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Field Notes article

David Grossman’s Camouflage of Violence


Guest: David Grossman, Israeli writer. October 30, 2016, Theatro São Pedro/Porto Alegre.
Image credits: Fronteiras do Pensamento | Luiz Munhoz. CC BY-SA 2.0.

When the city of Düsseldorf decided to give Amos Oz the Heinrich Heine Prize in 2008, historian Zvi Ben-Dor Benit ridiculed the investment of the German establishment in the prophet of the Israeli left. Oz received the Goethe Prize just three years earlier. Ben-Dor Benit rebuked Oz’s many celebratory speeches to European audiences where he condemned “extremists of both sides,” Palestinian and Israeli. For Oz, in a racialized fashion, it was the mizrahim who represented the extremists on the Jewish side. Sixteen years later. Düsseldorf found a new champion of Israel’s “universalistic” and “humanist” idealism in David Grossman. But Grossman’s politics, not to mention his relation to mizrahim, are much more sophisticated than Oz’s, and for this reason have not received the same attention by critics.

As with much writing on Mizrahi politics, Grossman’s public claims about Israeli politics are cleverly camouflaged when presented to English readers. Just a few days after October 7, Grossman published a lengthy essay in Haaretz, where he presented a version of Netanyahu’s infamous argument in the Knesset from 2015: Grossman argued that Hamas’ onslaught revealed the depth of hatred among Palestinians, which has no context and was beyond reason, and forces us, “the Jews,” to always be alert and prepared for battle. It was almost a replica of Netanyahu’s notorious “ḥayim ‘al ha-ḥerev” (living by the sword) statement. The article was never translated into English and readers of Haaretz English edition will have to go back to August 2023 to read contributions from Grossman in this venue. Conversely, in February 2024, Grossman was described in the most important newspapers of the German language (Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung, Neue Zuericher Zeitung) as a harbinger not just of Israeli humanism but as a pioneer in accepting the necessity to negotiate with Hamas. Until today I have not been able to find any trace of that in the Hebrew media. This dual tonality, saying one thing in Hebrew and another in English or another outward language, constitutes a form of strategic marketing.

This marketing is subtle but quite prevalent among Israelis. In the two songs that Israel offered the Eurovision Song Contest in 2024, what they included, despite pushback, is notable. After the first song, “October Rain,” was disqualified for being too political, Israel sent “Hurricane” and kept only the line “Who’s the fool who told you Boys don’t cry?” unchanged. A manifestation of a progressive ethos by which also “boys”—that is, probably soldiers—are sensitive, it encapsulates the ethos of Israeli wars since the Nakba, which has been critically named “shooting and crying.” The film Waltz with Bashir (2008) was a paradigmatic example of this ethos. In literature, we associate it with S. Yizhar and Yehuda Amichai, but not with Grossman, whose book The Yellow Wind (1988) is regularly praised for its reckoning with the First Intifada.

Eden Golan Eurovision Song Contest 2024 Dress rehearsal. Via Wikimedia Commons.

In “shooting and crying,” Israeli soldiers are not only sensitive (which many of them in fact are) but the violence which they inflict on their opponents is also always forced on them because no other alternative is purportedly available. This allows fighters to escape confronting their own position as perpetrators. In the 1980s, in the wake of the First Lebanon War and the First Intifada, a fault line was drawn in the Israeli public between violence bound by reality and sheer violence which was obscene and unjustified. The latter was then identified with Menahem Begin’s government and his brutal Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon. Latently, this violence—without a cry thereafter—was also ascribed to mizrahim (Oz’s “extremists”). The generation of Bashir’s director and protagonist, the blue-eyed Ari Folman who recounts his feelings over the Sabra and Shatila massacre to his psychologist, is now the generation waiting to usurp Benjamin Netanyahu via the figures of “moderate” and “sensitive” generals such as Benny Gantz and Yair Golan.

Interestingly, throughout the years, critics of the “shooting and crying” trope have focused solely on Palestinians as the distinct other. Critics’ own discomfort with colonialism led them to secure an imagined identity as Europeans, New Jews who were secular and “sensitive.” For them, responsibility requires one only to stop shooting. They shy away from any reckoning with shooting itself as something necessary to war and to the Jewish and human condition more broadly. The many critics of “shooting and crying” thus embark on the same cultural performance of repressing not only the “Old Jew” of the European diasporas but also the Arab-Jew—i.e., the mizrahi whose “oldness” is a function of eurocentic civilizational teleology of “progress.” This mizrahi “Old Jew” is—(as in Oz) allegedly “oriental,” “religious,” and “bloodthirsty.” The tormented and enlightened Jew-combatant and the postcolonial critic of this combatant’s eventual complacency are both able to consolidate their conscience based on the ability to see only one object: The Palestinian as an ultimate Other.

In recent years I have tried to better understand how violence and its camouflage (“shooting and crying”) function against objects of domestic, internal violence, such as against women, mizrahim, and of course against Judaism itself as a melancholic horizon because of its association with what is old, oriental, and primitive. I dwelled, for example, on the racist representations of mizrahim in the Israeli television series Prisoners of War, in which three male protagonists return from captivity and are engulfed by emasculation and tears. Like Waltz with Bashir, Prisoners of War came out in 2008. This was the same year that David Grossman published his most important work, the novel To the End of the Land, which amounted to a groundbreaking critique of the Israeli military. Over 650 pages it delved into the tormented conscience of a mother and a soldier. This no doubt reflected in Grossman’s own life circumstances. At the time, he was in grief over his own son who died as a soldier in the Second Lebanon War of 2006.

The many critics of ‘shooting and crying’ thus embark on the same cultural performance of repressing not only the ‘Old Jew’ of the European diasporas but also the Arab-Jew—i.e., the mizrahi whose ‘oldness’ is a function of eurocentic civilizational teleology of ‘progress.’

Prior to October 7, 2023, captivity was particularly associated in the Israeli public with the Yom Kippur War (1973). This war forms the dark core of this epic family novel, To the End of the Land. The book tells the story of Ora, the mother of two sons from two different men. The eldest son was born to her by her partner Ilan, and the younger, who had just embarked on a dangerous military operation, was born while she was married to Ilan, who acted as his father. But the second child came from a relationship she had with Avram, an intimate friend of the couple. Ilan, Avram, and Ora first met in their youth during the 1967 War. They matured into military service during the Yom Kippur War and became a family during the First and Second Intifadas. The latter events are depicted in the book via the military service of the younger son and the dissolution of Ora and Ilan’s marriage. Indeed, this is an exceptional national epic that not only describes Israel’s wars but also brings to light the emotional and psychological ordeals of Israeli civilians living amidst violence.

During the twenty years that passed from the birth of Ofer, the younger son, to the time during which the story takes place, amid the Second Intifada, the liberal hope of the Oslo Accords passed, which the novel describes with great longing. The time of hope and “sanity” is accompanied in the novel with unwelcomed guests, those that Oz might have dubbed “extremists”: the mizrahim, who also represent Jewishness. With their explicitly religious attributes, they are a reminder of the breakdown of secular and liberal utopia. Zionism promised the Jews to be like all nations, that is, to love like the people of the west, but that was unachievable because of the ostensibly war-oriented (and not love-oriented) ”orient.” Perhaps, Israelis also feel abandoned by the west which has promised them love, but instead, forsaken them, its Children (as in the Christian-biblical trope of “Children of Israel;” the Hebrew original talks about Israel’s, that is Jacob’s, sons, not children) and exposed them to “the beast” (of “the orient”).

In accordance with the free love counterculture of the Hippies, To the End of the Land is also full of descriptions of sex, “the most beautiful […] in Hebrew literature”; but among these scenes is also a description of rape inside the marriage of Ilan and Ora, which occurred while she was pregnant with Ofer (Avram’s biological son). This rape scene is not mentioned in the enormous bulk of scholarship that has been written about the novel, nor is the novel’s aversion to mizrahim, who are framed as responsible for the breakdown of western utopia.

In keeping with the racialization of the political geography of Israel, all the many scholars who wrote on Grossman’s epic were Ashkenazim, something that perhaps explains why they all preferred to stick to the state’s involvement with the occupation and violence against Palestinians. But the interesting thing is that the rape scene (on pages 564–66 in the Hebrew version) has a double function: on one level it is an instance of sexual coercion, and on another level, it is a reminder of captivity in war. During this repressed scene, Ilan not only penetrates his wife against her will, but also tells her about their friend Avram’s captivity on the Egyptian front during the war, when Ilan tried to reach him. This story defines the posttraumatic state of Ora, the loving mother who had to feed the fetus in her womb with the story of war.

This rape scene is not mentioned in the enormous bulk of scholarship that has been written about the novel, nor does the novel’s aversion to mizrahim, who are framed as responsible for the breakdown of western utopia.

Ora’s rape by her intimate domestic partner is the other side of Israel’s Ashkenazi ethos of lack of choice: in committing acts of war, but more than that, in living in the “violent Orient.” But whereas so many articles were written on the latter—the Jew who is being coerced into the position of a perpetrator—Ora’s trauma is not even acknowledged as such. From this point of view, To the End of the Land is a moving example of the divided Israeli psyche, which is first of all in a position of blindness to its own pain, not only in relation to mizrahim, and Jews in general, but first of all to its innermost intimate family, in relation to women and children. Even if we accept the paradigm of “wars of no choice”—Israelis are forced to subject their loved ones to it during every family dinner and in their bedrooms. Grossman’s story is first of all the story of a mother whose burning love for her young son collapses under the national narrative of violence and death. It therefore outlines rape as essentially deniable, by characters themselves as well as by critics. Again, critics and writers share the trope of “shooting and crying” because it is a dyad that functions on both ends: it not only simply denies violence, but needs denial (cry, camouflage) to enable violence in the first place.

Grossman’s story is first of all the story of a mother whose burning love for her young son collapses under the national narrative of violence and death.

Like the story of Ora, October 7 was a confrontation with that denial. In many videos Israelis were disgraced, sometimes sexually, and deprived of their honor as humans at their most intimate domestic surroundings. Grossman’s novel, where the Israeli secular everyday living room takes on such importance, is a reminder of what has been suppressed in the public sphere. Living the national bourgeois family narrative calls for constant camouflage, which in Ora’s case leads her also to panic attack within her family unit as she, Ilan, and the two boys are having dinner (494–95). Even today, after reading and writing so extensively on the novel, I find it hard to explain its title and main gesture: in being A Woman Fleeing the News, Ora is not trying to avoid death but rather the very possibility—and thus de facto imaginary—news of death. In many ways being in this limbo—not being able to confront death (and thus reality; not being able to confront her partner as perpetrator and her children as soldiers)—became a prefiguration of Israelis during this unprecedented onslaught on Gaza: finding themselves in a position of very real vulnerability while at the very same time placing themselves in an imaginary constitutive victimhood that makes them incapable of bearing responsibility for their actions.

Adania Shibli, author of A Minor Detail in conversation with Michał Nogaś, Góry Literatury Festival 2024. Via Wikimedia Commons.

It is interesting to compare Ora’s trauma with the rape of the Bedouin girl who is the historical focus of Adania Shibli’s acclaimed novel Minor Detail (2017). In Shibli, rape is entirely admitted by its many readers, although the novel avoids a description of how it unfolds; we readers understand it is a rape precisely because the mimesis avoids description. In Grossman’s novel, the rape scene is carefully outlined (so many times Ora asks Ilan to stop), but its reception entirely denied. Perhaps it relates to the fact that Shibli’s novel is about the loneliness of a single woman, who lives on her own, while Grossman’s heroine almost drowns under the relentless discourse of family unity. The relations that exist within a family—like those within a nation—often make it difficult to reckon with facts. Exactly at the age of maturity, when her younger son has stopped being a minor, Ora’s 20-year marriage is ending, and thus the promise it offered—the promise of a sane Jewish place “among the nations,” that is, western nations; the promise of Oslo and of the Eurovision—turns to denial. She, like the many scholars who wrote on her, does not confront Ilan, the perpetrator, and thus instead of reaching maturity—of being sovereign as an adult—she collapses in nostalgia and denial. Much the same could be said of current Israel. Thus, David Grossman’s camouflage of violence, is first and foremost our own, Israelis and their families.

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Omri Ben Yehuda
Dr. Hannah (Omri) Ben Yehuda is a scholar of comparative literature in Tel Aviv University. This essay is based on her academic paper “The Flight of a Mother: Rape and National Coercion in David Grossman’s To the End of the Land”, Shofar 42:3, 2024, 155–180.
Field Notes article

Israel’s Genocidal Assault on Gaza: A Lecture with Raz Segal


Photo of Professor Atalia Omer introducing Professor Raz Segal
Steve Toepp /Midwest Photographics

Within days of Hamas’ October 7, 2023 mass murders across rural communities around the Gaza Strip, 1.1 million Gazans had been ordered to flee northern Gaza. At the same time, the death toll in Gaza was rising under Israel’s constant bombing of the densely populated walled-in strip. Raz Segal, Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University, was among the first in his field to raise the alarm, calling Israel’s response “A Textbook Case of Genocide.” By November 2nd, 2023, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor warned “Israel has dropped more than 25,000 tons of explosives on the Gaza Strip since the start of its large-scale war on 7 October, equivalent to two nuclear bombs.”

The International Court of Justice has since ruled the Israeli assault a “plausible genocide.” Against the backdrop of the Jewish High Holy Days and the grim one-year anniversary of the conflict, Professor Raz Segal visited the University of Notre Dame on October 10, 2024 to discuss the Genocide Convention as it applies to the Israeli attacks on Gaza and more recently on the West Bank and Lebanon. Professor Ernesto Verdeja, Associate Professor of Peace Studies and Global Politics at Notre Dame and Dr. Thalia Pachiyannakis, South Bend-based MD OBGYN who volunteered in Gaza in June 2024, responded. Below is a recording of the lecture followed by a short summary of key ideas from the lecture and question and answer section. The event was co-sponsored by Contending Modernities, the Initiative on Race and Resilience, and the Center for Social Concerns.

 

Key Ideas and Highlights from the Lecture:

“I have to admit I’m just mostly very sad these days,” opened Segal. Marking one year of this most recent assault and over 100 years of historical context leading up to it, Segal detailed examples of an “intent to destroy” an entire community of people–not just fighters–expressed publicly by Israeli government officials with command authority. He then matched this intent with Israeli military action in Gaza. He highlighted in particular the tactic of mass starvation, noting: “at a certain point of these long processes of starvation, right, perpetrators cannot anymore deny that they [don’t] know and understand the consequences of their actions”; that they have “created conditions calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the group in whole or in part.”

The war in Gaza is unprecedented in many ways, Segal noted, but key among them is the rise of global Nakba memory, not least in the repeated Israeli government claims of creating a new “Gaza Nakba.” The history of the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 by proto-IDF forces during the creation of the State of Israel, while the Genocide Convention was being written and signed, has long been silenced. “Nakba denial is structural in Holocaust memory, but also in the international legal system,” Segal told the audience. But now, “the Israelis are saying the quiet part out loud.”

Ernesto Verdeja, himself a scholar of genocide and mass atrocity, followed up on Segal’s comment that the field of Holocaust and Genocide Studies was in crisis and that for many scholars of the Holocaust, it was “business as usual,” per Segal. “Many genocides were always examined and assessed to the extent that they were in conformity with what we knew about the Holocaust,” Verdeja explained. ”The crisis of Genocide Studies that Raz has emphasized for us, means also questioning some of the foundational concepts at the very heart of how we make sense of mass atrocities. What does it mean to be a perpetrator? How do we think of the nature of ideology? How do we think of the motives and the intentions of particular actors and the rights of victims, and who is grievable and who is not grievable.”

Dr. Thalia Pachiyannakis describes her medical trip to Gaza
Steve Toepp /Midwest Photographics

Dr. Thalia Pachiyannakis, who lives and works near  Notre Dame, spent three weeks in Gaza in June 2024 as a volunteer MD OBGYN through Baitumaal. It was very difficult to go to Gaza, she shared, flipping through photographs of the approval process and her travel from Jordan into Israel and through a Gaza checkpoint and the rubble of bombed apartment buildings. “They couldn’t guarantee our safety.” She worked in a hospital with no soap, no air conditioning, performing surgeries at 104 Fahrenheit. Through a hospital window she could see the churned earth where a mass grave with over 300 people, including health care workers, was found after Israeli forces raided the Al Nasser hospital. The hospital director was released from 7 months of detention while she was at the hospital. Hospital staff were all living in tents, sick from the lack of clean water, working though they had not been paid in 9 months. Her fellow volunteers were among the 65 doctors, nurses, and paramedics who sounded the alarm that they were frequently seeing young Palestinian children with bullet wounds to the head and chest.

 

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Selected Excerpts

The audience of students, staff, faculty, and community members had the opportunity to share questions after a brief discussion period. A few selections from the lecture and Q&A are highlighted below, lightly edited for clarity.

Does “military necessity” mean there isn’t a genocide?

Verdeja: Part of the point about genocide is that what makes genocide somewhat distinct from other major crimes in international law is the emphasis not only on group destruction and not just group repression but also on the question of intentionality. That is, that the actions have to be committed in such a way that the perpetrators intend to bring about the destruction of the group in whole or in part.

But this is an important point, because I think a lot of the debates at the present moment tend to obfuscate some of the really important analytical points here. Often you will see, “Well, Israel is not committing genocide because it’s engaged in a war of defense or national security.”

There’s a distinction between intentionality, which is what the crime requires proof of, and the motives that underpin that intentionality. There are many different motives or justifications that are compatible with the intent to destroy: it can be territorial acquisition. It can be a claim to security, it can be ethnic or racial supremacy or eradication, etc. We can imagine a lot of different types of motivations, but the point is that those motivations are compatible with the intention to destroy a group in whole or in part. So, the issue of whether it’s genocide or not is an issue that is irrespective of the motives underpinning what the perpetrators themselves are doing.

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How do you navigate discourses that we need to “engage with both sides of the conflict”? 

Segal: I don’t think there are sides in this sort of violence, whatever we want to call it right? And you know, we have to understand also that even in cases [where] there’s a significant consensus that they’re a genocide, right? I mentioned the Herero and Nama, for example, in German Southwest Africa…. The genocide was a result of the uprising of the Herero, which was very violent, that is, they attacked German settlers and their families and murdered them.

The German colonialists were acting from their perspective of what we would call today “self-defense.” And like the Israelis, they were fighting a war against “barbarians.” This, by the way, harkens back to the origins of international law because international law was always about regulating wars between “civilized” nations. That is, Europeans. It was never meant to apply to colonial warfare. Right? That’s just the basic history of how international law emerges. So that’s what we’re seeing in front of our eyes. Now, there are no two sides to that. I know that’s more complicated.

But I don’t see sides here when we see a destructive assault of this kind against a people and a culture and their society and their lands in this way. Now this, this attack is meant… The rationale of the Israeli State has always been that this is the way to provide security to Jews. Or this is one of the rationales of the Israeli state.

Okay.

Now, this, of course, was a system that meant that my security as an Israeli Jew was based on the insecurity and the oppression of Palestinians. Now, has this worked? You know we can ask Israeli Jews, “has this worked? Do you feel safe today?”

Of course it hasn’t worked. Of course it hasn’t worked.

Verdeja: I think, on the question of how to navigate discourses that talk about both sides, the kind of the both side-ism question, I would simply emphasize that whenever we’re talking about any complex political phenomena you have to take seriously asymmetries in power, right?

And the discourse or the language of both sides sometimes functions to cover up or obfuscate that because it treats all of the different sides, so to speak, first of all as monolithic sides, as if there is a “Jewish side,” and we’ve just heard the complexity around that, or a “Palestinian side,” or a “Muslim side,” etc. So we need to disentangle that a little bit. One.

And two we need to take seriously that there are again power differentials here. And so the language of side-ism, I think, reproduces this myopia around what actually is happening on the ground, which is why, following my earlier comment, one has to start from the perspective of evidence. What is the evidence?

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Not a Post-Holocaust World:

Professor Raz Segal answers student questions.
Steve Toepp /Midwest Photographics

Segal: We still live in a world structured, politically and ideologically, in the same way as the Holocaust world was.

But we are also living in a time of change that few could have imagined before October 7th. For the voices of Palestinians who are facing Israel’s genocidal assault are now, for the first time in the history of the ongoing Nakba, front and center around the world, really front and center. Also in national and international courts from California to the Hague, marking an era beyond impunity for Israel, when the crime of genocide might serve, not as it emerged, to blur the Nakba, to deny Israeli state violence, but now to support the struggle against it, and the effort to envision a truly different decolonial world.

It is indeed the voices of Palestinians that now point to a new era when the promise of Holocaust memory will center the voices and experiences of survivors and forcibly displaced people; that promise, now, at the beginning of what, again, I suggest we can call perhaps the era of global Nakba memory. That promise may finally be realized.

 

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Contending Modernities
Theorizing Modernities article

Sacrality, Land, and Conceptual Fluidity: A Synthetic Response to Dana Lloyd and Barbara Sostaita


The Mackenzie Delta where each year the Mackenzie River empties melted snow and ice into the arctic ocean.

There are concepts in the field of religion that have solidified, like water into ice, into a definitive, if not permanent, shape. In the conversations featured here between Barbara Sostaita, author of Sanctuary Everywhere, and Dana Lloyd, author of Land is Kin, several of these concepts—sovereignty, the sacred, religious freedom—are melted back down into a more fluid form. The result is that they are allowed to flow into passageways previously unimaginable, whether in applying the concept of the sacred to practices of resistance or to understanding Indigenous ways of relating to land and the people who occupy it. My reflections here build on the questions and answers raised by Sostaita and Lloyd in their interviews with one another and specifically highlight the conceptual innovations in their interventions into the study of religion, coloniality, and modernity.

Retheorizing the Sacred

In the same spirit as scholars like An Yountae and J. Kameron Carter, Sostaita understands the sacred—which the concept of sanctuary is linguistically linked to—as that which interrupts our normal ways of understanding the world. The sacred is a potential disrupter of hegemonic forms of domination such as White supremacy, heteronormativity, and neoliberalism. The people Sostaita accompanies in her book challenge the authority of border control agents to determine who does and who does not belong and who is and who is not worthy of value. They plant crosses where people have died migrating across the border; they give food and water to those ICE would prefer remain hungry, desperate, and easier to detain; they house those who would otherwise face death under unbearable conditions. As highlighted in Lloyd’s interview with Sostaita, such a study by nature meanders from place to place, topic to topic, in an effort to avoid fixing on one or another particular account of what is or is not sacred, the latter being a project in which the state is often invested. Sostaita, mirroring her subjects, is always on the move with the sacred, discovering and rediscovering it in unlikely places.

Sostaita traces her account of the sacred through classical theoretical sources such as Emile Durkheim, Georges Bataille, and others who saw the sacred as disruptive of the ordinary and thus a powerful means by which to challenge the status quo and traditional authorities. Of course, in the study of religion the sacred has often been understood as a uniquely conservative, even reactionary, force. For Mircea Eliade, one of the most influential twentieth century historians of religion, the sacred does interrupt our day-to-day experiences, but it does so in order to reestablish a premodern order to society. If scholars following in Sostaita’s genealogy seek to evoke the sacred in order to challenge modernity’s hierarchies, Eliadean-influenced scholars evoke it in order to reestablish a premodern hierarchy.  For Sostaita, sacrality’s fluidity is to be embraced, whereas for Eliade it is to be resisted.

This challenge to the ordinary that the sacred represents in both Sostaita and Eliade is nonetheless one that scholars have mostly abandoned, as Sostaita briefly notes in the book and reiterates in the interview. Beginning with J.Z. Smith and becoming most pronounced in the work of Russell McCutcheon, the construction of notions of the sacred have been understood to stem from the specific interests of those defining the term rather than any essential content the term might represent. The sacred most often has served to universalize Protestant Christian visions of religion and their accompanying liberal humanitarianism. Thus its “analytical” value is seen as suspect and lacking in rigor.

For Sostaita, sacrality’s fluidity is to be embraced, whereas for Eliade it is to be resisted.

But scholarly critiques, like the concepts with which they engage, can become too set in stone, too resistant to new formations, especially when guilds and conferences are structured around either their preservation or deconstruction. Sostaita reminds us that a fluid conceptualization of the sacred need not serve reactionary purposes. Indeed, it might afford quite the opposite. This is a possibility that those who critique Eliade and other “historians of religion” foreclose when they treat the sacred as immutably tied to its previous formulations. The critique of the sacred, in this case, is parasitic upon what is critiqued. For critics of the sacred and its defenders, the concept is less like ice and more like stone.

Religious Freedom and Indigenous Sovereignty

Sostaita’s approach to the sacred is rooted in her desire to make sense of the actions of those she spent time with in the Sonoran desert during her fieldwork. Oftentimes, the sacred is a term she applies to their actions even when it is not one they themselves apply. It is a pragmatic tool used to analyze actions rather than an ontological claim about the reality of the sacred. Lloyd, in a slightly different vein, investigates the very real way religion and the sacred have been mobilized in the legal realm to manage and control Indigenous peoples and their land. Focusing on the Lyng Supreme Court case, she brings to light the way “religious freedom” was mobilized by Indigenous plaintiffs and government defendants alike to claim sovereignty over a portion of land that the national forest service hoped to build a road on in order to transport timber. The case was won by the Indigenous plaintiffs at the lower level on religious freedom grounds, but lost at the Supreme Court when it ruled that the government’s property rights superseded the right to religious freedom for the Indigenous population. In the majority opinion, Justice O’Connor made clear that the Indigenous claim to the land went beyond the religious freedom that the constitution was required to protect. In separating religion from the Indigenous worldview, Justice O’Connor in effect subjected it to an alien US/European colonial framework. As Lloyd makes clear in her interview, this framework is also ontological. As Sostaita’s questions and Lloyd’s response to them help unpack, treating Indigenous claims as ones that are “religious,” and therefore a matter of private belief, has the effect of Protestantizing Indigenous beliefs and removing claims to sovereignty over land from the conversation. In other words, it frames the conversation in such a way that the Indigenous worldview is excluded from the start.

But Lloyd also goes beyond this framework to show how resistance to practices of land theft by the US government require using, at times, the settler colonial framework of sovereignty and religious freedom. The Yurok people, she shows, use concepts like the sacred and religious freedom strategically, often to successful ends. What Lloyd shows then, like Sostaita, is that the concepts of religious freedom, the sacred, and sovereignty are not frozen in their genealogical ice mold. Rather, they are terms that hold possibilities for resignifying and reimagining. A binary framework that would see Indigenous and governmental claims to sovereignty as exclusive would be unable to account for this kind of creative agency among Indigenous actors.

What Lloyd shows then, is that the concepts of religious freedom, the sacred, and sovereignty are not frozen in their genealogical ice mold. Rather, they are terms that hold possibilities for resignifying and reimagining.

In the study of religion, modernity, and secularism, there is no shortage of attempts to frame the secular/religion binary and the modern/premodern binary as a good/bad binary, with the value attached to them dependent upon the motives of those employing the terms. Yet, by focusing on what the sacred does, as each of these books seeks to do, we see that that there are multiple ways of contesting authority, often in subtle ways that challenge those in power. In this manner, Lloyd and Sostaita show us how we might move beyond the sacred/profane binary that both its defenders and critics are parasitic upon. By treating such concepts as heuristics that are contingent upon the particular circumstances in which they are applied, they loosen the constraints of modern/colonial frameworks and chart new arroyos down which they may travel.

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Joshua S. Lupo
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism  (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Theorizing Modernities article

Sovereignty, Land, and Religious Freedom: Barbara Sostaita Interviews Dana Lloyd

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Barbara Sostaita (BS): Hi Dana! I’m so excited to chat about Land is Kin and your reading of the Lyng case. Can you open our conversation by sharing an overview of your project and its arguments, and perhaps the different conceptions of land you engage with in the book—land as home, property, sacred, wild, kin?

Dana Lloyd (DL): Thanks, Barbara! Yes, I’m thrilled for our conversation to continue. At the center of Land Is Kin is a place known as the High Country. It is a forest of Douglas fir trees taller than 300 feet, where pre-human ancestors called woge reside, Indigenous doctors train, and medicine is made and gathered. It is the sacred homeland of the Yurok, Karuk, Hupa, and Tolowa Nations, but it is managed by the U.S. government as the Six Rivers National Forest, among the Siskiyou Mountains in Northern California.

In the 1980s, the Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa Nations argued in court against cutting 733 million board feet of the trees in the High Country over 80 years, as well as against completing the final six-mile section of a logging road known as the G-O Road because it was supposed to connect the towns Gasquet and Orleans. They argued that what the forest service referred to as developing the High Country would irreparably damage their ability to practice their religion in the area, and that free exercise of religion was promised to them by the U.S. Constitution and by the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978). The case went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, and while the nations won in the lower courts, in the Supreme Court, where the case is known as Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association (1988), they lost.

Given that the Supreme Court only hears 70 cases a year, which make about 10% of the cases brought in front of it, I was surprised to learn that a case about six miles in the middle of a forest made the cut, and even more surprised that the nations lost. In order to answer my questions about Lyng I needed to do two things. The case has been argued, decided, and studied as a case about religious freedom—there are hundreds of law review articles dissecting the nuances of Justice O’Connor’s majority opinion, and every first-year law student in the United States reads it for class—but I needed more context: I especially wanted to see what the testimony and evidence in the original trial were about. I also needed a new theoretical framework with which to think about the case, and I found that thinking of it as a case about Indigenous sovereignty was more productive than thinking of it as a case about religious freedom. And centering sovereignty meant centering land.

I argue in the book that Native American sacred sites cases, especially when the sites are owned by the U.S. government, pit against each other ideas about land as sacred and land as property as mutually exclusive. When this is the case, in a competition between property and religion, property is always going to win, because property is the paradigmatic right and land is the paradigmatic property. But when I read Lyng in its context, I saw that land played other roles in the case as well. While the plaintiffs talked about the High County as their home and as their kin, their lawyers had to focus on the place as sacred and wild, but the forest service and the justices saw it as no more than government property. My reading of the case shows that all these ideas about land could actually live together (just as they do in your own reading of the Sonoran Desert, Barbara). Ultimately, I argue that a multi-faceted understanding of land could lead to a more just treatment of it (and of its people). 

(BS): Thanks, Dana. I want to dwell on your emphasis on Indigenous sovereignty. You elaborate on this argument in chapter two of Land is Kin. I was really struck by the ways you unsettle binaries, inhabiting a “third space” (I might call this nepantla). You write that “land can be simultaneously understood as property and as other things that ostensibly contradict the idea of land as property;” you trouble the religious freedom framework that sees religion as either public or private and the “false choice” of having to choose between “acknowledging Indigenous sovereignty with the consequence of destructing the sovereignty of the occupying state; or continuing to deny Indigenous sovereignty.” Can you share more about how you engage with categories or frameworks that might be seen as contradictory or at odds with each other and how you dwell in this in-between, particularly regarding “sovereignty?” What does this approach make possible?   

(DL): Thanks for this fantastic question, Barbara. I came to this project thinking that Lyng is a case about Indigenous sovereignty rather than religious freedom. But I thought the case was about sovereignty because the question at its heart was who had the power to decide the fate of the High Country (sovereignty of people over lands). I ultimately understood that I needed a new conception of sovereignty, as partnership with the land (the land decides people’s fate just as much as we decide her fate, if not more so). A few things happened along the way that helped me to see how the different binaries at play in the case fall apart. The more I talked to Yurok (and other Indigenous) lawyers and activists, the more I realized that they don’t only use religious freedom strategically (as opposed to using it out of genuine belief in the idea of religious freedom), they also use sovereignty strategically, when talking at the United Nations, for example. Sovereignty, as they told me, is a western, colonial concept just as much as religion is. So the opposition I had imagined between religious freedom and Indigenous sovereignty as two different theoretical frameworks started losing its significance. As I worked on the book, other binaries started seeming less meaningful as well. Each chapter tells the story of a sphere that has been used as a colonial tool (property, for example, but also the wilderness discourse, religion, and kinship) but also demonstrates how Indigenous peoples have used these spheres as sites of resistance. Ultimately, settler law itself becomes a site of resistance, where Yurok and Karuk testimonies can be seen as bringing Yurok and Karuk ceremony, Yurok and Karuk law, into the settler courtroom.

Furthermore, if we think of this case (of the relationship between Yurok and Karuk people and the High Country) in terms of rights, the outcome of Lyng seems devastating. But as Native American Studies scholar Cutcha Risling Baldy (Hupa, Yurok, Karuk) writes, these peoples still gather medicine in the High Country, enacting what she calls “bio-cultural sovereignty.” If at the beginning of working on this project I thought of it all in terms of struggle, I can now see that collaboration also opens up possibilities (the dam removal from the Klamath River is a result of the tribes working together with the states of California and Oregon; the Yurok Tribal Court coordinates a lot of its cases with state and county courts, successfully getting people out of the federal system). In this sense, the binary notion of sovereignty (according to which the sovereignty of the nation-state and Indigenous sovereignty are mutually exclusive) is harmful.

Excavators clear the Iron Gate Dam from the Klamath River. Via Wikimedia Commons.

I want to think, even more broadly, about decolonization in the sense of land return. Decolonization also becomes more possible when we give up binary thinking. I love Elisha Chi’s work on these questions, and how she demonstrates that many things we may not think of as successful #landback initiatives actually are exactly that. And so, even though when I end the book with the Klamath River dam removal I don’t write about it as an instance of #landback, I do want to offer it here as such.

(BS): Yes!! To build on that previous question and your answer, I was in awe of how multivocal your book is—you engage with the words and voices of lawyers, expert witnesses, and Yurok and Karuk witnesses (which, as you point out in the first chapter, are not mentioned in the Supreme Court decision at all), among others. As you introduce us to these different voices, it becomes clear that you are also introducing us to different ontologies. Can you share more about what it meant as a scholar and writer to engage with (and bring together) these different, though partially connected, worlds?  

(DL): This is such a great question! My friend and colleague Cecilia Titizano writes that decolonization requires us to stop reducing ontological conflicts into merely epistemological ones.[1] She’d say that underlying cases like Lyng is an ontological dispute over the nature of reality. Specifically, it is a dispute over the nature of the sacred, as we see (perhaps even more robustly) in your own book, Barbara. For the Supreme Court justices, including Justice Brennan who wrote the dissenting opinion in Lyng, what we have here is an epistemological difference: the Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa peoples consider the High Country to be sacred. No one is asking whether or not the land is actually sacred, and this is in line with the legal framework of “sincerely held belief.” There is no dispute that the plaintiffs in the G-O Road case believe, sincerely, that the High Country is sacred. And therefore the only question the courts are concerned with is that of access—does the forest service’s development plan prohibit those who consider the land sacred from accessing it in order to perform religious ceremony? If the answer is negative, if there is no prohibition, there should be no problem with executing this development plan.

But the Yurok and Karuk witnesses are saying something different. Their argument is not about their belief system. The High Country is sacred, regardless of who considers it so, and doing what the forest service wants to do there has consequences. As the Theodoratus Report (the main piece of evidence submitted in court) explains, “‘improper’ removal [of the trees from the High Country] is likely to bring extremely bad luck or disease to the offender (whether he/she be a believer or a non-believer).” I like witness Chris Peters’s explanation of why constructing a logging road in the High Country is problematic: to demonstrate why asphalt does not belong there he offers an analogy: “last night a woman . . . prayed for us, and to do that effectively, she had to take off everything that was a white man’s stuff, jewelry and things like that, to engage the powers that she has. In the same respect here, you are bringing into a spiritual area something that is foreign to that area, and it is an intrusion.” Peters explains the ontological dispute and at the same time brings into the conversation colonial invasion. Asphalt does not belong in the High Country because it desecrates it; asphalt does not belong in the High Country because it is the White man’s asphalt. The road does not belong in the High Country because White settlers do not belong in the High Country. It is the Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa home that the government proposes to invade, and it is only in this context that we can fully understand the G-O Road case.

To go back to Titizano, what she calls “the coloniality of the real” negates the presence of multiple ontologies and transforms them into many cultures (multiculturalism), reducing ontological conflicts into merely epistemological ones. Only “western” ontology is considered universal. Reducing what Peters describes as Yurok and Karuk ontology (one might say, theology) into a cultural belief ultimately helps to justify colonial invasion. And so Land Is Kin wants to read all the stories about land that we hear in Lyng (both the colonial-legal story and the Indigenous story) as multiple ontologies that can co-exist.

(BS): I have learned so much from your book and this exchange, Dana. For the last question, I want to turn to your last chapter and conclusion. Here, you write about a 2019 resolution passed by the Yurok Tribal Council that extended rights to the Klamath River and about a project authorized in 2022 to remove four dams from the Klamath River, clearing hundreds of miles of salmon habitat. In these sections, you engage with questions of rights, responsibilities, and obligations—continuing, as you have throughout the book, to unsettle false binaries and insist on multiplicity. I’m interested in hearing more about the role of land in nurturing or pursuing rights and kinship. You write about water’s refusal to “adhere to state, municipal, or reservation boundaries.” You refer to the “agency of place” and to “land as a protagonist.” Ultimately, you suggest, “If we started this book’s journey with the human right to use the land … we are ending it with the rights of the land itself.” How is land active, alive, present, and engaged in the struggles you write about in Land is Kin? 

(DL): ​​I end the book with the Yurok Tribal Council’s 2019 recognition of the Klamath River as a legal person, and I see it as an assertion of Yurok sovereignty, which is tied, importantly, with the Yurok’s fulfillment of their obligation to care for the river. But I want to emphasize here that recognition, legal or otherwise, is not what makes the river (or land more generally) into a person. Land is alive, and its agency does not depend on recognition by human beings. The fact that the High Country has not been domesticated (or “developed,” as the forest service thinks of it), that it has maintained its integrity through two hundred years of colonial invasion, including the Lyng case, suggests as much.

Klamath Basin Tribes and allies from commercial fishing and conservation organizations stage a rally at the bi-annual meeting of the international hydropower industry in 2006. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The witnesses in the G-O Road trial describe instances when they were called to go to the High Country to talk with the Great Spirit (some say they have received warnings from the Great Spirit, that something bad would happen if they don’t go). Since the question of accessibility (or inaccessibility) of the High Country is central to the case, the judge asks witness Chris Peters what happens if one gets a calling, or a warning, during wintertime, when snow makes it impossible to walk into the High Country. Peters responds: “It would depend on the individual. The individual may die. Bad things may happen to his family, members of his family could die.” The judge keeps questioning: would a person try anyway? Even knowing that you can’t make it? and Peters explains that it depends on a person’s persistence: “If your children were dying, you might attempt to do that.” I think this exchange contains everything we need to know about land’s agency and about kinship. The Great Spirit might call you to go to the High Country, and nevertheless, the High Country might kill you for trying to get there. If it is your family you are trying to protect, you might attempt a visit to the High Country even knowing you will likely fail; indeed, you might try even knowing it will probably kill you. We could see an analogy here to the Lyng case itself: knowing that they are doomed to lose in a settler court—indeed, knowing that such a loss may have serious consequences for future Indigenous sacred sites cases—the Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa people are doing everything they can to protect the High Country as their kin.

And even though the Lyng case was lost, the High Country is still free. The Klamath River is running free now, after the largest dam removal project in U.S. history was completed in 2024. I think that these triumphs have a lot to do with the people declaring and executing their sovereignty, but I think that the High Country and the Klamath River are also working here to free or heal themselves (and their people). I think about my own children. Often, when they struggle to achieve something, the knowledge that I’m there with them is enough for them to succeed on their own. I have responsibility to care for them, but they have the agency, and capacity, to try and succeed. And of course, they take care of me as well. When I think about the relationship between the Yurok people and the High Country or the Klamath River as kinship, this is the kind of reciprocity I think about. Thanks, Barbara, for helping me see my own work with new eyes here.

[1] Cecilia Titizano and Dana Lloyd, “The Bankruptcy of the Category of Religion: A Decolonizing Approach,” Journal of the Council for Research on Religion, vol. 5 no. 3 (forthcoming).

Leave a Comment on Sovereignty, Land, and Religious Freedom: Barbara Sostaita Interviews Dana Lloyd Array
Dana Lloyd
Dana Lloyd is Assistant Professor of Global Interdisciplinary Studies and affiliated faculty at the Center for Peace and Justice Education at Villanova University. She is the author of Land Is Kin: Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Sites (University Press of Kansas, 2024) and co-editor of American Examples: A New Conversation about Religion, volume 3 (University of Alabama Press, 2024).
Barbara Sostaita
Barbara Sostaita (she/ella) is a scholar of religion and global migration, and an Assistant Professor in Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her book, Sanctuary Everywhere: The Fugitive Sacred in the Sonoran Desert (Duke University Press, 2024), colludes with migrants melting the border’s steel bars through excess touch, artists summoning the migrant dead, and activists leaving water in the Sonoran Desert—in defiance of prevention through deterrence, in celebration of life that transgresses walls and bans.
Theorizing Modernities article

Reimagining the Sacred: Dana Lloyd Interviews Barbara Sostaita

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Dana Lloyd (DL): Dear Barbara, I am thrilled to begin this conversation about your book, Sanctuary Everywhere, and some of our mutual interests. I’d like to start by inviting you to unpack the broad argument of your book and relay some of the key interventions it makes in the field. 

Barbara Sostaita (BS): Dana, I want to open by naming how important it was for me to form part of the theories of land working group that you and Evan Berry convened a couple of years ago. Being in conversation with you and other participants deepened my engagement with land, inviting me to think more capaciously about the Sonoran Desert and its more-than-human forms of life. Since our collaborations with each other begin with land, I want to start by situating sanctuary as emerging through sets of relations—between and among the living and dead, the human and more-than-human, the past and present, the sacred and profane. Sanctuary, then, is fragile and fleeting, emergent and mobile. I began this project by proposing that sanctuary is not a singular place, and that this practice cannot be confined to one location, that is, a church, city, university, restaurant, hospital, or safe house. But that does not mean that sanctuary does not emerge through and engage with land. I really like how Hugo Canham describes Mpondoland and Mpondo theory in his book Riotous Deathscapes, and it applies to sanctuary, too—“Located, but in motion” (14).

Sanctuary Everywhere traces the ways people on the move—migrants, activists, artists—engage in fugitive practices of care. It turns to four scenes: (1) moments when land and its more-than-human formations refuse or defy the enforcement strategy known as Prevention Through Deterrence, (2) when incarcerated migrants pursue illicit or forbidden touch inside detention centers, (3) when a deported nurse tends to the wounds and spiritual needs of migrants in Nogales, Sonora, and (4) when the desert’s dead restlessly haunt the living and refuse closure from humanitarian workers. It is an ethnography focused on the Sonora-Arizona borderlands, not because the border is the only site of immigration enforcement but instead because there is a long history of fugitive activity in this region. From Chinese migrants who crossed the Sonoran Desert covertly during the era of Asian exclusion to enslaved Africans who fled south to evade capture, the Sonoran Desert is—to quote Samuel Truett—a “fugitive landscape.”

I always struggle with questions about my interventions because I see myself more as a curator or maybe even a medium—an intermediate or someone who relays messages between worlds. The word “sanctuary” comes from sanctus or the sacred. And in this book, I hope to encourage scholars to think about the sacred as unruly, disruptive, and dangerous to the everyday—a fugitive movement that unsettles the profane, or everyday. The sacred refuses to recognize boundaries. It restlessly seeks escape from the profane world of policing, militarization, and bordered nation-states. In writing about the sacred, I draw inspiration from abolitionist thinkers and practitioners who are laboring towards defunding, disrupting, and dismantling the present and who see abolition not as an arrival but as an ongoing practice and process. Extending Georges Bataille’s and Michel Foucault’s theories of transgression, I consider sanctuary and the sacred as life-transforming disruptions of immigration enforcement operations, as these vibrant and ephemeral moments that interrupt the everyday. As, to draw inspiration from Angela Davis, a practice of experimentation in refusing the everyday and ordinary. If this is an intervention, it is also an inheritance. One that comes from the Black Radical Tradition and from scholars like M. Jacqui Alexander and Gloria Anzaldúa, who have made it possible for me to think of the sacred as on the move.

(DL): Thanks for this, Barbara. Reading your book, I could hear echoes of our conversations from a couple of years ago, conversations that had a similar impact on my own thinking.

In some ways, your book begins where mine ends. You talk about meandering as your method but also as the land’s (or water’s) method of resisting authority—especially state authority. I end my book with the story of the Klamath River, and how rivers are especially helpful in challenging the binary notion of sovereignty—only nation-states can be sovereign—because they do not obey state borders. I end my book with the removal of four dams from the Klamath River and you write in your first chapter that “[e]ven the dams that allegedly tamed the wild river have a life span. Concrete wears down. The water will flow again” (46).

In your answer above, you speak about sanctuary as a set of relations, but in the book, you also write about land as a set of relations. I read your “meandering method” as perhaps your way to enter into a relationship with the land of the Sonoran Desert.  

So I’m especially eager to hear you talk more about this method, as your own method, as the desert’s method, and about the relationship between the two.

(BS): What a beautiful connection between our two books. Your reflections on sovereignty are precisely why I was also drawn to meandering. My method was in part inspired by Nicole Antebi’s meander maps of the Río Bravo, which trace how the water interrupted and even disturbed Mexico’s and the United States’ efforts to establish fixed borders in the aftermath of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. She shows how the river constantly refuses the state’s designs and instrumental aims. The meandering of the river, to me, pointed to how land and its many more-than-human formations defy the ambitions of states, capitalists, and “settler-conquistadors” (to cite Tiffany Lethabo-King) to tame or operationalize their sacred energies. The Sonoran Desert moves—from dry washes that fill with water during monsoons to jumping cholla that latch onto skin or clothing and javelinas that leave behind seeds as they cross borders.

The author, Barbara Sostaita, carries a cross to be planted into the Sonoran desert. Image courtesy of Alex Morelli.

When writing the book, I wanted the prose to honor these movements as well as the movements of people—which unfold alongside and through land. The people I met in the Sonora-Arizona borderlands were constantly on the move (or being moved)—traversing the desert’s underground passages, being smuggled to detention centers, relocating from one humanitarian shelter to another, visiting the sites where migrant remains were found, over and over again. As I suggest in the book, migrants and their collaborators are not fixed in place, and neither are the words on the page. My meandering method points to these detours and precarious itineraries. It honors the exit routes that humans and more-than-human forms of life pursue, their restless and unsettling movements. Meandering is a sacred movement, one that escapes comprehension and exceeds intelligibility.

I’m so grateful that you identified the meandering method as an attempt to seek or pursue relation with the desert. Like my theorization of sanctuary, relation too refers to a practice, not a destination.

I wanted the text to show that I, too, am on the move—as an ethnographer, writer, and migrant. I meander from scene to scene, inviting the reader along as I join humanitarian water drops, plant crosses for migrants, attend my citizenship ceremony, and return to Argentina for the first time in over twenty years. Édouard Glissant refers to relation as a “modern form of the sacred,” as chaotic, unruly, endlessly under construction–“a disorder one can imagine forever” (16, 133). In a sense, my meandering method owes a lot to his understanding of relation and his conceptualization of errantry—as movement that does not and cannot settle, that is circular and ongoing. At points, my chapters dwell on the paradoxes and ambiguities of practices of sanctuary without reaching a definitive conclusion or cohesive argument. I also write about the ethnographic task as one that will always be unfinished. For me, this comes from Glissant and his insistence on relation.

(DL): Thank you. If your meandering method is about relations, then your theoretical framework seems to be about relations as well. I love the idea of sanctuary as practice—could you unpack it for us? Your second chapter—”The Detained”—broke my heart, but I don’t think that was your intention. You theorize sanctuary, through instances of contraband touch in migrant detention centers, as abolitionist care work, but as we see later in the book, sanctuary and care travel with migrants across borders (“Chapter 3: The Deported”), and it is not limited to living people either (“Chapter 4: The Dead”). I guess what I’m asking is to hear more about sanctuary as a practice of care and about your relational theoretical framework. 

(BS): When I began researching this book in 2017, Donald Trump had recently assumed the presidential office, and, in response, organizers across the country (and elsewhere in the Americas) were taking up the tradition of sanctuary. I learned about sanctuary homes and restaurants. I read a press release by Pueblo Sin Fronteras—a group that organizes migrant caravans—demanding Mexico declare itself a “sanctuary country” for migrants traversing its vertical borderlands. And I spoke with activists from the 1980s Sanctuary Movement (including Reverend John Fife), who explained that sanctuary continues to inform the work of organizations like the Tucson Samaritans and No More Deaths. My first questions were: Why this particular tradition? In what ways is sanctuary portable? And then, when I began to hear about the Trump administration targeting groups like No More Deaths—raiding their humanitarian camp in the desert, arresting their volunteers—and about the experiences of migrants who described living in sanctuary as a form of confinement or even incarceration, I started wondering about the limits of this tradition when it is imagined as a fixed place of protection. In the face of widespread surveillance, policing, and militarization and in a context where borders exist as “mobile technologies” (to cite my colleagues Jonathan Inda and Julie Dowling), sanctuary cannot be confined to a stable or singular place.

A section of the border wall along the US-Mexico border. Image courtesy of Alex Morelli.

Instead, I propose that sanctuary is a practice and process—never guaranteed nor settled. María Puig de la Bellacasa is helpful here, describing care as the “concrete work of maintenance,” as work that entails ritual and repetition and involves touch and labor (5). As a practice, sanctuary is emergent and creative, endlessly being made and remade. In the book, I think seriously about the etymology of this practice—which comes from the Latin sanctus, meaning sacred. And though many in religious studies have let go of the binary of the profane and sacred, I find it really useful for thinking about taboos, prohibitions, transgression, and immanence or intimacy. What I find really interesting about the sacred is that it’s kept separate from the profane because of its potential to disturb and unsettle the everyday, and because sacred beings and forces move. They are slippery, contagious, unstable, precarious, and even fickle. Notably, sanctus refers to a place, person, or object that has been made sacred, that has been dedicated, consecrated, and set apart. The sacred must be made, over and over again.

In the chapter you mention, “The Detained,” I consider how migrants confined in detention centers defy prohibitions on touch. I think about touch as sacred–positive and negative, healing and harming, alluring and threatening. I consider how scholars like Émile Durkheim theorize the sacred as contagious, as eager to spread through touch and proximity. There are countless taboos on touch in the prison—even for visitors like me. In the last chapter, “The Dead,” I introduce readers to Álvaro Enciso, who plants crosses for migrants who died attempting the border crossing. He describes his project as one that “defaces” and “disturbs” the desert. For me, sanctuary emerges in these moments when taboos are disrupted, when migrants and other activists transgress prohibitions, even if only momentarily. In this way, I propose that fugitive sanctuary is at odds with law and order, incompatible with charters and petitions. When we try to instrumentalize sanctuary and incorporate it into our world of policy and procedure, we are striving to tame or master a practice that is inherently out of grasp or reach. But sanctuary exceeds us.

Lastly, I don’t think my intention was for the second chapter to break your heart. But it was to invite you to enter into a kind of intimacy with my collaborators. I did want the prose to touch you.

(DL): Yes, it has touched me; indeed, the whole book touched me, and I think it is mainly because of your relationships with your protagonists—Eva, Juana, the dead whose names you recite at the end of chapter 4—and since so much of our conversation has been about relations, I’d like to invite you to reflect on your protagonists and about the relationships you have developed with them during your work on the book. You opened our conversation by saying you see yourself as a kind of medium. I think I could hear your own voice very clearly as I was reading the book, but I also appreciate this notion of the author as a curator or medium. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about balancing story (channeling the voices of your interlocutors) and analysis (bringing in your scholarly lens) in your writing?

(BS): What draws me to ethnography is the capacity for developing relationships with people who not only reaffirm but often challenge my ideas or presumptions. For example, when I first visited Juana at St. Barnabas, I didn’t really expect to hear her describe the violences of sanctuary and how they were felt on her body—the pressure of the ankle monitor squeezing her leg, the lower back pain caused by her stillness and inactivity while confined to the church. I try to show the reader glimpses of moments when other people intervene in my analysis—like Tristan Reader warning me not to “delocate” sanctuary or Panchito chastising me for not taking photographs while conducting fieldwork. The analysis, in that sense, is relational. My scholarly lens emerged alongside the stories people told me and the arguments they themselves formed about their work. And that goes both ways—I know that Álvaro, for example, has shifted some of the language he uses to describe the desert in response to a lunchtime conversation we had about my first chapter and land’s refusals.

We learn from and theorize in conversation with each other. I did often bring in my scholarly analysis—like, once, as we were planting a cross for the dead, Álvaro showed me a cross that migrants had turned into a shrine. While crossing the desert, people had left behind coins, votive candles, and garlic bulbs, likely hoping for safe passage. I told Álvaro that this scene reminded me of what Elaine Peña in Performing Piety calls “devotional labor.” He really appreciated that term, which encouraged me to use it in the book. There were other moments during fieldwork when he said something, like describing his work as desecration, which inspired me to turn to Michael Taussig and his theories of defacement. Álvaro may not have expected me to use that word—desecration—as I did, as a sacred practice (he first saw it as the opposite of sacred), but I really enjoyed chasing these unexpected turns and theoretical meanders.

I saw myself in Álvaro—in his care for language and poetics, in his sense of being in-between, never having fully arrived in the United States yet not identifying with his homeland either. With Eva, though our situations were completely different—she was incarcerated, and I was conducting fieldwork—I understood and even shared her solitude. I met her weeks after moving to Arizona. At the time, I had no friends, family, or colleagues nearby. We kept each other company. Panchito drew me in—magnetic, charming, verbose. Spending time with him in Nogales was like being a celebrity’s groupie, and—as he says in the book—he saw me as another person in need, like the poor and wounded he tends to as a nurse. Distance makes maintaining these relationships very difficult and as I begin work on my next projects, I’ve decided that I won’t begin projects outside of the place where I live moving forward. Relationships demand presence and consistency. But I think (or at least I hope) that, in the relationships I developed in the field, we could all contribute to each other’s lives—to offer each other sanctuary, if only briefly. 

Leave a Comment on Reimagining the Sacred: Dana Lloyd Interviews Barbara Sostaita Array
Barbara Sostaita
Barbara Sostaita (she/ella) is a scholar of religion and global migration, and an Assistant Professor in Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her book, Sanctuary Everywhere: The Fugitive Sacred in the Sonoran Desert (Duke University Press, 2024), colludes with migrants melting the border’s steel bars through excess touch, artists summoning the migrant dead, and activists leaving water in the Sonoran Desert—in defiance of prevention through deterrence, in celebration of life that transgresses walls and bans.
Dana Lloyd
Dana Lloyd is Assistant Professor of Global Interdisciplinary Studies and affiliated faculty at the Center for Peace and Justice Education at Villanova University. She is the author of Land Is Kin: Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Sites (University Press of Kansas, 2024) and co-editor of American Examples: A New Conversation about Religion, volume 3 (University of Alabama Press, 2024).
Global Currents article

The Rising Call to Codify Gender Apartheid: Epistemic Resistance and International Accountability


RAWA protest rally against Taliban in Peshawar (1998). Image via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0

In late 2022, Tamana Zaryab Paryani, an Afghan woman in exile, initiated a hunger strike, demanding that the international community formally recognize gender apartheid as a crime against humanity . This act of defiance embodies the ongoing struggle against the Taliban’s regime that systematically erases women from public life. Her actions, alongside other protests in national and diasporic spaces, continue a legacy of resistance that Afghan women began in the ’90s during the Taliban’s first regime. This transcends mere opposition to physical and political oppression; it’s also a profound form of epistemic resistance, which includes challenging dominant forms of knowledge and producing counter-knowledge to assert their own perspectives.

Despite their hypervisibility in 2001—when the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was justified as a mission to “liberate” Afghan women, these same women’s narratives were ignored during 2019 U.S.-Taliban peace negotiations, and further marginalized under the Taliban’s regime since 2021. Historically, gender rights have been used as symbolic markers of progress in imperial “modernizing” projects, while Afghan women’s voices have often been co-opted to align with broader geopolitical interests. Thus, Afghan women’s lack of epistemic authority—their exclusion from producing and controlling the knowledge about their own situation—remains one of the most glaring injustices. Yet, even under the Taliban’s oppressive regime, Afghan women continue to reclaim their authority through diverse forms of defiance and by creating alternative frameworks to the imperial desire of war-making, namely the call to codify gender apartheid as a crime against humanity under international law.

Addressing the systemic nature of “gender apartheid” demands a comprehensive response that confronts the imperial legacies, inequalities of power, and militarization that sustain this oppression. This post calls for a radical rethinking of advocacy and legal frameworks, one that holds the Taliban and the international powers accountable for the structural forces that continue to shape and impact Afghan women’s lives. It invites rigorous academic inquiry to understand how the term can practically address the root causes of Afghan women’s repression. Without such critical analysis, we risk repeating the cycle of reductive engagement that has consistently failed Afghan women.

The Legacy of “Empowerment” and the Rise of Gender Apartheid: A New Legal Framework

The “success” of “women’s empowerment” in Afghanistan has often been reduced to superficial metrics, serving as symbols of progress within a neoliberal agenda. Feminist scholars like Lila Abu-Lughod critique such approaches, arguing that western discourses frequently impose a monolithic imperialist framework of “modernity” on non-western women, neglecting their complex socio-political and cultural histories. This framing obscures Afghan women’s agency by reducing their struggles to checkbox exercises under the guise of inclusivity.

With the Taliban’s oppressive policies, including the recent Law on the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, banning Afghan women’s voices in public, the widespread violations of Afghan women’s rights have reached a critical juncture. Thus, the term “gender apartheid” has regained traction in national and diasporic circles.

The ‘success’ of ‘women’s empowerment’ in Afghanistan has often been reduced to superficial metrics, serving as symbols of progress within a neoliberal agenda

Modeled after the concept of racial apartheid, the naming of which was crucial in dismantling institutionalized racial oppression in South Africa, “gender apartheid” offers a powerful legal framework for addressing the systemic oppression of individuals based on their gender identities. While existing legal mechanisms like the Rome Statute offer a framework to prosecute gender persecution, its application is often slow and underutilized. Gender apartheid, instead, captures the structural and continuous nature of gendered discrimination—not as isolated acts of persecution but as an organized system that meets the legal threshold of apartheid.

The call to codify gender apartheid has gained significant support from UN experts, international organizations, and recently, the European Parliament, highlighting historical progress in pushing for legal recognition over imperialistic war-making. Theoretically, codifying gender apartheid would trigger a stronger obligation on states, providing them with specific legal tools to fulfill their international commitments on gender discrimination. It would demand greater accountability from the international community, which has defaulted to a policy of inaction in Afghanistan, even as the Taliban regime erodes human rights, particularly those of women.

The notion of apartheid carries a symbolic and political weight, as seen in its application to racial apartheid in South Africa. Apartheid is recognized as a jus cogens norm—a fundamental principle of international law that is non-derogatory. By codifying gender apartheid, the international community could invoke a powerful form of “shame” politics, forcing states to respond to the ongoing violations. States like Iran, Russia, Pakistan, China, and others that have maintained relationships with the Taliban would face increased pressure to align their foreign policies with human rights standards so as not to be seen as complicit with an apartheid regime. This means that recognizing gender apartheid has the potential to create a global social movement that could isolate regimes like the Taliban, preventing the normalization of systematic gender oppression.

Critical Considerations on Codifying Gender Apartheid

While gender apartheid’s recognition offers a transformative framework for addressing systemic oppression, its practical implications warrant careful consideration. Thus, the enthusiasm surrounding this term should be tempered with a critical perspective on its potential limitations:

Gender Apartheid as a “Celebrity Term”

The codification of gender apartheid carries the risk of being reduced to a symbolic gesture within international legal and humanitarian discourse. Feminist scholars critique the commodification of women’s struggles within neoliberal frameworks of development. Here, concepts like “empowerment” and “gender equality” have often been depoliticized and co-opted for imperialist agendas, particularly within the context of the “saving Muslim women” discourse. Historically, this narrative has been used to frame military and political actions as benevolent efforts to liberate women. However, this framing often reinforces colonial attitudes and Orientalist representation of Muslim women.

In this context, the term “gender apartheid” risks becoming yet another “celebrity term”—a label loosely used to attract attention and political capital without addressing the entrenched structural forces perpetuating Afghan women’s oppression. This dynamic reflects the broader feminist critique of projectization, where women’s struggles are repackaged as consumable narratives and development projects for international visibility, serving neoliberal interests while remaining detached from the lived experiences of those they are intended to help.

Instead of bluntly defining Afghan women’s current conditions in yet another colonial term, the movement advocating for gender apartheid’s codification (the movement) must interrogate how the language and frameworks surrounding this term may perpetuate the very power dynamics they seek to challenge. It’s vital to clearly articulate their demands and expected outcomes of this process, ensuring that this concept is grounded in the realities of Afghan women within the country. Its use must also be accompanied by a long-term commitment to addressing the structural conditions of Afghan women’s oppression.

Practical and Legal Challenges of Enforcement

Codifying gender apartheid may face resistance from states unwilling to expand the scope of international human rights law, preventing any addition to their international responsibilities. Practically, gender apartheid’s codification is a long effort with no specific timeframe, due to the normative heavy lifting that it requires. Accordingly, the UN Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan suggests continuing to hold the international community and the Taliban accountable for their responsibilities via any available legal avenues, calling it an “all tools” approach.

Even if gender apartheid is successfully codified in a timely manner, its enforcement presents significant legal and practical challenges. Among others, the ICC, as the institution responsible for adjudicating cases of gender apartheid, has been critiqued for its limited reach and efficacy. Legal scholars have pointed out that the ICC’s focus on prosecuting individuals, rather than addressing systemic violence, limits its ability for structural change.

Freedom for Afghan Women and Girls march, London 2022. Image via Flickr User Steve Eason. CC BY-NC 2.0

Considering that the politics of shame is a critical aspect of the crime of apartheid, it’s essential to assess what additional “shaming” could achieve in the context of the already isolated Taliban regime. Historically, shaming has been a double-edged sword; while it can sometimes catalyze change by highlighting human rights abuses, it can also deepen the ideologies of those in power. The Taliban’s claims of legitimacy through their interpretation of “Islamic traditions”—though viewed as a façade to maintain control—can reinforce their narratives and possibly bolster support. Consequently, increased external pressure may not lead to the meaningful reforms expected, but instead compel the Taliban to double down on their positions, using condemnation as a rallying point to further entrench these ideologies among their “followers.” This dynamic illustrates the complexity of shaming as a strategy, raising critical questions about its practical effectiveness in confronting a regime that can leverage its ideological stance to resist change.

These challenges are compounded by the limitations of international legal mechanisms in addressing the structural conditions giving rise to gender oppression. In the case of gender apartheid, for a meaningful impact to occur, the legal structure and its enforcement need to move beyond symbolic prosecutions and meaningfully address the broader systems of inequality that sustain gender-based oppression. One possible solution is for the movement to focus its advocacy on a more comprehensive effort, thus making clear that international legal efforts should be complemented by policies that address the root causes of gender apartheid, including imperialism, capitalism, economic inequality, militarization, and patriarchal norms.

The Instrumentalization of Gender Apartheid in International Law

The codification of gender apartheid may become instrumentalized within the international legal order. As international law is not a neutral tool but one deeply embedded in historical power relations that can reinforce existing hierarchies, this would raise concerns about the use of international law for purposes other than justice. This critique is central to feminist concerns about how international legal interventions often serve geopolitical interests rather than addressing the root causes of gender oppression.

Legal scholars have critiqued how international law is often instrumentalized by powerful states to advance their own political and economic interests, rather than achieving justice for marginalized groups. They argue that international legal frameworks, including those aimed at protecting women’s rights, are frequently co-opted by hegemonic powers to legitimize military interventions, economic sanctions, or political pressure, often under the guise of humanitarianism. Without careful safeguards, the legal recognition of gender apartheid could be used to selectively exert political pressure aligned with the goals of powerful nations, while overlooking other instances of systemic gender oppression. As seen in international responses to human rights abuses in countries like Saudi Arabia or Iran, there is often inconsistency in how violations of women’s rights are addressed, depending on the strategic value of the state in question.

In the case of gender apartheid, for a meaningful impact to occur, the legal structure and its enforcement need to move beyond symbolic prosecutions and meaningfully address the broader systems of inequality that sustain gender-based oppression.

To avoid such instrumentalizations, it’s crucial to ensure that international legal efforts are grounded in solidarity with Afghan women. This means actively involving diverse groups of Afghan women in the drafting, interpretation, and implementation of legal instruments related to gender apartheid. Furthermore, building coalitions with feminist and resistance movements can help create a more effective front that resists the co-optation of women’s rights for political ends. The analysis of patriarchal systems must engage with transnational and postcolonial feminist frameworks, which highlight how imperialism not only shapes geopolitical landscapes but also perpetuates gender hierarchies. Transnational solidarities should focus on challenging patriarchal structures and the imperialist systems that sustain them, ensuring that legal interventions serve the interests of justice rather than geopolitical strategies. Establishing accountability mechanisms that monitor the application of international law can prevent its misuse, promoting transparency in its enforcement.

A New Era for Afghan Women’s Struggle

The struggles of Afghan women and their diasporic comrades should move beyond mere advocacy for codifying gender apartheid as a crime and encompass a more comprehensive critique that highlights the continuous role of imperial powers in perpetuating Afghanistan’s crisis despite the existence of numerous international legal principles and commitments.

While the Afghan women’s movement has drawn western attention to codifying gender apartheid, this often leads to symbolic collaboration without fundamentally altering geopolitical strategies, like enabling political upheavals for broader strategic interests. Thus, the movement must interrogate the discourse around gender apartheid and clarify its demands and expected outcomes, challenging superficial allyships that ignore deeper geopolitical complexities.

Transnational solidarities should focus on challenging patriarchal structures and the imperialist systems that sustain them, ensuring that legal interventions serve the interests of justice rather than geopolitical strategies.

If the call for codifying gender apartheid leads to further isolation of the Taliban’s regime, ending the international aid, or imposing broad-based sanctions, one must critically assess the impacts on women’s lives inside Afghanistan. Such consequences are likely to exacerbate their suffering under extreme Taliban oppression on a daily basis. Historically, in most cases of isolation and broad-based sanctions, such as with Iran, regimes often survive while the people continue to suffer. The South African regime, often cited as an inspiration, is more of an exception than the rule. While international sanctions were a vital factor in dismantling apartheid, this success was due to a unique confluence of factors. South Africa’s economy was highly integrated into global trade systems, making it particularly vulnerable to sanctions, unlike regimes like the Taliban, which have less dependency on international markets.

Moreover, South Africa’s internal resistance movement, including robust labor unions and grassroots activism, played a pivotal role in sustaining pressure from within, something that many isolated regimes do not experience to the same degree. Additionally, the apartheid regime lacked the same level of strategic regional and international support that the Taliban command. Thus, the Taliban are often insulated from the effects of sanctions, allowing them to persist while the populations suffer the brunt of economic hardships. Therefore, the movement must deeply engage with the historical and geopolitical nuances and consider whether such strategies align with their goals. To move beyond the current status quo, there is a need to foster collaborative spaces with Afghan women, where they can articulate their demands in their own ways and terms, free from the pressure of conforming to colonial expectations, language, and frameworks.

The challenge lies in producing a discourse that does not merely echo reductive modes of Western feminisms and binaries of backward versus progressive, secular versus religious, but instead offers a radical rethinking of what advocacy and solidarity can entail. Thus, it’s essential for the Afghan women’s movement to strategically integrate gender apartheid into a broader, multidimensional advocacy approach. By doing so, the movement can enhance its adaptability, ensuring that it remains effective in its pursuit of meaningful change.

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Tahmina Sobat
Tahmina Sobat is a Ph.D. student in the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies Department at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. She earned her law degree from Herat University in 2015 and later completed an LLM in International Human Rights Law at the University of Notre Dame in 2020. Continuing her academic journey, she earned a second master’s degree in Gender and Women Studies through a Fulbright Scholarship at Minnesota State University, Mankato.

Sobat’s interdisciplinary research centers on transnational feminist theory, epistemic violence, the politics of representation, and peacebuilding. Her dissertation, titled “Puzzling Complicity and Paradoxical Representation: Elite Afghan Women within Feminist Empire,” examines the complexities of representation among elite Afghan women. Her recent publications include: “Afghan Women and the Struggle for Transnational Feminist Solidarity” and “What Did the US War and Exit Do for Afghan Women’s Rights?” published in the Gender and Policy Report at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
Global Currents article

Theological Reflections on Gaza from the Global South


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.

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Kwok Pui Lan
Dr. Kwok Pui Lan was Dean’s Professor of Systematic Theology at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, and a past president of the American Academy of Religion. She has authored and edited numerous books on Asian and Asian American feminist theology, biblical interpretation, and postcolonial criticism. An internationally known theologian, she is the author of The Anglican Tradition from a Postcolonial Perspective; Postcolonial Politics and Theology, and Globalization, Gender, and Peacebuilding. She is the co-editor of The Hong Kong Protests and Political Theology and the editor of Transpacific Political Theology (forthcoming). She received the Lanfranc Award for Education and Scholarship from the Archbishop of Canterbury in 2021.
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After Gaza, Standing Again at Sinai


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.

2 Comments on After Gaza, Standing Again at Sinai Array
Atalia Omer
 Atalia Omer is Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame in the United States. She earned her Ph.D. in Religion, Ethics, and Politics (2008) from the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her research focuses on Israel/Palestine; religion, violence, and peacebuilding; as well as theories and methods in the study of religion. Omer was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, resulting in Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2023). Among other publications, Omer is the author of When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (University of Chicago Press, 2019). She is also a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2015). 
Global Currents article

Christian Zionism as Geopolitics and Public Theology: A Latin American Perspective


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.

Christian Zionism in Latin America Today

In the Latin American political arena, references to Israel have increased significantly in recent decades. Case studies from Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, Guatemala, Mexico, among others provide evidence of this increase. The most emblematic recent case is that of President Javier Milei in Argentina, who claims to be close to Israel and Judaism and uses Jewish biblical references to describe his activism and political discourse. Brazil is another emblematic case, where we see not only the instrumentalization of the Christian Zionist discourse in the words of former President Jair Bolsonaro, but also in the broader cultural and political sphere. For example, there are constant Zionist references in the speeches of evangelical congressmen.

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.

3 Comments on Christian Zionism as Geopolitics and Public Theology: A Latin American Perspective Array
Nicolás Panotto
Nicolás Panotto, Theologian and PhD in Social Sciences. He is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Professor at the Universidad Arturo Prat in Chile and General Director of Otros Cruces (www.otroscruces.org). Panotto is the author of several books and articles in Spanish on the intersection between religions, politics, and post/decolonial studies. In English, he is the editor of Pope Francis in Postcolonial Reality (Borderless Press, 2015) and Indecent Theologians: Marcella Althaus-Reid and the Next Generation of Postcolonial Activists (Borderless Press, 2016) He is also the co-editor with Luis Andrade of Decolonizing Liberation Theologies: Past, Present, and Future (Palgrave, 2023).
Global Currents article

A Letter to the President of Tel Aviv University


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.”

[4] Gleischaltung evokes Hannah Arendt’s critique of German intellectuals for coordinating with the Third Reich. See e.g., Arendt, “What Remains? The Language Remains: A Conversation with Günter Gaus,” in Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, 11.

[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.

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Khaled Furani
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]).