What I Saw and Heard in Palestine

Against my better judgment, I shared honestly about my trip to Palestine with a MAGA relative. While doing so, she asked out of the blue, “You get your news from CNN, don’t you?” I stared at her for a few awkward seconds. Then, “No, I’m telling you what I saw and heard.”

There’s something about seeing, hearing, smelling, and feeling “the Israel-Palestine issue” for yourself that renders news bias irrelevant and abstract left-right arguments meaningless. I’ve lost the desire to trade opinions with armchair ideologues or engage in Facebook fights.   

Too many civilians have been killed.

photo by Al Tizon

Oh yeah, well, what about the hostages?

Are you excited about football season to start?       

Checkpoints. Walls. Political graffiti. Demolished homes of Palestinians in East Jerusalem. Firsthand testimonies of harassment, imprisonment, torture, death. One teacher at a school told us she hadn’t heard from members of her family in Gaza since late 2023. Another told us how she was abducted in the night shortly after October 7, 2023. "I was imprisoned, interrogated, tortured," and if she wasn’t on her period, she said, "I would have been raped." A public restroom we could use but our Palestinian colleagues couldn’t. Israeli colonial-settlements built intentionally around remaining Palestinian families to trap them and restrict their movements, like Indigenous birds in a foreign cage. Thirsty farms due to a shortage of water and governmental regulations. Water tanks atop Palestinian dwellings riddled with bullet holes.   

Oh, but the tenacity, the resilience, the strong faith we encountered in the Palestinian people. There’s no surrender in those whom we met. I’ve read about active, nonviolent, righteous resistance before; I’ve even written about it. But I saw it in action, Nobel prize worthy action. These holy activists are as committed to peace as soldiers are to war. Community organizers organizing. Writers writing. Artists singing, dancing, painting. Farmers standing their ground. The oppressed advocating for the oppressed. Old priests and pastors preaching peace. The youth keeping hope alive. I heard the lioness roar, and I was inspired.  

No, not from CNN, or any news channel. I saw and heard and felt these things firsthand. As a result, “the Israel-Palestine” issue can never be just an issue for me. It has faces and names now. I can sense the images and stories physically restructuring my brain to make room for more compassion, justice, and resolve.

a delegation of theologians photo by Julie Lytle

I wasn’t alone on this trip; I went with a group of fellow theologians. There are many ways to define a theologian, but we are essentially people who have been trained to see the world through theological eyes—that is, through lenses that are informed by personal faith, family, culture, church tradition, critical study of Scripture, and a library of resources ranging from biblical studies, systematics, history, personal and social ethics, cultural studies, and mission. These lenses are (or should be) coated with a generous shade of humility since no one—not even those considered masters and doctors of God—can fully see how God sees the world.  

With my theologically colored glasses on (actually, they’re hard to take off), I saw what I saw over there in a certain kind of way, which, if even remotely accurate, sets off a few alarms. I feel compelled to sound them off.

First of all, God is not happy with Israel. By “Israel,” I don’t mean the biblical Israel whose roots go back to Jacob, son of Abraham in the book of Genesis. I mean the state of Israel that began in 1948 by way of massacring and removing hundreds of thousands of indigenous Palestinians from the land. God is not happy with perpetrators of genocide, especially those who do so in God’s name.

But what about the conquest of Canaan in the OT, Al? God seemed to be okay with it back then; why not now?

So many ways to answer that question. Progressive revelation. Postcolonial hermeneutics. The fulfillment of love in Jesus Christ. The whole earth as the new promised land. The multiethnic future of God. I’m happy to go over any or all of these things upon request. For now, the bottom line is this: the best of theological scholarship today says it is absolutely wrong to apply the conquest narrative of the book of Joshua to any situation today. Which is why I can confidently say that God is not happy with the ongoing actions of the state of Israel to rid Palestinians of the land. I mean, starving people—children!—as a tactic to take Gaza?

Divine wrath cometh.

God is also not happy with evangelicals (and others) who not only support Israel’s actions, but who also try to silence those who dare to criticize Israel. “To go against Israel

w activist Alice in Bethlehem photo by Al Tizon

is to go against God!” The Christian Zionists’ battle cry. I’m learning more about you—you who believe by some last-days chart at the back of your Scofield Bible that Israel must be established in Jerusalem in order for Jesus to return. You’ve justified the expulsion and slow deaths of millions of people, mostly women and children, on the basis of a Late-Great-Planet-Earth eschatology.

They're collateral damage to God’s end time plan. Besides, they’re Arab, which makes them Muslims, right? (Wrong) Enemies of God.

Fools! Do you really think that Jesus will establish his kingdom of peace and justice by way of mass slaughter? Do you think he’s just waiting in the wings for all the Palestinians to be gone as his cue to return? Is this your idea of the coming glory of the “Prince of Peace?”

Also, did you know that there is a large community of Palestinian Christians in the land whom you have lumped in with “enemies of God?”   

Not only do you “stand with Israel,” you also use your political positioning to apply pressure on the United States government to finance the genocide. Nearly four billion of our tax dollars go to Israel annually, mostly for its military. While the state finances the genocide, the church sanctifies it. The wet dream of a Christian Zionist-Nationalist!  

Do you not know that God is on the side of the poor and oppressed? Like African prophet Desmond Tutu explained, "God is not evenhanded. God is biased, horribly in favor of the weak. The minute an injustice is perpetrated, God is going to be on the side of the one who is being clobbered." 

I don't know when, but the great and terrible day of the Lord will come. On that day, perpetrators of mass cruelty and their supporters will have to face the God of the clobbered.

eyes of Silwan - an art project in a neighborhood in East Jerusalem scheduled for demolition for a biblical theme park. photo by Julie Lytle.

Al, man, when did you get so mean about this?

Ever since I saw and heard.