Gaza

For as long as Lecrae has been a public figure, he has been a lightning rod for white evangelical racism.

A spearhead for the movement that turned Christian hip-hop from a misfit genre to a powerhouse industry, Lecrae has consistently endured racism thinly veiled as theological critique. While he was earning deep respect from hip-hop luminaries—Sway In the Morning and Kendrick Lamar, for example—he was fighting a Christian industry that only begrudgingly came to accept that CHH was here to stay.

Early on, critics claimed “Christian” and “hip-hop” were contradictory terms, and Christian rappers like Lecrae were putting godly messages second to godless culture. Then, as the U.S. began another reckoning with racist police violence, Lecrae was accused of division, partisanship, and putting “political issues” like racism before “biblical issues” like abortion. When he attempted dialogue, white pastors told him to his face that chattel slavery was a “white blessing.”

In August, at least 20 people were killed in an Israeli attack on Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza. According to MSNBC, Israel struck the hospital at least four times, killing journalists, health workers, and emergency response personnel, many of whom were responding to the initial round of bombings.

AS WE NEAR the second anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, we don’t forget the hundreds killed that day. Neither do we dare look away from the cascade of human rights abuses Israel has unleashed upon the Palestinian people since. As Mae Elise Cannon and Ben Norquist report, this ongoing war has even turned water into a weapon — and the people of Gaza are dying of thirst.

The late theologian and longtime Sojourners contributor Walter Brueggemann would remind us that we have alternatives. A poll in July showed that 74% of Israelis back an agreement with Hamas that would release all hostages at once in exchange for an end to the war on Gaza. In May, 600 Israelis led an anti-war protest along Israel’s border with Gaza. In the U.S., college students have led the largest anti-war demonstrations seen in years, despite a targeted smear campaign to label pro-Palestinian groups as “terrorist support networks.” We can be conscientious objectors to war profiteering and join with Palestinian American memoirist Sarah Aziza in conspiring against the forces of destruction and erasure to relentlessly pursue life.

We also need to be clear: Iran did not possess a nuclear weapon. Iran was enriching uranium needed for such a weapon and had recently increased its production, but intelligence assessments concluded they had not made a final decision to produce a bomb. In fact, the assessment said Iran would be more likely to produce a weapon if the U.S. attacked its uranium supply. 

PANKAJ MISHRA OPENS The World After Gaza: A History with the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising in German-occupied Poland. The Jews imprisoned in the ghetto fought their Nazi captors for “a few desperate weeks” until they were crushed. Mishra quotes one of few survivors, Marek Edelman, who “was ‘terribly afraid’ that ‘nobody in the world would notice a thing,’ and ‘nothing, no message about us, would ever make it out.’”

The Israel Defense Forces’ ongoing destruction of Gaza following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israeli civilians by Hamas has been livestreamed by journalists, mothers, and teenagers. Globally, many suffered “an inner wound,” Mishra writes, from watching these cruelties: Israel’s bombs targeting children, schools, and hospitals; military dogs mauling disabled Palestinians; and IDF soldiers denying starving people access to food. Despite Palestinian efforts to broadcast the war crimes, Gaza still burns. Mishra contrasts reactions to the atrocities in 1943 Warsaw and in Gaza today to explore Western state-sanctioned violence.

Although Western Allies pledged never to let the genocide of the Holocaust happen again — a promise that has defined Western morality for decades — the violence unleashed in World War II death camps has been repeated across the globe in Japan, Vietnam, Rwanda, Iraq, Syria, and Gaza.

Mishra, a British Indian writer, links the rhetoric of Israel’s ethno-state to the Hindu nationalism of his native India. From a Hindu Brahmin family, Mishra recalls his childhood admiration of Israel’s leaders and how he, and many other Hindu nationalists, admired their macho tactics.

Francis called the church hours after the war in Gaza began in October 2023, Antone said, the start of what the Vatican News Service would describe as a nightly routine throughout the war. He would make sure to speak not only to the priest but to everyone else in the room, Antone said.

In ‘Christ in the Rubble,’ Palestinian pastor Rev. Munther Isaac surveys the devastation of his homeland and finds God in the most unexpected places.

Amid the fragile ceasefire, the exchange of hostages, and the temporary pause in Israel’s genocidal onslaught against Gazans, nearly six hundred Christians huddle together in one of Gaza’s battered churches, their prayers rising above the rubble as a defiant testament to their faith and resilience. Among them, Gazan Christian George Antone boldly declares, “For us, as Christians, we are not leaving Gaza. We will remain in Gaza and help people in Gaza reconstruct their houses, rebuild the streets. Yes, we will stay in Gaza. We are not leaving.”

Antone’s words stand in stark contrast to the explosive press conference at the White House on Feb. 4, when President Donald Trump brazenly suggested that the United States should “effectively own” Gaza, proposing to turn it into a real estate venture while displacing Palestinians from their homeland and relocating them to neighboring countries.

When I visited Rev. Munther Isaac in Bethlehem, the West Bank, in October, he mentioned that he was previously opposed to liberation theologian James H. Cone. Isaac was trained in theologically conservative teachings, growing up in a conservative church and then leaving Palestine to attend a conservative seminary in the U.S.