on the Hill. I looked up and saw Israeli flags in some of the windows. Appropriate since Israel was the first country in the world to fly the F-35, which, of course, is made in America.
This year, Congress allocated $13 billion in the defense budget to make sure these genocidal killing machines continue to wreak havoc.
There were B-2’s up in the dark DC sky too. The triangle wing bomber costs $2 billion to make. It is the only aircraft in the world capable of carrying the 30,000-pound “bunker buster” bomb built to destroy deeply buried targets, like the nuclear facilities in Iran.
During the freakishly loud flyover spectacle, I thought about a poem written by Marwan Makhoul:
In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political
I must listen to the birds
and in order to hear the birds
the warplanes must be silent.
Marwan Makhoul is a poet and a civil engineer. He manages a construction company for his day job. He was born the same year that scientists started designing the B-2 bomber.
Marwan Makhoul is from the Galilee region of Palestine, not far from where Jesus was baptized. The Gospels say that when Jesus was coming up out of the Jordan River, the heavens were torn apart and divine Spirit descended upon him like a dove.
America replaced divine Spirit with fighter jets. This is one reason why the poetry of our lives must be political.
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The day after Confederates, flyovers and fireworks took over DC, the annual Interfaith Action for Palestine commenced at a church six blocks from the Capitol.
We attended the IAP last year - and the year before that. We keep coming back. Because these people possess a rare blend of spiritual depth, moral clarity and political courage.
On Sunday afternoon, right after registration, I met Jason, a white guy in his forties wearing tight denim shorts and a black tank top. In an accent that tilted towards Tennessee, he shared some of his story with me.
Jason enlisted in the military when he was seventeen. All of a sudden, he found himself in a unit that was almost entirely Black.
As he got to know these guys, it sucked the air right out of the balloon of his racist evangelical brainwashing. And then, when he was sent to Iraq as a field medic, he saw for himself how utterly pointless the whole operation was.
Jason told me that when he got out of the military, he made a commitment to become a medic for the movement.
On that Sunday afternoon, we canvassed the neighborhood to share our concerns about Pete Hegseth’s church, which is hidden in plain sight at an unmarked storefront, just a few doors down from Starbucks on Pennsylvania Avenue.
These Christo-fascists planted this church right after Hegseth became the so-called Secretary of War. The congregation is a hub of fighter-jet hetero-patriarchy, hellbent on banning marriage equality and overturning the 19th Amendment, which guarantees women the right vote.
We went door-to-door to let neighbors know what this church was all about – and that there are three dozen other churches just like it, all over the country.
On Monday afternoon, we marched in a three-hour procession through the streets, singing and chanting and inviting others to come join this movement descending with a Spirit of hope, love and radical truth-telling.
Just picture it. Scores of Jews, Christians, Muslims, atheists and other people of faith and conscience conjuring Something Else.
Jason organized a network of marshals and medics to make sure we all stayed safe and hydrated in the heat and humidity.
We broke out in song inside Union Station. The acoustics were amazing. After we marched outside, Rabbi Dr. Koach Baruch Frazier led us in a lamentation, naming the ways that America has “missed the mark.”
We kept marching.
Along the way, we passed the Heritage Foundation, a well-oiled fundamentalist Christian machine that has promoted Project Esther since October 7. It is a political blueprint that cynically equates Palestinian solidarity with antisemitism. It says that anyone who attends pro-Palestinian protests is engaging in "material support" for terrorism.
We stopped in front of Hegseth’s church and unfurled a shawl with the names of Palestinian children murdered by bombs made in America. We quoted journalist and martyr Anas Al-Sharif who said that Palestine is the heartbeat of every free person in this world.
We came to process the grief.
We also came to proclaim that the heart is still beating.
We are in a season that holds this sacred tension.
As empire is placed on hospice, we are dealing with layers upon layers of grief.
We are grappling with generations of slaughter, eviction, exploitation and total neglect.
We are also weighed down by what Palestinian academic and activist Edward Said called “the crippling sorrow of estrangement.” There is so much pain that comes with refusing to fit in with the imperial establishment.
This week in Washington DC, we walked through the humid fog of not really knowing what we should be doing in this moment. All our calls, canvassing, press conferences, posts, protests, arrests and boycotts have not been enough to stop the genocide.
However, we are a feeling people in the process of getting free. We collectively know that woe is not the same thing as despair – and that anguish is the opposite of apathy.
We carried all this grief with us, following the same path of the fighter jets on the Fourth, all the way down the Hill to the final stop on our procession: the Museum of the Bible.
We gathered in front of this evangelical Christian propaganda project hatched by Dan Green, the founder of Hobby Lobby.
We weren’t there to bash the bible.
We came to reclaim the sacred script from those who weaponize it to sanctify their fighter jets.
Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart from Christians for a Free Palestine preached a short sermon comparing these popular weaponizers of the bible to body-builders who cannot bend over to touch their toes.
Rev. Naomi exhorted us not to bail on the bible, but to learn how to get supple with the text so that we can bend and flex with the descending Spirit that subverts supremacy – in the scriptures and in our world.
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The final session of the Interfaith Action for Palestine was on Tuesday afternoon. It was a panel on religious nationalism that unserendipitously started at the 82nd minute of the World Cup match between Argentina and Egypt.
The day before the match, the Egyptian coach called on FIFA to use its “soft power” to do something for the people of Palestine. The problem is that the wealthy men who run FIFA are also heavily invested in fighter jets.
Three minutes into that match between Argentina and Egypt, Israel murdered Mohammed al-Wahidi, who was working with the Egyptian Relief Committee in Gaza.
Mohammed al-Wahidi had literally just helped set up big screens so that survivors of the genocide could watch the World Cup in the midst of the rubble.
On our panel, a nineteen-year-old Palestinian-American Muslim named Jenna testified to the horrifying conditions on the ground in the occupied Palestinian territories. She lived in the West Bank for a decade before she moved to DC last year to attend George Washington University.
Jenna said that her Islamic faith subverts imperial conventional wisdom and that her hijab breaks protocol with the beauty standards of the West. She told us that she came back to the u.s. to study – but that she won’t stop standing up for her people – no matter what it costs her materially.
Students like Jenna are setting the tone and the terms for this interfaith movement. They are animated by a clear-eyed, open-hearted integrity that is totally allergic to selling out the most vulnerable.
Just last week, Layla, a Palestinian-Christian student-organizer from Columbia University posted this to social media:
Back in 2024, Columbia University offered all of the Palestinian students full scholarships during negotiations if we stopped the encampment early. We all said no. They thought scholarships would erase the impact of a genocide.
These university administrators tried to bribe students with full scholarships so they could continue investing in the fighter jets killing these students' families in Gaza.
Every single student-organizer rejected the offer.
This is what real leadership looks like.
Rabbi Alissa Wise from Rabbis for Ceasefire was on that final panel too. She told us that she grew up attending Jewish Day School in Cincinnati, Ohio. She was taught that Zionism and Judaism are the same thing. In college, she left home and came to a totally different conclusion. That was more than twenty-five years ago.
Rabbi Alissa said she came to realize that authentic Jewish faith finds a home in exile. It makes an exodus out of imperial Egypt and pitches a tent in the wilderness.
Exile is the orienting consciousness of this interfaith coalition.
We are the weirdos repudiating the false security of fighter jets.
We are the fugitives breaking rank with the agenda of billionaires who build bible museums.
We are the traitors who stand in solidarity with those deemed “terrorists.”
We are persona-non-grata in the eyes of the corporate-sponsored establishment.
Because we belong to Something Else.
