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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.
Global Currents article

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]).
Global Currents article

Marc H. Ellis: A Life of Encounter


The author, Jessica Wong, pictured With Marc Ellis.

I first met Marc Ellis as an undergraduate at Baylor University and, unlike his graduate students, had no idea who he was. I had no knowledge of his scholarship or his standing. I was too ignorant to be impressed or intimidated. To me, Ellis was simply my teacher and mentor. It was only later that I came to realize that this opinionated and somewhat peculiar Jewish man who rode a recumbent bike around his neighborhood and was a fixture of my life at Baylor was also a significant figure within the field of liberation theology.

One common characteristic of liberation theologies is that they are born of particularity. Such theologies arise out of specific times and places to address the particular forms of oppression being experienced by particular people. It is a theology steeped in context. In the work of Latin American theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, the primary context is the struggle of the poor in Latin American who have been disenfranchised to the point of being rendered subhuman. In the work of feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, the primary context is the plight of women, the patriarchal nature of traditional approaches to religion and theology, and how women might claim space for themselves. In the work of Black theologian James Cone, the primary context is the plight of Black Americans within a White-dominated racial economy undergirded by a White Christian imagination. Each of these theologians advocates for more than the liberation of the people occupying these particular contexts, having a more expansive message of freedom embedded within their vision of a redeemed society. What is notable about Marc Ellis’s work, however, is that this capacious and inclusive move toward liberation is not simply an aspect of his theology, it is the very heart of it.

Throughout his career Ellis sought Jewish liberation. Yet, his position moved beyond the claim that the Jewish people are God’s chosen and, therefore, God is with them in their suffering. He believed this to be true, but the liberative message he offered was far more challenging than that. For him, Jewish liberation did not mean deliverance from an external oppressor. Rather, Jewish liberation meant release from the Constantinian complicity of the Jewish state, a political project that has resulted in the domination, displacement, and dehumanization of the Palestinian people.

Driven by fear and a desire for survival that emerged in response to the atrocities of the Holocaust, Ellis believed that the Jewish people have come to idolize their own safety and security at the expense of the authentic and vulnerable relationality to which God has called them. And so, in an effort to secure themselves, Jews have inflicted upon Palestinians the very oppressive strategies from which they have sought to protect themselves. From the ghettoization of the Jews in Nazi Germany to the ghettoization of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank; from the walled Nazi concentration camps to the Israeli West Bank Barrier; from the destruction of Jewish homes to the dispossession of the homes of Palestinians; from the plundering of Jewish assets to the discriminatory regulations that have decimated the livelihood and economy of the Palestinian people—Ellis recognized these parallels with a level of clarity that compelled him to denounce the injustices perpetrated by the State of Israel, a decision that made him particularly unpopular among certain Jewish and Christian leaders who preferred his silence.­­­

For Ellis, Jewish liberation did not mean deliverance from an external oppressor. Rather, Jewish liberation meant release from the Constantinian complicity of the Jewish state.

His critique of Israel, however, was not an indication that Ellis was somehow inauthentically Jewish or antisemitic, as some would claim. On the contrary, it was, in part, his deep connection with the Jewish tradition—with Jewish philosophy and the prophets—that moved him to condemn Israel’s actions. His time meditating on the writings of Jewish philosophers like Martin Buber led him to understand the sacredness of encounter. “All real living is meeting,” Buber writes in I and Thou (11). There is divinity in our authentic connection to one another. Through encounter, we are met by the divine. God “becomes ever nearer, increasingly near to the sphere that lies between beings, to the Kingdom that is hidden in our midst, there between us” (119–20). By encountering another person as Thou, we are met by the ultimate Thou. We are met by God.

This sacredness of meeting was a guiding principle in Ellis’s life. It was this holy encounter that he believed to be missing from the State of Israel’s view and treatment of the Palestinians. Without it, the Jewish people turned a blind eye to the real struggles and suffering of their Palestinian neighbors. And, in this way, they alienated themselves from God. It was from this self-alienation that the Jewish people needed liberation. As such, Ellis’s rebuke of the Israeli government was born not from a lack of care for his own people, but from his deep and abiding love for them.

Rebuke as an expression of love has an important place within the Jewish scriptural tradition. We see it in the prophets’ words of condemnation, warning, and call to repentance and transformation. Prophetic rebuke, while perhaps caustic in tone, is nonetheless an invitation into right relationship with God, often through the restoration of right relationship with others. And so it was with Ellis’s own prophetic speech. Though at times off-putting to those on the receiving end, his words of caution and calling almost always stemmed from a place of love, as they invited the recipient into deeper knowing, more profound connection, and truer faithfulness.

This sacredness of meeting was a guiding principle in Ellis’s life. It was this holy encounter that he believed to be missing from the State of Israel’s view and treatment of the Palestinians.

I remember being called out by Ellis on more than one occasion over the course of our friendship: once for having missed Shabbat dinner at his home, and a second time regarding my attitude toward myself and my identity. As a biracial kid growing up in predominantly White circles in the South, I had learned that whiteness was both normal and preferred. As a Christian growing up in Dallas, I had learned that race didn’t really matter. After all, as the Apostle Paul once wrote, “There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28–29). From this, I had concluded that, if my true identity was in Christ, then my racial identity was inconsequential. And so, I saw myself as White and largely ignored my Chinese identity, perhaps secretly hoping that others would do the same. While I had yet to admit any of this to myself, let alone to Ellis, he somehow saw the truth of my situation and, in that moment, spoke a challenging, prophetic word over my life. He told me that unless I came to know and accept my Chinese identity, I would never truly know myself.

Initially, his words struck me as patently false. Steeped in American individualism’s story of the “self-made man,” I struggled to see how my sense of self could be bound up with a history, family, and culture that, at that time, felt fundamentally foreign to me. Nonetheless, Ellis’s words stayed with me, prompting me to think deeply about the nature of identity beyond individualism. What did it mean to be constituted by people and places from which I had been separated not only geographically, but also linguistically and culturally? What did it mean to be constituted by people whose stories I had not been told? I now wonder whether it was perhaps because of Ellis’s own diasporic identity that he so readily recognized and spoke to the diaspora that I, too, was navigating.

Whether in his writing, his relationship with students, or his routine exchanges, Ellis sought to live a life of encounter. He was a person of presence. Being present was of course, for him, a profoundly spiritual practice that entailed seeing and witnessing. Retiring to Cape Canaveral, Ellis cultivated this practice of presence in his landscape photography, painting, and poetry. Each day, he strived to see, to acknowledge, and to be present with the world, both in its beauty and in its painful loneliness. He chose not to look away from any of it.

He also practiced presence in his relationships. He was someone who loved to joke, was quick to laugh, and refused to take himself too seriously. When Gustavo Gutiérrez visited Baylor, Ellis convinced this world-renown scholar—who, albeit a giant within the field of liberation theology, is a man of decidedly modest height—to hoist himself up into a full-sized pickup truck wearing a Texas-sized cowboy hat. I still remember the photo. In it, Gutiérrez looked like a child trying on his parent’s clothing. He was lifting the brim of the hat so that he could peer out from beneath it and was grinning from ear to ear. Ellis tended to his friendships. He was the kind of person who kept in touch. Even after illness restricted his movement and sapped his energy, he stayed connected and as present as he could with the people in his life.

I was able to speak on the phone with Marc three weeks before he died. We talked about a lot of things: sickness, death, anger, but also love and family. We talked about the beauty of life and fear of the unknown. I told him that I loved him. I told him how much he meant to me. And he told me how thankful he was that we had encountered one another. The influence of Ellis’s life extends beyond his scholarship and prophetic witness. For those of us who knew him, it was his life of authentic encounter that impacted us the most. Marc Ellis encountered us, and in the sacredness of meeting, we were forever changed.

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Jessica Wong
Jessica Wai-Fong Wong is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Azusa Pacific University and works in political and liberation theologies with a focus on race, gender, society, and visual theory. She is an ordained ruling elder in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and holds degrees in Christian theology and ethics from Duke Divinity School and Duke University. She is the author of Disordered: The Holy Icon and Racial Myths (Baylor University Press, 2021) and co-author of the curriculum Lamenting Racism: A Christian Response to Racial Injustice (MennoMedia, 2021). Her current research project—Black Monsters, Yellow Ghosts—considers the racial and sociopolitical dynamics of Asian American invisibility and Black hypervisibility as they function to create docile subjects and maintain established systems of power.
Global Currents article

Memories of Gaza and Memories of Peace


Codex Ephraemi Rescript, in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. This manuscript contained a medieval saint’s life written over text from a Biblical text, which is therefore difficult to decipher. Via Wikimedia Commons.

As a Christian social ethicist, I reflect on the issues of war and peace with an assumption that Christians live in two conflicted understandings of time: linear and palimpsestic. These two perspectives have shaped Christian discourse on God, Jesus, war, peace, and apocalypse. The linear frame sees time as one-directional from the past to the future. In contrast, M. Jacqui Alexander conceptualizes time as “neither vertically accumulated nor horizontally teleological.” Alexander frames time as a palimpsest, “a parchment that has been inscribed two or three times, the previous text having been imperfectly erased and, therefore, remaining still partly visible” (190). A palimpsest brings the past into the present and the future and casts the future into the present and the past. It leads one to scrutinize what has been erased, what has been rewritten on the text, and what traces will remain. War stories and memories move between these two frames of time, evoking and triggering the memories and traumas of different wars. It is based on this conceptualization of temporality that I approach the Israeli war on Gaza, searching for peace in the remains of war ruins. More specifically, in a world where no one knows peace free from war, is it possible to imagine a theology of peace that can sustain Christians of conscience in a firm belief in the God of peace, bring global citizens together in resistance to militarized violence, and renew our creative and strategic skills in building peace?

Memories of War across Time and Space: Gaza and Korea

The escalated war on Gaza is not an isolated, unique event. Instead, as the war has been revealed in the media since October 7, 2023, global spectators have processed it through their (collective) memories and experiences of other wars. In my case, Gaza evokes memories of the Korean War, known as the forgotten war in the United States. The full-blown Korean War broke out in June 1950 and ended in July 1953 when the United States/United Nations and the China-North Korea alliance reached an armistice agreement. The war killed as many as four million people, mostly Korean civilians. Although the Demilitarized Zone and the U.S. military’s presence in South Korea are constant reminders of the ongoing Korean War, I had no direct physical experience of the war. Nonetheless, like many Koreans and Korean Americans, I have emotionally and psychologically experienced the effects of the war because of transgenerational memories and trauma that have been passed on to me.

In the summer of 2012, I visited Nablus in the West Bank of Palestine as part of a political tour group organized by the Green Olive Collective. The tour exposed the participants to realities in the West Bank and the Negev desert. When my group walked through the ruins from the Second Intifada (2000–2005), memories of the Korean War were relayed: bombed buildings, half-fallen walls with bullet holes, and broken armored vehicles. The ruins were confined to a tiny area close to the city center. Although the day tour allowed me to explore the beauty of Palestinian art and culture, after facing the war ruins left by the Israeli military, I realized that I had walked through one of the world’s most militarized zones, if not a war zone. Palestinians have made their lives on the remains of war ruins and continue to constantly be exposed to one militarized episode of violence after another.

Damage in Gaza Strip during October 2023‏‏. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Grace Cho insightfully argues that “the trauma of militarized violence can traverse boundaries of time and space so that the effects of military bombing … can at once be embodied in two seemingly distinct geographical and historical locations,” such as Palestine in 2024 and Korea in 1950 (57–58). Cho’s argument allows me to see the war on Gaza as the reminiscence of the Korean War, or the Korean War as an evocation of a future Gaza. By studying a “one-hundred-year war” against Palestinians, I could investigate the Korean War and its necropolitical logic (politics of death) more critically. As Achille Mbembe argues, war is “a means of achieving sovereignty as much as a way of exercising (its) right to kill” (66). The Korean War allowed the Allied Forces, mainly the U.S. Armed Forces, to exercise their unregulated killing of Korean civilians, regardless of their political affiliations. Subsequently, the war structured a post-war Korean society and caged it in a permanent state of warfare.

“Brutality” may not justly describe the intense level of atrocities done to the collective body of Koreans. Like Palestinians in Gaza, Koreans experienced “fire and fury” seventy-four years ago. U.S. airstrikes and napalm bombings wreaked havoc on major cities in North Korea, such as Pyongyang, Sinuiju, Wonsan, and Hamheung. These cities had no standing buildings left at the end of the Korean War. The secret U.S. military files declassified in the early 2000s suggest that the U.S. armed forces knowingly killed civilians, including women, children, and refugees, even in the southern Korean peninsula. They justified these killings with the logic of preventing possible insurgencies by communists disguised among refugees or hiding in villages (aka “human shields”). The U.S. military considered all Koreans as (potential) communist enemies to be eliminated. A similar logic is manifested in Gaza. Suppose that mutilated, killed, and burnt bodies and towns during the Korean War illustrated the U.S.-led fear and hatred of dehumanized communists while the collective Korean body was equated with communism. In that case, Palestinians’ debilitated bodies and devastated Gaza City, Khan Yunis, and Rafat are equated with religiously motivated terrorists by the Israeli government and its global allies.

War Logic

The present moment of the war on Gaza is accessible through traces of the Korean War because of not only the intensity of militarized violence but also the imperial logic behind the war and sovereignty’s impromptu response to armed violence. Indeed, like the U.S. Air Forces in the Korean War, the Israeli airstrikes and saturated bombing on every part of Gaza debilitated Palestinian civilians and their schools, homes, houses of worship, and hospitals. As Sharon Welch argues, “Cruelty can be intoxicating,” and, therefore, “the use of violence, even for noble ends, can spark excessive violence” (38). Images from Gaza since October 7, 2023, resonate with the shock doctrine used in many wars, such as those in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Pacific Gulf, Iraq, and more.

The genocidal aspects of the said wars are linked with colonial history in those regions and, more specifically, racial, cultural, and religious prejudices against formerly colonized people of color or colonizers’ sense of moral superiority. According to Jodi Kim, like the war in Vietnam, the Korean War could have been seen as a newly emancipated third world country’s anticolonial nationalist conflict; instead, the United States hijacked the war to consolidate its power in Asia Pacific, interpreting the war as part of communist attacks on the free capitalist world. Subsequently, the Korean War would enable the United States to intervene in various wars in a post-colonial world based on its geopolitical interests. Similarly, Israel and the United States have portrayed Palestinians’ various violent and nonviolent endeavors to reclaim their self-governance and sovereignty as religiously motivated terrorist attacks against liberal democratic states.

Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) from the South Korean side. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The war on Gaza has effaced memories of nonviolent peacemaking, making Palestinians, Jews of conscience, and global citizens in solidarity with Palestinians irrelevant in Israeli–Palestinian relations. For this reason, I encounter the ghosts of the Korean War in Gaza. Although the war on Gaza does not identically align with the Korean War, they share the historical roots of the colonial and Cold War logic and the prioritization of U.S.-centered international security over human security. The Korean War and the Nakba erupted in the global transition from territorial colonialism to neo-colonialism. More than seven decades later, Gaza still demonstrates the tenacity of territorial colonialism; the contemporary Korean peninsula meanwhile is marred with competition and conflict augmented by neocolonial empires (i.e., U.S., Japan, China, and Russia) and sub-empires (i.e., South Korea).

A Theological Reflection on Time: Memories of War and Peace

The logic of war relies on linear thinking about time: the beginning, the middle, and the end, the latter of which creates a clean slate for a new beginning. This logic aligns with the ideology of Christian triumphalism that depicts Jesus Christ as the mighty warrior who will accomplish the ultimate victory over evil and end human history. Christian triumphalism is an apocalyptic and Manichean vision that is shared among many evangelicals who see this world as a constant battlefield. For these Christians, violence is necessary and even holy because it eradicates evil and makes possible the creation of a new world. Christian triumphalist ideology interprets the death and resurrection of Jesus as a military tactic to win over evil. Emilie Townes points out the historical infusion of Christian triumphalism in American imperial desire. If the United States were called to become a new Jerusalem, City on the Hill, its theo-political responsibility would destroy one evil after another until the final battle. Christian triumphalism has been alive for many years in U.S. domestic and foreign policies. For instance, the United States justified the Korean War as a means to defeat “godless communism,” just as U.S. military campaigns in the Middle East often invoked the name of a Christian god.

Whenever militarized violence erupts, the linear time frame recalls past episodes of violence. Yet, memories of war and only partially erased stories of massacres and genocide constantly haunt linearly remembered war stories. Within this linear frame, peace is imagined only following war, violence, and killing. As a result, peace is often defined as an absence of armed conflict (negative peace) or as attainable only through military power. In a palimpsestic time, however, peace is always alive, creating multiple meeting points for past, present, and future peace activists. God’s time is palimpsestic, just as the name of Jesus Christ is invoked at the Eucharistic table, where the living and the dead are all invited, sharing meals in solidarity to realize God’s peace and justice or paradise on earth. The peace of Christ at the Eucharist is manifested through sharing bread and wine rather than through bloody crucifixion in the hands of the Roman Empire.

Memories of war and only partially erased stories of massacres and genocide constantly haunt linearly remembered war stories. Within this linear frame, peace is imagined only following war, violence, and killing.

A palimpsestic approach traces peace as it is embodied and practiced by ordinary people who have left cracks in the imperial history of war. Palestinian Christian activists such as Jean Zaru illuminate nonviolent peacemaking as an embodied practice rather than a theory, principle, or noble idea. Zaru interweaves her multiple social identities of being an Arab, Palestinian, Quaker, and a woman with practicing nonviolence as a practical way of everyday living. Her aim is to achieve justice and peace without losing the practitioner’s integrity. Memories of Gaza are not simply about killed, mutilated, and debilitated bodies of Palestinian women, men, and children but also their persistent resistance to Israel’s militarized violence.

Different war stories should be read together critically, comparatively, and relationally. By doing that, we can interrogate the complexities of militarized violence and the banality of evil. Peace is never erased from human history but is often hidden and palimpsestic. Even if peace activism is documented, peace activists’ embodied spirituality, steadfastness, and imagination cannot be captured in written documents. This embodied peace only remains in our memories, which can be accessible only when we consciously embody it. If we can ever talk about a theology of peace in Gaza and in Korea, this theology is grounded not in the remains of the war ruins but in the palimpsest of peace.

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Keunjoo Christine Pae
Keunjoo Christine Pae is professor of religion/ethics and women's and gender studies and chair of the Religion Department at Denison University, Granville, Ohio. As a Christian social ethicist, she specializes in transnational feminist ethics, ethics of peace and war, spiritual activism, sexual ethics, and Asian/Asian American feminist theologies. Many of her publications take U.S. military prostitution in South Korea as a critical site for producing feminist knowledge concerning militarized violence, faith-based popular resistance, and a theology of peace. She has authored A Transpacific Imagination of Theology, Ethics, and Spiritual Activism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) and edited with Boyung Lee, Embodying Antiracist Christianity: Asian American Theological Resources for Just Racial Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Her edited volume with Kathleen Talvacchia, Searching for the Future in the Past: Renewing Feminist Theological Voices, is forthcoming from T&T Clark (2024). 
Global Currents article

The Dawn of A New Era: What Lies Ahead For Bangladesh’s Youth?

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On August 5, 2024  Students cheering the victory at the Raju sculpture at Dhaka University area after the fall of Sheikh Hasina. Photo courtesy of Sudeepto Salam. Used with permission.

Bangladesh stands at a crossroads, experiencing what many call a “second liberation” after the ignominious exit of Sheikh Hasina, its long-serving ruler. Hasina’s 16-year authoritarian streak ended abruptly in August 2024 after a month of student-led protests triggered by a non-partisan resistance against quota reforms for government jobs. These protests have now led to the formation of an interim government headed by Nobel Laureate Dr. Muhammad Yunus. This new administration faces the challenge of guiding Bangladesh towards better governance and participatory elections, although no election timetable has been set.

As Bangladesh transitions from autocracy to popular governance, it faces numerous political, social, economic, and legal challenges. Yet, many Bangladeshi youth remain cautiously optimistic about this moment’s potential to build a better future. These street-hardened young men and women, who often bore the brunt of Hasina’s oppressive regime, are now poised to create a system that prioritizes human dignity, equality, and fundamental rights—marking a sharp break from repression, corruption, and nepotism of the past.

The Bangladeshi youth have every reason to be hopeful. Their country, with the world’s eighth-largest population, also boasts the seventh-largest youth demographic globally. This newfound zeal for active participation in social, political, and economic processes empowers them to drive democratic reform, social justice, and economic stability. Bangladesh’s students have initiated a successful revolution, drawing lessons from movements like the 2011 Arab Spring. Now, its administrators must learn from the failures of those past movements to ensure lasting change.

Reasons for Hope

In a recent address to the nation, Professor Yunus placed renewed trust in Bangladesh’s youth. He and his team of advisors seem to recognize the critical role these young people will play in rebuilding the country and driving proposed reforms. If there was ever a time for Bangladesh to affirm the power of its own people over foreign or capitalist influences, it is now. Fulfilling these promises may also require drafting a new constitution—a demand gaining traction among legal experts and intellectuals. Many Bangladeshis believe that the 1972 constitution, tarnished by opportunistic amendments, no longer reflects the aspiration of the Bangladeshi people or adequately safeguards their rights.

On August 4, 2024 students and others took to the streets in Dhaka to demand the resignation of Sheikh Hasina. Image courtesy of Kaler Kantho. Used with permission.

Bangladesh’s recent experiences provide valuable insights for politicians, policymakers, rights advocates, and scholars of Islamic politics. With a population of 171 million, 91% of whom are Muslim, Islamic political parties have wielded notable influence since the 1990s, when the country began its transition into democracy. Despite this influence, electoral politics have been largely dominated by two secular centrist blocs—the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and the Awami League. During this period, support for Islamic parties ranged between 5% and 15%, with Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) historically leading the Islamic political bloc, while Hefazat-e-Islam (HI) emerged later as a pressure group, closely supported by madrasa students and teachers.

Islamic parties in Bangladesh faced challenges even before Sheikh Hasina’s return to power in 2009. Frequently overshadowed by the two dominant political parties, they struggled to balance religious and democratic ideals, often failing to find a viable middle path. When Hasina returned to power in 2009, she exploited this situation by separating secular and religious factions within the opposition and implemented a divide-and-rule strategy to weaken them. She frequently branded her adversaries as extremists, despite their status as legally registered political parties within an electoral democracy.

The Impact of Hasina’s Authoritarian Rule

Sheikh Hasina’s administration systematically targeted and prosecuted both BNP and JI leaders after 2009, with a particular focus on JI. Between 2012 and 2014, the administration used the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) to neutralize JI’s leadership, handing down death sentences that were widely criticized as politically motivated. The BNP, then JI’s coalition partner, also suffered, with one of its former members of parliament executed by the tribunal. Other Islamic parties were similarly targeted. In May 2013, Sheikh Hasina’s security forces violently dispersed a Hefazat-e-Islam sit-in using live ammunition, resulting in numerous fatalities. Human Rights Watch reported that at least 150 people were killed by security forces in Bangladesh between January and May 2013 alone.

On August 2, 2024, students in the High Court Area of Dhaka demanded the resignation of Sheikh Hasina with a single-point agenda. Photo courtesy of Sudeepto Salam. Used with permission.

A particularly dark episode during Hasina’s tenure was the 2009 Border Guards Bangladesh (formerly Bangladesh Rifles, or BDR) massacre, in which 74 people, including 57 army officers, were killed. BDR soldiers launched a brutal assault on army officers and their families at their headquarters in Pilkhana, Dhaka, resulting in extensive casualties. The violence persisted for over 48 hours, with minimal intervention from the Hasina government. Instead of coordinating rescue operations with military officials, Hasina and her advisors opted to negotiate with a faction of the BDR personnel. Moreover, her decision to grant a general amnesty during the crisis allowed many perpetrators to escape, further exacerbating the situation. This incident significantly eroded the army’s trust in Hasina and her party.

Under Hasina’s rule, Bangladesh experienced a troubling culture of impunity, characterized by judicial murders and enforced disappearances. Since 2009, security forces have been implicated in over 600 enforced disappearances, with only around 100 individuals returned alive, and some detainees remained missing for years. Two recent cases highlight this pattern—a Supreme Court lawyer and a retired Brigadier General, both sons of former JI leaders, were abducted by plainclothes police in 2016 and only released in 2024, following Hasina’s departure.

How the Youth Revolt Took Shape

The current generation of Bangladeshi youth, who never experienced a free and fair election, were frustrated by high unemployment and an inequitable quota system in government jobs. As of 2024, 56% of these positions were filled based on quotas rather than merit, with nearly 30% reserved for descendants of freedom fighters—a small segment of the population. University students were particularly aggrieved by allegations that Hasina’s party officials exploited these positions for personal and political gain. Additionally, an executive order from 2018 abolishing the quota system was overturned by a High Court ruling in June 2024, leading students to question Hasina’s sincerity on the issue. In March 2024, the Dhaka University administration prohibited students from holding a Qur’an recitation ceremony, obstructing their religious practices. This led to increasing frustration among the students.

On August 5, 2024 people entered the premises of the Bangladesh National Parliament House. Dhaka, Bangladesh. Photo courtesy of Kaler Kantho. Used with permission.

The student-led protests that evolved into a nationwide civil disobedience campaign in Bangladesh offer valuable lessons for global nonviolent resistance. The movement was notable for its nonpartisan and inclusive approach, with leaders focusing on solidarity around common issues. The protesters were deliberate in avoiding any religious motivations for their demands, contrasting sharply with attempts by Hasina’s administration and allies to portray the revolt as a conservative Islamist movement against a secular state, blaming Jamaat-e-Islami for the unrest. Hours before her abdication, Hasina ordered a ban on JI and its student wing, Islami Chhatra Shibir, without providing specific allegations. In an interview, Syeda Rizwana Hasan, a current advisor to the interim government, praised the movement’s broad-based support, noting that it encompassed students from diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds:

This [was] not a Muslim students-led movement; it was a movement that had students from the Hindu community, Christian community, and indigenous people.

The student leaders demonstrated a keen understanding of the broader national context and carefully designed their protest. Despite pressures to call for Sheikh Hasina’s resignation, they initially focused on demanding that she fulfill her prior commitments. Only after seeing widespread popular support did they escalate their demands. As one young female activist aptly captured the prevailing sentiment:

There is no way we can go back [to the status quo]; the police may be chasing us now, but it is freedom that lies ahead.

The strategic acumen of the student leaders was clear as they maintained pressure despite setbacks. In late July, when six top leaders were detained and forced to halt the protests abruptly, the next tier of leaders quickly stepped in to continue the demonstrations until the first group was released. Capitalizing on this momentum, they announced a “Long March to Dhaka,” originally planned for August 6 but moved to August 5 in anticipation of victory. Hasina’s security forces struggled to keep up, and the Army, which had supported the police with live ammunition against protesters, eventually withdrew and informed Hasina that soldiers would no longer enforce the curfew. This shift provided the unarmed students and protesters with the critical respite they needed.

Looking to Bangladesh’s Future

In the wake of Hasina’s downfall, questions have emerged about why the regime failed to foresee its collapse. Even Indian intelligence was caught off guard by the erosion of Hasina’s control over her security forces and the shifting political dynamics in Bangladesh. For those who did not closely follow the youth movement or were disillusioned by the perceived lack of social commitment among Gen Z, doubts remain about the true catalysts of this revolution. How did Bangladeshi youth manage to overcome dysfunctional politics, a near-silenced civil society, and widespread fear to shape their destiny? Was religion a factor? Were foreign influences involved? In this piece, we have argued that the student leaders emphasized a political vision centered on life, dignity, and economic justice rather than sectarian religious goals. Beyond that, we will now explore the impact of another significant factor: India’s outsized role in Bangladeshi politics.

In analyzing the dynamics of the revolution, foreign factors, particularly India’s support for Hasina, emerge as a crucial element. Many Bangladeshi youth viewed Hasina as a symbol of Indian dominance and sought to assert their nation’s independence. While their revolution was primarily driven by demands for employment, freedom of expression, and the right to protest, it was also fueled by a resolve to combat the corruption linked to India’s steadfast backing of Hasina’s regime. Both the BJP and Congress in India backed Hasina’s Awami League, largely disregarding the significant support for the BNP. Additionally, the youth were keenly aware of India’s role in endorsing and providing diplomatic cover to three contentious national elections in Bangladesh —2014, 2018, and 2024—two of which were boycotted by the main opposition and all of which were widely criticized as fraudulent.

Despite these external factors, it was the Bangladeshi youth who were the true driving force behind this revolution. Initially led by students from both private and public universities, the movement quickly grew to include young people from across the country and diverse socio-political backgrounds. United, these youth fearlessly engaged in a struggle rooted in opposition to the quota system, in whose undoing  they found the seeds of their country’s freedom.

On August 8, 2024 Nobel laureate Dr. Muhammad Yunus took the oath as the head of the interim government at Bangabhaban. Photo courtesy of Kaler Kantho. Used with permission.

Prapti Taposhi, a student activist, succinctly captures the stakes: “With great powers comes great responsibility.” The interim government, now including two student advisors, faces the formidable task of navigating deep political divisions and stabilizing the nation. Key challenges include addressing systemic corruption, restructuring institutions, and ensuring that the revolution’s gains lead to a more just and equitable Bangladesh. Student leaders have called for a thorough overhaul of the political system, demanding accountability from future administrations. Given Hasina’s extensive control over state institutions—including the judiciary, bureaucracy, police, and military—meaningful reform will likely require a thorough re-evaluation of the administrative apparatus, potentially involving the removal of Hasina’s appointees. For Bangladesh, anything less may prove inadequate.

The military’s top brass have so far aligned with the new government’s efforts, while the role of India, the regional hegemon, remains uncertain. The Indian government is expected to adopt a cautious yet strategic approach in its dealings with Bangladesh in the coming months, as indicated by recent comments from the Indian Prime Minister. Additionally, the Bangladeshi government may request India’s extradition of Sheikh Hasina, who faces impending murder charges. Despite the challenges ahead, Bangladesh appears to have weathered a dramatic political storm, thanks to its guardian youth. One hopes that these youth will also steer the country to safety.

4 Comments on The Dawn of A New Era: What Lies Ahead For Bangladesh’s Youth? Array
Mohammed Boshir Uddin
Mohammed Boshir Uddin is a journalist and educator based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He holds graduate degrees in theology and social work from Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet. He is also a participant in the University of Notre Dame's Madrasa Discourse Program. Currently, Bashir serves as a Sub Editor at Kaler Kantha, a national newspaper based in Dhaka. In addition, he teaches and coordinates curriculum for Darul Arqam, a premium Bangladeshi institution affiliated with Al Azhar University in Egypt. Bashir’s debut book, Master O Kata Tarer Golpo, was published in 2017, and his upcoming book, Partition, Independence, and Ulama of India, is set to be released in 2025.
Helal Mohammed Khan
Helal Mohammed Khan is a Lecturer of Justice and Peace Studies at Georgetown University. He earned his Ph.D. in Peace Studies and Anthropology from the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, where he also served as a Postdoctoral Teaching Scholar at the Center for Social Concerns. Helal holds graduate degrees in Islamic & Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Edinburgh (UK), Social & Cultural Anthropology from the University of Leuven (Belgium), and Defence Studies from Bangladesh’s National University. Helal's doctoral research focused on the Rohingya refugees from Myanmar who resettled in the American cities of Chicago, Milwaukee, and Fort Wayne. He is currently working on a book project provisionally titled “The Abling Refugee and Regimes of Cooperation: The Burmese Rohingya in the American Midwest.”
Global Currents article

Marc H. Ellis: Doing the Impossible


War – 10/9/2023 (first in the series) by Marc H. Ellis. Used with permission.

For the eight months prior to Marc Ellis’s death on June 8, 2024, the war in Gaza had been raging. Though cancer ravaged his body, he continued to post on Facebook before he felt too weak to do so. His posts described his disgust and lament over the war, his reflections on life and death, his illness and treatment, and the dreams he had. Sometimes, they were like a long stream of consciousness. After Israel began bombing the Gaza Strip, Ellis also documented his responses to the war through painting. These posts had just one word, “war,” and the date with the accompanying painting below. He took up photography and painting during his later years. I imagine that when words failed, only art and the canvas could express the palimpsest of his moods and emotions.

As a Jew growing up in the United States, Ellis took up the plight of Palestinians and developed a Jewish liberation theology in solidarity with them. He argued that Jewish liberation could not be achieved without the liberation of Palestinians. For him, Jews cannot use the painful history of the Holocaust to justify the displacement, dispossession, killing, and harassment of another people.

It is a pity that Ellis did not live to see the liberation of Palestinians, but instead witnessed Gaza’s history taking a dark turn. His persistence and dedication to a cause that cannot be achieved in his lifetime reminds me of a Chinese saying, “知其不可為而為之” (Do something even though one knows it is impossible). This saying was originally used to describe Confucius, who persisted in persuading society to accept his moral values, even though he knew it was futile. Later, it was used to mean that when one decides to do something, one should consider whether it is right or wrong, not possible or impossible. One may not achieve the goal, but the process matters. One acts according to one’s conscience, though one may not succeed. Ellis worked with Jews of Conscience, and his decades of speaking truth to power inspired postcolonial theologians who fought for noble but distant goals.

War – 3/31/24 (Easter Sunday) by Marc H. Ellis. Used with permission.

I first met Ellis when he delivered a lecture on the day of Yom Kippur in 1991 at Union Theological Seminary. He spoke about his Jewish upbringing and explained his Jewish liberation theology. I remember leaving the lecture hall admiring his courage to speak truth to power. I had renewed respect for the Jewish tradition, which has continuously raised prophets who speak to the human condition. Jewish prophets offered wisdom and solace when the people were weak and oppressed, and caution and admonition when they had gained power but deviated from God’s commandment for justice.

A few years after I listened to Ellis, I began to study postcolonial thought because Hong Kong, where I was born and grew up, was going to be returned from the British to the Chinese in 1997. Some of my reflections and writings have been published in Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology and other works. I argued that theology in the past centuries has been impacted by modernity/coloniality, and that an essential task facing theology is to decolonize the mind and free Christianity from colonizing bias and structures.

Although Ellis did not identify himself as a postcolonial theologian, his thoughts contributed to the study of religion and empire, dispossession, diaspora, exile, the global prophetic, and interreligious solidarity—themes that postcolonial scholars care about. He spoke highly of the work of Edward Said, a Palestinian-American pioneer in postcolonial theory. Ellis wrote, “Said functioned as a contemporary prophet for Jews, warning us that our newfound power has become a form of idolatry” (139). He also contributed to a volume celebrating Said’s legacy of emancipation and representation. In turn, Said affirmed Ellis’s work and appreciated his activism for Palestinians.

Said argued that Palestinians have the power and right to narrate their own stories because many of the reports and writings on Palestinian people, culture, and history are biased and skewed. In a certain sense, much of Ellis’s published work, commentaries, Facebook posts, and paintings are attempts to claim the power to narrate an alternative understanding of Jewish identity, history, and theology that is different from Zionism and collusion with the State of Israel. His fidelity to the prophetic tradition of Judaism and his outspoken stance made him a target of the Jewish establishment. He became an exile in his own community. Like the prophets of old who were rejected—Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel—many Jewish people did not accept Ellis.

His fidelity to the prophetic tradition of Judaism and his outspoken stance made him a target of the Jewish establishment. He became an exile in his own community.

As a postcolonial theologian, I admired most his courage to attack what he coined “Constantinian Judaism.” Postcolonial and decolonial scholars and theologians have challenged the ways Constantinian Christianity has colluded with colonialism, imperial expansion, White supremacy, genocide, and the plunder of the earth. Ellis insisted that the collusion with state power is not limited to Christianity, for other religious traditions are not immune. Thus, there is Constantinian Judaism, Constantinian Islam, and so forth. He rejected the equation of Judaism with Zionism and challenged the view that if one does not support the policies of the State of Israel, one is antisemitic.

Ellis’s theological and political analysis provides methodological insights that are helpful for postcolonial theologians. He drank deep in the well of his Jewish tradition. He searched broadly for wisdom and inspiration from the Torah and other parts of scripture. He dialogued and debated with his teachers, such as Richard Rubenstein. He interrogated the works of Jewish luminaries—Ellie Wiesel, Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Hannah Arendt, and Emmanuel Levinas—to answer the question, “Are Jews destined to become conquerors and oppressors? Or, with our history in mind, can we change directions?” (11). Ecumenical in his thinking, Ellis read broadly outside the Jewish tradition and consulted the works of Latin American theology, feminist theology, Black theology, and other global theological movements. He demonstrated that those who are prophets withing their tradition and hence marginalized and in exile in their communities have much to learn from one another and with which to support one another.

Ellis rejected the equation of Judaism with Zionism and challenged the view that if one does not support the policies of the State of Israel, one is antisemitic.

Ellis shared the postcolonial position that identities are not rigid and should not be constructed in static and binary ways. The relationship between the self and the Other is fluidly constructed according to changing political and social situations. A binary understanding of colonizers and colonized, oppressors and oppressed, White and colored, masculine and feminine, and Israelis and Palestinians hardens the minds and closes off possibilities for solidarity. An identity in flux allows adaptations to new situations and opens to future possibilities.

Kwok Pui Lan with Marc H. Ellis. Photo courtesy of the author.

Even when hope seems impossible, one practices defiance and daily acts of resistance. Ellis was constantly on the move: jotting down his thoughts on napkins, envelopes, and scraps of paper, writing journals, using social media to express his take on current events, writing voluminously, traveling to lecture around the world, responding to his critics, passing his legacy on to his sons, keeping Sabbath, studying the Torah, meeting visitors, painting, answering emails and requests, and visiting his “Chapel of Love” in nature near his beloved beach.

Ellis’s unfinished work will be carried on by his students and others who have learned and been touched by his life, scholarship, and activism. Confucius reportedly had seventy-two students who mastered his thought and helped to develop the Confucian tradition. I am certain Ellis has more students and admirers in the internet age who will continue to follow his model and do the impossible. His student Santiago Slabodsky learned from him about being a public intellectual and taking risks. He wrote, “Dr. Ellis was one of the intellectuals who was able to sustain a deep, audacious, and indefatigable commitment to structural critique and true care for the individual human beings he encountered.” Jessica Wai-Fong Wong, an undergraduate student who took Ellis’s class, said that Ellis’s teaching and prompting helped her confront the idolatry of Whiteness. “Marc Ellis is the first prophetic voice to challenge the hold that whiteness had over my heart and my thoroughly racialized theo-political imagination” (49). As Ellis had helped her, she now tries to debunk the White mythologies in her students’ minds.

Even when he was dying, Ellis did not believe history is destiny, for it is open to change, though sometimes slower than we have hoped. Reflecting on the aftermath of October 7 in early spring of 2024, Ellis concluded his blog with the following: “History is open. It varies between nightmare and closeness. One never knows when a path forward will open. Those who want it closed will work toward that end. Those who seek an opening must continue on. It is our fidelity that we must pursue, with others. It is the only path we have.”

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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.
Global Currents article

Breaking With Formation: The Jew as Reactionary in American Media


“Not in My Name” poster held during a protest the American Israel Public Affairs Committee annual meeting in Washington DC, March 26, 2017. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

When Kamala Harris nominated Tim Walz for vice president, the New York Times ran a curious headline: “Harris’ Choice of Walz Over Shapiro Mollifies the Left but Misses a Chance to Reassure Jews.” As a headline (later slightly altered), it less reports on the news than it puts forward a telling chain of significations and oppositions. Why would Jewish voters need reassurance from Democrats? Are American Jews part of the left wing of the Democratic Party, or its opposition? What conflict is there between the Democratic Party’s left and the Jewish community? In short, in a sentence in which the opposition to “left” should be “right” or perhaps “center,” the word “Jew” has instead been substituted.

In his lecture “Old and New Identities,” Stuart Hall makes the observation that one has to be “positioned somewhere in order to speak” (72). The construction of identities is not only based in one’s history or communal belonging, but also in politics and ideology. Hall charts the decline of “class based” identities in the west and the decline of socialist movements alongside the rise of pan-African identities in the Caribbean such as “Blackness” as part of the global decolonial movements (75). In that new category, Hall suggests, he was called upon in his adulthood as very different kind of subject than he was in his youth in Jamaica.

Something rather similar, if also inverted, has been taking place within the category of “Jewishness” in the last several decades in the west. While “Jewishness,” at least since the advent of Christianity, has been constituted by a figural meaning beyond its halachic definition (which defines Jewish identity as being a member of the Jewish religion and/or a descendent of a Jewish mother), its meaning at least since the 19th century had been for a century rather stable. The Dreyfus Affair may be remembered as the beginning of modern political antisemitism; it is also marks one beginning of late 19th and early 20th century identity politics.

As historian Stephen Wilson pointed out, the Dreyfus trial was not immediately perceived as political. It was only after Emile Zola and several other prominent French intellectuals came out in defense of the Jewish artillery officer that socialist parties and liberals took up Dreyfus’s case as a cause. In response, the Right mobilized a populist campaign of anti-Jewish pogroms and street battles. As the French writer and socialite Baroness Steinheil commented, the trial “is no longer between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards, but between the Republic and enemies of the Republic, between radicals and socialists on one hand, and Royalists and ‘anti-Semites’ on the other” (102). That Dreyfus himself was neither a radical nor a reactionary mattered very little: he and his “identity” had been abstracted, or perhaps conscripted, into an ideology: “antisemitism” was now an explicitly political conflict, taken up by the Right and the Left on opposite sides, for the first time European history.

As is well known, the association of Jews and the Left long precedes Dreyfus, going at least as far back as the French Revolution. After the revolution, the new government recognized Jews as full citizens, a first for a European state. And of course, long after the Dreyfus Affair, Jews themselves embraced, if not liberalism, radicalism, with a large and vibrant Jewish presence in the American socialist and labor movements from late 19th century to the Cold War, along with over-representations of Jews in the Bolshevik Revolution and in left parties in South Africa, Argentina, and Brazil.

Indeed, after the Enlightenment began the dominant antisemitic image of the Jew was transformed from a Christ-killer to a secular revolutionary: one who bears the perversions of modernity, whether in the form of global capitalism or communism. According to Paul Hanebrink, the imagery of the Judeo-Bolshevik often simply translated Christian iconography of the Jewish devil to a secular force of social evil: for instance, in the anti-communist propaganda poster featuring a satanic, red-fleshed Leon Trotsky on top of a mountain of skulls. The Jewish financier and the Jewish communist both embody and concretize the abstractions of capitalism and state management together.

One can still see such lineages in the post-war United States. Jews who are less than two-percent of the U.S. population were nonetheless two-thirds of those questioned in the 1952 McCarthy hearings—to say nothing of the fate of the Rosenbergs. And of course, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s rantings about Rothschild space lasers and Tucker Carlson’s claim that George Soros finances migrant “invasions” into the U.S. are variants on this theme.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, separated by heavy wire screen as they leave U.S. Court House after being found guilty by jury. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Since the early 1970s however, there has been a steady campaign led by key organizations in the putatively liberal Jewish establishment to remake the concept of antisemitism and by extension, Jewish identity. In 1974, Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein of the ADL issued its opening salvo in what would become a decades long attempt by the Jewish establishment to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Their argument in the influential The New Antisemitism (1974) had two parts: the first, that Israel is “the collective Jew,” in Antony Lerman’s phrasing, a representative of the Jewish people concretized into a state. Rather than view Israel as a military power and client of the world’s first truly global hegemon, the United States, Israel was framed as a schlemiel among nations: a target for the unquenched rage the world still bares against Jews. And perhaps more insidious still, The New Antisemitism made a subtle but important substitution: the Jewish state was now a figure for the global Jewish people; indeed, the former subsumed the latter.

Rather than view Israel as a military power and client of the world’s first truly global hegemon, the United States, Israel was framed as a schlemiel among nations: a target for the unquenched rage the world still bares against Jews.

It’s important to note how much of a change the framing was: rather than understand the foundation of Israel as a conflict over land or geopolitical power, Forster and Epstein framed it as a question of Jewish identity. Israeli wars, including against the British, the 1948 and 1956 Arab-Israeli Wars, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine’s indigenous inhabitants were historically framed as political questions over national identity, land, and citizenship. When Hannah Arendt wrote “Zionism Reconsidered” in 1944, she articulated the conflict as between the “Arab peoples” and European settlers—not antisemites against Jews (344). Likewise, there have been attempts by Netanyahu to retroactively blame Jerusalem’s grand mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini for the Holocaust. Such claims are not uttered because they are believable, but because they fit an uncomfortable past into a new framework.

While the association of antisemitism and anti-Zionism is not new and is no longer news, with everyone from Jewish university presidents to anti-Zionist students to politicians and intellectuals smeared with the term for their criticism of Israel, such a construction has not only changed the discourse around Zionism, it has dramatically changed who and what is considered legibly Jewish, and thus what Jewishness has come to mean.

Perhaps most famously, the attack on Jeremy Corbyn while he was leader of the Labour Party in Britain not only targeted Corbyn as an antisemite, but also mobilized a new definition of Jewishness as a collective interest. This campaign denied Corbyn elected office; as importantly it reframed Jewish interest: Jews are supporters of the status quo and enemies of the Left. That this construction was primarily disseminated by non-Jewish activists and media personnel did not matter: the Jew as anti-communist and upholder of Western (neo)liberalism was complete.

Jeremy Corbin at a rally in solidarity with Palestine on May 15, 2021. Image via Flickr user: Revolutionary Communist Party. CC BY 2.0.

This brings us back to Josh Shapiro. He was clearly not the first Jewish presidential or vice-presidential candidate to be denied his Party’s support. For example, in dramatic fashion, Bernie Sanders was denied by the Democratic Party establishment during the 2020 primary. Yet this did not raise concerns in the New York Times or among Democratic Jewish commentators such, as Eli Klein. One can neither argue that Sanders does not publicly identify as Jewish, nor that Sanders lacks his own loyal base of Jewish supporters, from “Jews for Sanders,” to the progressive Jewish magazine Jewish Currents, from IfNotNow to the Jewish caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America. This difference between the Jewishness of Sanders’s candidacy and Shapiro’s has less to do with who is more Jewish; it has a great deal to do with the way the idea of Jewishness has been constructed in the last few decades. Or perhaps, to channel Hall, how Jews have been positioned to speak.

Increasingly, media outlets from The New York Times to Fox News the New York Post have run stories on the defection of American Jews from the Democratic Party over the Democrats’ selection of Walz over Shapiro. In another headline on the topic, the NYT speaks of “heightened concerns” Jews have over the decision; the NYP states frankly that Jews are abandoning the Democrats for the GOP over Shapiro; Fox News reports that Walz is a “far left nightmare” for “Jewish organizations.” The assumption in all of these stories is not only that Jews care only about Israel, but also that Jews are a singular ethnic force of conservativism within the Democratic Party.

This difference between the Jewishness of Sanders’s candidacy and Shapiro’s has less to do with who is more Jewish; it has a great deal to do with the way the idea of Jewishness has been constructed in the last few decades.

A problem with this construction is that few American Jews seem to agree. Not only has the overwhelming Jewish identification with the Democratic Party remained stable as of April of 2024 according to Pew, the nomination of Tim Walz has been reported to be very popular among Jewish Minnesotans. Walz is also the vice presidential pick most aligned with mainstream American Jewish values, especially on reproductive rights, gun control, and an expanded welfare state. It also needs to be said that Israel is consistently ranked as a low priority among 96 percent of Jewish voters—behind climate change, the economy, antisemitism, and health care. And further, it is no secret that the consensus over Israel in the Jewish community has long since ended: one-third of American Jews believe Israel is committing genocide; 60 percent of American Jews believe that the Biden administration should embargo arms to Israel; over one quarter of American Jews see Israel as an apartheid state. If one selects for younger Jews, the number is closer to half.

And while it is arguable whether Walz is a “leftist,” what is of note is the way American Jews are deployed as wedge constituency by media outlets from the nominally liberal Times to the conservative Fox News and Post. This is an intensification, or perhaps a concretization, of the “The New Antisemitism” thesis. While Shapiro’s Zionism is far more virulent than Walz’s—he infamously likened Palestine solidarity protesters to the “Ku Klux Klan”—there is no suggestion that Walz is an anti-Zionist, let alone that he supports calls to embargo weapons for Israel. Thus Jews have gone from a constituency less formed by a support of Zionism, to a constituency marked by an ethno-conservativism. While the choice of Walz over Shapiro was overdetermined, it is clear that Walz was perceived as the more progressive of the two and was more suitable to the left wing of the Democratic Party. Any shift to the left in the Democratic Party is framed no longer simply as a threat to wealthy donors or tax cheats, but also to Jews as an entire people. In this reading, it is Walz’ s and Corbyn’s leftism that is more dangerous to the Jewish community than Boris Johnson or Donald Trump’s antisemitic conspiracy theories.

As Stuart Hall noted, the appearance of new social phenomenon is often less a case of novelty than a shift in the political conjuncture. A conjuncture, Hall reminds us, is a “specific life in a social formation” that forms a “unity” among disparate, even contradictory formations (368). The articulation of a new identity, or new social actor, often occurs when the social formation and its unwieldy set of unities is suddenly in crisis. Hall offers as an example the emergence of the “mugger” in the 1970s Anglophone Atlantic as a figure that hails the crisis of social democracy, and points to a solution of carceral neoliberalism. In a similar way, I would suggest, the emergence of the “Jewish conservative” has little to do with changing Jewish loyalties or allegiances, and everything to do with the crisis of both Zionism and neoliberalism.

Capital and imperialism cannot speak out of universal interest: they have none. Suggesting that the U.S. supports Israel’s genocide out of geopolitics—even identification with the state’s colonial project—can no longer be said by any liberal (anymore than it can be said that Shapiro was a better pick for the NYT and Post as much because of his Zionism as his support for school vouchers and his questioning of public health measures such as masking and vaccines). The consensus around Zionism and the kind of racial politics it supports—let alone the U.S. imperial presence in the Middle East—is rapidly fraying: constructing constituencies for which the state acts to protect is far more palatable than naked self-interest.

This is not to say of course, that there are no Jewish interests in Israel: major Jewish institutions from the ADL to the Jewish Federation have become more fiercely Zionist and right wing in the last few decades. Yet like Hall also reminds us, a crisis is not simply marked by systemic failure: it is also the detachment of the ruled from their rulers; it is the de-alignment of part of a hegemonic bloc from its formation and the potential realignment with another. We are in such a moment of crisis. Even in the stories by Fox and the NYT such discord is visible under the headline: after the ADL or Democratic Majority for Israel is quoted, IfNotNow and Bend the Arc are featured much further down in the story. What we are seeing in the Jewish community is not altogether different from what we are seeing in the U.S. writ large: a polarization around the fundamental question of whether we should live in authoritarian, racially bound states or in multi-ethnic democracies. While Jews may have their own internal fights within their institutions, in temples, community centers, and in the streets over Zionism and socialist politics, it is incumbent upon us to refuse such identitarian conscription as part of that fight.

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Benjamin Balthaser
Benjamin Balthaser is an associate professor of multi-ethnic US literature at Indiana University, South Bend. He is the author of Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War (University of Michigan Press, 2016), and Dedication (Partisan Press, 2011), a personal history of growing up in a Jewish "red diaper" family. His forthcoming book from Verso, Citizens of the Whole World: The American Jewish Left and Cultures of Anti-Zionism, is due to be out this fall. His critical and creative work has also appeared in Historical Materialism, Boston Review, PMLA and elsewhere. He is an associate editor at American Quarterly.