Gaza

As we journey through Holy Week, I’m meditating less on Jesus on the cross—I see that every day—and am instead meditating on Jesus razing hell.

Israel’s displacement and killing of Palestinians continues; the U.S. continues to escalate the war with Iran; and immigrants are still being hunted down by cowards in masks. Every day we see Christ crucified. What does the hope offered by Jesus, that these forces of evil can be stopped, look like? What are the lessons for us on the road from the crucifixion to the resurrection?

Our shared planet is crumbling under the weight of human greed and exploitation; our neighbors are being snatched up and disappeared from our communities; and money for jobs and education is being used to fund wars and genocide. And I’m expected to believe that God is good?

In Palestine, we welcomed the news of a ceasefire with hope—a fragile, trembling hope. After months of unbearable horror, we allowed ourselves to exhale. For the people of Gaza, it meant a pause in the killing, a night of uneasy quiet, and the possibility of sleep without bombs.

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.