rom Palestinian Cultural Mural Honoring Dr. Edward Said. Via Wikimedia Commons.
In the spring of 2024, I taught a doctoral seminar on “Postcolonial Theory and Theology” at Emory University. The student protests against the war in Gaza across the United States and in other countries provided the backdrop for the discussion of Edward Said’s book Orientalism. His work was timely as the stereotypes of Middle Eastern people that he criticized in the book were continuously being deployed by Israeli officials and others to justify Israel’s bombing of Gaza and genocidal violence in retaliation to the Hamas attack of October 7. 2023.
A pioneer of postcolonial theory, Said was born in Jerusalem during the British Mandate. His family moved to Cairo in 1947 to avoid the impending political and military crisis with the founding of the State of Israel. Egypt had been under British occupation in the past, and British troops continued to be stationed there to protect Britain’s imperial interests. In The Question of Palestine, Said linked the ideology of Zionism to European colonialism. He wrote, “There is an unmistakable coincidence between the experiences of Arab Palestinians at the hands of Zionism and the experiences of those black, yellow, and brown people who were described as inferior and subhuman by nineteenth-century imperialists” (68-69). He associated the Palestinian national movement with anticolonial struggles in other parts of the world.
During the war in Gaza, many nations in the Global South stood in solidarity with the Palestinians and demanded a ceasefire and an end to the siege of Gaza. They criticized the hypocrisy of western leaders, who have said that they champion human rights, but had done little in this case to exert more pressure to stop the war. South Africa brought a case to the International Court of Justice, charging that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. Turkey later joined the world court genocide case against Israel. Many leaders of Christian and other religious communities spoke out to support a ceasefire and called for prayers for peace. For example, the World Council of Churches issued a statement in June 2024 calling for a permanent ceasefire and asking churches to support the people of Gaza through prayers and actions. It reiterated that justice is the foundation for sustainable peace and reconciliation.
Some church leaders and theologians have linked the Palestinian struggle for justice and freedom to the Global South’s broader social and political movements. The late Archbishop Desmond Tutu was outspoken in criticizing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. He compared Israel to the apartheid regime that discriminated against Blacks in South Africa. After witnessing the systemic humiliation of Palestinian people, he said, “Their humiliation is familiar to all black South Africans who were corralled and harassed and insulted and assaulted by the security forces of the apartheid government.” He was a prominent supporter of the boycott, divestment, and sanction movement to compel Israel to change its policies. He insisted that we could not turn a blind eye to injustice and emphasized that everyone is equal before God. “It doesn’t matter where we worship or live. We are members of one family, the human family, God’s family.”
During the war in Gaza, many nations in the Global South stood in solidarity with the Palestinians and demanded a ceasefire and an end to the siege of Gaza.
Archbishop Tutu was criticized as anti-Zionist and antisemitic because of his sharp criticism of Israel. He realized that some people, especially those in the Jewish community, were enraged by his comparison of Israel to the South African apartheid regime. But he did not back down. As a Black South African church leader, he was less burdened with the post-Holocaust guilt that tripped up many church leaders in the west. He wrote in the “Foreward” to Naim Stifan Ateek’s A Palestinian Christian Cry for Reconciliation, “For those of us who lived through the dehumanizing horrors of the apartheid era, the comparison seems not only apt, it is also necessary. It is necessary if we are to preserve in our hope that things can change” (xi). He held onto the hope that if the evil apartheid system in South Africa could be changed, transformation could also happen in Palestine.
Leading South African church leaders continued to criticize the oppression of Palestinians. In September 2023, the Anglican Church of Southern Africa declared Israel an apartheid state. Archbishop Thabo Makgoba said, “As people of faith who are distressed by the pain of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza—and who long for security and a just peace for both Palestine and Israel—we can no longer ignore the realities on the ground.” When the South African Zionist Organization labeled the declaration “antisemitic,” the Anglican church said it did not target the Jewish people, but the policies of the Israeli government, which had gone more extreme. After the bombing of Gaza began, Archbishop Makgoba condemned the Hamas attack on Israel and the escalating levels of fighting and destruction, leading to mass civilian casualties. With the Anglican Archbishop of Jerusalem, Hosam Naoum, he called for an immediate ceasefire and the establishment of humanitarian corridors into Gaza to facilitate the provision of food, water, electricity, and medical supplies.
Archbishop Tutu held onto the hope that if the evil apartheid system in South Africa could be changed, transformation could also happen in Palestine.
While South African church leaders have compared apartheid policies in Israel and South Africa, other theologians have connected with the Palestinian struggle for land and self-determination. In Asia, ethnic minorities and tribal peoples in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Northeast India, and West Asia have fought against the dispossession of their land, political oppression, and military violence. For many decades, Sri Lankans saw similarities between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the ethno-nationalist strife between the Sinhalese and the Tamils. The Sinhalese government adopted discriminatory policies against the Tamils, and the long civil war claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. In Transpacific Political Theology, Jude Lal Fernando argues that Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, which developed as a reaction to British colonialism, can be compared to political Zionism. He wrote, “As the Jews were accorded the status of Chosen People by the empire in excluding the Muslims, in particular the Palestinians (who are Christians, Muslims, and Jews), the Sinhala Buddhists were made the true heirs of the island excluding the Tamils (who were both Hindus and Muslims). Tamils were seen as invaders who were not only inferior but also did not have a history; while the Sinhala Buddhists, in contrast, had a proper history” (175).
Both in the Middle East and South Asia, British colonialism has contributed to the years of political and religious conflicts that created animosity between peoples. Fernando argues that the liberal suggestion of interreligious dialogue to resolve conflict and promote peace and understanding is futile because it overlooks the political mobilization of religious differences. Mainstream Jewish-Christian dialogue has avoided criticizing political Zionism and the policies of the State of Israel. Similarly, Buddhist-Christian dialogue has been silent or cautious about the oppression of Tamils. For him, political theology that engages in interreligious dialogue must adopt a postcolonial and anti-imperialist stance if it is to stand in solidarity with the oppressed.
Both in the Middle East and South Asia, British colonialism has contributed to the years of political and religious conflicts that created animosity between peoples.
The war in Gaza caused many church leaders and theologians to reflect on Zionism. Christian Zionism is influential among evangelical Christians, including those in the Global South. As an ideology, Christian Zionism advocates the return of Jewish people to their homeland, which is seen as a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Rev. Yang Huaien, a leader of the evangelical Macao Bible Institute, asked Christians to reexamine their eschatological beliefs in a news bulletin issued by the Hong Kong Christian Council.
Image from the World Day of Prayer post by Joyce Larko Steiner from February 28, 2024.
He says that Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, killing many people, and the displacement of two million Palestinians from their homes shattered many Christians’ illusion and fantasy about Israel. Christians cannot equate today’s State of Israel with the Kingdom of Israel in biblical times. Jews do not occupy a special position because in Christ, there is no distinction between Jews and Gentiles (Gal. 3:28; Col. 3:11). He further points out Christians have linked the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the prophecy of the end of time. However we explain these prophecies, Christians should not compromise the Christian core values of justice, compassion, virtue, and righteousness. He notes that many Hong Kong Christians, following the news about the war, criticized the Israeli government and disapproved of the U.S. government’s support for Israel. If churches blindly support Israel, he argues, they will disappoint and anger these Christians, especially the idealistic young people among them. For Yang and other evangelical Christians, the Bible is an important source for theology and ethics. It is important to adopt anticolonial and anti-imperial approaches to biblical interpretation and religious action.
Coincidentally, the World Day of Prayer program in 2024 was written by a group of ecumenical Palestinian Christian women. Hong Kong Christian women and Christians worldwide prayed for justice and peace in Palestine and God’s compassion for the long-suffering people. The theme was “I Beg You. . . Bear With One Another in Love” (Eph. 4:1–3). The prayer service included the stories of three Palestinian Christian women who shared how they responded to Jesus’ calling and witnessed the power of bearing together in love. The cover artwork depicted three Palestinian women in traditional dresses praying under an olive tree, a symbol of abundant and everlasting life and of Palestine. In our troubled times, Palestinian Christian women invite us to walk in love and continue to advocate for freedom, justice, and liberation for all.
Mount Horeb, Sinai, November 7, 2011. Via Wikimedia Commons.
The title of my essay plays on the famous book by Judith Plaskow, which requires Jews to return to Sinai (the site of God’s Covenant with the Israelites when the Torah was given) and reread the tradition through a feminist hermeneutical prism. After the Gaza genocide, Jews ought to stand again at Sinai and ascertain how to reenter a covenant with God, one another, and now with Palestinians, a reentry that will depend on righting wrongs. This reentry after Gaza entails centering Palestinian ethical claims upon Jews. It is a reparative covenant with God and Palestinians; such a covenant cannot be made without the presence of both. Returning to Sinai after Gaza amounts to a restorative justice praxis. In other words, this return, or teshuva in Hebrew (which also means atonement), would signify a decolonial move (not a metaphor!), an acknowledgment of harms dating back over a century, and accountability for past injustice. It requires imagining future horizons that do not replicate injustice and unjust structures undergirded by selective and harmful hermeneutics.
In her resignation letter from the Biden administration (the first such public letter by a Jewish appointee), which was released on Nakba Day in May 2024, Lily Greenberg Call referred to Biden as “making Jews the face of the American war machine. And that is so deeply wrong.” “Jewish safety cannot—and will not—come at the expense of Palestinian freedom,” she continued. “Making Jews the face of the American war machine makes us less safe.” In her reference to the question of “Jewish safety,” Greenberg Call disrupts the discursive manipulation of antisemitism, conflating Israel with Jews and rendering Palestinian life subsequently ungrievable. In her reference to “making Jews the face of the American war machine,” Greenberg Call names the persistence of imperial political, cultural, and economic forces in the dynamics that unfold on the ground in Palestine/Israel. Greenberg Call, in other words, illuminates the convergence of weaponized violence and (neo)imperial politics. To identify how weaponized antisemitism serves imperial designs is not to take away the agency of Jews in their colonization of Palestine and the racialized structures of dispossession and elimination they put in place.
Passover during a Time of Despair
The giving of the Torah at Sinai occurred after the Israelite exodus from slavery under the pharaoh and before entry into the land of Canaan (where other communities had lived). Since the Jewish holiday of Passover, which celebrates God’s intervention on behalf of the Israelites to liberate them from the pharaoh, occurred amid the sixth month of the Israeli genocidal assault in Gaza, many Jews in Palestine solidarity circles felt despair. They did not know how they could celebrate Jewish liberation at a time when the utter un-freedom and destruction of Palestinians occurred in their name. Palestinian un-freedom has long been justified as necessary for the protection of a political entity that claims to embody Jewish liberation and redemption. In light of this despair, a small group of American rabbis and Jewish Israeli activists orchestrated an action that drew on the Jewish imperative to feed the hungry during the Passover seder. Carrying bags of rice and flour and other food items, the delegation of rabbis and Jewish Israeli activists walked toward the gates of Gaza. They sang passages from the seder conveying the imperative of feeding the hungry. The military police quickly stopped them and seven were arrested. Rabbi Brant Rosen, one of the American rabbis detained, wrote about the absurdly tragic reason for his arrest in a piece for The Nation: “The Americans were told, bluntly, that they were being held for ‘attempting to bring food into Gaza.’” The famine generated by Israel amounts to a war crime. The rabbis’ symbolic action, drawing upon the Jewish script of the Passover Seder, represents the reclaiming of Jewish meanings from the jaws of cruelty and violent ideology. This motif has permeated Jewish protest and, during the Gaza genocide Passover, has reconnected Jews to Sinai and the Exodus story. As public intellectual Naomi Klein argued, it reflects a breaking free from the shackles of idolatry. At a Seder in the Streets of New York City in April 2024, after saying the traditional blessing over the bitter herbs, Klein meditated on Zionism as the Golden Calf Jews have been worshipping. She called on Jews to undergo an exodus from this idolatrous captivity. In this meditation, Klein conveys the general sentiment of the movement of Jews critical of Zionism: “We cannot be free until Palestinians are free.” Young Jewish American activists have chanted this saying in marches and at university encampments across the US and Europe. However, as those Passover actions happened with urgency, in mourning, and through an effort to shutter the Golden Calf of Zionism to re-access the Jewish tradition—historically, through direct accountability to Palestinians—other Jews actively attacked humanitarian trucks and destroyed food en route to Gaza. These are the Jews who long ago left Sinai.
Landlords’ Theology
Those who deliberately and repeatedly attacked humanitarian convoys embody a landlords’ theology (see also Rouhana). “Landlords’ theology” refers to how the Jewish tradition is deployed as a land title to authorize Jewish domination and supremacy along with a prolonged process of “Judaizing” historic Palestine. The latter is achieved by uprooting Palestinians through settler colonial processes. They believe themselves to be in the “Promised Land,” an illusionary redemptive space predicated on eternal violence and domination. To read the bible as a land title reveals, as Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has argued, the colonization of Judaism by the Christian imagination. The enactment of this imagination and Jews’ “return” to Zion (undergirded by a presumption that Jews were not really from Europe) has carried with it the seeds of two genocides, the Shoah and Gaza (as the culmination of the Nakba that pre-dated 1948).
Activists in a new movement called The Faithful Left, which came into being following the consolidation of a fascist-settler coalition during the election cycle of 2022, reject the theology of landlords, arguing that only God is sovereign. In doing so, they reclaim the Jewish tradition from its violent desecration. They seek to re-access the gentler Judaism of the diasporas and, with it, a virtue ethics that defines norms for interpersonal and intercommunal relationships. Anti-occupation Jewish Israeli religious activist Mikhael Manekin, for example, wrote in Haaretz amid the Gaza genocide about his rejection of the ascendance of a Judaism that sacralizes starvation, domination, and war. He expressed disdain for Rabbi Dov Lior, who sanctioned the looting of aid to Gaza, framing it as a sacred act that could trump keeping the Shabbat. Manekin writes: “For Lior, blocking aid to a starving population, even against the wishes of the Israeli military and an extreme right-wing government, is a more crucial religious commandment than keeping the Sabbath.” Another, Rabbi Eliyahu, the Chief Rabbi of Tzfat, even wrote a prayer for the looters and those who prevent humanitarian aid from reaching the victims in Gaza. This rabbinic sanctioning, for Manekin, is deeply troubling. He further writes: “The very idea of violating the Sabbath to create more hunger and as a means of punishment or coercion is alien to Jewish rabbinic tradition and would undoubtedly have baffled our sages. However, in Israel, it is an increasingly mainstream ethical position. To be a good Jew is to put the collective punishment of Palestinians ahead of basic observance.” Manekin calls to reclaim Jewish ethical traditions in the face of this desecration of the tradition. Manekin’s and The Faithful Left’s intervention embodies what I have called “critical caretaking,” which refers to a peacebuilding methodology that centers a historicist demystifying of religiopolitical scripts. However, rather than remaining in the privileged location of critique, “caretaking” conveys hermeneutical work, in this case, on the ground and from within the sources of the Jewish tradition itself in order to rewrite religiopolitical scripts.
To read the bible as a land title reveals, as Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has argued, the colonization of Judaism by the Christian imagination.
In a second annual conference of The Faithful Left held in February 2024, religious Zionists who served during the genocidal assault on Gaza met behind closed doors to discuss the contradictions they experienced between their actions and their understanding of Jewish ethics. They rejected how the Jewish tradition had become drafted into a discourse that posits “the more violent you are and believe in the war, the more Jewishly authentic you are, and the more you speak of peace, the more you are assimilated into the West” (my translation). This directly opposes the centering of the Amalek discourse and the downgrading of many other resources within the Jewish tradition as “weak” and “diasporic.” The Faithful Left sees itself as challenging from within the sources and institutions of religious Zionism, i.e., the supremacist and violent interpretations of Jewish power. In doing so, they stay “at home” in the discourse of religious Zionism, even as they challenge some of its tenets. In prioritizing this feeling of being “at home,” however, they are unable to provide the necessary, more foundational, critique of religious Zionism.
What this examination of the discourse within the Faithful Left reveals is that theology after Gaza that seeks to make Jewish power nicer and more consistent with presumed Jewish values as operationalized within a “Jewish home” is not the same as standing again at Sinai and retelling the story from the perspective of its victims. The latter is as a hermeneutical praxis of repair. The returning religious Zionist soldiers who felt inconsistently Jewish as they donned their uniforms and became instruments in a genocidal war involving Jewish narratives of revenge never shattered the Golden Calf, the “sacralization of Jewish safety/security,” as Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian illuminates in her work.
Theology after Gaza that seeks to make Jewish power nicer and more consistent with presumed Jewish values as operationalized within a ‘Jewish home’ is not the same as standing again at Sinai and retelling the story from the perspective of its victims
Hence, Jewish ethics after the Gaza genocide has to dismantle this Golden Calf and its illusions of agency, redemption, and freedom. Both manifestations, the gentler of the “faithful left” and the grotesque of the looting landlords, do not interrogate Zionism as a political theology whose focus on homemaking and homecoming (redemption) has meant the uprooting and erasure of Palestinians. Literally, turning Palestinian homes into rubble. Therefore, even if mostly not conceptualizing their agency as theological or religious, anti-Zionist Jewish activists who center the Nakba as an ongoing structure that has now escalated into a genocide, in effect, do theology when they don’t do theology. They do theology when they unlearn Zionist mythology about the Nakba and subsequently concretely imagine Palestinian return (such as Zochrot), or when they engage in anti-colonial binational translation, seeking to reclaim Arabic or Persian as Jewish languages and cultures. They enact a restorative political theology of unlearning supremacy and reclaiming how to be Jewish in the space outside a settler colonial and supremacist frame. A restorative political theology, therefore, is “theological” when it unlearns supremacist Euro-Zionism and what Solo Baron called Zionist “lachrymose history.” This process requires a counter-archival retraining of the political imagination which identifies, together with Ella Shohat, for example, the intersecting geographies of Arab-Jewish and Palestinian dislocation, as well as Indigenous Peoples’ genocides associated with modernity/coloniality. Unlearning Zionism, in other words, means excavating Judaism from the debris of Gaza and Zionist historiographical epistemic destruction.
Back to Sinai
Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, a Jewish American who has been in the Jewish/Palestine solidarity space since 1966, like Naomi Klein, spoke recently (responding to a talk I delivered at UC Davis in May 2024) about how, upon descending from the mountain, Moses—who was enraged by the idolatrous behavior of the Israelites whose impatience for their liberation and entry into the “Promised Land” led them to worship the Golden Calf—shattered the tablets upon which the Ten Commandments were inscribed. Speaking while the genocide against Gaza is still ongoing, Rabbi Lynn said that the shards of the tablets represent the current reality of the Jewish tradition. Is it possible to put it back together?
Rabbi Lynn’s image of reconstituting the tradition from the shattered Tablets is striking because of its similarity with the kabbalistic notion of Shevirat Hakelim or the “Breaking of the Vessels.” Shevirat Hakelim or tzimtzum (contraction) refers to how, to make room or space for creation, God or Ein Sof (the infinite, “without an end”) contracted to create an empty space into which God sent light, which initiated the creation process. Seven of the ten sefirot, or vessels, were shattered by the power of the light. Their shards entangled with divine sparks descended into the abyss. This act of creation entangled with the breaking of the vessels denotes the utter disharmony of creation, making room for the human agency of repair or tikun olam.
Speaking while the genocide against Gaza is still ongoing, Rabbi Lynn said that the shards of the tablets represent the current reality of the Jewish tradition. Is it possible to put it back together?
In the kabbalistic discourse, the brokenness of Jews interconnects with the brokenness of the world. However, over the centuries, tensions emerged between more particularistic and more universal interpretations of tikun olam. For Rabbi Lynn, the repair of Judaism means its decolonization (or an exodus from slavery in the false idol of Zionism), and this process will go hand-in-hand with decolonizing Palestine. Jews need to grapple historically through a restorative un-theology (rather than mythologically) with the blood-soaked debris in Gaza as utter profanity. The most urgent political question for Jews in Palestine/Israel therefore is also a theological one, even if they see themselves as atheist or not religious: How can I be Jewish in this space but not a settler colonialist supremacist? It requires us to stand again at Sinai.
Jair Bolsonaro visit to Israel, meeting with Benyamin Netanyahu, March 31, 2019. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Last February, a protest was held in São Paulo, Brazil against the government of current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. It was promoted by supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro. One of the striking features of the mobilization was the presence of protesters with the flag of Israel. In a video from the platform “Mídia Ninja,” a journalist asked one of the protestors why she was wearing—in the form of a cape—the flags of Israel and Brazil. “Because Israel is Christian, like Brazil,” she answered. With some surprise, the journalist replied that Israel is not a Christian nation. The woman insisted: “But they represent us. We are not communists. Israel is with us.”
On its surface, this claim might seem absurd. However, it reflects the theological-political logic behind the increasingly common evocation of Israel in various political discourses in Latin America, especially within conservative governments that have arisen during the last decade, like those in Brazil, Argentina, and Guatemala. Zionist discourses, especially in their Christian varieties, permeate Latin American society. Understanding this framework helps us deepen our analysis of the complex relationship between politics and religion across the globe, but particularly in Latin America. It also illuminates the colonial role that conservative Christianity has historically played in the region. We could even say that Zionist Christianity is the novel factor within the new imperial logic we live today, where Gaza becomes a fundamental axiom for contemporary imperialist eschatology in moral, anthropological, and geopolitical terms.
The growth in this discourse has been spurred by the actions of neoconservative evangelical groups. Their aim is to build a counter-political position to leftist voices in governments or civil society, weaponizing an anti-communist discourse as a counter-position of ideal types, in this case treating Israel as a mythical representation of the origin of the west and its “values.” This results in the creation of new hegemonic narratives and political platforms for wielding power against rising progressive forces. In this sense, Christian Zionism operates as a theological framework that pursues public advocacy in support of Israel and legitimizes Israel’s imperialist actions against Palestinians. It does so using a cultural understanding of Christianity that corresponds to a broader agenda focused on the “true” defense of democracy, good morals, and civilization.
In this post, I would first like to highlight two elements of Zionist symbols and discourses. These will lay the foundation for an examination of the role of Zionism in Latin American politics more broadly. On the one hand, Zionism expresses a theological-religious-political content that mixes different signifiers that are often in tension with one another. At times, it is difficult to identify whether Zionism is a religious discourse that legitimizes a political ideology, or if it is a political discourse that masks itself as a religion. In these narratives, the borders between the religious and the political blurs, with the result that symbols and ideas of all kinds—such as the idea of Israel, communism, democracy, the religious itself—come to be resignified.
On the other hand, the evocation of Israel responds to a logic of antagonism and othering. “Israel” as a signifier embraces a set of political ideals (a “true” democracy, alignment with the west) and religious ideals (the notion of “chosen people,” the bedrock of Christian morality, a messianic promise in the face of the end times). Such signifiers serve as antagonists vis-à-vis other signifiers, namely communism, atheism, antisemitism, immorality, anti-family ideology, and so-called gender ideology.
Local studies of these cases raise some important issues that need to be taken into account. On the one hand, references to Zionism are used to establish an antagonistic positioning vis-à-vis the political class and its traditional liberalism, as in the case of Milei who, as Argentine sociologist Damian Setton notes, uses Zionist narratives to highlight his prophetic position in relation to the monarchy represented by “the caste” (the political class) and the State. On the other hand, in Brazil Christian Zionism acts as a colonial device for othering. As the Brazilian anthropologist Rodrigo Toniol argues, the use of Israel flags at demonstrations and in wider political discourse is part of a “process of whitening,” which has three socio-political elements: stratifying (as a class distinction), saving (as a messianic designation for the evangelical groups), and nationalizing (invoking the principle of nationalism from Israel as an ideal type).
State of Israel Drive in the City of Mendoza, Argentina. Via Wikimedia Commons.
The influence of Zionism in political terms is directly related to the deepening influence of conservative evangelical sectors in the regional political arena. This link can be understood as part of a double dynamic. First, Christian Zionist narratives serve as discursive platforms for conservative evangelical sectors in Latin American. Second, Christian evangelical Zionist groups in the US collaborate with Latin American groups in lobbying efforts, especially in global, international, and multilateral organizations.
This brief summary helps account for the socio-historical complexity of Christianity, especially along the evangelical neoconservative spectrum. Here we see not just pragmatic political actions. Rather, we see a set of ritual practices and theological discourses that have permeated the deepest strands of evangelical identity to the point of an almost naturalized and imperceptible identification. This naturalization goes hand in hand with the construction of liturgical spaces with a Jewish ritual imprint, the theological work of giving biblical legitimization to the concept of the “holy land,” the elaboration of an eschatology based on the political role of the State of Israel, and even the promotion of missiological models that place Islam and other “unreached” religious groups as audiences for re-Christianization work, which is based on the Zionist theological recreation of the people of Israel (see, for example, the narratives behind Spiritual Warfare, the “10/40 Windows,” among others). These are theological perspectives that have been influencing Latin American evangelical thought since post-war times, especially since the new wave of missionary organizations arrived in the region at the end of the 1950s.
From here, I want to outline three key points:
Christian Zionism acts as an articulator of the new political position of the neoconservative evangelical field. Sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, we see this occur directly through its work with Zionist political lobbies, governments, and evangelical organizations focused on influencing public officials and congressmen (especially North American) in both national and multilateral instances (like the Interamerican System). We see it indirectly through the use of theological symbolism related to this movement to legitimize its political actions.
Christian Zionism operates as a floating signifier of socio-political/moral differentiation and antagonization in a religious key. The narratives of Christian Zionism offer a symbolic scaffolding that reconfigures political positions within the context of ideological polarization. It moves towards a moral Manichaeism that constructs a place of purity and sacredness exempt from ideological bias and contingency. We also find a conception of political rivals as the enemies who are evil, contaminated, and immoral, and thus whose political legitimacy must be contested. We see, even, a resignification of history, as in the allusion to the same signifiers of the cold war, such as “cultural battle,” anti-communism, and “axis of evil,” among others.
Christian Zionism enables a field of articulation, instrumentalization, and political mobilization. Christian Zionism, as a lobbying mechanism, presents itself as a transversal space, that is to say, trans-ideological, trans-partisan, and trans-geopolitical.
Taking all this into account, we can define Christian Zionism as a political-religious movement with outreach to various social sectors (churches, political groups and parties, civil society organizations, and faith-based organizations) founded on the theological conjunction between the biblical-apocalyptic figure of the people of Israel with the modern State of Israel. Such a nexus legitimizes a Christian supremacy and a set of values associated with its western distinction. These include modern ontology itself, the processes of “civilizing,” and the legitimization of US politics, with diverse impacts on different levels, such as the geopolitical (the colonial policy adopted in the Middle East and its global resonances), the religious (so-called Judeo-Christian hegemony in liberal democracy), the moral (the promotion of “Judeo-Christian values” with respect to sexuality, the body, the economy, and the family), and the social (the channeling of ideological antagonisms in the capitalist context).
Zionism as Public Theology and Colonial Device
We can affirm that the effectiveness of Christian Zionism resides in having transformed itself into a public theology that makes it possible to counter discourses and link spaces in a comprehensive and effective manner. It can do so in the face of the crisis of traditional political discourses (conservative and progressive, from the right to the left) and their respective theological-religious platforms (especially within Latin American Catholicism).
Nukhet Ahu Sandal suggests that a public theology can be understood as a process of reflection on the implications of religion in everyday life. In her words, “what sets the tone of political debates in society is usually not the religions themselves, but the public theologies created, disseminated and consolidated by political and religious institutions” (69). Following along these lines, we can identify two characteristics of this Christian and Zionist public theology that need to be contested. First, Christian Zionism operates as a colonial public theology that de-humanizes the human from a radicalization of moral purism. This type of Zionist colonialism goes far beyond the characteristics of the classical neocolonial theory and even of the more complex postcolonial theories. This is a type of colonialism that is based, following Frantz Fanon, on treating colonial subjects as existing in the zone of non-being as bodies that can be discarded, who do not deserve to be considered as individuals or as being assignable to any type of collective. They are, rather, bodies of the dregs that, as Edward Said stated, are the target of a “redemptive occupation” for the transformation or eradication of their perverse moral condition (68–69).
In other words, Christian Zionism is presented as a public theology where coloniality is legitimized on the basis of the Manichean principle of an original pure morality, promoted by a chosen people, and channeled by a historical-political-cultural reality, such as the presence of (the State of) Israel in Palestine. Such public theology as a colonial and moral political project is directly related to conservative US geopolitics and its imperial expansionism, not only in geographical and political terms, but also in cultural and religious terms. It is a theology that operates in the background of anti-feminist, anti-LGBTIQ+, anti-Indigenous people, and anti-“minorities” movements of all kinds.
Christian Zionism is presented as a public theology where coloniality is legitimized on the basis of the Manichean principle of an original pure morality,
The colonialism of settlement over the colonized bodies of Palestine—with its eschatology and redemptive theology—acts as a geopolitical symptom for a moral colonialism, a colonialism of settlement over bodies. It sustains its political agenda in different countries and multilateral organizations to the point of justifying the discarding of these bodies. Thus, Christin Zionism allows for a metaphysical inversion in a moral key by combining the elements of colonial “manifest destiny,” the end of (barbarian) time, and the redemption of western morality (identified with its Christian political theology). This moral colonial policy pursued by the neoconservative evangelical groups also acts as a basis for the justification of the war and genocidal enterprise in Gaza. This is an inevitable part of and a necessary element in the same redemptive enterprise of the world, as we can see in countless speeches of pastors and religious leaders.
Conclusion: Towards a Transcendental and Re-humanizing Utopian Imagination
To conclude, we can say that a counter-reaction to the growth of Christian Zionism as a political device implies both a work of theological critique as well as the construction of alternative platforms of religious advocacy in public space to contest naturalized meanings. Christian Zionism is based on a moral immanentism that co-opts anthropological potential for its colonial control and abolishes all dignity by emptying bodies of transcendence. The utopia it claims is nothing more than a teleological, fatalistic, and metaphysical vision of history, which blocks any possibility of movement, of liberation, of genuine redemption. Here lies one of the most important tasks we have: how do we recover these meanings from a critical point of view, towards other public theologies? Here I recall Franz Hinkelammert’s idea of overcoming what he called abstract universalism towards a practical universalism, based on a utopian transcendental imagination. In the face of political theologies that legitimize terror, genocide, and death in the name of God, we need a trans-immanent theology—in the words of Ignacio Ellacuría, a theology that searches for the “beyond” within history in its possibility of being something different (328–29)—that promotes collective work for an alternative that redesigns the dominant immanence.
University encampment. Photo credit: Helene Furani.
Background Introduction
Amidst the genocidal onslaught on Gaza over nearly the past year, universities have pondered whether, and how, to respond. From student protests calling for boycott and divestment, to faculty organizing, to administrative repression, universities around the world have been a site of contention and debate.
What should the role of the university be in the face of genocide? What does the university’s mission demand? And what responsibilities do university leaders have in the current climate?
These questions could be addressed to any university, but in the letter that follows, they are addressed to an Israeli university, particularly to Tel Aviv University, to its president, Professor Ariel Porat, from one of its Palestinian faculty,[1]Professor of anthropology Khaled Furani.
This letter is part of a conversation following the arrest and release of Palestinian Hebrew University Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian. On April 30, 2024, seventy-three current and former Palestinian academics at Israeli institutions of higher education sent a letter to the Association of University Heads in Israel (VERA). This body is comprised of the presidents of nine universities, including Ariel University in the occupied West Bank.
That letter holds the universities collectively accountable for the campus atmosphere of repression and retribution that contributed to their colleague’s arrest. It asks VERA to issue a statement demanding that charges be dropped against Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian and to uphold her safety, academic freedom, and right to free speech. Only days earlier, VERA had issued a public statement expressing concern with “Violent Demonstrations and Anti-Semitism on US Campuses.”
In their letter, the Palestinian academics include as an action generating a lack of safety the referencing of ‘Amalek, a biblical people that the Israelites are enjoined to decimate, referring, in part, to this language appearing in a speech given by Porat at Tel Aviv University (TAU) on November 7, 2023. The International Court of Justice has cited such language as incitement to genocide.
VERA did not issue a public statement in response to the academics’ letter. Porat’s response amounted to directly writing to seven faculty at his institution who had signed the letter. In his letter, Porat defends his reference to ‘Amalek and his record of upholding academic freedom, inviting the faculty to contact him directly should they ever feel unsafe.
Despite spending the academic year in Germany, Furani felt threatened at a distance, personally, for his Palestinian academic community, and for his family members in Gaza. He spent many months thinking about how to express this lack of safety to Professor Porat and about how to ask that he, in his role as a university president, lead toward safety and dignity for all in the land. Upon his safe return home from his sabbatical, Professor Furani sent the following letter to Professor Porat. Footnotes have been added to the original for clarification.
The Letter
August 31, 2024
Dear Ariel (if I may),
There is a prophetic tradition (hadith), far away from modern liberalism and close to the ethical precepts of ancient Judaism, whereby the Prophet Muhammad reminds us that the best of striving (jihad) is speaking with justice (haq) before an unjust authority (sultan ja’ir). In this letter I strive to speak just so, about what you are owed, including my understanding of what you yourself owe. I pray that truth (haqiqa) remains my companion in every word. Please forgive me if I inadvertently deviate from it and please strive to listen deeply when you hear it.
Ultimately, I write this letter to beseech you to be more conscious and attentive toward leadership, so that you may remember truth and make decisions founded upon it, rather than unthinkingly follow decisions made for you. Nothing less than this task is necessary for leading. And in our diluvian times, leading, genuine leading, is required if we are to emerge from the flood. You, indeed all of us, must decide where we stand in this blood-drenched land in need of recovery of justice, freedom, and equality for all lives between, and beyond, the River and the Sea.
I owe you an appreciation, an apology, and this very letter. Appreciation, because to this day, I carry with me the ethically profound human touch of your personal call on a Saturday morning over three years ago to make sure that my family and I were safe in our neighborhood as throngs of Jewish thugs (with “the tolerance” of state security) threatened Palestinian Haifa.[2]
I also appreciate the ways in which you stand out among your peers in seeking to ensure your faculty’s personal safety, and also to protect certain civil liberties, responsibilities which other university presidents seem all too willing to abdicate. As you commit to these types of freedom, you also stand out in your manifest desire to listen. It is your desire to listen that made it possible for me to write this letter. It reverberated all the way over to my sabbatical abroad. My physical distance undoubtedly hindered my ability to follow and fully appreciate what you have been doing day by day to safeguard these types of freedom.
I owe you an apology for writing this letter in English, a language that is native to neither of us. For reasons that lie with you, Arabic is not an option. For reasons that lie with me, neither is Hebrew. Although I am working on recovering my relation to a native Hebrew, whose no fault it is that modern Zionism colonized it, at this moment I must, the world being what it is, resort to the foreign, and yes colonial, language of this letter, so that words may flow from my heart to yours.
I now turn to what you owe as a university leader. You owe us, Palestinian faculty and the wider Palestinian community to which we belong, and also and essentially yourself, a more genuine sense of, and a truer commitment to, safety (aman). I am referring to a safety native to the land, enduring and encompassing all peoples, neither false nor prejudicial. You have kindly and keenly asked us to contact you should we ever feel endangered. I am doing this now. Shocking as it may seem, my need for safety also stems from a danger present at times in your words as well as in your silence, in your actions and in your non-actions.
Your resort to the annihilationist language of ‘Amalek, however analogical your intention, constitutes danger. Your recruitment of funds for students drafted for reserve service in an army whose leaders are charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity constitutes danger. Your mustering of campus resources for ideological, surveillance, strategic, and other forms of support in service of slaughter in Gaza masquerading as self-defense constitute danger.
Your utter silence on the destruction of higher education in Gaza presents danger. Your failure to institute on campus a deep introspection that examines how we arrived at the calamity befalling the land, the peoples on it and beyond it—and not merely since last October, nor since the last couple of years or decades, but for at least the past century—also constitutes danger.
Separation fence. Photo Credit: Helene Furani.
Your vocal challenge of attacks on democracy while remaining utterly silent on this democracy’s attacks on human life, including its brutal occupation of a people, presents danger.[3] Questioning the legitimacy of the current government, while keeping unquestionable your nation-state’s foundational violence—endemic to any colonial state—presents danger. This danger amounts to the tragic hindrance of your ability to hear and to see the ways in which you are made to help perpetuate a certain violence even as you earnestly combat another.
You might begin recognizing this disparity by listening to your very language. As you seek to protect “democracy” and its “rule of law” you participate in normalizing this law’s violence. You normalize this violence when sounding like the state. Like it you call the current iteration of a vast tragedy “war.” In this so-called “war,” you seem to attribute “murder” and “terror” exclusively to “the other side,” but never to your state. Who commits “illegal violence” and what “legal violence” and even “law” amount to seem set and set beyond the frame of questioning.
Both the substance and the agent of terror are made to appear self-evident, rather than merited subjects of critical learning, our foundational task at the university. The task of learning that engenders clarity of thinking becomes more, not less, vital for the university’s integrity when that university depends on a state. Indeed, it is fateful when, out of a history of colonialism, that state seeks to numb, confuse, and normalize its occupying powers, and malign any and every form of resistance to those powers, even the most non-violent, as “terror.”
Allowing state violence to hide in what counts as “normal” or “legal” undermines your very striving for my safety. Worse still, your sense of “safety” itself becomes a form of endangerment every time it turns blind to, and tunes out, state violence. No humanitarian impulse can remain safe under the inhuman and dehumanizing power of the modern state. Treated as self-evidently “legal,” this state violence is bound to turn reality lethal for all, for citizens from this or that “sector” and for non-citizens alike.
Ultimately, when you fear violence that is against “the law” yet normalize the violence of “the law,” my safety is not the only casualty. Yours is too. The danger to safety here lies not in some abstract inconsistency but in a real ethical one. It is a safety in which you can properly hear, see, and sense our common world. If you stand outside the safety of an ethical landscape, then neither us nor your leadership nor the university you are charged with leading can be assumed to be safe.
Where do you and your leadership stand, within or outside of an ethical landscape? Do you lead from moral agency or are you pursuing a hollow non-leadership, or something in between? Sadly, instead of seeing you lead, I see you as being led. Instead of “making history” by “stepping outside” of it, you appear to surrender to its vagaries. Should you dare to examine and self-examine what may appear self-evident and to question, as a steady form of knowing, what may appear scary, then we can be assured that you are leading. When you dare to take steps, not merely ahead of your homologues but wherever necessary, even stand alone, then we know that you are leading.
Ultimately, when you fear violence that is against “the law” yet normalize the violence of “the law,” my safety is not the only casualty. Yours is too.
The “aloneness” of genuine leadership requires you to find a place outside the matrix dominating your society, that is, outside of Zionism. When you remember what Zionism wants you to forget, that this land was never empty and that all peoples on it from the River to the Sea, are all equally deserving of life and of mourning over it when lost, then we know that you are leading. When you transcend the glitter of sanctioned words and venture toward justice for all, then we know that you are leading. When you recognize that the dangers derived from “coordinating” (Gleichschaltung)[4] with and for the state exceed those threatened when questioning its hubris, then we know that you are leading.
Rather than seeking to end the historic confusion of Jewish safety with Jewish supremacy and the conflation of Jewish freedom, or any freedom, with sovereignty, you have helped perpetuate a fatal confusion. This fatal confusion has brought a European poison to Palestine, at times to combat European toxins and at other times to spread them, while masquerading as a theriac.
This European poison, modelled after, while capitulating to, fateful European nationalism and xenophobia, is modern Zionism. Allured to drink from this supposed theriac and by spreading its drinking, you join thoughtless condemnation of what could bring you and your society back to sobriety, indeed to health and to freedom.
Your leadership has our university go on, in frenzy, fighting against the academic boycott,[5] for example, rather than strive toward understanding, which is distinct from justifying, its motivations and aspirations. While wanting to be democratic, your leadership treats the non-violent boycott movement as demonic. Why not instead leaderly encourage what thinking—because it is thinking, all the more so at an institution entrusted with it—requires on this matter as on any other: to think it through and debate it?
Often, we, Palestinians, have been asked about where or who our Mandela might be. Despite this question’s many flaws, it has value in that it can easily be turned around. As you seek to lead, please attune your ears, open your eyes, and ask from your heart with due humility and remembrance: from whence and under what conditions could an Israeli Jew emerge as a de Klerk? If and when you are ready to recognize that it is “the drink” itself and not only “the drunkard” (a minister here, or a prime minister there) then genuine leadership could await you.
Do you want to stay on board a chariot of death, recharging it with Zionism, and irrecoverably lead our peoples in this land toward an abyss, or will you summon the courage to steer us away from colossal descent?
Let us recall, when entrusted to lead a university, you are entrusted to safeguard its foundational mission to pursue learning unhindered. Our university, like other universities around the world today, has been entrusted with safeguarding one of the greatest capacities given to humans: to think. Through thinking we learn to perceive truth and discern it from falsehood, along with beautiful from ugly and good from bad, and crucially, acting from failing to act for justice.
This mission is why, when you preside over a university, you are poised to save, or destroy, bodies and souls, of persons as well as of polities. More than merely training our thinking away from perdition in this world, if committed to striving to the ideal of justice for all—not only for some—a university can chart new and previously unknown paths for existence.
In reality, TAU violates this original entrustment, as would any university anytime it participates in a state’s domination of a people. TAU currently, and rightly so, refrains from serving as an obvious arm of the state’s policing, surveillance, or prosecution. Yet it seems quite comfortable, rather eager, to dutifully join its ideological arm, through TAU’s commitment to “hasbara” efforts. Instead of allowing in some light, instead of welcoming new or difficult or “heretical” voices, TAU goes on to participate in your state’s denial of Palestine. This denial is not simply of a past on whose literal ruins TAU exists, namely on al-Sheikh Muwwanis. It has to do with a future that all peoples of this land, no matter the state, could and should enjoy with their progeny and without privileging one people over another.
Your recent conference focusing on the future demonstrates perception of one and only thing: a state.[6] You see a single state and those assimilated by it, but not the multiplicity of peoples, their histories and futures, banished by it. Numbed by the state while imagining its future, TAU holds Palestinians in the realm of suspicion. They are singularly invoked as the object of “security” experts. Just like the state itself, nothing and no one seems higher for you than the state, not its people nor any people.
Instead of allowing in some light, instead of welcoming new or difficult or “heretical” voices, TAU goes on to participate in your state’s denial of Palestine.
Voices for justice, for truth, and for reconciliation are rising up loud and clear from around the world, and even on your own campus, so that we may all, Israelis, Palestinians, and more, re-found our joint existence, outside Zionism’s dominion in this land, yet such voices seem to meet your condemnation. You refuse to hear them. Indeed, you malign them. This denial by someone entrusted with thinking becomes ever more stupefying in the face of the rapid fraying of existence of both peoples, if not of the world entire.
A university that participates in the crushing of another people’s freedom cannot possibly remain a university, for it robs freedom thrice: first from the people its state dominates, second from the people claimed by the state as its own, and third from thinking. Can a university that abnegates its own freedom be called, properly speaking, a university?
Ultimately Ariel, it comes down to whom you want to serve as you lead a university. It has been said that one cannot serve two masters, only one. Strikingly, you seem to be caught in the service of three at once: knowledge, market, and the state. The perception available to your heart is quite likely torn and fragmented in the torrent of attention they each demand from you. Stepping back to perceive the whole, as any leading—including of one’s own existence—requires, must be rather difficult. Under this triple servitude, your perception might be smashed to smithereens as readily as a grain under a grindstone.
You are rightly indignant about a government that you find noxious for a healthy life, a life to which all creation, without exception, is entitled. Yet you have not allowed yourself the possibility that the current government is merely the latest concoction of the state’s steady and stupefying secretion of poisons. This stately poison has kept flowing, no matter the government, no matter the prime minister who came and went. There is nothing that you may say about the current government and its members that cannot justifiably be said about your state for the entirety of its life: paranoid, lying, deceiving, manipulating, thuggish, divisive, corrupt, massively destructive of human bodies and souls, and, of course, perpetuating a denial that numbs the senses necessary to recognize it all.
Only now, the masks and walls designed to obscure this poison are disintegrating, along with the sealed-off cellar that aims to hide its casualties. Somehow and somewhere, you surely know that this cellar has been there all along. It is known to many Israelis as occupation. Anyone alert and daring to peek can see behind its literal walls offering a false safety and freedom and find an abyss. Now the abyss along with its poison is catching up with you and perhaps the whole world as well.
A cactus blooms. Photo Credit: Helene Furani.
Ariel, you have indeed led in reminding that a time of calamity can also be a time of recovery. But will you, amidst the continuing slaughter, lead with courage, notwithstanding the risk and fear, to a recovery from the dominion of modern Zionism? What needs to be renewed, outside and before this Zionism, is a way of living together in this land that embraces all. And we should be able, inshallah, to re-learn it. Peoples have lived together and found refuge in this land for millennia. For the sake of our children, grandchildren, and the world entire, we cannot allow a single century to undo all those that came before it. We cannot allow a modern Zionist un-learning of this rooted history to deracinate the historical living together in and with the land.
A free university must begin to relearn to belong to this place, rather than this land to “us.” It would see that no one and nothing needs to be hemmed into serrated and clashing identities, as demanded by the state’s false promise of “security.” If it is not too late, certainly before the utter ruination of the university as a beacon of learning, I hope that you realize that only one of the three masters you serve can and must be served at a university. You know which one.
Before too late, please do the reckoning that allows you to perceive that what ultimately the state cares for is its own life, not the lives of its citizens nor of the “world Jewry” it purports to defend, let alone the subjects of its terror in the sealed-off cellar, now exposed for all those who care to see. Before too late, ask yourself in what ways you, as a citizen of the state, have been party to a deal with a Mephisto falsely promising manna.
A free university must begin to relearn to belong to this place, rather than this land to ‘us.’
In the instance of a Jewish state, it means, perhaps above all else, the bartering of a profoundly ethical tradition, committed to justice, the best foundation of any and all governance, for a non-ethical institution (the state), which sells both justice and ethics on the altar of its own life, believing in its inviable perpetuity. What is more, being a modern state, your state has duped you into a false sense of safety and into a fake sense of belonging. It has duped you into a sense of freedom, including freedom from violent death, despite how violent, militarized, and nuclear it has become.
At stake therefore is more than learning at an institution, that is, the university, whose vital mission is to safeguard learning. At stake is our existing and belonging on this land and beyond it. Beware that as they damage learning, the state and the market also damage existing. So please open your eyes and attune your ears and ask with your heart: what have I not been seeing, hearing, and feeling, when my horizon is only the stupefying idol of the state and its stupefying images of riches?
You must have had enormous patience and power if you have made it to these lines in this letter. At the end of this exhortation, let us recall that God commands that we govern with justice, justice for ourselves and for others. To forget this is to forget a crucial message from Amos 5:26–27 who warned against the perils of images we make for ourselves. I pray that you heed his advice for recovering a perception of justice: “You also carried your king, Sikkuth, and your idol, Chiun, the star of your gods, which you made for yourselves, and I will exile you beyond Damascus…” [7]
The land, including its prophets and poets, has taught us an important lesson about the self-deceptive, self-destructive pursuit of seductive power and wealth: Crusaders’ castles have no durability here. What lasts grows in and from the land, like za’atar, sage, and olive trees, and the people who cherish them. If you recover your perception for justice, I trust that you will help open a path for a joint healthy life like that lived by the land’s enduring flora, and not by the transient and deserted castles crumbling in its midst.
Sincerely,
Khaled
Notes
[1] Palestinian faculty at Israeli institutions of higher education all hold Israeli citizenship.
[2] In May 2021, what is commonly known as habbat al-karamah (Arabic for “dignity uprising”) was instigated by heightened Israeli assaults on al-Aqsa Mosque and al-Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem.
[3] Professor Ariel Porat has been a vocal proponent of the pro-democracy movement challenging attempts at “judicial reform.”
[5] Professor Porat has called on his faculty to assist in thwarting the academic boycott. Relatedly, on May 21, 2024, VERA issued a statement in response to the Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities’ decision to join the academic boycott.
[6] Professor Porat convened a conference on June 19, 2024 titled “Israel’s Future.”
[7] The original letter gives the original Hebrew verse. This English translation is based on the New King James version.
Khaled Furani is a Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel-Aviv University. He researches and teaches in the areas of language, literature, secularism, the history of anthropology, theology, sovereignty, and Palestine. His current research focuses on the relation between reason and revelation. He co-edited, with Yara Sa'adi-Ibraheem, Fi Jawf al-Hut: Tajarub Filasteeniyyah fi al-Jami'aat al-Israeliyyah [Inside the Leviathan: Palestinian Experiences at Israeli Universities](Jerusalem: Van Leer Jerusalem Institute & Dar Leila, ‘Akka, 2022 [in Arabic]).
The author, Jessica Wong, pictured With Marc Ellis.
I first met Marc Ellis as an undergraduate at Baylor University and, unlike his graduate students, had no idea who he was. I had no knowledge of his scholarship or his standing. I was too ignorant to be impressed or intimidated. To me, Ellis was simply my teacher and mentor. It was only later that I came to realize that this opinionated and somewhat peculiar Jewish man who rode a recumbent bike around his neighborhood and was a fixture of my life at Baylor was also a significant figure within the field of liberation theology.
One common characteristic of liberation theologies is that they are born of particularity. Such theologies arise out of specific times and places to address the particular forms of oppression being experienced by particular people. It is a theology steeped in context. In the work of Latin American theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, the primary context is the struggle of the poor in Latin American who have been disenfranchised to the point of being rendered subhuman. In the work of feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, the primary context is the plight of women, the patriarchal nature of traditional approaches to religion and theology, and how women might claim space for themselves. In the work of Black theologian James Cone, the primary context is the plight of Black Americans within a White-dominated racial economy undergirded by a White Christian imagination. Each of these theologians advocates for more than the liberation of the people occupying these particular contexts, having a more expansive message of freedom embedded within their vision of a redeemed society. What is notable about Marc Ellis’s work, however, is that this capacious and inclusive move toward liberation is not simply an aspect of his theology, it is the very heart of it.
Throughout his career Ellis sought Jewish liberation. Yet, his position moved beyond the claim that the Jewish people are God’s chosen and, therefore, God is with them in their suffering. He believed this to be true, but the liberative message he offered was far more challenging than that. For him, Jewish liberation did not mean deliverance from an external oppressor. Rather, Jewish liberation meant release from the Constantinian complicity of the Jewish state, a political project that has resulted in the domination, displacement, and dehumanization of the Palestinian people.
Driven by fear and a desire for survival that emerged in response to the atrocities of the Holocaust, Ellis believed that the Jewish people have come to idolize their own safety and security at the expense of the authentic and vulnerable relationality to which God has called them. And so, in an effort to secure themselves, Jews have inflicted upon Palestinians the very oppressive strategies from which they have sought to protect themselves. From the ghettoization of the Jews in Nazi Germany to the ghettoization of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank; from the walled Nazi concentration camps to the Israeli West Bank Barrier; from the destruction of Jewish homes to the dispossession of the homes of Palestinians; from the plundering of Jewish assets to the discriminatory regulations that have decimated the livelihood and economy of the Palestinian people—Ellis recognized these parallels with a level of clarity that compelled him to denounce the injustices perpetrated by the State of Israel, a decision that made him particularly unpopular among certain Jewish and Christian leaders who preferred his silence.
For Ellis, Jewish liberation did not mean deliverance from an external oppressor. Rather, Jewish liberation meant release from the Constantinian complicity of the Jewish state.
His critique of Israel, however, was not an indication that Ellis was somehow inauthentically Jewish or antisemitic, as some would claim. On the contrary, it was, in part, his deep connection with the Jewish tradition—with Jewish philosophy and the prophets—that moved him to condemn Israel’s actions. His time meditating on the writings of Jewish philosophers like Martin Buber led him to understand the sacredness of encounter. “All real living is meeting,” Buber writes in I and Thou (11). There is divinity in our authentic connection to one another. Through encounter, we are met by the divine. God “becomes ever nearer, increasingly near to the sphere that lies between beings, to the Kingdom that is hidden in our midst, there between us” (119–20). By encountering another person as Thou, we are met by the ultimate Thou. We are met by God.
This sacredness of meeting was a guiding principle in Ellis’s life. It was this holy encounter that he believed to be missing from the State of Israel’s view and treatment of the Palestinians. Without it, the Jewish people turned a blind eye to the real struggles and suffering of their Palestinian neighbors. And, in this way, they alienated themselves from God. It was from this self-alienation that the Jewish people needed liberation. As such, Ellis’s rebuke of the Israeli government was born not from a lack of care for his own people, but from his deep and abiding love for them.
Rebuke as an expression of love has an important place within the Jewish scriptural tradition. We see it in the prophets’ words of condemnation, warning, and call to repentance and transformation. Prophetic rebuke, while perhaps caustic in tone, is nonetheless an invitation into right relationship with God, often through the restoration of right relationship with others. And so it was with Ellis’s own prophetic speech. Though at times off-putting to those on the receiving end, his words of caution and calling almost always stemmed from a place of love, as they invited the recipient into deeper knowing, more profound connection, and truer faithfulness.
This sacredness of meeting was a guiding principle in Ellis’s life. It was this holy encounter that he believed to be missing from the State of Israel’s view and treatment of the Palestinians.
I remember being called out by Ellis on more than one occasion over the course of our friendship: once for having missed Shabbat dinner at his home, and a second time regarding my attitude toward myself and my identity. As a biracial kid growing up in predominantly White circles in the South, I had learned that whiteness was both normal and preferred. As a Christian growing up in Dallas, I had learned that race didn’t really matter. After all, as the Apostle Paul once wrote, “There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28–29). From this, I had concluded that, if my true identity was in Christ, then my racial identity was inconsequential. And so, I saw myself as White and largely ignored my Chinese identity, perhaps secretly hoping that others would do the same. While I had yet to admit any of this to myself, let alone to Ellis, he somehow saw the truth of my situation and, in that moment, spoke a challenging, prophetic word over my life. He told me that unless I came to know and accept my Chinese identity, I would never truly know myself.
Initially, his words struck me as patently false. Steeped in American individualism’s story of the “self-made man,” I struggled to see how my sense of self could be bound up with a history, family, and culture that, at that time, felt fundamentally foreign to me. Nonetheless, Ellis’s words stayed with me, prompting me to think deeply about the nature of identity beyond individualism. What did it mean to be constituted by people and places from which I had been separated not only geographically, but also linguistically and culturally? What did it mean to be constituted by people whose stories I had not been told? I now wonder whether it was perhaps because of Ellis’s own diasporic identity that he so readily recognized and spoke to the diaspora that I, too, was navigating.
Whether in his writing, his relationship with students, or his routine exchanges, Ellis sought to live a life of encounter. He was a person of presence. Being present was of course, for him, a profoundly spiritual practice that entailed seeing and witnessing. Retiring to Cape Canaveral, Ellis cultivated this practice of presence in his landscape photography, painting, and poetry. Each day, he strived to see, to acknowledge, and to be present with the world, both in its beauty and in its painful loneliness. He chose not to look away from any of it.
He also practiced presence in his relationships. He was someone who loved to joke, was quick to laugh, and refused to take himself too seriously. When Gustavo Gutiérrez visited Baylor, Ellis convinced this world-renown scholar—who, albeit a giant within the field of liberation theology, is a man of decidedly modest height—to hoist himself up into a full-sized pickup truck wearing a Texas-sized cowboy hat. I still remember the photo. In it, Gutiérrez looked like a child trying on his parent’s clothing. He was lifting the brim of the hat so that he could peer out from beneath it and was grinning from ear to ear. Ellis tended to his friendships. He was the kind of person who kept in touch. Even after illness restricted his movement and sapped his energy, he stayed connected and as present as he could with the people in his life.
I was able to speak on the phone with Marc three weeks before he died. We talked about a lot of things: sickness, death, anger, but also love and family. We talked about the beauty of life and fear of the unknown. I told him that I loved him. I told him how much he meant to me. And he told me how thankful he was that we had encountered one another. The influence of Ellis’s life extends beyond his scholarship and prophetic witness. For those of us who knew him, it was his life of authentic encounter that impacted us the most. Marc Ellis encountered us, and in the sacredness of meeting, we were forever changed.
Jessica Wai-Fong Wong is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Azusa Pacific University and works in political and liberation theologies with a focus on race, gender, society, and visual theory. She is an ordained ruling elder in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and holds degrees in Christian theology and ethics from Duke Divinity School and Duke University. She is the author of Disordered: The Holy Icon and Racial Myths(Baylor University Press, 2021) and co-author of the curriculum Lamenting Racism: A Christian Response to Racial Injustice(MennoMedia, 2021). Her current research project—Black Monsters, Yellow Ghosts—considers the racial and sociopolitical dynamics of Asian American invisibility and Black hypervisibility as they function to create docile subjects and maintain established systems of power.
Codex Ephraemi Rescript, in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. This manuscript contained a medieval saint’s life written over text from a Biblical text, which is therefore difficult to decipher. Via Wikimedia Commons.
As a Christian social ethicist, I reflect on the issues of war and peace with an assumption that Christians live in two conflicted understandings of time: linear and palimpsestic. These two perspectives have shaped Christian discourse on God, Jesus, war, peace, and apocalypse. The linear frame sees time as one-directional from the past to the future. In contrast, M. Jacqui Alexander conceptualizes time as “neither vertically accumulated nor horizontally teleological.” Alexander frames time as a palimpsest, “a parchment that has been inscribed two or three times, the previous text having been imperfectly erased and, therefore, remaining still partly visible” (190). A palimpsest brings the past into the present and the future and casts the future into the present and the past. It leads one to scrutinize what has been erased, what has been rewritten on the text, and what traces will remain. War stories and memories move between these two frames of time, evoking and triggering the memories and traumas of different wars. It is based on this conceptualization of temporality that I approach the Israeli war on Gaza, searching for peace in the remains of war ruins. More specifically, in a world where no one knows peace free from war, is it possible to imagine a theology of peace that can sustain Christians of conscience in a firm belief in the God of peace, bring global citizens together in resistance to militarized violence, and renew our creative and strategic skills in building peace?
Memories of War across Time and Space: Gaza and Korea
The escalated war on Gaza is not an isolated, unique event. Instead, as the war has been revealed in the media since October 7, 2023, global spectators have processed it through their (collective) memories and experiences of other wars. In my case, Gaza evokes memories of the Korean War, known as the forgotten war in the United States. The full-blown Korean War broke out in June 1950 and ended in July 1953 when the United States/United Nations and the China-North Korea alliance reached an armistice agreement. The war killed as many as four million people, mostly Korean civilians. Although the Demilitarized Zone and the U.S. military’s presence in South Korea are constant reminders of the ongoing Korean War, I had no direct physical experience of the war. Nonetheless, like many Koreans and Korean Americans, I have emotionally and psychologically experienced the effects of the war because of transgenerational memories and trauma that have been passed on to me.
In the summer of 2012, I visited Nablus in the West Bank of Palestine as part of a political tour group organized by the Green Olive Collective. The tour exposed the participants to realities in the West Bank and the Negev desert. When my group walked through the ruins from the Second Intifada (2000–2005), memories of the Korean War were relayed: bombed buildings, half-fallen walls with bullet holes, and broken armored vehicles. The ruins were confined to a tiny area close to the city center. Although the day tour allowed me to explore the beauty of Palestinian art and culture, after facing the war ruins left by the Israeli military, I realized that I had walked through one of the world’s most militarized zones, if not a war zone. Palestinians have made their lives on the remains of war ruins and continue to constantly be exposed to one militarized episode of violence after another.
Damage in Gaza Strip during October 2023. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Grace Cho insightfully argues that “the trauma of militarized violence can traverse boundaries of time and space so that the effects of military bombing … can at once be embodied in two seemingly distinct geographical and historical locations,” such as Palestine in 2024 and Korea in 1950 (57–58). Cho’s argument allows me to see the war on Gaza as the reminiscence of the Korean War, or the Korean War as an evocation of a future Gaza. By studying a “one-hundred-year war” against Palestinians, I could investigate the Korean War and its necropolitical logic (politics of death) more critically. As Achille Mbembe argues, war is “a means of achieving sovereignty as much as a way of exercising (its) right to kill” (66). The Korean War allowed the Allied Forces, mainly the U.S. Armed Forces, to exercise their unregulated killing of Korean civilians, regardless of their political affiliations. Subsequently, the war structured a post-war Korean society and caged it in a permanent state of warfare.
“Brutality” may not justly describe the intense level of atrocities done to the collective body of Koreans. Like Palestinians in Gaza, Koreans experienced “fire and fury” seventy-four years ago. U.S. airstrikes and napalm bombings wreaked havoc on major cities in North Korea, such as Pyongyang, Sinuiju, Wonsan, and Hamheung. These cities had no standing buildings left at the end of the Korean War. The secret U.S. military files declassified in the early 2000s suggest that the U.S. armed forces knowingly killed civilians, including women, children, and refugees, even in the southern Korean peninsula. They justified these killings with the logic of preventing possible insurgencies by communists disguised among refugees or hiding in villages (aka “human shields”). The U.S. military considered all Koreans as (potential) communist enemies to be eliminated. A similar logic is manifested in Gaza. Suppose that mutilated, killed, and burnt bodies and towns during the Korean War illustrated the U.S.-led fear and hatred of dehumanized communists while the collective Korean body was equated with communism. In that case, Palestinians’ debilitated bodies and devastated Gaza City, Khan Yunis, and Rafat are equated with religiously motivated terrorists by the Israeli government and its global allies.
War Logic
The present moment of the war on Gaza is accessible through traces of the Korean War because of not only the intensity of militarized violence but also the imperial logic behind the war and sovereignty’s impromptu response to armed violence. Indeed, like the U.S. Air Forces in the Korean War, the Israeli airstrikes and saturated bombing on every part of Gaza debilitated Palestinian civilians and their schools, homes, houses of worship, and hospitals. As Sharon Welch argues, “Cruelty can be intoxicating,” and, therefore, “the use of violence, even for noble ends, can spark excessive violence” (38). Images from Gaza since October 7, 2023, resonate with the shock doctrine used in many wars, such as those in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Pacific Gulf, Iraq, and more.
The genocidal aspects of the said wars are linked with colonial history in those regions and, more specifically, racial, cultural, and religious prejudices against formerly colonized people of color or colonizers’ sense of moral superiority. According to Jodi Kim, like the war in Vietnam, the Korean War could have been seen as a newly emancipated third world country’s anticolonial nationalist conflict; instead, the United States hijacked the war to consolidate its power in Asia Pacific, interpreting the war as part of communist attacks on the free capitalist world. Subsequently, the Korean War would enable the United States to intervene in various wars in a post-colonial world based on its geopolitical interests. Similarly, Israel and the United States have portrayed Palestinians’ various violent and nonviolent endeavors to reclaim their self-governance and sovereignty as religiously motivated terrorist attacks against liberal democratic states.
Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) from the South Korean side. Via Wikimedia Commons.
The war on Gaza has effaced memories of nonviolent peacemaking, making Palestinians, Jews of conscience, and global citizens in solidarity with Palestinians irrelevant in Israeli–Palestinian relations. For this reason, I encounter the ghosts of the Korean War in Gaza. Although the war on Gaza does not identically align with the Korean War, they share the historical roots of the colonial and Cold War logic and the prioritization of U.S.-centered international security over human security. The Korean War and the Nakba erupted in the global transition from territorial colonialism to neo-colonialism. More than seven decades later, Gaza still demonstrates the tenacity of territorial colonialism; the contemporary Korean peninsula meanwhile is marred with competition and conflict augmented by neocolonial empires (i.e., U.S., Japan, China, and Russia) and sub-empires (i.e., South Korea).
A Theological Reflection on Time: Memories of War and Peace
The logic of war relies on linear thinking about time: the beginning, the middle, and the end, the latter of which creates a clean slate for a new beginning. This logic aligns with the ideology of Christian triumphalism that depicts Jesus Christ as the mighty warrior who will accomplish the ultimate victory over evil and end human history. Christian triumphalism is an apocalyptic and Manichean vision that is shared among many evangelicals who see this world as a constant battlefield. For these Christians, violence is necessary and even holy because it eradicates evil and makes possible the creation of a new world. Christian triumphalist ideology interprets the death and resurrection of Jesus as a military tactic to win over evil. Emilie Townes points out the historical infusion of Christian triumphalism in American imperial desire. If the United States were called to become a new Jerusalem, City on the Hill, its theo-political responsibility would destroy one evil after another until the final battle. Christian triumphalism has been alive for many years in U.S. domestic and foreign policies. For instance, the United States justified the Korean War as a means to defeat “godless communism,” just as U.S. military campaigns in the Middle East often invoked the name of a Christian god.
Whenever militarized violence erupts, the linear time frame recalls past episodes of violence. Yet, memories of war and only partially erased stories of massacres and genocide constantly haunt linearly remembered war stories. Within this linear frame, peace is imagined only following war, violence, and killing. As a result, peace is often defined as an absence of armed conflict (negative peace) or as attainable only through military power. In a palimpsestic time, however, peace is always alive, creating multiple meeting points for past, present, and future peace activists. God’s time is palimpsestic, just as the name of Jesus Christ is invoked at the Eucharistic table, where the living and the dead are all invited, sharing meals in solidarity to realize God’s peace and justice or paradise on earth. The peace of Christ at the Eucharist is manifested through sharing bread and wine rather than through bloody crucifixion in the hands of the Roman Empire.
Memories of war and only partially erased stories of massacres and genocide constantly haunt linearly remembered war stories. Within this linear frame, peace is imagined only following war, violence, and killing.
A palimpsestic approach traces peace as it is embodied and practiced by ordinary people who have left cracks in the imperial history of war. Palestinian Christian activists such as Jean Zaru illuminate nonviolent peacemaking as an embodied practice rather than a theory, principle, or noble idea. Zaru interweaves her multiple social identities of being an Arab, Palestinian, Quaker, and a woman with practicing nonviolence as a practical way of everyday living. Her aim is to achieve justice and peace without losing the practitioner’s integrity. Memories of Gaza are not simply about killed, mutilated, and debilitated bodies of Palestinian women, men, and children but also their persistent resistance to Israel’s militarized violence.
Different war stories should be read together critically, comparatively, and relationally. By doing that, we can interrogate the complexities of militarized violence and the banality of evil. Peace is never erased from human history but is often hidden and palimpsestic. Even if peace activism is documented, peace activists’ embodied spirituality, steadfastness, and imagination cannot be captured in written documents. This embodied peace only remains in our memories, which can be accessible only when we consciously embody it. If we can ever talk about a theology of peace in Gaza and in Korea, this theology is grounded not in the remains of the war ruins but in the palimpsest of peace.
Keunjoo Christine Pae is professor of religion/ethics and women's and gender studies and chair of the Religion Department at Denison University, Granville, Ohio. As a Christian social ethicist, she specializes in transnational feminist ethics, ethics of peace and war, spiritual activism, sexual ethics, and Asian/Asian American feminist theologies. Many of her publications take U.S. military prostitution in South Korea as a critical site for producing feminist knowledge concerning militarized violence, faith-based popular resistance, and a theology of peace. She has authored A Transpacific Imagination of Theology, Ethics, and Spiritual Activism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) and edited with Boyung Lee, Embodying Antiracist Christianity: Asian American Theological Resources for Just Racial Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Her edited volume with Kathleen Talvacchia, Searching for the Future in the Past: Renewing Feminist Theological Voices was published in 2024.
On August 5, 2024 Students cheering the victory at the Raju sculpture at Dhaka University area after the fall of Sheikh Hasina. Photo courtesy of Sudeepto Salam. Used with permission.
Bangladesh stands at a crossroads, experiencing what many call a “second liberation” after the ignominious exit of Sheikh Hasina, its long-serving ruler. Hasina’s 16-year authoritarian streak ended abruptly in August 2024 after a month of student-led protests triggered by a non-partisan resistance against quota reforms for government jobs. These protests have now led to the formation of an interim government headed by Nobel Laureate Dr. Muhammad Yunus. This new administration faces the challenge of guiding Bangladesh towards better governance and participatory elections, although no election timetable has been set.
As Bangladesh transitions from autocracy to popular governance, it faces numerous political, social, economic, and legal challenges. Yet, many Bangladeshi youth remain cautiously optimistic about this moment’s potential to build a better future. These street-hardened young men and women, who often bore the brunt of Hasina’s oppressive regime, are now poised to create a system that prioritizes human dignity, equality, and fundamental rights—marking a sharp break from repression, corruption, and nepotism of the past.
The Bangladeshi youth have every reason to be hopeful. Their country, with the world’s eighth-largest population, also boasts the seventh-largest youth demographic globally. This newfound zeal for active participation in social, political, and economic processes empowers them to drive democratic reform, social justice, and economic stability. Bangladesh’s students have initiated a successful revolution, drawing lessons from movements like the 2011 Arab Spring. Now, its administrators must learn from the failures of those past movements to ensure lasting change.
Reasons for Hope
In a recent address to the nation, Professor Yunus placed renewed trust in Bangladesh’s youth. He and his team of advisors seem to recognize the critical role these young people will play in rebuilding the country and driving proposed reforms. If there was ever a time for Bangladesh to affirm the power of its own people over foreign or capitalist influences, it is now. Fulfilling these promises may also require drafting a new constitution—a demand gaining traction among legal experts and intellectuals. Many Bangladeshis believe that the 1972 constitution, tarnished by opportunistic amendments, no longer reflects the aspiration of the Bangladeshi people or adequately safeguards their rights.
On August 4, 2024 students and others took to the streets in Dhaka to demand the resignation of Sheikh Hasina. Image courtesy of Kaler Kantho. Used with permission.
Bangladesh’s recent experiences provide valuable insights for politicians, policymakers, rights advocates, and scholars of Islamic politics. With a population of 171 million, 91% of whom are Muslim, Islamic political parties have wielded notable influence since the 1990s, when the country began its transition into democracy. Despite this influence, electoral politics have been largely dominated by two secular centrist blocs—the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and the Awami League. During this period, support for Islamic parties ranged between 5% and 15%, with Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) historically leading the Islamic political bloc, while Hefazat-e-Islam (HI) emerged later as a pressure group, closely supported by madrasa students and teachers.
Islamic parties in Bangladesh faced challenges even before Sheikh Hasina’s return to power in 2009. Frequently overshadowed by the two dominant political parties, they struggled to balance religious and democratic ideals, often failing to find a viable middle path. When Hasina returned to power in 2009, she exploited this situation by separating secular and religious factions within the opposition and implemented a divide-and-rule strategy to weaken them. She frequently branded her adversaries as extremists, despite their status as legally registered political parties within an electoral democracy.
The Impact of Hasina’s Authoritarian Rule
Sheikh Hasina’s administration systematically targeted and prosecuted both BNP and JI leaders after 2009, with a particular focus on JI. Between 2012 and 2014, the administration used the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) to neutralize JI’s leadership, handing down death sentences that were widely criticized as politically motivated. The BNP, then JI’s coalition partner, also suffered, with one of its former members of parliament executed by the tribunal. Other Islamic parties were similarly targeted. In May 2013, Sheikh Hasina’s security forces violently dispersed a Hefazat-e-Islam sit-in using live ammunition, resulting in numerous fatalities. Human Rights Watch reported that at least 150 people were killed by security forces in Bangladesh between January and May 2013 alone.
On August 2, 2024, students in the High Court Area of Dhaka demanded the resignation of Sheikh Hasina with a single-point agenda. Photo courtesy of Sudeepto Salam. Used with permission.
A particularly dark episode during Hasina’s tenure was the 2009 Border Guards Bangladesh (formerly Bangladesh Rifles, or BDR) massacre, in which 74 people, including 57 army officers, were killed. BDR soldiers launched a brutal assault on army officers and their families at their headquarters in Pilkhana, Dhaka, resulting in extensive casualties. The violence persisted for over 48 hours, with minimal intervention from the Hasina government. Instead of coordinating rescue operations with military officials, Hasina and her advisors opted to negotiate with a faction of the BDR personnel. Moreover, her decision to grant a general amnesty during the crisis allowed many perpetrators to escape, further exacerbating the situation. This incident significantly eroded the army’s trust in Hasina and her party.
Under Hasina’s rule, Bangladesh experienced a troubling culture of impunity, characterized by judicial murders and enforced disappearances. Since 2009, security forces have been implicated in over 600 enforced disappearances, with only around 100 individuals returned alive, and some detainees remained missing for years. Two recent cases highlight this pattern—a Supreme Court lawyer and a retired Brigadier General, both sons of former JI leaders, were abducted by plainclothes police in 2016 and only released in 2024, following Hasina’s departure.
How the Youth Revolt Took Shape
The current generation of Bangladeshi youth, who never experienced a free and fair election, were frustrated by high unemployment and an inequitable quota system in government jobs. As of 2024, 56% of these positions were filled based on quotas rather than merit, with nearly 30% reserved for descendants of freedom fighters—a small segment of the population. University students were particularly aggrieved by allegations that Hasina’s party officials exploited these positions for personal and political gain. Additionally, an executive order from 2018 abolishing the quota system was overturned by a High Court ruling in June 2024, leading students to question Hasina’s sincerity on the issue. In March 2024, the Dhaka University administration prohibited students from holding a Qur’an recitation ceremony, obstructing their religious practices. This led to increasing frustration among the students.
On August 5, 2024 people entered the premises of the Bangladesh National Parliament House. Dhaka, Bangladesh. Photo courtesy of Kaler Kantho. Used with permission.
The student-led protests that evolved into a nationwide civil disobedience campaign in Bangladesh offer valuable lessons for global nonviolent resistance. The movement was notable for its nonpartisan and inclusive approach, with leaders focusing on solidarity around common issues. The protesters were deliberate in avoiding any religious motivations for their demands, contrasting sharply with attempts by Hasina’s administration and allies to portray the revolt as a conservative Islamist movement against a secular state, blaming Jamaat-e-Islami for the unrest. Hours before her abdication, Hasina ordered a ban on JI and its student wing, Islami Chhatra Shibir, without providing specific allegations. In an interview, Syeda Rizwana Hasan, a current advisor to the interim government, praised the movement’s broad-based support, noting that it encompassed students from diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds:
This [was] not a Muslim students-led movement; it was a movement that had students from the Hindu community, Christian community, and indigenous people.
The student leaders demonstrated a keen understanding of the broader national context and carefully designed their protest. Despite pressures to call for Sheikh Hasina’s resignation, they initially focused on demanding that she fulfill her prior commitments. Only after seeing widespread popular support did they escalate their demands. As one young female activist aptly captured the prevailing sentiment:
There is no way we can go back [to the status quo]; the police may be chasing us now, but it is freedom that lies ahead.
The strategic acumen of the student leaders was clear as they maintained pressure despite setbacks. In late July, when six top leaders were detained and forced to halt the protests abruptly, the next tier of leaders quickly stepped in to continue the demonstrations until the first group was released. Capitalizing on this momentum, they announced a “Long March to Dhaka,” originally planned for August 6 but moved to August 5 in anticipation of victory. Hasina’s security forces struggled to keep up, and the Army, which had supported the police with live ammunition against protesters, eventually withdrew and informed Hasina that soldiers would no longer enforce the curfew. This shift provided the unarmed students and protesters with the critical respite they needed.
Looking to Bangladesh’s Future
In the wake of Hasina’s downfall, questions have emerged about why the regime failed to foresee its collapse. Even Indian intelligence was caught off guard by the erosion of Hasina’s control over her security forces and the shifting political dynamics in Bangladesh. For those who did not closely follow the youth movement or were disillusioned by the perceived lack of social commitment among Gen Z, doubts remain about the true catalysts of this revolution. How did Bangladeshi youth manage to overcome dysfunctional politics, a near-silenced civil society, and widespread fear to shape their destiny? Was religion a factor? Were foreign influences involved? In this piece, we have argued that the student leaders emphasized a political vision centered on life, dignity, and economic justice rather than sectarian religious goals. Beyond that, we will now explore the impact of another significant factor: India’s outsized role in Bangladeshi politics.
In analyzing the dynamics of the revolution, foreign factors, particularly India’s support for Hasina, emerge as a crucial element. Many Bangladeshi youth viewed Hasina as a symbol of Indian dominance and sought to assert their nation’s independence. While their revolution was primarily driven by demands for employment, freedom of expression, and the right to protest, it was also fueled by a resolve to combat the corruption linked to India’s steadfast backing of Hasina’s regime. Both the BJP and Congress in India backed Hasina’s Awami League, largely disregarding the significant support for the BNP. Additionally, the youth were keenly aware of India’s role in endorsing and providing diplomatic cover to three contentious national elections in Bangladesh —2014, 2018, and 2024—two of which were boycotted by the main opposition and all of which were widely criticized as fraudulent.
Despite these external factors, it was the Bangladeshi youth who were the true driving force behind this revolution. Initially led by students from both private and public universities, the movement quickly grew to include young people from across the country and diverse socio-political backgrounds. United, these youth fearlessly engaged in a struggle rooted in opposition to the quota system, in whose undoing they found the seeds of their country’s freedom.
On August 8, 2024 Nobel laureate Dr. Muhammad Yunus took the oath as the head of the interim government at Bangabhaban. Photo courtesy of Kaler Kantho. Used with permission.
Prapti Taposhi, a student activist, succinctly captures the stakes: “With great powers comes great responsibility.” The interim government, now including two student advisors, faces the formidable task of navigating deep political divisions and stabilizing the nation. Key challenges include addressing systemic corruption, restructuring institutions, and ensuring that the revolution’s gains lead to a more just and equitable Bangladesh. Student leaders have called for a thorough overhaul of the political system, demanding accountability from future administrations. Given Hasina’s extensive control over state institutions—including the judiciary, bureaucracy, police, and military—meaningful reform will likely require a thorough re-evaluation of the administrative apparatus, potentially involving the removal of Hasina’s appointees. For Bangladesh, anything less may prove inadequate.
The military’s top brass have so far aligned with the new government’s efforts, while the role of India, the regional hegemon, remains uncertain. The Indian government is expected to adopt a cautious yet strategic approach in its dealings with Bangladesh in the coming months, as indicated by recent comments from the Indian Prime Minister. Additionally, the Bangladeshi government may request India’s extradition of Sheikh Hasina, who faces impending murder charges. Despite the challenges ahead, Bangladesh appears to have weathered a dramatic political storm, thanks to its guardian youth. One hopes that these youth will also steer the country to safety.
Mohammed Boshir Uddin is a journalist and educator based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He holds graduate degrees in theology and social work from Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet. He is also a participant in the University of Notre Dame's Madrasa Discourse Program. Currently, Bashir serves as a Sub Editor at Kaler Kantha, a national newspaper based in Dhaka. In addition, he teaches and coordinates curriculum for Darul Arqam, a premium Bangladeshi institution affiliated with Al Azhar University in Egypt. Bashir’s debut book, Master O Kata Tarer Golpo, was published in 2017, and his upcoming book, Partition, Independence, and Ulama of India, is set to be released in 2025.
Helal Mohammed Khan is a Lecturer of Justice and Peace Studies at Georgetown University. He earned his Ph.D. in Peace Studies and Anthropology from the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, where he also served as a Postdoctoral Teaching Scholar at the Center for Social Concerns. Helal holds graduate degrees in Islamic & Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Edinburgh (UK), Social & Cultural Anthropology from the University of Leuven (Belgium), and Defence Studies from Bangladesh’s National University. Helal's doctoral research focused on the Rohingya refugees from Myanmar who resettled in the American cities of Chicago, Milwaukee, and Fort Wayne. He is currently working on a book project provisionally titled “The Abling Refugee and Regimes of Cooperation: The Burmese Rohingya in the American Midwest.”
War – 10/9/2023 (first in the series) by Marc H. Ellis. Used with permission.
For the eight months prior to Marc Ellis’s death on June 8, 2024, the war in Gaza had been raging. Though cancer ravaged his body, he continued to post on Facebook before he felt too weak to do so. His posts described his disgust and lament over the war, his reflections on life and death, his illness and treatment, and the dreams he had. Sometimes, they were like a long stream of consciousness. After Israel began bombing the Gaza Strip, Ellis also documented his responses to the war through painting. These posts had just one word, “war,” and the date with the accompanying painting below. He took up photography and painting during his later years. I imagine that when words failed, only art and the canvas could express the palimpsest of his moods and emotions.
As a Jew growing up in the United States, Ellis took up the plight of Palestinians and developed a Jewish liberation theology in solidarity with them. He argued that Jewish liberation could not be achieved without the liberation of Palestinians. For him, Jews cannot use the painful history of the Holocaust to justify the displacement, dispossession, killing, and harassment of another people.
It is a pity that Ellis did not live to see the liberation of Palestinians, but instead witnessed Gaza’s history taking a dark turn. His persistence and dedication to a cause that cannot be achieved in his lifetime reminds me of a Chinese saying, “知其不可為而為之” (Do something even though one knows it is impossible). This saying was originally used to describe Confucius, who persisted in persuading society to accept his moral values, even though he knew it was futile. Later, it was used to mean that when one decides to do something, one should consider whether it is right or wrong, not possible or impossible. One may not achieve the goal, but the process matters. One acts according to one’s conscience, though one may not succeed. Ellis worked with Jews of Conscience, and his decades of speaking truth to power inspired postcolonial theologians who fought for noble but distant goals.
War – 3/31/24 (Easter Sunday) by Marc H. Ellis. Used with permission.
I first met Ellis when he delivered a lecture on the day of Yom Kippur in 1991 at Union Theological Seminary. He spoke about his Jewish upbringing and explained his Jewish liberation theology. I remember leaving the lecture hall admiring his courage to speak truth to power. I had renewed respect for the Jewish tradition, which has continuously raised prophets who speak to the human condition. Jewish prophets offered wisdom and solace when the people were weak and oppressed, and caution and admonition when they had gained power but deviated from God’s commandment for justice.
A few years after I listened to Ellis, I began to study postcolonial thought because Hong Kong, where I was born and grew up, was going to be returned from the British to the Chinese in 1997. Some of my reflections and writings have been published in Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology and other works. I argued that theology in the past centuries has been impacted by modernity/coloniality, and that an essential task facing theology is to decolonize the mind and free Christianity from colonizing bias and structures.
Although Ellis did not identify himself as a postcolonial theologian, his thoughts contributed to the study of religion and empire, dispossession, diaspora, exile, the global prophetic, and interreligious solidarity—themes that postcolonial scholars care about. He spoke highly of the work of Edward Said, a Palestinian-American pioneer in postcolonial theory. Ellis wrote, “Said functioned as a contemporary prophet for Jews, warning us that our newfound power has become a form of idolatry” (139). He also contributed to a volume celebrating Said’s legacy of emancipation and representation. In turn, Said affirmed Ellis’s work and appreciated his activism for Palestinians.
Said argued that Palestinians have the power and right to narrate their own stories because many of the reports and writings on Palestinian people, culture, and history are biased and skewed. In a certain sense, much of Ellis’s published work, commentaries, Facebook posts, and paintings are attempts to claim the power to narrate an alternative understanding of Jewish identity, history, and theology that is different from Zionism and collusion with the State of Israel. His fidelity to the prophetic tradition of Judaism and his outspoken stance made him a target of the Jewish establishment. He became an exile in his own community. Like the prophets of old who were rejected—Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel—many Jewish people did not accept Ellis.
His fidelity to the prophetic tradition of Judaism and his outspoken stance made him a target of the Jewish establishment. He became an exile in his own community.
As a postcolonial theologian, I admired most his courage to attack what he coined “Constantinian Judaism.” Postcolonial and decolonial scholars and theologians have challenged the ways Constantinian Christianity has colluded with colonialism, imperial expansion, White supremacy, genocide, and the plunder of the earth. Ellis insisted that the collusion with state power is not limited to Christianity, for other religious traditions are not immune. Thus, there is Constantinian Judaism, Constantinian Islam, and so forth. He rejected the equation of Judaism with Zionism and challenged the view that if one does not support the policies of the State of Israel, one is antisemitic.
Ellis’s theological and political analysis provides methodological insights that are helpful for postcolonial theologians. He drank deep in the well of his Jewish tradition. He searched broadly for wisdom and inspiration from the Torah and other parts of scripture. He dialogued and debated with his teachers, such as Richard Rubenstein. He interrogated the works of Jewish luminaries—Ellie Wiesel, Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Hannah Arendt, and Emmanuel Levinas—to answer the question, “Are Jews destined to become conquerors and oppressors? Or, with our history in mind, can we change directions?” (11). Ecumenical in his thinking, Ellis read broadly outside the Jewish tradition and consulted the works of Latin American theology, feminist theology, Black theology, and other global theological movements. He demonstrated that those who are prophets withing their tradition and hence marginalized and in exile in their communities have much to learn from one another and with which to support one another.
Ellis rejected the equation of Judaism with Zionism and challenged the view that if one does not support the policies of the State of Israel, one is antisemitic.
Ellis shared the postcolonial position that identities are not rigid and should not be constructed in static and binary ways. The relationship between the self and the Other is fluidly constructed according to changing political and social situations. A binary understanding of colonizers and colonized, oppressors and oppressed, White and colored, masculine and feminine, and Israelis and Palestinians hardens the minds and closes off possibilities for solidarity. An identity in flux allows adaptations to new situations and opens to future possibilities.
Kwok Pui Lan with Marc H. Ellis. Photo courtesy of the author.
Even when hope seems impossible, one practices defiance and daily acts of resistance. Ellis was constantly on the move: jotting down his thoughts on napkins, envelopes, and scraps of paper, writing journals, using social media to express his take on current events, writing voluminously, traveling to lecture around the world, responding to his critics, passing his legacy on to his sons, keeping Sabbath, studying the Torah, meeting visitors, painting, answering emails and requests, and visiting his “Chapel of Love” in nature near his beloved beach.
Ellis’s unfinished work will be carried on by his students and others who have learned and been touched by his life, scholarship, and activism. Confucius reportedly had seventy-two students who mastered his thought and helped to develop the Confucian tradition. I am certain Ellis has more students and admirers in the internet age who will continue to follow his model and do the impossible. His student Santiago Slabodsky learned from him about being a public intellectual and taking risks. He wrote, “Dr. Ellis was one of the intellectuals who was able to sustain a deep, audacious, and indefatigable commitment to structural critique and true care for the individual human beings he encountered.” Jessica Wai-Fong Wong, an undergraduate student who took Ellis’s class, said that Ellis’s teaching and prompting helped her confront the idolatry of Whiteness. “Marc Ellis is the first prophetic voice to challenge the hold that whiteness had over my heart and my thoroughly racialized theo-political imagination” (49). As Ellis had helped her, she now tries to debunk the White mythologies in her students’ minds.
Even when he was dying, Ellis did not believe history is destiny, for it is open to change, though sometimes slower than we have hoped. Reflecting on the aftermath of October 7 in early spring of 2024, Ellis concluded his blog with the following: “History is open. It varies between nightmare and closeness. One never knows when a path forward will open. Those who want it closed will work toward that end. Those who seek an opening must continue on. It is our fidelity that we must pursue, with others. It is the only path we have.”
“Not in My Name” poster held during a protest the American Israel Public Affairs Committee annual meeting in Washington DC, March 26, 2017. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
When Kamala Harris nominated Tim Walz for vice president, the New York Times ran a curious headline: “Harris’ Choice of Walz Over Shapiro Mollifies the Left but Misses a Chance to Reassure Jews.” As a headline (later slightly altered), it less reports on the news than it puts forward a telling chain of significations and oppositions. Why would Jewish voters need reassurance from Democrats? Are American Jews part of the left wing of the Democratic Party, or its opposition? What conflict is there between the Democratic Party’s left and the Jewish community? In short, in a sentence in which the opposition to “left” should be “right” or perhaps “center,” the word “Jew” has instead been substituted.
In his lecture “Old and New Identities,” Stuart Hall makes the observation that one has to be “positioned somewhere in order to speak” (72). The construction of identities is not only based in one’s history or communal belonging, but also in politics and ideology. Hall charts the decline of “class based” identities in the west and the decline of socialist movements alongside the rise of pan-African identities in the Caribbean such as “Blackness” as part of the global decolonial movements (75). In that new category, Hall suggests, he was called upon in his adulthood as very different kind of subject than he was in his youth in Jamaica.
Something rather similar, if also inverted, has been taking place within the category of “Jewishness” in the last several decades in the west. While “Jewishness,” at least since the advent of Christianity, has been constituted by a figural meaning beyond its halachic definition (which defines Jewish identity as being a member of the Jewish religion and/or a descendent of a Jewish mother), its meaning at least since the 19th century had been for a century rather stable. The Dreyfus Affair may be remembered as the beginning of modern political antisemitism; it is also marks one beginning of late 19th and early 20th century identity politics.
As historian Stephen Wilson pointed out, the Dreyfus trial was not immediately perceived as political. It was only after Emile Zola and several other prominent French intellectuals came out in defense of the Jewish artillery officer that socialist parties and liberals took up Dreyfus’s case as a cause. In response, the Right mobilized a populist campaign of anti-Jewish pogroms and street battles. As the French writer and socialite Baroness Steinheil commented, the trial “is no longer between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards, but between the Republic and enemies of the Republic, between radicals and socialists on one hand, and Royalists and ‘anti-Semites’ on the other” (102). That Dreyfus himself was neither a radical nor a reactionary mattered very little: he and his “identity” had been abstracted, or perhaps conscripted, into an ideology: “antisemitism” was now an explicitly political conflict, taken up by the Right and the Left on opposite sides, for the first time European history.
As is well known, the association of Jews and the Left long precedes Dreyfus, going at least as far back as the French Revolution. After the revolution, the new government recognized Jews as full citizens, a first for a European state. And of course, long after the Dreyfus Affair, Jews themselves embraced, if not liberalism, radicalism, with a large and vibrant Jewish presence in the American socialist and labor movements from late 19th century to the Cold War, along with over-representations of Jews in the Bolshevik Revolution and in left parties in South Africa, Argentina, and Brazil.
Indeed, after the Enlightenment began the dominant antisemitic image of the Jew was transformed from a Christ-killer to a secular revolutionary: one who bears the perversions of modernity, whether in the form of global capitalism or communism. According to Paul Hanebrink, the imagery of the Judeo-Bolshevik often simply translated Christian iconography of the Jewish devil to a secular force of social evil: for instance, in the anti-communist propaganda poster featuring a satanic, red-fleshed Leon Trotsky on top of a mountain of skulls. The Jewish financier and the Jewish communist both embody and concretize the abstractions of capitalism and state management together.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, separated by heavy wire screen as they leave U.S. Court House after being found guilty by jury. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Since the early 1970s however, there has been a steady campaign led by key organizations in the putatively liberal Jewish establishment to remake the concept of antisemitism and by extension, Jewish identity. In 1974, Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein of the ADL issued its opening salvo in what would become a decades long attempt by the Jewish establishment to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Their argument in the influential The New Antisemitism (1974) had two parts: the first, that Israel is “the collective Jew,” in Antony Lerman’s phrasing, a representative of the Jewish people concretized into a state. Rather than view Israel as a military power and client of the world’s first truly global hegemon, the United States, Israel was framed as a schlemiel among nations: a target for the unquenched rage the world still bares against Jews. And perhaps more insidious still, The New Antisemitism made a subtle but important substitution: the Jewish state was now a figure for the global Jewish people; indeed, the former subsumed the latter.
Rather than view Israel as a military power and client of the world’s first truly global hegemon, the United States, Israel was framed as a schlemiel among nations: a target for the unquenched rage the world still bares against Jews.
It’s important to note how much of a change the framing was: rather than understand the foundation of Israel as a conflict over land or geopolitical power, Forster and Epstein framed it as a question of Jewish identity. Israeli wars, including against the British, the 1948 and 1956 Arab-Israeli Wars, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine’s indigenous inhabitants were historically framed as political questions over national identity, land, and citizenship. When Hannah Arendt wrote “Zionism Reconsidered” in 1944, she articulated the conflict as between the “Arab peoples” and European settlers—not antisemites against Jews (344). Likewise, there have been attempts by Netanyahu to retroactively blame Jerusalem’s grand mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini for the Holocaust. Such claims are not uttered because they are believable, but because they fit an uncomfortable past into a new framework.
While the association of antisemitism and anti-Zionism is not new and is no longer news, with everyone from Jewish university presidents to anti-Zionist students to politicians and intellectuals smeared with the term for their criticism of Israel, such a construction has not only changed the discourse around Zionism, it has dramatically changed who and what is considered legibly Jewish, and thus what Jewishness has come to mean.
Perhaps most famously, the attack on Jeremy Corbyn while he was leader of the Labour Party in Britain not only targeted Corbyn as an antisemite, but also mobilized a new definition of Jewishness as a collective interest. This campaign denied Corbyn elected office; as importantly it reframed Jewish interest: Jews are supporters of the status quo and enemies of the Left. That this construction was primarily disseminated by non-Jewish activists and media personnel did not matter: the Jew as anti-communist and upholder of Western (neo)liberalism was complete.
Jeremy Corbin at a rally in solidarity with Palestine on May 15, 2021. Image via Flickr user: Revolutionary Communist Party. CC BY 2.0.
This brings us back to Josh Shapiro. He was clearly not the first Jewish presidential or vice-presidential candidate to be denied his Party’s support. For example, in dramatic fashion, Bernie Sanders was denied by the Democratic Party establishment during the 2020 primary. Yet this did not raise concerns in the New York Times or among Democratic Jewish commentators such, as Eli Klein. One can neither argue that Sanders does not publicly identify as Jewish, nor that Sanders lacks his own loyal base of Jewish supporters, from “Jews for Sanders,” to the progressive Jewish magazine Jewish Currents, from IfNotNow to the Jewish caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America. This difference between the Jewishness of Sanders’s candidacy and Shapiro’s has less to do with who is more Jewish; it has a great deal to do with the way the idea of Jewishness has been constructed in the last few decades. Or perhaps, to channel Hall, how Jews have been positioned to speak.
Increasingly, media outlets from The New York Times to Fox News the New York Post have run stories on the defection of American Jews from the Democratic Party over the Democrats’ selection of Walz over Shapiro. In another headline on the topic, the NYT speaks of “heightened concerns” Jews have over the decision; the NYP states frankly that Jews are abandoning the Democrats for the GOP over Shapiro; Fox News reports that Walz is a “far left nightmare” for “Jewish organizations.” The assumption in all of these stories is not only that Jews care only about Israel, but also that Jews are a singular ethnic force of conservativism within the Democratic Party.
This difference between the Jewishness of Sanders’s candidacy and Shapiro’s has less to do with who is more Jewish; it has a great deal to do with the way the idea of Jewishness has been constructed in the last few decades.
A problem with this construction is that few American Jews seem to agree. Not only has the overwhelming Jewish identification with the Democratic Party remained stable as of April of 2024 according to Pew, the nomination of Tim Walz has been reported to be very popular among Jewish Minnesotans. Walz is also the vice presidential pick most aligned with mainstream American Jewish values, especially on reproductive rights, gun control, and an expanded welfare state. It also needs to be said that Israel is consistently ranked as a low priority among 96 percent of Jewish voters—behind climate change, the economy, antisemitism, and health care. And further, it is no secret that the consensus over Israel in the Jewish community has long since ended: one-third of American Jews believe Israel is committing genocide; 60 percent of American Jews believe that the Biden administration should embargo arms to Israel; over one quarter of American Jews see Israel as an apartheid state. If one selects for younger Jews, the number is closer to half.
And while it is arguable whether Walz is a “leftist,” what is of note is the way American Jews are deployed as wedge constituency by media outlets from the nominally liberal Times to the conservative Fox News and Post. This is an intensification, or perhaps a concretization, of the “The New Antisemitism” thesis. While Shapiro’s Zionism is far more virulent than Walz’s—he infamously likened Palestine solidarity protesters to the “Ku Klux Klan”—there is no suggestion that Walz is an anti-Zionist, let alone that he supports calls to embargo weapons for Israel. Thus Jews have gone from a constituency less formed by a support of Zionism, to a constituency marked by an ethno-conservativism. While the choice of Walz over Shapiro was overdetermined, it is clear that Walz was perceived as the more progressive of the two and was more suitable to the left wing of the Democratic Party. Any shift to the left in the Democratic Party is framed no longer simply as a threat to wealthy donors or tax cheats, but also to Jews as an entire people. In this reading, it is Walz’ s and Corbyn’s leftism that is more dangerous to the Jewish community than Boris Johnson or Donald Trump’s antisemitic conspiracy theories.
As Stuart Hall noted, the appearance of new social phenomenon is often less a case of novelty than a shift in the political conjuncture. A conjuncture, Hall reminds us, is a “specific life in a social formation” that forms a “unity” among disparate, even contradictory formations (368). The articulation of a new identity, or new social actor, often occurs when the social formation and its unwieldy set of unities is suddenly in crisis. Hall offers as an example the emergence of the “mugger” in the 1970s Anglophone Atlantic as a figure that hails the crisis of social democracy, and points to a solution of carceral neoliberalism. In a similar way, I would suggest, the emergence of the “Jewish conservative” has little to do with changing Jewish loyalties or allegiances, and everything to do with the crisis of both Zionism and neoliberalism.
Capital and imperialism cannot speak out of universal interest: they have none. Suggesting that the U.S. supports Israel’s genocide out of geopolitics—even identification with the state’s colonial project—can no longer be said by any liberal (anymore than it can be said that Shapiro was a better pick for the NYT and Post as much because of his Zionism as his support for school vouchers and his questioning of public health measures such as masking and vaccines). The consensus around Zionism and the kind of racial politics it supports—let alone the U.S. imperial presence in the Middle East—is rapidly fraying: constructing constituencies for which the state acts to protect is far more palatable than naked self-interest.
This is not to say of course, that there are no Jewish interests in Israel: major Jewish institutions from the ADL to the Jewish Federation have become more fiercely Zionist and right wing in the last few decades. Yet like Hall also reminds us, a crisis is not simply marked by systemic failure: it is also the detachment of the ruled from their rulers; it is the de-alignment of part of a hegemonic bloc from its formation and the potential realignment with another. We are in such a moment of crisis. Even in the stories by Fox and the NYT such discord is visible under the headline: after the ADL or Democratic Majority for Israel is quoted, IfNotNow and Bend the Arc are featured much further down in the story. What we are seeing in the Jewish community is not altogether different from what we are seeing in the U.S. writ large: a polarization around the fundamental question of whether we should live in authoritarian, racially bound states or in multi-ethnic democracies. While Jews may have their own internal fights within their institutions, in temples, community centers, and in the streets over Zionism and socialist politics, it is incumbent upon us to refuse such identitarian conscription as part of that fight.
National Cathedral, Bucharest, Romania. People’s Salvation Cathedral. Seen in reflection of glass building. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Scholars theorizing the connections among nationalism, religion, and violence have presented a wide range of perspectives. Atalia Omer and Jason A. Springs’s co-authored reference handbook on religious nationalism provides an overview of the subject with attention to critical analyses of secularism, modernity, and orientalism. Whereas Benedict Anderson’s influential work on the origins of nationalism—which defines the “nation” as an “imagined community” that evokes a sense of collectivity, communion, and common history across a people group—argues that nationalism developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Omer and Springs contend that “nationalism is not strictly a modern phenomenon” (26). They also argue that religious forms of nationalism are not inherently more volatile or “irrational” than presumably “secular” forms of nationalism, and further, that “secular” and “religious” forms of nationalism cannot be clearly distinguished from or contrasted with each other. Omer and Springs introduce the term “ethnoreligious nationalism” to describe the need for examining nationalism, religion, and ethnicity together, particularly in cases in which “religious identity markers blur or merge with ethnic identity markers” (15) and the language of authenticity and purity is mobilized in support of violence. This module takes Omer and Springs’ definition of religious nationalism as a starting point for an investigation across geographies, disciplines, and conceptual terrains that have been explored in blogs on the CM site.
Omer and Springs’s critical approach to “secularism” resonates with the influential works of anthropologist Talal Asad, which highlight the dynamic and ongoing construction of “religion” and the “secular” as categories and critique the use of the “secular” as a designation for that which is considered rational and acceptable in public spheres. Asad challenges the ways that the “secular” is often imagined as a modern successor to “religion,” arguing in particular against the idea that nationalism should be understood as secularized religion. Further complicating the presumed “religious”/“secular” divide, Asad writes that secular states should be understood in terms of their efforts to regulate—not eliminate—violence and intolerance directed against “religious minorities.” Similarly, historians of religion such as Tisa Wenger have described the ways that discourses of religious freedom, pluralism, and tolerance—particularly in the context of the ostensibly “secular” U.S. empire—have been mobilized by the dominant White Christian population to naturalize and reinforce White Christian norms, which in Omer and Springs’s terminology may be understood as a form of ethnoreligious nationalism. Wenger notes, however, that discourses of religious freedom have also been reappropriated by minoritized and colonized groups to challenge racial and religious forms of violence and exclusion. These studies question assumptions of particular, bounded, stable “religions”; complicate the division between “secular” and “religious”; and discuss the divergent political uses of presumably tolerant approaches to religion in “secular” national contexts.
This educational module introduces teachers, students, and practitioners to three major themes pertaining to religion, nationalism, and conflict: the deployment of narratives of victimization to support a dominant ethnoreligious group’s maintenance of power within a particular context, the mobilization of various Islamophobic discourses across geographies, and proposals for interreligious conflict transformation and peacebuilding. The examination of such themes provides an assessment of how religious nationalisms shape global politics and allows readers to examine the convergences and divergences among various forms of religious nationalism in diverse contexts. This module also highlights constructive postcolonial/decolonial efforts towards religious pluralism and peacebuilding.
Theme 1: Religious Nationalism and Narratives of Victimization
These pieces explore the role that narratives of victimization serve in various manifestations of religious nationalism. Philip Gorski’s post identifies victimization narratives as one key element of religious nationalism, particularly in “western” contexts, but which are also applicable elsewhere. Jason A. Springs’s post describes narratives of persecution and marginalization that inform White evangelical Christian ethnoreligious nationalism in the United States. Raz Segal discusses the weaponization of discourses of antisemitism to silence legitimate critiques of apartheid in Israel/Palestine. Ather Zia’s post reveals how Hindu nationalists construct Muslims as threatening “invaders” in order to maintain a position of dominance in the Indian subcontinent. Lastly, Gladys Ganiel’s piece addresses competing narratives of victimization between Protestant-Unionist-Loyalists and Catholic-Nationalist-Republicans in Northern Ireland. Together, these pieces offer diverse examples of the ways that religious nationalisms from different contexts mobilize narratives of victimization in order to construct a threatening ethnoreligious “other” and to justify violence against this “other.” Importantly, claims of victimization, marginalization, and oppression are not always false. These pieces, however, point to the ways that a community that in fact comprises a dominant ethno-cultural majority might employ narratives of victimization to justify their own moral superiority and maintenance of power and domination within a particular context—a phenomenon that Gorski’s post identifies as a key element of religious nationalism.
Photo Credit: Flickr user Ted Eytan. MAGA hats sold at Trump rally in DC in 2017. CC BY SA 2.0.
This post by Philip Gorski examines the nature of right-wing populism and its affinity with religious nationalism. Although Gorski begins by considering White evangelical Christian nationalism and Trump’s ascendancy in the American right, he notes that connections between religious conservatism and right-wing populism go beyond and before Trumpism in the United States (with Hindu nationalism in the Indian subcontinent being an example from another context). While nationalism was once theorized as a secular, modern version of religion, Gorski argues that religious nationalism is a distinctive variant of modern nationalism—a perspective that contrasts with that presented in Omer and Springs’s reference handbook—and that connections between religion and nationalism also existed before modernity. He identifies blood tropes, apocalyptic narratives, victimization narratives, and messianic expectations as four key elements of “western” versions of religious nationalism, which are historically rooted in Jewish and Christian scriptures, but notes that these elements are also commonly found in “non-western” Hindu, Islamic, and Buddhist religious nationalisms. Gorski then describes right-wing populism as a narrative in which a “pure” people are betrayed by a “corrupt” elite who has allied with an undeserving other. Because of this narrative of corruption, they place hope in a messianic leader who “promises to restore the people to its birthright.” Significant overlaps between this populist victimization narrative and the key elements of religious nationalism—which are evident, for instance, in the portrayal of the dominant ethno-cultural majority as a supposedly morally pure yet persecuted religious minority—may explain the attraction of religious nationalists to right-wing populist movements and of right-wing populists to religious nationalism.
While Gorski notes that further comparative work is needed to contend with other forms of religious nationalism, he writes that much of this framework could apply in “non-western” contexts shaped by other religious discourses. His discussion of narratives of victimization can be applied to White evangelical Christian nationalism, as Jason A. Springs’s post details further, but also to other examples of religious nationalism that are discussed throughout this educational module. While Gorski’s emphasis on the distinctness of religious nationalism—implying an acceptance of the separability of “religious” and “secular” forms of nationalism—might be critiqued by other schools of thought regarding the relationship between nationalism, religion, and violence, his framework provides a useful analysis of the connections between particular religious discourses and the key elements of populist, nationalist narratives.
Zombies as portrayed in the movie Night of the Living Dead (1968). Via Wikimedia Commons.
This post by Jason A. Springs examines the role of apocalypticism and messianism in White Christian evangelical nationalism. While elaborating on his concept of “zombie nationalism”, Springs writes that the continual reoccurrence and reanimation of this form of religious nationalism is driven by “U.S. White evangelical Christians conceptualizing themselves as an increasingly marginalized remnant in a society that (putatively) originally did, and (allegedly) should still, reflect their central identity and values” and imagining themselves as a “perennially marginalized—and progressively more endangered—victims of an aggressively anti-Christian ‘secular’ society.” This post contends that the tropes employed by QAnon—particularly its assertions that the Democratic party is controlled by an anti-Christian elite, that Trump is a messianic figure whose actions have apocalyptic significance, and that America’s “true” Christian identity must be retrieved—have precedents in the White evangelical movement in the United States. Springs argues that “QAnon conspiracy ideology symbiotically feeds upon populist White evangelical impulses toward apocalypticism and messianism” and fuses them with Republican political ideology.
Springs’s attention to the recurrent pattern of White evangelical Christian nationalists conceptualizing themselves as a “victimized-yet-faithful and long-suffering” chosen people elucidates the role that narratives of victimization serve in the context of U.S.-based White Christian nationalism. This post and others in Springs’s series on “zombie nationalism,” such as “Race, Ressentiment, and Nihilism in White Evangelical Christian Nationalism,” show how narratives of White Christian victimization—particularly in relation to anxieties around White majority status diminishing, America’s “Christian values” being lost, and heteronormative sexual politics being challenged—are mobilized as “a covert means of conjuring and asserting power” and maintaining a position of ethno-cultural dominance.
Beit Hanina, East Jerusalem, 8 June 2020. The Jerusalem Municipality offers Palestinian residents of Jerusalem two options: to demolish their own homes or wait for the municipality’s heavy machinery to do it. The latter will force them to pay huge fines. Photo: ‘Amer ‘Aruri, B’Tselem. CC 4.0.
In this post, Raz Segal uses the 2022 confirmation hearing of Dr. Deborah Lipstadt for the role of Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism as a case study in how apologists of the Israeli state reframe critiques of Israel’s policies as antisemitic attacks. Segal, who studies the Holocaust, Jewish history, and antisemitism, argues that those who defend Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians “distort legitimate criticism of a state and present it, only in the case of Israel [and not in the case of criticism of Russia’s war in Ukraine, for example], as an attack against a people.” In response, Segal provides evidence to support Amnesty International’s claim that Israel has created and maintained a system of apartheid against Palestinians, and to show that critiques of Israeli state violence are legitimate. He writes that the weaponization of discourses of antisemitism to silence criticism of the Israeli state “abus[es] the historical struggle of a vulnerable people, Jews, under attack by powerful states to blur the attack of a state, Israel, against a vulnerable people, Palestinians.” Segal argues that such conflations lead not only to a false picture of the reality faced by Palestinians, but also risk reinforcing the segregationist logic of antisemitism that the apologists claim to combat—that is, the idea that Jewish people belong in Israel and only in Israel.
In this context, the use of narratives of victimization—specifically, the weaponization of the charge of antisemitism in discussions of Palestine/Israel—serves to conceal realities of settler-colonialism and apartheid and to actually reinforce antisemitic logics. For more information about this topic, see posts by Atalia Omer and Moshe Behar that critique how the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) has weaponized discourses of antisemitism in ways that stifle legitimate criticisms of the state of Israel and cause important manifestations of antisemitism to go overlooked. Also see Brian Klug’s posts on Europe’s “Jewish Question” and the need for its “unasking.” Klug argues that shielding Israel and Zionism from critique positions Jewish people as “the valorized Other of Europe” (thus reinforcing Jewish otherness and failing to treat Jewish people as normal human beings). He also asserts that critiques of Israel and Zionism must contend with histories of antisemitism in Europe rather than “fold[ing] Zionism completely, without remainder, into the history of European hegemony over the Global South, as if this were the whole story.”Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s and Raef Zreik’s contributions to the book symposium on When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism also address Zionism and Palestine/Israel.
The Khanqah-e-Moulla, or Shah-e Hamdan Shrine, in the Old City of Srinagar, is one of the oldest examples of Kashmiri wooden architecture. Photo Credit: Mike Prince.
This post by Ather Zia details how the 2019 revocation of Article 370—which had previously acknowledged the special status of Indian-administrated Kashmir and maintained the autonomy of the region in formulating laws—serves the Hindu nationalist agenda, which envisions a unified social fabric built on a conception of “Hinduness.” Zia notes that the ideology of Hindu indigeneity in the Indian subcontinent “casts Muslims living in India as invaders and foreigners”; thus, “Kashmiri Muslims are doubly marked as the demonized other: first as Muslims, and second as Kashmiris who are longstanding dissidents committed to the fight for a UN [United Nations]-mandated plebiscite, democratic sovereignty, and freedom from India.”
The post also provides a brief overview of Kashmir’s recent history and religious demographics and explores how past events and recurrent narratives of victimization shape the current conflict dynamics. Zia covers the 1846 Amritsar Treaty in which the British Empire sold the land and people of Kashmir to a Hindu warlord, the Kashmiri movement for sovereignty and independence that first rose in prominence around 1931, the UN-arbitrated bifurcation of Kashmir into Indian- and Pakistan-administered territories around 1947–1948, and the drafting and later revocation of Article 370. Zia writes that the RSS (Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh)—a Hindu supremacist paramilitary organization—had rejected the special autonomous status of historically-Muslim-majority Kashmir because they viewed it “as an appeasement of Muslims and a threat to Indian unity.” Zia’s account shows how narratives of victimization (or anticipated/feared victimization) have enabled Hindu nationalists in the subcontinent to construct Muslims as threatening others, to justify Indian settler colonialism, and to support the passage of legislation that discriminates against Muslims.
Banner from July 12, 2021 Orange Parades crossing Donegall Square South, Belfast, Northern Ireland (Ballysillan Loyal Orange Lodge 1891). Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.
In this post, which is part of a book symposium on Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kervorkian’s edited volume When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism, Gladys Ganiel analyzes examples of religious nationalism in diverse contexts and shows how states have invoked religious claims in order to justify assertions of sovereignty and legitimize violence. (For a more detailed summary of the book, refer to this introduction to the book symposium.) Ganiel’s post focuses on Northern Ireland’s Troubles and points out that, although some scholarship on this issue downplays the role of colonialism and religion, When Politics are Sacralized helpfully foregrounds settler colonialism (particularly the role of the British state as a colonial power that informs Protestant-Unionist-Loyalist versus Catholic-Nationalist-Republican conflicts) and religious claims.
Ganiel’s post recognizes that conflicting narratives of victimization shape interpretations of the conflict in Northern Ireland: “Loyalists [Protestant, Unionist] identify with an Israel that they perceive as under attack by terrorists, while Republicans [Catholic, Nationalist] identify with Palestinians whose land has been occupied.” Her contribution valuably explores the complexities of victimization narratives that are mobilized on both sides of a conflict, while emphasizing that such narratives must be evaluated through an awareness of historical power dynamics. Although one must acknowledge the migration of some Protestants to Northern Ireland as a result of their experience of structural violence in Catholic-dominated Republic of Ireland, it is also true that Protestant Unionist elites have constructed colonial political structures in Northern Ireland since its creation in 1921. (For more on the latter, see Cathal McManus’s discussion of the Orange Order.) Like the Hindu nationalists explored in the previous post by Ather Zia, Unionists in Northern Ireland also fear future victimization and have drawn on that narrative to sustain their position. Here, their fear is that a unification with the Republic of Ireland will result in their oppression as a Protestant minority in a Catholic-majority state. For more information on the complexities of colonialism and decolonial thought in the context of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, see this post by Maxwell Woods, which shows that decolonization alone is not sufficient for guaranteeing justice.
Theme 2: Religious Nationalism and Islamophobia
These pieces examine the ways that longstanding, global discourses of Islamophobia and more recent deployments of language of “terrorism” have functioned to support religious nationalisms in various contexts. Jason A. Springs’s post points to the subtle manifestations of Islamophobic European nationalisms in presumably “secular” laws that advance anti-Muslim discrimination. Similarly, Uzma Jamil critiques the ways that the idealization of “secularism” within White Quebecois nationalism contributes to both a systemic context of Islamophobia and a determined refusal to acknowledge this Islamophobia. Julia Kowalski shows how Muslim women protesters in India have challenged the stereotypes about Islam and gender that Hindu nationalists have promoted. Rachel Harris discusses the Chinese government’s campaign of cultural cleansing against the Turkic Muslims of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, which has drawn upon the United States’ post-9/11 rhetoric of religious extremism and terrorism as well as Islamophobic discourses from other sources. Perin Gürel also discusses violence against Uyghurs, but focuses on complicating the idea of a unified “Muslim world” by examining the ways that different Muslim-majority countries have responded to the oppression of Uyghur Muslim communities in China. Together, these posts address multiple discourses and manifestations of Islamophobia—including and beyond the U.S.-led “war on terror”—and the ways that images of Islam being incompatible with both secular modernity and notions of cultural/national authenticity have informed religious nationalisms in different contexts.
The top portion of the frontispiece of the book Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes; engraving by Abraham Bosse. Via Wikimedia Commons.
In this post, which is an abbreviated overview of an article that was published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Jason A. Springs observes how many rulings by the European Court of Human Rights point to the idea that “the expanding presence of Islam throughout Europe presents a pronounced challenge to Western conceptions of secular law and human rights.” He writes that European nationalisms identifying and scapegoating an inassimilable Muslim “other” seem to underlie this idea. Noting that the consideration of only the most extreme or radical manifestations of Islamophobic European nationalisms can obscure more surreptitious and pervasive varieties, Springs attends to subtle European ethnoreligious nationalisms that occur as modes of anti-Muslim “exclusion, inequality, and humiliation.”
Springs warns that human rights discourses have been mobilized in Islamophobic European nationalist ways. Turning to recent French headscarf bans as a case study, he shows that even some avowedly secularist state laws represent subtle forms of ethnoreligious nationalism that advance anti-Muslim discrimination. At the same time, Springs presents international human rights norms and institutions as insufficient yet indispensable sites of potential for guarding against religious nationalism and protecting religious freedom in contemporary European contexts. He argues for a corrective approach to human rights discourse which would contend with the political and cultural power dynamics “that inevitably influence adjudication of human rights cases,” and in response, intentionally incorporate “analytical tools that guard against [human rights discourse’s] unjust applications.”
A sticker from a post in Montreal taken on May 20, 2019 likely in reference to the Quebec ban on religious symbols enacted by Bill 21. Photo Credit: Flickr User Ingrid Cold. CC BY-SA 2.0.
In this post, Uzma Jamil critiques the systemic context of Islamophobia reinforced by Quebec’s idealization of “secularism,” focusing particularly on the tendency of White politicians and citizens to deny the role of Quebec’s secularist Bill 21 in creating conditions for Islamophobic violence elsewhere in Canada. Such denials indicate a “refusal to know and to see Islamophobia,” which Jamil argues “is ultimately a refusal to accept the political claim by Muslims to be treated as equal citizens” and “a refusal to see how Islamophobia is sustained through its connection to Whiteness in Quebec.”
Jamil explains that Bill 21, a 2019 Quebec law which prohibits people who wear religious symbols from working in the public sector or engaging with public services, “disproportionately excludes Muslim women who wear hijabs.” She discusses the law’s rootedness in key aspects of “modern” Quebecois nationalism—which since the 1960s–70s Quiet Revolution that resulted in the Catholic Church’s removal from its previous prominent role in the public sphere—has been centered around secularism, gender equality, and the French language. Muslim women who wear hijabs and niqabs are frequently represented as threats to these nationalist ideals of secularism and gender equality. As Jamil argues, the maintenance of Quebec’s nationalist “secularism” rests upon “the erasure of Muslim religiosity from public space”—an erasure which ultimately serves to legitimize acts of Islamophobic violence.
Jamil writes that victimization narratives that focus exclusively on French Quebec’s minority position in relation to English Canada also inform denials of Bill 21’s role in reinforcing Islamophobia in other parts of Canada. Such victimization narratives are incomplete and ignore the fact that both are White settler societies which hold a position of dominance in relation to racialized, non-White minorities. Refusals to see Islamophobia and White supremacy indicate an “epistemology of ignorance”: anti-racist philosopher Charles Mills’s term for the ways that an intentional failure to see Whiteness is “a necessary requirement for the structure of White supremacy to exist and to endure.” Like the Islamophobic European nationalism identified by Springs, White Quebecois nationalism is a form of ethnoreligious nationalism that conceals itself through secularist language and various “refusals to see” Islamophobia and White supremacy. Against this epistemology of ignorance, expressions of Muslim political consciousness and agency—seen in rising efforts to name and combat Islamophobia—have the potential to reshape conversations around Islamophobia, Whiteness, and ethnoreligious nationalism in Quebec.
Wooden model of a house explaining the Constitution created by activists in Ahmedabad, India. Photo courtesy of RAJEEV KHANNA/TheCitizen.in. Used with permission.
In this post, Julia Kowalski discusses protests that took place in the Shaheen Bagh neighborhood of Delhi from 2019–2020 in resistance to the combined effects of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC). She writes that these protests—attended mostly by middle-class, middle-aged-or-older women wearing hijab—represented acts of subversion against stereotypes about Islam and gender that the ruling Bharatya Janata Party in India has deployed to advance Islamophobic legislation. (For more information about the CAA and NRC as discriminatory against Muslims, see this post by Susan Ostermann.) Kowalski argues that Muslim women protestors innovatively mobilized representations of female kinship (including by referring to older protesters as dabaang dadis—“fearless grannies”) and home while promoting the vision of a secular, inclusive democracy and of religiously pluralistic national belonging in India.
When contextualizing stereotypes about Islam and gender in India, Kowalski notes that “[s]ince the late twentieth century, the Hindu right has targeted Muslim family laws, and their supposed ill-treatment of Muslim women, to argue for universal (read: Hindu) family and inheritance laws.” She connects these moves to longer, global histories of Islamophobic discourses that have promulgated notions of “oppressed Muslim women” in order to condemn Islam as “uncivilized” and justify Western colonial and imperial intervention in majority-Muslim contexts. In India, the Hindu right has co-opted critiques of gender inequality in order to advance these notions of “oppressed Muslim women” and “undermin[e] the status of Muslims in India more broadly.” Against these Islamophobic discourses, Kowalski’s post shows how Muslim women protesters in the Shaheen Bagh neighborhood have contested right-wing Hindu nationalism, countered narratives of Muslim non-belonging in India, and subverted sexist and Islamophobic representations of Muslim women.
(Note: a different exposition of this post appears within the “Politics of the Gender, Sexuality, and Religion Nexus” module, since Kowalski’s analysis focuses on the intersections among Islamophobia, gender, colonialism, and religious nationalism.)
Sultanim, Shrine on Horizon, 2014. Image courtesy of Lisa Ross.
This post by Rachel Harris discusses the Chinese government’s escalating “counterterrorism” in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China—or, more accurately, cultural cleansing driven by Chinese President Xi Jinping’s campaign to control the region and its natural resources. Harris explains that the strategic management and positioning of cultural heritage “serves as a resource for political legitimacy and soft power and is used as an asset to boost local economic development”—for instance, by driving tourism and Han Chinese settlement in the Uyghur region. Despite the listing of sites of Uyghur religious heritage on local and international protected heritage lists, Harris points to “the large-scale destruction of sacred sites, prohibitions on Uyghur language and literature, and disruption of Uyghur communities since 2017” as evidence that “the biggest threats to Uyghur heritage and culture are the policies of the Chinese government itself.”
Harris writes that by the 1990s, “strike hard” campaigns led by Xinjiang authorities began to repress religious practices central to Uyghur culture, such as by designating pilgrimages to shrines as “illegal religious activities.” Beginning in the 2000s, the Chinese government drew from global Islamophobic discourses and from the rhetoric of religious extremism and terrorism deployed within the U.S.’s “Global War on Terror” in order to re-categorize such Uyghur religious practices as acts of “religious extremism” and “to justify its actions against the Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities: actions which were increasingly taking the form of cultural cleansing.” The anti-religious extremism campaign in Xinjiang has involved the demolition of thousands of mosques, shrines, and cemeteries important to Turkic Muslim Uyghurs’ religious heritage, accompanied by heavy securitization, mass incarceration, and attacks on Uyghur language in the region. Harris contextualizes these repressive acts as “a part of the national campaign to ‘Sinicize’ religion” in China and warns that the systematic destruction of a people’s cultural and religious heritage frequently functions as a precursor to genocide.
A Uyghur Rights Protest in San Francisco in April 2008. Photo by Jack Fitzsimmons.
This post by Perin Gürel challenges monolithic ideas of Islam and the “Muslim world” that dominate Western discourse on Uyghur issues, focusing on the ways that Muslim-majority countries are often expected “to respond to the oppression of Muslims across state boundaries [and particularly to condemn the oppression of Uyghurs] in a way that is not expected from Christian-majority countries.” Gürel emphasizes the heterogeneous policies within Muslim-majority countries and the existence of disunity among them in order to push for more nuanced and contextually informed understandings of how countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Türkiye respond differently to the treatment of Uyghur communities in China. She notes that although the Turkish government did issue a statement condemning the Chinese government’s violation of the human rights of Uyghur Turks and other Uyghur Muslim communities, international politics and economic relations shape governments’ decisions. She contends that those who uphold the idea of a presumably unified “Muslim world” must recognize that “the failure to condemn international human rights abuse despite cultural, linguistic, and religious ties with its victims is not unusual.”
Theme 3: Constructive Proposals for Religious Pluralism and Interreligious Peacebuilding
These posts introduce frameworks for envisioning religious pluralism and justice-oriented peacebuilding in contexts that have been impacted by violence and religious nationalism(s). Abir Bazaz discusses ideas of religious tolerance, respect, and freedom in Kashmiri history and literary culture in order to propose certain visions of Kashmiri religious pluralism as productive alternatives to Indian secularism in South Asian contexts. Bashir Bashir proposes egalitarian binationalism as a constructive ethical principle that can be applied to Israel/Palestine. Kwok Pui Lan shows how postcolonial scholarship can dismantle colonial myths that impede discussions within the field of religion and peacebuilding and offer constructive criticisms of the field. Jenna Streich, although not explicitly focused on religious nationalism, offers reflections on the ways that Catholic schools might combat religious perpetrations of violence, move away from a conversion model and towards one which honors students’ diverse religious and cultural traditions, and work towards justice-oriented peacebuilding in their communities. Her post demonstrates the on-the-ground educational work required to resist exclusionary religious nationalisms. Through cultural/literary, political/governmental, religious/social, and educational registers, these four posts offer distinct frameworks for responding to religious nationalism, addressing violence and conflict, and working towards religious pluralism and peacebuilding.
Nigeen Lake, Srinagar, Kashmir. Photo by the author.
In this post, Abir Bazaz traces the deployment of the idea of Kashmir as a “special place” over time, including in the popular movement for Kashmiri sovereignty (joined by Kashmiri Muslims and Hindus and supported by Indian nationalists) against Dogra rule in the 1920s–40s, and in the recognition of the region’s “special status” through Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. The provisions of Article 370 were slowly eroded, however, as Hindu nationalists accused them of representing “nothing other than yet another shameful capitulation by the ruling Indian National Congress Party to Muslims,” and in 2019, Article 370 was revoked entirely. (For more information about Article 370 and Kashmir’s recent history, see this post by Ather Zia discussed earlier in this module.) Bazaz warns that “cancelling Kashmiri autonomy … could return Kashmir to being narrowly imagined as a site of sectarian Hindu-Muslim conflict.”
Referring to the mobilization of religion and culture in the political claims of India and Pakistan on Kashmir, Bazaz writes that “even though the Hindu and Muslim religious cultures in India and Pakistan offer us fantasies of Kashmir as either a sacred Hindu space or a lost Muslim paradise, the actual Kashmiri Hindu and Muslim religious culture affirms Kashmir as a heterodox and plural spiritual space.” He turns to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century examples of Saiva-bhakti-Sufi-tantric poetry in Kashmir to show how ideas of religious tolerance and caste equality have a long history within Kashmiri literary culture. Such visions of Kashmiri religious pluralism are already “affirmed by many Kashmiri Hindus and Muslims” and, if attended to more deeply in the present, might open up new ways of thinking about democracy, freedom, and interreligious respect in South Asia. This unique vision of religious pluralism is “[w]hat is, and remains, special about Kashmir,” and offers a justice- and peace-centered alternative vision for the future of the region in contrast to the exclusionary chauvinist nationalism of the Modi government in India.
This post by Bashir Bashir, co-editor of The Arab and Jewish Questions alongside Leila Farsakh, introduces a symposium on the book by describing the wider research projects that gave rise to it. (This post by Farsakh, which co-introduces the book symposium, focuses more on describing the book’s thesis and contents.) Bashir provides an overview of the conflict between Zionism and Palestinian nationalism, alternatives to partition, memories of the Holocaust and the Nakba, and the connections between antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe that have informed these prior projects and publications.
Based on his participation in research on the conceptual and historical links among the “question of Israel/Palestine,” the “Arab-Muslim question,” and the “Jewish question”—and among the dynamics of colonialism, Orientalism, Islamophobia, and antisemitism—Bashir proposes egalitarian binationalism as an ethical frame for challenging colonialism, promoting historical reconciliation, and dismantling Jewish Israeli supremacy in Palestine/Israel. He defines egalitarian binationalism as “a principle that recognizes and promotes the existence of two national groups with equal rights to self-determination … while insisting that this right ought to not be realized in the form of an exclusive ethnic state.” Bashir writes that some analyses of settler colonialism—though importantly drawing attention to power asymmetries between Israeli and Palestinian peoples and to the centrality of land in Palestine/Israel conflicts—are “underdetermined regarding what would be the ultimate outcome of decolonization.” As an alternative theoretical framework, Bashir argues that the principle of egalitarian binationalism “offers rich resources for a decolonizing project in Israel/Palestine that seeks to establish a polity based on the principles of justice and equality, coming to terms with historical injustices, and imagining alternative pasts, presents, and futures based on Palestinian-Israeli relationships.”
For more information about the “Jewish Question,” histories of antisemitism in Europe, and political Zionism, see Brian Klug’s post “Why is the Jewish Question Different from All Similar Questions?” Klug discusses the “Jewish Question” as a European question about the Jewish people, who (in one reading of this question) were positioned as Europe’s antithesis: Europe defined itself first as Christian (as opposed to “Jewish”) and later as a bastion of post-Enlightenment universalism (as opposed to Jewish “particularism”). Additionally, other contributions to the book symposium on The Arab and Jewish Questions contend with European colonialism, histories of antisemitism and Islamophobia, and the relationships among Europe’s “Jewish” and “Arab-Muslim” questions.
End Islamophobia, Silent Protest at Union Station, Washington DC. Photo Credit: Lorie Shaull.
In this post, Kwok Pui Lan begins by challenging three dominant myths that are rooted in European and Euro-American colonialism and that tend to impede discussions on religion and peacebuilding: Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” myth that explains wars and conflicts in terms of clashes between homogeneous, bounded, religiously based civilizations; the secularist myth which views religion as irrational, incompatible with modernity, and an obstacle to conflict resolution; and the Islamophobic myth that sees some religions (like Christianity) as inherently peaceful and other religions (especially Islam) as inherently violent—a myth that, as posts included in the previous theme have shown, has informed Islamophobic forms of religious nationalism. She shows how postcolonial criticism helps debunk these myths and also challenges the legacies of racist and colonialist dynamics that have shaped the field of religious studies.
Kwok Pui Lan then presents the ways that constructive criticism from postcolonial studies might help the emerging field of religion and peacebuilding—which “focuses on the themes of interreligious dialogue, the retrieval of religious resources for peacebuilding in various traditions, and the instrumental role that religious actors and networks play in the dynamics of both conflict and peacebuilding”—to attend to subaltern religious actors and grassroots efforts towards peace, to highlight women’s participation in peacebuilding, and to apply a lens of hybridity to the understanding of religious traditions and identities. Kwok Pui Lan’s critical analysis of religion and “secularism” draws from Talal Asad and resonates with the framing provided within Omer and Springs’s reference handbook, and her focus on practices of peacebuilding offers constructive steps towards combatting religious nationalism.
This image provides a glimpse into a Catholic high school in North Philadelphia where the author taught science. This image is of a hallway mural painted by students. Photo Courtesy of the author.
In this post, Jenna Streich reflects upon her experience of teaching at a Catholic high school in North Philadelphia, PA, and calls the disciplines and practitioners of religion, education, and peacebuilding to collaborate in efforts to build peace and justice. Streich writes that working with students impacted by gun violence, poverty, and racism in their communities pushed her to explore how Catholic schools might “draw on their theological roots to maximize their potential as religious peacebuilding institutions” and support students’ formation and empowerment as co-creators of justice and peace, particularly when such students are themselves non-Catholic or non-religious.
Streich emphasizes that in order to take on a positive peacebuilding role, Catholic schools must first acknowledge and combat the forms of violence that have been perpetrated by Catholic institutions, including abuse and cultural violence at Catholic boarding schools for Indigenous children and instances of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy more broadly. She also calls for a “bottom-up” approach to peacebuilding that—rather than pushing students to fit their experiences into existing Catholic frameworks—would ground religious peace education in students’ lived realities, values, and efforts to advance peace and justice in their communities. Ultimately, Streich argues that by shifting “the primary focus of a Catholic school away from conversion or indoctrination towards a theological imperative of care”—for example, by taking students’ experiences and struggles seriously, valuing their cultural and religious traditions, replacing punitive practices of discipline with restorative justice models, and empowering students as co-creators of peace in their classrooms and communities—Catholic schools can participate in the work of justice-oriented peacebuilding.
Streich’s reflections on religious peacebuilding offer a vision of religious pluralism, encounters across difference, and the co-creation of a culture of justice and peace as it might be lived out in the daily interactions among students, teachers, and their surrounding communities. Although rooted in the specific experience of teaching at a Catholic school, Streich’s post also points more broadly to the ways that religious institutions might draw from the resources of their traditions to challenge religious perpetrations of violence, work towards justice and healing, and collaborate with peacebuilding efforts rooted in other religious traditions. In this way, her argument offers a counterexample to the right-wing religious nationalisms critiqued by other posts in this module, which draw on violent and reactionary practices in pursuit of their ends.
Discussion Questions
The contributions featured within this educational module have provided means of theorizing and responding to religious nationalism; understanding histories of Islamophobia, antisemitism, and European colonialism; and turning constructively to religious resources for justice and peacebuilding. The questions below highlight some areas of ongoing scholarly debate; invite critical reflection on discourses of “secularism” and “terrorism”/“extremism”; and encourage the further exploration of pathways towards conflict transformation in interreligious contexts.
Religion, Nationalism, and Secularism
Scholars such as Philip Gorski present religious nationalism as a distinctive variant of modern nationalism, but Atalia Omer and Jason A. Springs (in their co-authored reference handbook on religious nationalism) intentionally trouble the lines of distinction between “religious” and secular (or “non-religious”) forms of nationalism. To what extent is it useful to theorize religious nationalism as a distinct form of nationalism? How ought analyses of religion inform the examination of forms of nationalism that are not typically categorized as “religious”?
Insidious Nationalisms
Scholars such as Uzma Jamil and Jason Springs have emphasized the concealed operation of ethnoreligious nationalisms in presumably “secular” contexts. How does religious nationalism appear in contexts such as the United States, Canada, or Europe that are typically imagined as “secular” or as safeguarding “religious freedom”? How do Orientalist and other colonialist discourses lead to “religious nationalism” being imagined in association with particular religions, geographies, or ethnic groups rather than others? Specifically, how do the posts included in this module help trouble the idea that certain religions are “peaceful” (Buddhism) or particularly compatible with “secularism” (Christianity) whereas others are inherently violent (Islam)?
Islamophobia and the Discourse of Terrorism
What makes the threat of “Islamic terrorism” and “religious extremism” such a compelling mobilizing force in European and American religious nationalisms, and how do these discourses of “terrorism” transform when adopted in other contexts (such as China)? How do discourses of “terrorism” differ from or reinforce Islamophobic discourses from other sources or contexts? How is the violence enacted by a state—particularly against an ethnoreligious minority group—constructed differently from forms of violence (actual, anticipated, or imagined through narratives of victimization) enacted by other actors?
Religious Peacebuilding
How might the constructive proposals for interreligious peacebuilding offered by Bazaz, Bashir, Kwok, or Streich apply (or not apply) to various contexts impacted by religious, cultural, ethnic, and political conflict? How do these proposals differ from the secularist myth (critiqued within Kwok Pui Lan’s post) that imagines religion as irrational, a hindrance to conflict transformation, and properly transcended by “secularism”?
Bibliography
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York, NY: Verso Books, 2016.
Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Dawisha, Adeed. Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair. New Edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.
de Silva Wijeyeratne, Roshan. Nation, Constitutionalism and Buddhism in Sri Lanka. New York, NY: Routledge, 2014.
Gorski, Philip S. The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.
Hindu Nationalism: A Reader. Edited by Christophe Jaffrelot. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Omer, Atalia and Jason A. Springs. Religious Nationalism: A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2013.
The Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding. Edited by Atalia Omer, R. Scott Appleby, and David Little. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Wenger, Tisa. Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
White, Jenny. Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks. Updated Edition. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2014.
Zerubavel, Yael. Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Victoria Basug Slabinski is a PhD student in religious studies at the University of Virginia, with a graduate certificate in American studies. Her work draws Christian theology into conversation with decolonial thought and explores constructive Filipino American theologies, focusing especially on questions of memory, ancestrality, narrative, and aesthetics. Her research interests include decolonial and postcolonial thought, Christian liberation theologies and eschatology, gender and sexuality studies, and constructive readings of literature and the arts.
Prithvi Iyer is a Program Manager at Tech Policy Press. He completed a master's in Global Affairs from the University of Notre Dame, where he also served as Assistant Director of the Peacetech and Polarization Lab. Prior to his graduate studies, he worked as a research assistant for the Observer Research Foundation, wherein he published research exploring the mental health implications of political conflict, the role of behavioral science in shaping foreign policy outcomes, and discourse on countering violent extremism. He also holds a BA Hons in Psychology from Ashoka University.
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This post by Bashir Bashir, co-editor of The Arab and Jewish Questions alongside Leila Farsakh, introduces a symposium on the book by describing the wider research projects that gave rise to it. (
