they starve. We send weapons.
I have started and stopped writing a post about deconstructing the evangelical Christian perspective on Israel, Palestine, Gaza, and the Holy Land in general more times than I can track. I’ve been so concerned that I wouldn’t do the topic justice that I’ve essentially overlooked my responsibility to demand something resembling justice after 11 months of absolute madness and devastation.
The fact is, it’s easy to settle in to a complacent comfort at a safe distance from the conflict. Personally, I’ve never felt peace about it, but I suppose my concern about saying the right thing has given way to my resolve to say something. So that something is this:
They’re starving, and we’re sending weapons.
When I say “they’re starving,” I mean literally all of Gaza. UNICEF calls it a complete collapse of food, health, and protective systems.
It’s truly unfathomable. It’s far from the only way the people of Palestine are suffering. It is remarkably easy to ignore. It’s easy to watch television, read the paper, and scroll through social media without hearing about the suffering in Gaza. Astoundingly easy.
Meanwhile, people are starving. Meanwhile, we’re sending billions in weaponry to their enemy.
I know. Evangelical Christians grew up thinking Israel played a key role in the coming kingdom of Christ. I know. Evangelicals view Israel as the living museum of their faith, proof positive that their faith reigns supreme. They’ve traveled to Tel Aviv on El Al Airlines and witnessed firsthand the security measures that protected them as they boarded and disembarked the only passenger planes with their own weapons defense system. They’ve accepted the every narrative of the threats posed by Israel’s enemies and rejects every argument of inhumane injustice waged against Palestine. Every “defense” measure is justified. Every “terrorist” act is dismissed as exactly that. It’s easy. It’s simple. It’s a no brainer.
But I believe we need this to be one of those occasions when we employ both our brains and our hearts . . . and our eyes while we’re at it.
Everyone in Gaza is in danger of going absolutely hungry. Maybe it’s true that neither you nor I know what the answer is, but certainly we know what the answer is not: more guns. While we fill the pockets of American military manufacturers getting rich off this “aid,” any attempts at filling the bellies of Palestinian children are under constant threat from the very weapons with which we’ve armed their oppressors.
In all the words being spoken and printed about this horrific and unacceptable reality, so many of them are thought-killers. Genocide. Terrorist. Zionist. Hamas. Antisemitism. Colonialism. We pick the ones that stop the spinner in the right place in our minds. But I think it’s time to start recognizing why yet-to-be-deconstructed ideologies train us when to stop thinking about the fact that children are starving and the fact that we’re sending weapons to help prevent that from changing.
Christians have been using end-times beliefs and territorialism to justify violence against brown people across the globe since the Crusades and probably before. I thought we agreed in retrospect that those were bad.
At the same time I recognize the plague of antisemitism and the fraught history of animosity between people groups in Israel, Palestine, the West Bank, and Gaza. But what’s happening right now is impossible to understand.
Or . . . it’s very easy to understand. People are starving. We’re sending weapons.