On October 7, 2023, I was basking on a Southern California beach when I checked my phone. Hamas caught Israel off-guard. Hundreds of civilians had been killed. Hostages were taken. I held my breath - and then sighed. I knew that Gaza was about to be gutted. Ever since I started studying this situation for the World Geography course that I taught at the high school, I'd noted that the state of Israel kills with exponential disproportionality. A ratio of a hundred to one is no exaggeration.
Two days later, I drove 850 miles from Orange County to Bend, Oregon. On the road, I listened to a live interview with Rashid Khalidi, a professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University and author of The Hundred Years War on Palestine. Khalidi predicted that, in the weeks ahead, we would witness horrific war crimes, an unparalleled massacre of innocent Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank.
Rashid Khalidi said that it was imperative that we put the events of October 7 in context. He used words like ethnic cleansing, occupation, settler colonialism and apartheid. Just to clarify, he used those words to describe what the state of Israel did to Palestinians in the decades leading up to October 7. Khalidi lamented that, in this context, the atrocities committed on October 7 were inevitable.
Rashid Khalidi called Palestine a “pressure-cooker” situation. He specifically named the Israeli government’s takeover of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the heavy limits on food, water and electricity in Gaza, the annexation of more and more Palestinian land on the West Bank, two different laws for Israelis and Palestinians and the imprisonment of thousands of Palestinians, many of them without charges (those are called "hostages").
Over the past year, I have invested an immense amount of time and energy researching the context and current situation in Palestine. Everything that Rashid Khalidi described about the past and predicted for the future in that October 9 interview has turned out to be 100% accurate. This has not been the case for what US elected officials and mainstream media outlets have reported.
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Since my long drive on October 9, 2023, Gaza has become an apocalypse – a Greek word meaning "an unveiling" or "a revelation."
Over the past year, so much has been revealed.
It has been revealed, through credible sources, that reports of beheaded babies and mass rapes on October 7 were not based in reality. Yet American politicians, including Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, continue to say these things happened.
It has been revealed that, on October 7, Israeli forces were ordered to incinerate the vehicles of Hamas fighters even if there were Israeli hostages in them. That’s right. Israel sacrificed their own people in order to limit the number of hostages that Hamas would seize.
It has been revealed that the men making decisions for Israel have never really been interested in releasing the hostages. From October 7 on, it’s been all about collective punishment and seizing the land – in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and beyond.
Three days after October 7, Hamas agreed to swap every Israeli hostage for every Palestinian hostage. That’s right. There really are thousands of Palestinians being held indefinitely in Israeli detention without charges. Over the decades, Palestinians who’ve been released from Israeli custody have testified to being raped and tortured. An Israeli human rights organization has called the Israeli prison system a "network of torture camps." The Israeli government has admitted to it.
Over the past year, Israel has indiscriminately bombed hospitals, schools, refugee camps, orphanages, soccer fields, universities, churches and mosques. Israel has assassinated journalists, professors, doctors, nurses and humanitarian workers.
Israel used an AI program called “Where’s Daddy?” to track Hamas fighters. They intentionally waited until they entered the home of their families to bomb them.
Israel has been given a free pass for their barbarity by blaming Hamas for the hostage situation. That’s all they needed to say. That’s all Biden needed to say. It’s been the justification to murder tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children.
The official number of murdered Palestinians hovers around 40,000. But we’ve learned that the actual number is much higher. A highly respected medical journal gave a conservative estimate a couple months ago. 186,000.
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It’s amazing what Israel and the US have been allowed to do by turning Hamas and Hezbollah into the “terrorists.”
Hamas and Hezbollah, in fact, were created in response to US and Israeli terrorism aimed at their people. Hamas and Hezbollah are political organizations that have sought to protect and provide for their people. Because nobody in the world with power and resources will protect and provide for them.
Last week, Israel assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, the long-time leader of Hezbollah. In interviews, Nasrallah did not blame Israel or Jewish people for the injustice, violence and oppression in Palestine, Lebanon and throughout the Middle East. He said that the real decision-maker is the US government, sponsored by a trinity of special interests: the oil industry, the weapons manufacturers and the Christian Zionist lobby.
Hassan Nasrallah told the truth. He was echoing what James Baldwin communicated to Christian Zionists forty-five years ago in his "Open Letter to the Born Again:" the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests.
Since October 7, it has been revealed who the real terrorists are. The ones with all the money, power and weapons. The ones who are not interested in building a world that works for everyone. The ones who are only interested in maintaining a colonial outpost in the Middle East.
Most of the rest of the world has long known who the real terrorists are.
Most middle-class Americans have not.
Most middle-class Americans still believe the Presidential candidates from both major parties who swear up and down that the real terrorists are Hamas and Hezbollah.
Most middle-class Americans do not know (and do not care) that both of these Presidential candidates are sponsored by the oil industry, the weapons manufacturers and the Christian Zionist lobby.
Most middle-class Americans do not know that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King called the US government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”
The day after Dr. King proclaimed this in public, 168 major newspapers denounced him.
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Most middle-class Americans, like me, have been scripted to believe that the state of Israel is a force for good in the world. My brainwashing went deeper because it was “biblical.” My Christian Zionist pastors taught me to give my unconditional support to Israel. They quoted the book of Revelation saying that the nation of Israel must be re-established before Jesus comes back to re-make the world. They said Israel’s borders must be defended at all costs.
The truth is that the Christian Zionist interpretation of Revelation is a revisionist “end times” reading strategy invented by white men in the 19th century who divided the history of the world into “dispensations.” Our current chapter, they said, was all about getting people saved for eternity. Social justice, they said, was irrelevant. Because Jesus was coming back soon. This biblical reading strategy has justified death and destruction to Palestinian people for the past 75 years. All in the name of God and Christ.
The painful irony is that the book of Revelation was written by and for persecuted people who were experiencing their end times in the first century. Revelation is apocalyptic literature, utilizing metaphor and hyperbole to “reveal” reality, to pull the curtain back on power. Speaking in code, it incessantly critiques Caesar and Rome. The original audience of oppressed people understood the allusions. It gave them hope and courage to resist and repent from empire.
I followed Jesus out of Christian Zionism. Because Christian Zionism is not Christianity. It is settler-colonialism. Supporting a country unconditionally and anti-intellectually by simply quoting bogus bible interpretations is blasphemous. It is the exact opposite of everything Jesus taught and lived.
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What if a critical mass of middle-class Americans could press the rewind button and live the last year over again, this time through the lens of seeing the US government for what it really is: a terrorist organization?
What if we took our cues from the international bodies, the human rights organizations and the Palestinian journalists on the ground – instead of believing the US politicians who gave Benjamin Netanyahu twenty-three standing ovations, instead of trusting mainstream media outlets that are sponsored by the oil industry, the weapons manufacturers and the Christian Zionist lobby?
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Kamala Harris and Joe Biden still say that they are working around the clock for a ceasefire, but they continue to send weapons to Israel every single day.
This makes no moral sense. Unless, of course, the Democrats care more about pleasing the oil industry, the weapons manufacturers and the Christian Zionists than they do about making peace – or telling the truth.
Ever since that dark October 9 morning when I listened to Rashid Khalidi on a freeway in Southern California, I’ve heard a significant portion of middle-class Americans echo a horrifying moral logic to justify genocide. It goes something like this.
1. Hamas is a “terrorist” regime.
2. Hamas is supported by the people of Gaza.
3. Therefore: the people of Gaza should be held responsible for their government’s actions.
What if we placed this moral logic in front of the mirror and applied it to the US?
The US government has invaded, occupied and bombed all sorts of countries – for totally illegitimate reasons. Much of the US population has supported this state-sponsored terrorism – although many Americans have not.
What if just one country that the US has illegitimately invaded, occupied and bombed had the capacity to seek revenge?
What if just one country had the power and resources to come over to the US and do what Israel (with the full support of the US government) has done to the people of Gaza since October 7, 2023?
What if just one country came over to the US and completely decimated every American neighborhood, university and hospital as they seek to kill the American politicians and military leaders who plotted death and destruction on them?
We should be highly skeptical of anyone who utilizes moral logic to justify genocide - let alone occupation, apartheid, racism and Islamophobia.
We should not allow anything they say to make things confusing or complicated.
We should not even take anything they say seriously.
We should resist and replace all of their foolishness with a moral logic animated by love, justice, compassion, truth and humility.
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The good news is that, over the course of this apocalyptic year, many Americans have decided to take their cues from a Love supreme – and the international bodies, the human rights organizations and the Palestinian journalists on the ground.
One of these Americans is Dana Kornberg. She’s a college professor who invited Lindsay and I to a vigil organized by Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) in front of the office of Senator Gary Peters. It was a week after October 7 and we joined grandchildren of Holocaust survivors to lament, to listen to testimony, to raise our voices against the murdering of Palestinian civilians and the destruction of Gaza, and above all, to demand an immediate ceasefire.
A month later, JVP organized another vigil in front of Rep. Shri Thanedar’s office. We prayed and sang and demanded a ceasefire and an end to the occupation. A rabbi read the names and ages of 101 Palestinian children murdered by IDF bombs. She said her list represented one day of deaths. Just one day out of thirty. The rabbi quoted the Talmud where it says that whoever saves one life is considered by scripture to have saved the whole world. A ceasefire would have saved 101 worlds. In just one day.
That same week, I was in an organizing meeting with JVP and a young Jewish-American woman lamented that antisemitism was being weaponized to mute every critique of Israel. She said that chanting “from the river to the sea” at a protest is not stoking antisemitism. She said that the real cause of the rise in hate is what the state of Israel did to the people of Gaza before October 7 – and what the state of Israel has done to the people of Gaza since October 7. All of it supported by the US government.
In the months since, I’ve pivoted back-and-forth between two wildly different dimensions. On the one hand, I’ve consistently heard many friends, former colleagues and corporate media outlets (mis)characterize the pro-Palestinian movement as some sort of antisemitic side hustle celebrating Hamas. On the other hand, I’ve been with Jewish leaders like Holocaust survivor Rene Lichtman and Rabbi Jake Ehrlich who have made it aggressively and abundantly clear that there is a huge difference between Judaism and Zionism - and that genocide is not a Jewish value.
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On December 3, 2023, the Palestinian poet and professor Refaat Alareer sent out his final tweet from Northern Gaza:
The Democratic Party and Biden are responsible for the Gaza genocide perpetrated by Israel.
He was retweeting a video clip of Kamala Harris saying this:
Israel has a right to defend itself. As Israel does so, it matters how. Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. As Israel pursues its military objectives in Gaza, we believe Israel must do more to protect innocent civilians.
Three days later, the IDF assassinated Professor Alareer, his brother Salah, his nephew Mohammed, and his sister Asmaa with three of her children - Alaa, Yahia, and Mohammed.
Today, Harris is still justifying the genocide with the exact same words as her tweet from ten months ago.
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On Christmas Eve, Lindsay and I livestreamed a service from Bethlehem. Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac preached the prophetic sermon in English. He concluded the service with a benediction that was entirely in Arabic. What a statement. He was preaching to us Western Christians who have learned, over the centuries, to speak the language of empire.
The Palestinian pastor proclaimed that the US churches that have not called for a permanent ceasefire are complicit with genocide. Their silence has compromised their credibility. He called Gaza the moral compass of the world. If you are not shaken to your core, he preached, there is something wrong with your humanity.
He spoke of “sumud,” the Palestinian concept of collective resilience, a vintage strength to survive occupation and chronic injustice with beauty and brilliance. We will recover, he said, but for those who are complicit – will you ever recover your humanity?
The Palestinian pastor said that Jesus is under the rubble in Gaza. Precisely where he is in the Gospels. With the marginalized, suffering, oppressed, exterminated and displaced.
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Six weeks after Christmas, the International Court of Justice said that there was sufficient basis for South Africa's case against Israel to continue. The court ruled 15-2 that it is "plausible" that Israel's exponentially disproportionate response to October 7 is not self-defense, but a full-fledged genocide of Palestinians.
In late February, US soldier Aaron Bushnell livestreamed his self-immolation. While he walked with his gasoline can and matches, he spoke to the camera:
I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.
In March and April, a few of us white Christians “crossed over” and committed to fast during the daylight hours of Ramadan. We saw it as a small step towards strengthening our solidarity with Muslims in Gaza, the West Bank and around the world. We needed this discipline to deepen our commitments to collective liberation. It was the most challenging spiritual practice that I've ever participated in. Honestly, I cannot believe Muslims do this every year.
During this season, news was coming out of Gaza about how Israel was forcibly starving the civilian population. On the last day of Ramadan, my spouse Lindsay joined dozens of members of Christians for a Free Palestine in a nonviolent direct action in DC. They blocked the Senate cafeteria. Because if US leaders continued to be complicit in keeping food off the plates of Palestinians, then they didn’t deserve to eat lunch.
A few weeks after these radical disciples got arrested, the U.S. Agency for International Development sent US Secretary of State Antony Blinken a detailed 17-page memo describing instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.
Days later, Blinken delivered a statement to Congress that said, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.” Blinken lied. Because U.S. law requires that the government must cut off weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of U.S.-backed humanitarian aid - and without US weapons, Israel could not continue its killing spree.
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During the week of Passover, I walked alone, all the way down Grand River, past the bars and restaurants and sports stadiums, to the building named after Detroit’s first Black mayor. It’s inscribed with the biblical text that says that wherever God’s spirit goes, there is freedom. Right there, a vigil burned bright for those murdered in Gaza.
A doctor who just got back from Gaza warned of the graphic story he had to tell. A woman was holding her daughter when her home was struck. The missile melted the child to her arm. The doctor had to amputate. He could not sleep that night. The next day he found the woman, crying and smiling at the same time. She said that her arm has been buried with her daughter and when Allah raises her daughter up, a part of her will rise too.
Another doctor who just returned from Gaza testified to the rush hours in the hospital after every bomb, bringing in kids and kids and kids and how a mother and her twenty-something daughters came in with severe burns and they died due to complications and the only one now left in the family is an eight-year-old boy.
These doctors testified to the same horrific things that dozens of US doctors have shared about their experience in Gaza this year.
Our congresswoman Rashida Tlaib concluded the service. She just got back from Capitol Hill. She said it was one of her worst days ever. More than a hundred members of her own party voted to send twenty-six billion more unconditional dollars to “defend” Israel.
No one on the Hill acknowledged the death and destruction. Because divine spirit does not spring forth the Hill. Divine spirit breathes through the vigil, burning with the freedom lit by truth buried under the rubble.
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At the end of the school year, Lindsay and I visited Gaza encampments at the University of Michigan and Wayne State. These students and alumni were demanding that their universities disclose and divest from weapons manufacturers. We soaked up their courage and creativity days before police in riot gear rolled on to campus before dawn to forcibly arrest many of them, despite their commitment to the nonviolent discipline of Jesus, King, Gandhi and Gaza's Great March of Return.
Two demographic groups were clearly over-represented in this courageous cluster of folks who pitched tents and got arrested: young women wearing hijabs and Jewish people.
This Summer, the International Court of Justice announced that, after an 18-month investigation, it found multiple and serious international law violations by Israel towards Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including finding Israel responsible for apartheid. Israel is a Jim Crow society - separate and unequal. The court placed responsibility on all countries and the United Nations to end these violations of international law.
All summer long, the state of Israel continued its onslaught – and the US continued sending weapons.
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Some readers will respond to my apocalyptic sentiments by saying something like, “Well, it’s actually more complicated than this.” For those who still think this is complicated, one-year into a genocide committed by an apartheid regime, I only ask that you take a rigorous moral inventory of your sources and your social network. Where are you getting your information and what relationships are you afraid of losing?
I understand why most folks might be resistant to investing serious time and energy on these two questions. It is scary as hell coming to grips with the fact that I might actually be getting duped (or being gaslit) by an imperial agenda - and when the scales fall from my eyes and I speak out, that I might lose relationships. I know it is much easier to go along with the propaganda than to face the fact that harsh realities rarely cooperate with conventional wisdom.
Palestine only gets complicated when we get conned into believing the racist Western narrative of good guys versus bad guys. The narrative that the vast majority of middle-class Americans have been conned into believing. The narrative that privileged people have used, for centuries, to justify the awful conditions on the plantation, the frontier, the reservation, the colony, the concentration camp, the border, and the ghetto.
When we publicly second-guess this narrative, most of our middle-class neighbors will side-eye us. It's inevitable.
The apocalypse of Gaza in real-time reveals the way this has worked throughout US history. Middle-class America either supported Manifest Destiny, slavery, Jim Crow and imperial wars – or considered these too “complicated” to confront. The extermination and displacement of Palestinians – and now the Lebanese – is being scripted by the same old directors blowing the same old smoke.
Things only get complicated when we put our faith in US politicians and corporate media outlets sponsored by the oil industry, the weapons manufacturers and the Christo-Fascists - instead of the testimonies of thecommunities aggressively impacted by the decisions of our elected officials.
Over the past year, the "complicated" narrative has been washed away by my own tears, falling in the presence of real-life Palestinians. My most vivid cry came in the parking lot of city hall in Farmington Hills, Michigan when Mike told a few dozen of us that he had lost forty-nine of his relatives to IDF bombs in Gaza and that his aunt and cousin were still buried under the rubble. Waiting to rise up with Allah - or Jesus.
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Professor Eddie Glaude calls Palestine "the moral question of this generation."
Palestine is the moral question of this generation because tens of thousands have been murdered and hundreds of thousands more are being starved and contracting disease. Every single one of these lives is a whole world made in the image of God, just like you and me. But there’s more to ponder.
Palestine is the moral question of this generation because it pulls back the curtain on ways that U.S. wealth and power perpetuate and profit from extremely oppressive situations. Both political parties, corporate media outlets and a multitude of Christian pastors are implicated in all this death and destruction.
Palestine is the moral question of this generation because it has revealed that the so-called “culture war” between red and blue is just a charade to distract us from the real civil war ripping our population apart.
On one side, there’s an establishment clinging to power and wealth. It is disproportionately white, tokenizes people who are not, and justifies using violence - here and abroad - to preserve the mythology of the West and its material advantages. It is well-armed, corporate-sponsored and endorsed by celebrity culture.
On the other side, there’s a movement demanding truth and justice. It is darker, younger, queerer, deeper, far more creative, inherently nonviolent and unwilling to give a pass to America’s many sins. It is building a beloved community by transcending the establishment’s two-party monopoly.
Those of us with a little bit of privilege have a choice to make. Will we seek safety and security in the familiar confines of the establishment, or will we break rank and grow our souls in the movement?
This decision, every single day, has everything to do with little things like where we get our news, who we seek approval from, how we pray and invest, what we teach our children and when we should go out of our way to show up in solidarity with oppressed people.
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American culture is suffering a serious credibility crisis. Many of us are out here trying to figure out who we can trust to tell the truth – but also where we can go to organize with others who are committed to creating a world that works for everyone.
What the oil industry, the weapons manufacturers and the Christian Zionists have been doing for decades has not worked for the rest of the world. Maybe you and I have materially benefitted. But our souls have been malformed in the process.
If we really want to build a world that works for everyone, we desperately need a critical mass of people willing to disrupt the "complicated" narrative and demand that our corporate-sponsored politicians stop excluding, exploiting, imprisoning, bullying, bombing, terrorizing, torturing, starving, scapegoating and stealing from Palestinians and other dark-skinned people all over the world.
This past year, Palestine revealed that the supremacist status quo - maintained by the oil industry, the weapons manufacturers and the Christian Zionists - is a genocidal apocalypse. Reform is not nearly enough. We need Something Else. A spiritual and political revolution rooted in a Love supreme. We won't find it in celebrity culture. Because it's buried under the rubble - and rising up to newness of life.
