Since the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks on the State of Israel and in the context of the sustained Israeli state violence towards Gaza that followed, Black religious politics in the United States have moved in varying directions. Some Black clergy have organized around calls for an immediate ceasefire and the release of hostages, while also drawing attention to the role of American military support for the State of Israel. Groups similarly aligned have called for an end to U.S. support for what one group of Black church leaders has called Israel’s war of “mass genocide.” Meanwhile, other Black clergy have organized African American Christians in political solidarity with the State of Israel, including its actions towards Gaza. Within the social world of “the Black Church,” these different groups offer competing claims about how African American Christians should respond to the issue of Palestine and Israel as a group.
The Amalek Narrative
After spending six years studying the ways race, religion, and politics converge in transnational solidarity building within American Black religious spaces, I was compelled to again turn my attention to the kind of religious rhetoric that some of the Black Church leaders in my study were using after October 7. I was also paying attention more broadly to the use of religious rhetoric in both supporting and opposing Israel’s sustained campaign of violence and destruction in Gaza. On October 7, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged, “We will turn all the places that Hamas hides in and operates from into rubble.” And in the days and weeks that followed, as Palestinian civilian casualties mounted at an alarming rate, Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials intensified their use of specifically religious rhetoric to contextualize and justify the increasing deployment of deadly force against Palestinians in Gaza. For example, on October 28, 2023, in a joint statement with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Minister Benny Gantz, Netanyahu described Israeli forces as having “entered the gates of Gaza, at the doorstep of the fortress of evil.” And, elaborating on the religious impetus for the ongoing military assault, he said that members of Israel’s forces were “committed to eradicating this evil from the world, for our existence, and I add, for the good of all humanity. The entire people, and the leadership of the people, embrace them and believe in them. ‘Remember what Amalek did to you’”—a reference to Deuteronomy 25:17 and the biblical narrative of Amalek as Israel’s perpetual enemy and God’s command to eradicate the Amalekites. “We remember and we fight,” Netanyahu added. Hearing this religious rhetoric recalled for me references and appeals to the biblical Amalek narrative that I encountered on some of the African American Christian Zionist solidarity tours of Israel that I joined as a part of my research. I began to revisit the contemporary use of biblical narratives like the Amalek narrative as a source of moral and religious authority with respect to Israel’s violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. This narrative provided a religious mandate for the total destruction of the ostensible enemies of God and of God’s people.
This rhetoric is part of a larger trend of what Atalia Omer has called the “Amalekization” of Palestinians, where the weaponization of this narrative of total destruction—of genocide—is applied directly to the Palestinians. Further attention to this connection between “Amalek” and Gaza appears in the International Court of Justice case brought by South Africa. The latter has led to some journalistic attention to the contemporary significance of the Amalek narrative in the context of Israel’s assault on Gaza. Speaking to this trend, Donald Wagner suggests that Jewish and Christian Zionist narratives “facilitate political policies that undermine international law and ethical values once held sacred by Christians, Muslims, and Jews” (23).
The Amalek Narrative and Black Christian Zionism
I saw these tensions between religious ethics and political imperatives play out in my research. In 2016, I traveled with a group of denominational leaders, clergy, and lay leaders from the Black Pentecostal Church of God in Christ (COGIC) denomination for what was described as a “mission” to the State of Israel. One of the unifying motivations for the trip among its Black Pentecostal participants—including first-time and return visitors—was the religious significance of traveling to and experiencing “the Holy Land” or “the land of the Bible.” On the first day of that trip, we met with Ruben (a pseudonym[1]), who would significantly engage in these efforts to deploy religion—and specifically the Amalek narrative—in the service of Christian Zionist advocacy. As an Israeli partner and coordinator for the trip, Ruben offered some opening remarks to the group that included a promise that the trip would both shed light on the political situation in Israel and that participants would come away with a deeper understanding of the scriptures. “We’re in the most important piece of real estate in the world,” he said. Ruben also promised an impactful session later in the trip when he would teach about the Middle East and Bible prophecy. “I would like to teach you the Middle East,” he said, “and how we can fight the spirit of Amalek.”
Later in the trip, Ruben offered the group an account of the biblical story of the Exodus, asserting that the first charge that God gave the Israelites was to eliminate the “spirit of Amalek.” And for more than 20 minutes, he continued, offering a fast-paced narrative interpretation of Jewish history through the lens of this fundamental lesson about the need to annihilate “the spirit of Amalek.” Doing so, he contended, would allow for the fullness of God’s promises to the Jewish people to be realized. Moving into the 20th century, Ruben invoked anti-Jewish pogroms in Europe, the economic and geopolitical significance of the discovery of oil in the Middle East, and the role of the Ottoman Empire as an ally of Germany. He then emphasized how, following World War II and the Holocaust, Muslims in the Middle East became the primary threat to the newly founded State of Israel and the Jewish people more broadly. “Here’s the stem of Israel’s problem: Palestinians.” He continued: “Who are they? Where did they come from? If you understand this, you understand everything.” After working his way through his account of the 20th century as context for understanding the State of Israel in relation to its Arab neighbors and to Palestinians, Ruben emphasized: “If the Arabs laid down their weapons tomorrow there would be peace tomorrow. If the Jews laid down their weapons tomorrow, they would be massacred.” Ruben went on, “Amalek. Who was Amalek? From the hills of the dessert. Who are the Arabs? From the hills of the dessert. The fact that they accepted Mohammed at some point doesn’t matter. Amalek is here!”
At the time—and in the more than three years since October 7, 2023, as I have revisited these experiences—I struggled to pinpoint the political significance of this particular narrative focus on the trip. Perhaps an obvious starting point is to notice both its prominence in the trip itinerary (a sort of featured evening plenary session) and its source (an authoritative voice within the trip leadership tasked with connecting the Bible with the land and the COGIC experience of both). The nodding heads, the audible “yesses” and “amens” coming from many hearing Ruben’s passionate charge suggested a warm reception of this narrative and its weaponization against the Palestinians. But as I have been revisiting the significance of this narrative in the nearly 10 years since I was exposed to it on this trip, I have been examining not only what this weaponizing of religion rhetoric looks and sounds like but also how it was received by its target audience.
Revisiting the Reception of the Amalek Narrative
In a forthcoming article for the Journal of the Council for Research on Religion, I write about some of the ways that COGIC clergy and members wrestled with religious narratives—like the Amalek narrative—that, as one participant put it, seem to reflect a call to reenact “biblical genocides.” While it is beyond the scope of this essay to recount these moments of internalizing, reproducing, and even questioning the applications of these narratives, it is worth noting that encounters with Palestinians in the land were not part of the trip itinerary. Yet there were nonetheless moments when humanizing encounters with Palestinians seemed to offer at least the potential for the Amalek narrative to encounter some resistance. For example, it stood out to me when my roommate on the trip, Marvin, mentioned to me that he had met a family of Palestinians from Jerusalem while floating in the Dead Sea beach at a resort we visited. He explained, “I felt a change in my heart today about the Palestinians. We’re all claiming to descend from Abraham and just want a share of the Holy Land.” So, I began to wonder if a brief encounter with a Palestinian (in a souvenir shop, or floating in the Dead Sea) could possibly compete with the consistent and persistent message about Palestinians as entirely other, as threat, as deserving of total elimination.
Yet there were nonetheless moments when humanizing encounters with Palestinians seemed to offer at least the potential for the Amalek narrative to encounter some resistance.
At another point in the trip, in response to an overtly political briefing encouraging Christian support for maintaining Jerusalem as the “undivided capital of the State of Israel,” Marvin told me, “I think our covenant [with Israel] is spiritual… I think it’s good that they have their land here, but God is going to do what God is going to do, no matter what we do.” Here, Marvin was expressing a kind of indifference to the political weaponization of religious narratives on the trip. But a brief humanizing encounter with just a few Palestinians seemed to do much more in terms of opening up the possibility of a rupture in the dominant trip narrative about Palestinians, suggesting limitations in how much trip leaders, and the narratives they offer, can determine participant perceptions.
As I have returned to thinking about the significance of this experience of traveling with the Church of God in Christ in “the Holy Land” since October 7, 2023, I have wondered about the lasting impacts of the dominant dehumanizing narratives prescribing total destruction and annihilation of Palestinians that were consistently offered as pillars of the trip.
I have also wondered about the kinds of moments of rupture and dissonance—moments that, at the time, seemed perhaps small and insignificant. I have thought about the people I shared this trip with and I have wondered, what are they reading or seeing in the news or on social media about the plight of Palestinians in Gaza? What are they hearing from their pastors as they sit in the pews of the COGIC churches? What are they hearing from COGIC leaders about Gaza? Are they seeing images of the current violence, destruction, and starvation in Gaza? And if they are, I wonder what frameworks for meaning making they are drawing on when then think back to the formative time they spent in the Holy Land—what so many of them described as a life changing encounter with the land of the Bible. And I continue to wonder about this as I reflect on the religious and political power of the narratives that dominated that trip, realizing that it is hard to project the limits to the interpretive malleability of biblical narratives like the Amalek narrative, which has been used to carry out the slow annihilation of Palestinians and the annexation of their territory within that religious/political framework. But as I recall how Marvin seemed to move from indifference to empathy—or even compassion—when Palestinians went from a theological abstraction to a human point of reference, I imagine that a similar response to images and stories of devastation in Gaza and Palestinian suffering might be possible for Marvin and others like him. The weaponization of religious narratives is a powerful force in shaping perceptions and stimulating political solidarities. But so is a brief humanizing encounter as a bridge to empathy.
[1] All first names of trip participants are pseudonyms.
